The Worst Anime of Summer 2024

While there were many great anime this season, there were also some... not so great ones. From the boring to the outright painful, here are the editorial team's picks for the worst anime of the summer 2024 season.

Note: The commentaries below might contain spoilers

Richard Eisenbeis

Worst: Tower of God: Return of the Prince

Before I get into everything terrible about Tower of God: Return of the Prince, I want to mention at least something it does right. So let's go with the music. I like both the opening and ending—and the general soundtrack is just full of bangers. Of course, the downside is that an aspect of this good makes the contrast between it and everything else in the anime all the more clear.

Return of the Prince fails in nearly every important way. Both the animation and art style have degraded immensely from the first season. Every budget-saving trick seems to be at work here, from mostly static shots where only the mouths move to cutting away from fight scenes rather than showing them. And the combat we do see is anything but fluid—not to mention that the choreography is abysmal.

But even that would be forgivable if the story was told well. It isn't. Bam's new party is almost entirely one-dimensional. For most of them, their backstories are summed up in a single sentence (if that). The same could be said for both their personalities and motivations. Heck, I'm not even sure what most of their special powers are—much less how they work.

And as for the old cast, they're largely absent. The only big returners (besides Bam, of course) with notable screen time are Khun and Rachael—and our time with them is heavily diluted thanks to the introduction of another entire team of similarly one-note characters.

The story, or rather how the story is told, is also an issue. It moves too fast—feeling so heavily abridged that the big emotional character beats don't have the time they need to land. Moreover, without those beats hitting like they should, what we do see feels like a waste to have watched at all. This feels like one of those shows that needed double the runtime (not to mention double the budget). What we're left with is little more than an embarrassment.

Christopher Farris

Worst: Failure Frame: I Became the Strongest and badabadablahblahblah

You know, it's kinda sad that some shows can prove to be reliably bad. Here I was once again, due to my infallible taste, having not watched a bad anime all season. But you know, I don't get paid unless I can pick out something that sucks. So, like Hansel and Gretel just begging to get baked by an enterprising witch, I went hiking into the forest of isekai, looking to get my day ruined by something I'd sampled earlier. Not Raising Kids While Adventuring, though, I need to stay awake for this to work. So, Failure Frame was the set of tracks I tied myself to, and sweet merciful mediocrity did it deliver. Man, I've seen ARIFURETA, at least that series eventually stabilized into something decent. Failure Frame feels as if ARIFURETA were ten times stupider, gave twenty times fewer shits, and hated isekai almost as much as I do, but in a way that somehow made me feel sorry for that pitiable genre. In a very "take it out back behind the shed" manner, I assure you.

Just looking at Failure Frame makes you hope that the executives sponsoring it got the smallest tax break possible for doing so. I assume the real reason our heroes can so easily win fights against these CGI monsters is because they're clearly begging for death. Maybe that's part of the inherent commentary on the nature of humans as the true monsters, though, since the anime switches all the humans to janky computer-generated homunculi as soon as it needs them to do anything more complex than turn their heads or flap their mouths.

But that's all the show hardly needs to do, as the main character wins all his fights with naught but three spells for the first half of the show, requiring only point-and-click application of the most basic status effects in RPG history. There's little creative application of min-maxed abilities, as usually seen in this sort of series. It's like the author actively resents having to detail an isekai setup or expand on the lead's motivation beyond raw, projected misanthropy that he can't even commit to anyway. You gotta love how every single bad guy who appears in this show has to loudly declare that they're a rapist just so our limp leading man won't feel too bad for killing them via full-body lockjaw. Even the subs for this show don't care, unable to decide if the main dude's name is "Touka" or "Tooka." At that point, what the hell am I supposed to do? At least it's "nice" to know that whenever I need a simple seasonal sandbag, an incompetent isekai will be reliably waiting there for me to punt into the stratosphere. Godspeed, you ugly son of a bitch.

Rebecca Silverman

Not for Me: SHOSHIMIN: How to become Ordinary

I expect that I will have quite a few people telling me I'm somehow wrong not to have enjoyed this show, or perhaps I didn't get it. That's fine; everyone is entitled to their thoughts, and mine are that I didn't care for SHOSHIMIN. My dissatisfaction stems from a few places, the most obvious being that the pacing was glacial. It was, of course, all in service of highlighting the ordinary aspirations of the characters while hiding the fact that Osanai may not harbor any such aspirations at all. But it robbed the storyline of any urgency or impact, and if I had to hear one more conversation about sweets while our leads “solved” a mystery barely worthy of the name, I really might have lost it.

