Forum - View topicThe Worst Anime of Spring 2024
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Dumas1
Posts: 83 |
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The New Gate is probably the worst series I actually finished this season. It somehow made an elf in a maid outfit dual-wielding katanas dull to watch. I'm fairly fond of the manga version, so this turned into a partial hate-watch, just to see how bad it could be.
Reincarnated as a Slime was just kinda dull for most of twelve episodes. I can understand the urge to introduce crises and antagonists who can't just be steamrolled with brute force (or at least, not without broader consequences for people the main character cares about), but the series just doesn't seem to know how to present politics or conspiracies in an interesting way. It also suffers a bit from what happened with the later Tenchi Muyo OVAs where the cast kept getting bigger and everyone had to have a few lines and so any real progress got buried beneath the cameos and random side characters hardly anyone cares about. And Unnamed Memory is getting a second season somehow. Maybe the novels are selling well or something. |
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48 Rices
Posts: 104 |
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I wonder what's with Japanese productions being left behind on 3DCG animation. Even stuff from Malaysia looked way better. (looking at stuffs like BoboiBoy, Ejen Ali and Mechamato) And I am surprised that the article didn't mention The Banished Former Hero Lives as He Pleases. |
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Key
Moderator
Posts: 18390 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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I'd guess that's because most/all of the reviewers recognized how bad that series was from just the first couple of episodes and so dropped it quickly (like I should have). |
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Piglet the Grate
Posts: 738 Location: North America |
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I find shows like Gāruzu Bando Kurai (Girls Band Cry / "GaruKura") that are all 3DCG to be fine since I soon adapt to it. It it much worse when switching between 2D and 3D (Wake Up, Girls! was particularly bad when transitioning between the 2D scenes and the plastic figure looking 3D idol performances).
No fried hot spring egg for anyone who does not love Yuru CampΔ:https://youtu.be/sRR0CgAJM3Y?list=PLRe9ARNnYSY4fU-qCG13goQyRzDKkASDG The only reasons I can come up with for not loving Yuru CampΔ are: - Being a vegetarian/vegan and finding depictions of adorable cute girls devouring meat to be disturbing/disgusting/offensive; - Being in a situation where one is forced to be on an inadequate and/or unpleasant diet and watching adorable cute girls eating yummy food to make hunger feel worse; - Being an incorrigible heathen who hates watching adorable cute girls having fun.
GaruKura is a very different show from Hibike! Yūfoniamu (Sound! Euphonium); BanG Dream! It's MyGO!!!!! is a lot closer. That being said, I found GaruKura to be the more exciting and fun to watch. |
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Flash33
Posts: 64 Location: Florida |
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I disagree completely about the cast being as bad as Zenitsu. For one they don't constantly whine and complain about stuff or run away in fear like he does, and they put in the time & effort to get the stuff needed for their trips & learn how to use them. They do have their annoying moments sure but they're nowhere near as bad as his are. Granted I haven't watched Demon Slayer past S1 so maybe he's improved since then but still. As for camping I'm not a big fan of it myself (which is why it took me so long to watch it) but I do like how the show handles it & find its characters a big part in making it entertaining to watch. Last edited by Flash33 on Wed Jun 26, 2024 8:13 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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InfiniteNothingness
Posts: 173 |
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Having watched HIGHSPEED Étoile straight to the finish line, I'm delighted Steve Jones (and others) gave a shoutout to that impressively vacuous anime. Outside of the races, at select points -- i.e., when they would be called "most hype" -- it was just a vacuum of nothingness in terms of humor, character, literal basic plotting. Episode 2 was esssentially a rehash of episode 1, and it doesn't truly get an ostensible plot until episode 3; that's not even touching the characters for whom "barebones" is either a charitable or the most accurate description, truly shovelware marketable anime girls (and two guys) who are somehow getting a mobile game and a VN because this media mix train isn't stopping. Every character can be boiled down to a simplistic description with 1-2 character traits, and that's who they are for the entire show. The sassy, self-indulgently confident AI of ami-chan is literally more of a character than our main heroine. To say nothing of such baffling choices as dedicating entire episodes to the "King" and "Queen" and going no further than "He is ostensibly a nerd" and "She is a playfully competitive," as though that latter wasn't already palpable, or a sad backstory for another character that speedruns multiple episode's worth of character beats. Badly. There is just so little there it's almost hard to talk about, except also not really because everything it does is the most trite characterization imaginable. I ended up laughing my ass off when, upon beating the aforementioned, Rin does a title drop for her special moniker. Just an incredibly nothing, nonsense show, and I will almost miss it. Anyway, please watch Overtake!, it's a charmingly heartfelt, grounded, original sports drama that blends the various requirements needed to be a successful pro driver with some truly human character animation. It felt compulsively watchable in the best way, to say nothing of how it handles feeling like you are not, or cannot be, your best, and the weight of expectations and assumptions from people all around you. I actually got teary-eyed, with how delicately it touched on some things I did not expect from it. Everybody at TROYCA did a splendid job and I'm likewise glad to see it still mentioned.
