The Worst Anime of 2024

There's the worst anime of a respective season and there's "The Worst" of the entire year. Below are series that weren't just disposable and annoying; they failed so spectacularly that we couldn't stop thinking about it.

ANN's critic choices are based on loose criteria for "worst;" below are series our writers found wholly disappointing despite initial first impressions, marred by production collapse, tearfully boring, or containing noxious story elements that left them cold.

Uzumaki

I have written SO MUCH about how disappointed I am in the Uzumaki anime. I was part of a This Week In Anime column about how it flopped; it was my pick for Worst Anime of Fall 2024. All this writing is ironic because it was my most anticipated release for the Fall season! I think the way Uzumaki turned into a mess despite having such a clear visual and sonic direction is fascinating, but that's the only enjoyment I get out of this anime.

The animation and character and creature designs in this anime turned from rock solid to abysmal at the drop of a hat and were panned widely by critics and audiences for nearly a month. Stock effects run through a filter, distracting animation and visual choices, and clearly unfinished sequences turned what was supposed to be a horror masterpiece into a work that one could only find ironic enjoyment in. Actually, I think I'll recommend Uzumaki the next time my buddies and I get together for a bad movie night!

There was so much hype going into Uzumaki that maybe it would always be a letdown to some degree, but I don't think anyone expected it to be this bad. I hope we get a full-on documentary someday that details exactly how almost every part of this production broke bad, but regardless, it will live in infamy as my, and many others', pick for the worst anime of 2024.

Tower of God: Return of the Prince

Honestly, it's impressive how a popular, critically acclaimed show can squander all of its goodwill in just a few episodes. The first season of Tower of God was creative, action-filled, and brought its unique visual style to the table. Moreover, it ended on a cliffhanger, solidifying the story's central villain and leaving our hero at his lowest point, having lost everything and everyone he cared about.

The second season is a spectacular downgrade on every level. The once unique art style becomes bland and low-quality, with the animation utilizing every possible budget-saving trick in the book to poor effect. The story likewise becomes a meandering mess with a cast of entirely new characters that aren't adequately developed. It feels like it's going through the motions and running through the story as fast as possible to “get to the good parts.” Judging by the noticeable improvement in all areas during the subsequent cour, Tower of God: Workshop Battle, it may have been just that.

In the end, the only positive thing I can say about Tower of God: Return of the Prince, is that it does have a killer soundtrack. But as good as the music is, that does little to make up for actually having to watch this show.

Unnamed Memory Season 1

I don't like unambiguously saying something is bad, but I'm sorry to say that Unnamed Memory absolutely is. I could forgive the stripped-down adaptation that sucked every last bit of romantic tension from the story. I could almost accept the stilted and lazy animation. But the way the story sped-run through the plot, making each point feel borderline nonsensical? Oscar being way too handsy with Tinasha? An ending that absolutely shat on what it had purportedly been building up over the course of the series? No, thank you. Just thinking about this series makes me angry, and I am furious that it's getting a second season. And now, since I do not enjoy being enraged, I am going to stop writing. If you simply must experience this story, take my advice and read the light novels instead.

Tonbo! Season 1

Any interest I had in the Uzumaki anime faded after hearing about how it imploded, and while some of the anime I've covered this year, like Ninja Kamui or Narenare~Cheer For You were plenty bad in their own right, they were pretty good looking for what they were. I can at least say that I wasn't bored watching them. None of that can be said for Tonbo!. While it might not be as aggressively bad as any of the above shows, it takes the crown here by being aggressively boring. The series has a pretty simple premise: it follows an island girl named Tonbo, and she befriends an ex-pro golfer named Igaiga, who comes to the island to escape the world after a scandal. When Igaiga sees that Tonbo has a natural talent for golf, he thinks she should seek a pro career on the mainland.