Even if the point was not to have any urgency, it still needs to make an impact, and that's not something I felt it did at all. It felt as if SHOSHIMIN was too enamored with its own concept. It wanted to be smart and maybe a little edgy, and it wanted to point out the fallacy that Kobato was operating under all along – that he took joy from not being like everyone else to the point of overlooking how he very much was an ordinary boy. I might have liked it better had I read it, but when the series ended, it left me feeling nothing, except that maybe my time would have been better spent somewhere else.

Lucas DeRuyter

Worst: My Deer Friend Nokotan

Let me tell ya gang, having your most anticipated pick from the previous season become your least-liked anime of the current season doesn't feel great. I'll admit it I set myself up for disappointment and that My Deer Friend Nokotan is a mostly inoffensive, middling anime. However, I had lofty expectations for this anime, which makes its mid-status all the more crushing. The pre-release trailers were phenomenal, and I couldn't help but get hyped! But then the anime premiered, and my evaluation of it dropped as quickly and unceremoniously as deer scat plunking onto the leaf-covered ground of the wilderness.

My biggest issue with My Deer Friend Nokotan is that it's not funny. Sure, it got a couple of chuckles out of me here and there, but a single episode never had enough material to fill its 22-minute runtime. This often led to the jokes being stretched out or repeated so many times that they quickly lost their luster. Ordinarily, an anime being meme-able is a good thing, but My Deer Friend Nokotan goes too far and only really works when it's shared as clips on social media.

The most frustrating part of My Deer Friend Nokotan, though, is how many of its problems are unforced errors. Both the subbed and dubbed versions of the first few episodes suffer from a pretty amateurish translation, and the dialogue and on-screen text come across as clunky and stilted, which is unfortunate in any anime but a death blow in a comedy series like this one. This anime had all the makings of the next Pop Team Epic, but instead, it looks like it'll be pretty forgettable outside of its bop of an OP.

We were on a good stretch for a while there thanks to Bocchi the Rock! and the aforementioned Pop Team Epic, but My Deer Friend Nokotan is a reminder that comedies like these are, in fact, tricky to adapt into anime.

*Previously, this entry erroneously stated that My Deer Friend Nokotan was a 4-koma manga. This has been fixed.

Kennedy

Worst: Our Last Crusade or the Rise of a New World Season 2

I watched the first episode of this for the Preview Guide, where I gave it 2.5 stars and described it as “nothing special—it doesn't stand out as particularly bad or good. Perhaps a bit boring, to be honest.” Little did I know, but even from this low point, it would still find a way to careen itself downhill after this first episode. In addition to the story being as uninteresting as ever, the show's general animation quality plummeted, giving us baffling moments like the one pictured above. She's supposed to be squeezing his arm as though they're on a date. But instead, it looks like she has the protagonist's arm in a vice-grip, or vice-versa. I had to pause the episode and do a double-take when I first saw this. It took my breath away. Even now, I'm almost in awe of this moment in all its bewildering glory.

Now, in fairness to the second season of Last Crusade, as of when I'm writing this, there are only four episodes out. It got delayed indefinitely, and I have no doubt that it's better that way. For that exact reason, I was honestly pretty conflicted over whether or not it would even be fair to choose it for this. But still, I just can't find it in myself to get my hopes up for the remaining episodes. Even the best moments of season 1 were little more than just okay, and I haven't yet seen any reason to believe that season 2 will be any different. So that's more or less what I'm expecting once we get the latter half of season 2, whenever that may be.

Jairus Taylor

Worst: Narenare -Cheer for you!-

While I'm sure there are objectively worse shows to have come out this season, this is by far the worst one I watched, and the amount of hours I've spent staring at a computer screen thinking about it for weekly reviews is time I can never get back.

Despite starting out with some genuine promise with its first few episodes, its writing quality pretty much jumped off a cliff after that and has resulted in increasingly diminishing returns with each episode. While the show is a mostly harmless drama about a group of girls who are into cheerleading, it's bogged down by genuinely baffling levels of narrative convenience that undermine each of the girls' story arcs and make it almost impossible to take seriously.