Unnamed Memory gets by, despite all that it does wrong, by virtue of having things known as "characters," and "a plot," and "tension" and whatnot. Of course, those characters are only wafer-thin instead of paper-thin, the plot is speedran to hell and back, the editing is insubstantial or actively interering with coherency or plain uninteresting or all of those all at once, and the theoretical tension is pretty well sidelined by virtue of "Tinasha is the bestest witch to ever witch" or "Oscar is the coolest cool king-to-be- to ever be" or "This is a romantic drama" but I can squint and read between the lines! Also, sure, the finale pretty much undoes all of the events leading up to that point, which is one of the most anticlimactic things to do. I still didn't see it coming, given how incomprehensible or things just sort of happening the show is, though it's still nominally present. I can still see the story getting warped, and it's evidently a busy LN to some degree with all of the moving parts and characters whose individual plots get wrapped up within the span of actual minutes. The car was chugging along, as opposed to barely out of the prototyping stage, however battered it is. Re:Monster is one I'd count if I watched it, I suppose, though given I don't always consider grossness on the same level as flouting basic storytelling principles, it's just kind of whatever to me. Not like I enjoyed the several chapters I read before dropping, or considered any of it good, or liked anything that I saw, or found it interesting to dissect from any view I could think of. But hey! It was technically doing something (that I would sooner forget about). All the same, this, like the above, is one I can get being chosen instead, simply because of how blatant and encapsulating its own issues are. In terms of others I didn't finish and thus necessarily can't really count unlike the first two, Gods' Game We Play had a supremely forgettable first episode, Vampire Dormitory was simply uninterestingly bland and not wild enough in any particular direction, Tonbo and Rinkai! felt painfully boilerplate from their first episodes. Rounding out the "Not Really's," Mysterious Disappearances is not really worth a place here, but my word, has the adaptation been such a letdown for something I've been anticipating quite a bit. The spirit is there, strangled by a spirit crossed with multiple other interpretations of the same folkloric beast... or something. There's functional, and workmanlike, and simply bad, and it's been all of those at various points. It gets by on my appreciation for being ultimately a pretty softhearted story with interestingly fun folklore and myth considerately baked into the MOTW format, and nothing else really. A real bummer. Also, great bait there with Girls Band Cry, even knowing the staff I saw watching it wouldn't actually put it here. I like that. Part of me would sooner see a different entry for this; another part of me only feels raw vindication. |
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nyaa
Posts: 139 |
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I watched Girls Band Cry and enjoyed it immensely, it was tied with Jellyfish Don't Swim At Night on my favorites list for this season.
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Philmister978
Posts: 328 |
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Yeah, I suspect this is 100% Toei's fault in fumbling the ball for GBC's international releases, especially given their track record and how some of their work either took too long to get licenced or still aren't able to for whatever reason. And that's before them screwing up the things they do license out to other companies.