On paper, that seems like a pretty standard setup for a sports anime, but the problem is that while you'd expect Tonbo's decision to go to the mainland to take maybe one or two episodes, this plotline somehow stretches out for the entire 12-episode season. While a slow start wouldn't be much of an issue if the show was making good use of that time, or was at least good at making golf feel exciting, it fails pretty hard at both. Nearly every character outside of Tonbo and Igaiga feels one-note. Since most of the golfing we see in the show is just Tonbo messing around on her own, there's hardly any stakes to it, and loads and loads of sports commentary instead bog down any excitement her golf techniques could generate.

The series does at least look fairly passable in terms of animation. Still, it's so bland in its direction that there's no real reason to watch it unless you're already a huge golf fan, and even if you are one, I feel like you'd probably get a lot more entertainment out of just watching an actual golf match. If I were to give the show credit for anything, it's that it does at least seem as though it might have picked up the pace a little more with its second season, but with how slow the first season is, it doesn't feel like it'd be worth the investment. Especially not when there are plenty of other sports anime out there that are better about how they treat your time. If there's one thing worse than being terrible, it's being boring, and while there are certainly other shows this year that had bigger problems, this one was by far the biggest slog.

Solo Leveling

You know, I don't expect a lot from these kinds of shows at this point. But you'd think that an isekai-adjacent persecution-revenge power fantasy like Solo Leveling could at least get the persecution part right. When the show starts, the main sad-sack Jinwoo's low rank sees him regarded…perfectly personally by his fellow hunters. They're generally cool and accommodating of him, and it's only in later episodes, via flashbacks, that it's suddenly shown that party members mistreated Jinwoo. It's like he just forgot about it and only remembered to tell the audience later. Of course, I'd believe Jinwoo to be that absent-minded. This is the guy who constantly whines about not being able to raise his rank even though he knows the one way ranks can be raised. This story just finds itself and its details in random moments of self-serving mean-spiritedness, and all the flashy fight animation in the world can't make the whole feel worth watching. Never mind any of the kickass combat powers Jinwoo solo levels himself up to gain. I just wish I had his ability to conveniently forget stuff so I didn't have the annoyances of Solo Leveling still cluttering up a corner of my mind palace.

KamiErabi GOD.app Season 2

There was some stiff competition for the dubious honor of getting my vote for the worst anime of 2024. Right off the bat, there was plenty I didn't care to watch more than a few episodes like A Nobody's Way Up to an Exploration Hero. Then, there was the second season of Our Last Crusade or the Rise of a New World, which is notable for having only got four increasingly boring (and, at times, laughably bad-looking) episodes before being indefinitely delayed—a delay which is still ongoing as of the time of writing, nearly five months later. Uzumaki was a massive disappointment, the scale I don't think I've seen since the second season of Promised Neverland aired back in 2021. But to Uzumaki's credit, it at least had one good episode—which is one more than most of the other shows I'm listing here. While not as high-profile as Uzumaki, other anime looked like they had a lot of potential, but they also turned out to be pretty underwhelming—Metallic Rouge, especially, springs to mind. And then there's Orb, which feels like it was specifically engineered to annoy anyone who knows anything about the Middle Ages. Certainly, if I were writing about the anime that frustrated me the most, Orb would undoubtedly be my choice. But the anime I completed that was pound for pound the worst in overall quality was, without question, the second season of KamiErabi GOD.app.

I reviewed the first season not too long ago, and I got a full review of this second season incoming—so keep a sharp eye out for it if you want to hear about it in more detail. But suffice it to say that both seasons of KamiErabi GOD.app suffer tremendously from abysmal writing, nonsensical characters, and rigid CGI (which I've generously provided you with an example of). All these issues were present in the first season and felt more pronounced in the second—which, after several convoluted episodes, ended sloppily. The series felt poorly made from just about every angle save for most of its audio (admittedly, the soundtrack and voice acting are great. The sound design, however, doesn't always hit the mark), and doesn't even have the courtesy of being so-bad-it's-good.