The protagonist is suffering from a psychological condition that makes it hard for her to perform gymnastics? All she needed was a few kind words from her friends to make a near-total recovery. One of the girls is bummed about her favorite music shop closing down? She just so happens to be friends with multiple Grammy award-winning artists who all hop a flight to Japan to support her in her time of need. The amount of times it left me gasping at my screen in confusion has felt pretty surreal, to say the least, and while some of what I described sounds like it'd at least be entertainingly bad, the show is dull more often than not. Most of these left swerves only make it harder to invest in any of its melodrama.

P.A. Works usually has a pretty solid track record with their originals, but this is one of the weakest they've put out in a while, and it's a real shame, considering that it's the kind of drama that the studio is otherwise good at. If you're really in the mood for one of their originals this season, there's pretty much no reason not to go for Mayonaka Punch instead.

Steve Jones

Worst: Suicide Squad ISEKAI

Suicide Squad Isekai was by far the most disappointing anime I watched. Maybe that's because it played with my heart. I went into the show as a skeptic; I have little affection for any of the comic book mainstays, and in fact, I kind of resent their encroachment into the anime space. It's bad enough that they dominated Hollywood cinema in the 2010s. However, the first three episodes of this managed to charm me! The show leaned into its premise's oddness and its titular squad's cantankerous camaraderie. I was ready to enjoy a series about these guys causing weekly doses of mayhem for their isekai captors. That's really all I wanted.

Unfortunately, Suicide Squad Isekai suffers from too much isekai and not enough Suicide Squad. At one point, there's a montage of the squad's antics as they bumble through a variety of fantasy landscapes, and I remember pointing at my screen and saying, “But that's the stuff I want to see!” They could have dedicated a whole cour's worth of episodes to the gang farting around and causing chaos. It practically writes itself. However, the narrative instead hones in on the struggles of the other world's kingdom, and the story and setting there are just awfully bland. I know Tappei Nagatsuki can write a compelling isekai—I think Re:Zero is one of the genre's saving graces. Sadly, though, he doesn't bring any complexity or intrigue to this one. It's a mishmash of genre signifiers that coalesces into an utterly forgettable final showdown.

The strongest thing Suicide Squad Isekai has going for it is a handful of technically impressive combat scenes from the folks at Wit Studio. It's a good-looking anime. But that's not enough to justify its incursion into this space. If you want a far better Suicide Squad anime, go watch Akudama Drive.

Nicholas Dupree

Worst: Dahlia in Bloom

Dahlia is one of those shows that seems to do everything just slightly wrong in ways that pile up at the end of the season, like unattended dead leaves at your front door. It begins with an endearing lead heroine with an intriguing hook for an isekai set-up, built around a craft that seems promising and creative in how it could assimilate the modern and magical alike. It gives Dahlia a rather unique struggle to start out with, trying to achieve financial and social independence after a disastrous engagement leaves her rebuilding her professional life from scratch. It even has a pretty nice angle on its central romance, where Dahlia and her new man are clearly into one another but purposefully keep things in the Friend Zone due to how much else they already have going on. There are ingredients here for an engaging, understated slice-of-life story that could be right up my alley.

Unfortunately, the series never figured out what to do with any of those interesting elements. Once Dahlia's divorce is taken care of, we settle into a boring, aimless progression of lunch dates, business meetings, and lunch meetings that double as business dates. None of the characters develop or face any actual conflict, and whatever charm might be had from a slice-of-life approach is sucked out thanks to the show's abysmal production. There's a single frame of leaves sitting on a window pane that seems to be the show's only usable establishing shot for anything, and I became more familiar with that foliage than some of my loved ones' faces over this season. I cannot, for the life of me, explain the show's approach to shadows, which only serve to look more artificial, making it look like every character has big, flat mud stains across the lower halves of their bodies. It's a mess that drains out every ounce of charm or character from its material. There are shows with worse sins but few with so many small ones piled in front of you by season's end.

Kevin Cormack

Worst: Dahlia in Bloom

While I'd love to nominate Tower of God Season 2 as my worst of the Summer 2024 season, I dropped that garbage after a single episode, so it doesn't meet this article's criteria. There was no way I was about to suffer through a whole season of wasted time to confirm that it was indeed an awful disappointment. Instead, I'll go with a show that isn't terrible but bored me to tears.