As someone who's watched all of these to varying degrees, you've hit the nail on the head for most of them. Highspeed and Re:Monster especially. And then there's how atrocious the animation on both shows look. Highspeed legitimately makes it look like the efforts put forth by anime these days (hell, even other crappily-animated shows like EX-ARM or Tessla Note) look even less of worth than the standard drivel put out by DreamWorks' TV arm. How A-CAT got not only one title but two with Rinkai, which somehow looks a thousand times worse, this season I don't know. Hell, I genuinely don't get why they're still in business when they've shown time and again to be well behind the curve when it comes to CGI in general (and with their 2D output looking no better). Can't really say much about Re:Monster without repeating what other people think about Studio DEEN in general, but it's still horrifically lazy, even for the generally low standards of seasonal anime. And for all of King Record's previous shows where it's obvious these were meant for mixed media (Symphogear, Cross Ange, even Pop Team Epic to an extent), Highspeed is where this is the most blatant. Every plot beat it sets up is shunted off to the side and is either dropped entirely, or only used to reiterate something already brought up (We get it, Rin used to be a ballet dancer, actually tell us why she stopped). Not only that, but the show feels like a 24-26 episode title compressed into 12 and it steamrolls through it with no mercy, which is not helped by the sin that is Episode 1. Plus it's obvious all the budget went to the voice actors and tie-in games, and nothing else. As the animation is not only bad, it's got basic-level errors in many parts front and center, including obvious clipping errors, that it physically hurts to watch at points. It's a show where any potential it could have had gets squandered by not only creative decisions (Why did we need to wait until episode 2 to focus on Rin? Why do we need Richard in this series? Why set up tragic backstories for most of the lead females when all you're going to do is only focus on Youran's in any detail?), but also executive ones (seriously, whose idea was it to hire the staff they went with? Did they not look at their collective resumes beforehand?) Last edited by Philmister978 on Wed Jun 26, 2024 12:29 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Piglet the Grate
Posts: 738 Location: North America |
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After the final episode of GaruKura airs late this week, we all need to go to the ANN Encyclopedia page and rate it as "Masterpiece". |
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MiniMarps
Posts: 89 |
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You say it like Crunchyroll and Hidive weren't both STACKED with non- shonen action shows this season, when in fact my watchlist, as someone whose interests an anime like GBC appeals to, was longer this season than it's been in a long time. Doga Kobo, 8-Bit, EMT2, and so on, what about them? They just-so-happened to miraculously avoid this problem those dastardly American companies caused for Toei? Maybe, just maybe -- and this is gonna sound wild, I know, but hear me out: if the American companies are causing problems for no one but Toei, maybe Toei's the one with the problem?! |
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Ebb1993
Posts: 121 |
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I actually enjoyed Highspeed Etoile...
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Daerian
Posts: 222 |
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I'm surprised at people hating on Demon Slayer, I found character introductions and their interactions very fun and interesting. It's a change of style, but not for the worse.
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a_Bear_in_Bearcave
Posts: 536 Location: Poland |
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Yeah, not only season one of the Yuru Camp was not just tolerable, it was one of the best anime series I've watched, but also saying "camping is boring and needs very strong writing" is completely wrong. I could as well say, what's so interesting about beginner girls bands? Or any sport, in real life I don't really watch or care much for sports, that doesn't really mean I can't enjoy many sport anime, as long as they're just better than mediocre. Same with any slice-of-life school club, or any slice of life anime, what's inherently interesting in slice of life? "Theme isn't interesting, so anime is bad if it wasn't absolutely best" is just poor excuse for criticizing show for happening to not fit your tastes and claiming it means it was objectively bad. |
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kgw
Posts: 1151 Location: Spain, EU |
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Ditto. Is not as if were late Naruto seasons, where 1 of every 4 episodes was NOT filler. They are adapting the manga step by step, and that involves seasons were nothing happened in order to build up the final final battle. Also, I am following Mysterious Disappareances and the Well-Endowed Writer and, lewd "jokes" aside, I think the story is quite interesting. (I dropped Mieruko-chan because of the fanservice and Dark Gathering because they doubled down on the gore.) |
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fathomlessblue
Posts: 383 Location: Manchester, UK |
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I think between the shows I stuck with for a while, The Many Sides of Voice Actor Radio & Mysterious Disappearances were easily the worst. The former is apparently a poor adaptation, that cuts or rearranges a lot of the more impactful character writing in favor of fluff that doesn't matter, while the latter is in general a somewhat limp mystery series that isn't particularly deep or thoughtful, given the societal issues & themes it tends to plays around with. In addition to looking like complete ass. Sometimes literally.
Both series also have a fixation on fanservice that feels completely out of place, given the context, & feels more like writers not knowing what to add next and throwing out something to stop the audience drifting off. Neither were successful. Most disappointing: Spice & Wolf. I'm willing to take some heat for this, but having revisited the original series prior this this, I'm still shocked at how unnecessary it feels. The pacing is the same, as is the dialogue, in addition to the similarly meager production. It's almost like watching an Endless Eight style adaptation of the original show, but with (personally) slightly less appealing character designs and surprisingly weaker framing & overall directorial decisions. I obviously know a full reboot was really the only option, given the difficulties in getting new fans to watch older, perhaps less conveniently available titles, but seeing as this is the same mega-fan director behind both works, I would have he'd had been a bit more ambitious, given the chance to revisit it. At least make it feel like a slightly less-considered tracing over his original work. The new soundtrack is great at least. |
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