Failure Frame: I Became the Strongest and Annihilated Everything With Low-Level Spells

We here at Anime News Network are discouraged from hatewatching, a guideline I am generally perfectly happy to follow. However, once a year or so, I hear about a show that is popular for reasons I cannot fathom. I check it out to get an idea of what it looks like on the other side, where your anime diet isn't primarily composed of critical darlings and hidden gems. Where you watch anime for the trashiest, edgelordiest nonsense available. These shows are almost universally bad, sometimes in a funny or interesting way.

I'm still not sure where Failure Frame falls. Oh, it's bad. Really, really bad. I'm just not sure if it's bad in an interesting way. It starts like almost every revenge isekai: Mimori Touka's classmates barely considered him worthy of consideration, below the level of even bullying. They get summoned to another world, everyone is assigned a power, his is considered worthless, he gets cruelly discarded, blah blah blah. I'm pretty sure this is a carbon copy of Arifureta, a show I did not watch. Not only are Mimori's stats abnormally low, but his power is to cast status effects, which, according to the goddess, almost never work. So they send him into the Ruins of Disposal, a near-certain death sentence.

Except he doesn't die. Not because of cleverness or tenacity, but because status effect spells work really, really well. He just points at an enemy, shouts “Paralyze!” then “Poison!” and they die. He gains an absurd amount of experience points, his level well into the hundreds by the time he reaches the end. It just doesn't make sense! We're told that status effect spells don't work, but they're clearly extremely overpowered! The only reason to say they're not is to create a victim fantasy. Everything is convenient and easy for Mimori, who stomps around in a black trenchcoat and might as well be wearing a t-shirt that says “Welcome to My Twisted Mind” and is joined by a beautiful elf warrior maiden who has all her vulnerable spots exposed and is constantly fending off rape attempts.

It's also ugly as sin. The characters look like they exist on a different plane from the backgrounds, and they shift into CG at seemingly arbitrary points for even the simplest motions. The action is laughably bad, two separate Photoshop layers wiggling at each other until they overlap. I simply can't imagine watching this and saying, “Hm, yes, this is good.” Well, except for the theme song by THE ORAL CIGARETTES.

Metallic Rouge

Time hasn't been kind to my thoughts on Metallic Rouge, and they weren't exactly kind to begin with. The show certainly started strong—great character designs, a stylish OP, a cool premise wearing just enough of its influences on its sleeve, tons of chemistry between its two leads, and a nostalgic vibe all garnered a lot of excitement from me. Heck, I signed up to review it weekly. Quirky original sci-fi romp with solid production values already has a leg up on most of its contemporary competition. It almost doesn't need to be good in order to be worthwhile. Almost.

We can trace Metallic Rouge's main sin back to one of the original sins of modern anime production: the extinction of the 2+ cours original. They still exist, but they're an increasingly rare breed, with 12-13 episodes becoming the default length for many series. And don't get me wrong, you can do a lot in that space. This year's Train to the End of the World is a stellar example of how much adventure and creativity you can stuff into a small package. However, that is a testament to the creative duo of Tsutomu Mizushima and Michiko Yokote, experts in this field. You can't just enter it willy-nilly and expect it to work out. That's how you get Metallic Rouge.

I'm not saying an extra cour would have solved all of Metallic Rouge's problems, but I think it would have solved most of them. These characters, particularly Rouge and Naomi, were begging for breathing room. The strongest episodes let the two of them fart around on whatever mission they happened to be on, and I could have done with an entire extra season full of nothing but episodes like that. Then, it wouldn't have mattered that the overarching plot was a lot of convoluted nonsense with minimal emotional or thematic payoff. Conversely, back in reality, that's what murders Metallic Rouge. It has such little runtime to work with that it steamrolls the plot at the expense of the stuff that actually made it charming, and this topples its whole house of cards.