Dahlia in Bloom is a nominal isekai—protagonist Dahlia is a Japanese woman reincarnated into a fantasy world where magic exists, and she becomes her father's apprentice in his trade of producing magical tools. The fact Dahlia has memories of her past life barely affects the plot except when she attempts to recreate modern technology (such as the hair dryer) using magical components. In itself, this is a nice premise for a fun, comfy show.

Unfortunately, Dahlia as a character isn't very interesting; she's extremely passive, and the story pace is glacial. In the first few episodes, she enters an engagement with a fellow magical artificer, but he's an asshole who cheats on her, walks all over her, and it's only at the prompting of other characters that Dahlia looks after her own best interests. This passivity persists into the next arc, involving an extremely slow-burn romance with another male character.

With leaden direction, uninspired visuals, middling-to-poor production, and achingly slow pacing, I lost the will to remain conscious for Dahlia. I can handle bad, ugly, or even offensive anime. But boring anime? To be boring is the worst offense anime can commit.

Caitlin Moore

Worst: SHOSHIMIN: How to become Ordinary

SHOSHIMIN is simply the show I enjoyed least out of all of them this season, and for one reason: I simply cannot stand Hina Youmiya's performance as Osanai. It's soft and breathy, nearly to the point of monotone with how little modulation there is. It's a one-note performance for a complex character, flattening her out to nothing. And no, don't tell me it's subtle; there's a world of nuance between “over the top” and “bland,” which is what we have here. Considering SHOSHIMIN is like 90% dialogue, it made it actively difficult to get through Osanai's scenes, and I found myself disengaging during her lengthy monologues.

James Beckett

Worst (That I Saw): Quality Assurance in Another World

This is one of those seasons where I didn't end up spending a lot of time with any shows that I thought were truly terrible, and truth be told, I still think there is a lot to like about Quality Assurance in Another World. The drop-off in quality from its excellent season premiere, though, has been steep indeed, to the point where I don't think I could fully recommend the series without a massive list of “But….” caveats. It has a cast of likable characters! But…the story hasn't done much with them outside of going through the motions of the usual MMO-sekai adventures. The art and character designs make for a cozy storybook atmosphere! But…half the time, the animation looks so janky and cheap that it is impossible to appreciate the stuff that does look good. The focus on bug testing with an AI partner in a video game world is pretty unique! But…the rules and world-building for the videogame that Haga is trapped in are so vague and inconsistent that it becomes more confusing than fun to think about how it all works.

You get the picture. I loved the first episode of Quality Assurance, and I wanted to love the series as a whole. Instead, I find myself thinking that it is mostly just sort of okay. That's a huge disappointment, and it's why, even though it could have been so much worse, Quality Assurance ended up being my “Worst” pick for the season.

MrAJCosplay

Worst: Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian

Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian is undeniably a mixed bag. The presentation is nice, and some scenes will probably live rent-free in my head for the rest of the year, thanks to their comedic boldness. However, just as many elements drag down the show's overall quality. Despite being the titular character, Alya is hands-down one of the least interesting elements of the show, as the series can't seem to decide if they want to make her a sympathetic underdog or just a love-struck teenager. Her motivations are confusing, her attitude is mostly unlikable, and, in some ways, she actively hurts the plot's momentum even though it revolves around her.

The show's saving grace is Kuze and Yuki, who ride that line between being comedically engaging alongside their dramatic backstories. These characters chew scenery every time they are present to the point where it almost feels like they have to tell the audience that they are just the supporting characters. But that's the problem because I would much rather watch a story about them than I would about Alya. Instead, all we get is the buildup and promises of a much better story with Alya down the road, and just when things get interesting, the season ends. Even the show's main gimmick about Alya hiding her feelings behind the Russian language felt like more of a cute footnote by the end rather than genuinely engaging. There's a lot of potential here, but between the show's very inconsistent pacing, borderline unlikable main character, and the show's habit of sidelining the more interesting stuff for said unlikable character, it's hard for me to be excited about what happens next. It definitely falls into the category of shows I probably would've dropped a while ago if I wasn't actively reviewing them every week.