Ultimately, though, I'd rather watch a billion Metallic Rouges than sit through the glut of uninspired adaptations we get every season. At least this series had potential to squander. It reached for the stars and came frustratingly short. That's how I like my failures, and that's why I can't truly hate Metallic Rouge. It's the victim, not the perpetrator.

Uzumaki

I know I just went on about how disappointing and dispiriting this trainwreck of a miniseries was for our Fall 2024 wrap-up, but damn it, I'm still angry. Uzumaki was supposed to be the chosen one! It was supposed to lift us out of the pit of crappy Junji Ito adaptations, not join them! I know that Adult Swim's original anime have never had what anyone would call a “sterling” reputation, and the years of development hell spent to produce a measly four episodes of television should have been all of the warning any of us needed to stay as far away from Kurozucho as possible…but come on. You all saw that first episode, too. I wasn't even as bowled over by it as a lot of fans were, but even I could recognize that director Hiroshi Nagahama had cooked up something special. Sure, the script was a bit of a mess, taking an already fractured and episodic manga and chopping it up into something that only just barely made sense as a half-hour TV show, but aesthetically speaking, Uzumaki's premiere was practically flawless. It had the haunting atmosphere and oppressive monochrome color palette; it captured the frightening and uncanny desecration of the human body that Ito has made an entire brand out of; it had the vibes, man. When it comes to horror, having soundly spooky vibes is paramount. Even the crappiest direct-to-VHS slasher schlockfests have gotten by on getting the vibes right!

Then, well…you all know the rest, by now, I am sure. Uzumaki crashed and burned in such a record amount of time that I'm sure an entirely traumatized new generation of anime fans will feel forced to adopt a new “One-and-a-half Episode Rule” just to make sure they never have to go through anything so depressing again. At this point, I think we just need to call it as an entire industry. No more Junji Ito anime, or movies, or TV specials, or anything else that requires moving pictures to be synchronized with recorded sound and human performances. The man's work was clearly not meant to be transferred to any other medium beyond the printed page. We'll just toss all of his books in a big ol' basket labeled “UNADAPTABLE,” along with Don Quixote, House of Leaves, Infinite Jest, and anything Nabokov ever wrote. It's pretty good company, all things considered.

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime Season 3

I was tempted to put the atrocious Tower of God Season 2 here, but I dropped it after one episode, so that probably wouldn't be fair. I've heard nothing from viewers of subsequent episodes to convince me my decision wasn't wise. While My Deer Friend Nokotan's poorly-timed humor left me cold, it wasn't awful. Metallic Rouge's nonsensical, rushed ending irritated me, but I enjoyed most of the show up until that point. Bye Bye, Earth completely failed to explain any of its needlessly complicated lore, but at least it looked cool. I didn't hate it. No, this year's absolute worst piece of time-wasting crap was That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime Season 3, or “Meetings That Could Have Been an Email: The Anime.”

It could only have been the power of the Sunk Cost Fallacy that compelled me to endure twenty-four episodes of mind-numbingly boring meetings where the characters talked about things that might have been cool or dramatic had they bothered to show them. Though, to be fair, most of the crap they spoke about was dull as hell. Why would I want to endure endless meetings in my leisure time when I do everything I can to avoid them professionally? I should have been charging Slime an hourly rate for time wasted listening to terminally lifeless, inconsequential conversations.

I get that production committees often want to adapt source material closely, but sometimes anime's overly slavish adaptation practices count against it. If there are several light novels in a row of interminable, sluggish boardroom dialogue, do the brave thing and cut the whole goddamn lot out next time! I watch anime like Slime for cool fights, imaginative fantasy lands, and silly characters doing daft things. All of those aspects were in short supply during Slime's abysmally boring third season. I can only hope that Season 4 rips out the boardroom crap and gives us the good parts, or I'm out.

A Condition Called Love

The Dangers in My Heart was one of my favorite anime of all time because it highlighted some of the best traits of the slice-of-life romance genre. A Condition Called Love became one of my least favorite anime of all time because it highlighted some of the worst elements of that same genre. Character writing can be complicated because you want to show a natural progression of who the character is and where they're going. They don't necessarily need to reach the end of their arc for a show to be satisfying, but seeing that progress can make the journey worthwhile and satisfying from a narrative standpoint. If you don't properly show that progression or pay off character moments in a way that feels believable, then the whole thing feels cheap at best and downright frustrating at worst.

A Condition Called Love is a show that I don't think earned most of the emotional payoff because it felt like the show was at odds with itself at almost every waking turn. There are two stories going on here: one is about a girl discovering what it means to be in love when she was arguably bullied into thinking that she shouldn't feel that way, while the other is about a boy who sees love in a very dangerous way. The former character arc is relatively simple yet believable, while the latter is not handled with nearly as much care as the show pretends. There are so many moments throughout the show where it feels like our two leads are not having the same conversation with each other. One tries to understand what it means to be in a relationship, while the other compromises their arguably problematic love language for the other's comfort. There could be a good story in that, but the two journeys are too disjointed to be meaningful.

I think a lot of that comes down to our male lead, Hananoi, who never really addresses his behavior as harmful or invasive. There are a lot of moments where our obsessive boyfriend will do something that honestly should warrant a breakup or a proper retrospective on their relationship, but because it's done conveniently out of sight of his partner, that conversation never comes up. Moreover, even when there is progress, it doesn't feel like it's from a place of genuine character growth or reflection. Instead, it feels like it is done just for the sake of making sure that the relationship isn't lost. I understand there is compromising in a relationship, but sometimes it feels like our two leads are just one conversation away from not being together. So, the author manufactures the narrative so that that situation never presents itself while highlighting that there are uncomfortable things worth addressing.

None of this is helped by the fact that this might be one of the worst-looking slice-of-life shows I have ever seen. Some moments look fine, but the washed-out color palette, poor facial expressions, stilted movements, and some genuinely awful camera angles make the whole package very unpleasant to the eyes. I know this series has its fans, but I'm unfortunately not one of them. At best, this is a show that feels very misguided in what it's trying to accomplish, but at worst, it's just a mess that fails to understand why the genre it portrays can be so appealing.

Solo Leveling

Is there something I'm missing here? As of typing this, Solo Leveling has an 8.3/10 on IMDB, an 8.27/10 on MAL, and thousands and thousands of glowing ratings on Crunchyroll's website. My IRL friend loves Solo Leveling, and when he found out I didn't, we were cracking jokes back and forth about me being a contrarian.

I think there's more than just me not being the right audience for this type of show. I get all of the show's action, yet I just don't feel like there's enough depth and drama in our main man, Jinwoo, here. See, you can't be a character if you don't, well, have character. The great irony of Solo Leveling is that for all of the time spent on making Jinwoo a more powerful person, his personality is weak and as compelling as a tuna fish sandwich. Sure, the fights Jinwoo gets into are fantastically animated, nail-biting, and have their moments of badassery, even if they're a tad cliche (Jinwoo's line of “I've been leveling up this entire time” in episode 6 is delivered is too corny of a way for it to be a mic drop moment). On a technical action level, this show is impressive, and I'm confident that people who are into this type of thing were taken on one hell of a roller coaster ride with each and every passing episode. Jinwoo wanting to become stronger for his family's sake is a noble goal, but fight sequences lack punch (no pun intended) when there's no personality or additional inner conflict to latch onto.

It's easy to see why there are some comparisons to Sword Art Online. A-1 made both Sword Art Online and Solo Leveling. Both shows feature RPG mechanics that give it a pseudo-isekai feel to it. Both shows are power fantasies at their core. I've heard that Solo Leveling has the advantage here because Jinwoo doesn't start off as OP as Kirito. Does having a different power dynamic make for a different, and therefore more interesting, character dynamic? The jury's still out on that one.

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