The Worst Anime of Winter 2025

Not every show can be a winner, and sadly there was no shortage of stinkers in the Winter 2025 season. From an elf sexually attracted to her pet to shows that squandered their potential, these are the series our reviewers were underwhelmed by this past season.

For our long-time readers, the seasonal Best Anime, Worst Anime, and Most Anticipated are now selected via ranked voting by our editorial staff. This will give you more variety in the overall picks to create our top 10. Occasionally, we'll have a "runner-up;" this is for anime that were just shy of making it in the top 10 but were nonetheless included on multiple ranked lists from our team.

Below is the list of the editorial team's least favorite anime series from this season.

Ever watched a show that feels like it came out twenty years too late? That's how I felt watching Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms, a relatively harmless slice-of-life series that doesn't necessarily do anything crazy or offensive. But therein lies the problem. There's a larger discussion to be had about franchises that try something different and fail versus franchises that played it incredibly safe. I will always rather watch the former over the latter. I like reacting to things, commentating on them, and seeing how what might have started as dumb could have maybe been turned into something special. In the world of media analysis, the worst thing you can do is bore me and I don't think there is a show this past season that was a greater offender than Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms.

Focusing on an incredibly vain girl who pretty much got everything that she wanted ever since she was little, this is a show that has us try to empathize with somebody who just wants a little bit more attention. Some hints and scenes allude to something deeper, like the expectations of putting on a front and how sometimes it's nice to find somebody that you can maybe let your guard down around. However, this only comprises a very VERY small percentage of the show, as most of it is spent more or less recycling the same joke. Every episode consists of Mona trying to win the attention of this one specific guy in her class who isn't even disinterested in her, he's just trying hard to stay focused on other aspects of his life, and to be honest, I don't blame him. The joke isn't really funny no matter how many times the show beats it over my head, and by the time I finish an episode, I feel like nothing was gained.

Sometimes I'll rewatch older romance series from the early-to-mid-2000s, and it is interesting to see how a lot of stories were structured similarly. Back then you could argue those jokes were a lot better because they were new and fresh. Nowadays, I feel like the bar for slice-of-life and romance series has risen so high that something like this barely even feels like a show. Maybe if this came out back then, I would look back on Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms in a much fonder light. Still, in the year of our lord 2025, with a bland aesthetic and an unmemorable soundtrack, I don't see what I'm supposed to enjoy here.

—MrAJCosplay

Dear lord, this anime is impossibly boring. Mind numbingly, eye-glazingly boring. Think of the boring-est anime you've ever seen. Now multiply that by three. That's Grisaia: Phantom Trigger the Animation. And it's so weird to me that an anime that looks as exciting as this one sounds on paper could be an anesthetic. It's a school full of trained killers of all sorts, going on dangerous missions. There's ninjas, gun fights, and explosions aplenty. And the animation looks great. That's the textbook definition of cool, right? So why then have I consistently struggled to make it through a single episode of this show without checking how much time it has left a million times, taking mid-episode breaks, or often, both?

A common refrain you'll hear among fans of Grisaia is that Phantom Trigger and its protagonists just aren't as interesting, cute, or otherwise good as the main gaggle of girls in The Fruit of Grisaia. Even though the two Grisaia series are pretty disconnected from one another, it's nonetheless tempting to see this and assume that any given person doesn't like this show because it's just not the original Grisaia. And I'm here to tell you that's simply not true: even on its own merits, getting through even a singular episode of this show feels like a slow, grueling trudge.

A big part of what makes this show such a neverending drag is how overcomplicated more or less all of its storylines are. Things are always happening in this show, and it's hard to say whether or not they're high-stakes when it's so easy to get lost in this anime's essay-length, often pointless, explanations about why they're happening. It's as though this show won't be satisfied unless we know whatever manner of antagonist we have's identity, motive, blood type, first crush, mother's maiden name, and credit card numbers with expiration date and security codes, despite how very little of that information is actually relevant to anything. It's exhausting, it rarely (if ever) feels like we're getting a great deal of this information for a particularly good reason, and it just makes watching this show feel like an arduous test of patience.

—Kennedy

Signing up to review an anime weekly is akin to Russian Roulette. Spin favorably and you get something fun like Bureaucrat to Villainess: Dad's Been Reincarnated. Should luck abandon you, you're cursed with something as detrimental to your mental health as Übel Blatt's terminally botched anime adaptation. This season the blessings and curses came to me in equal measure, as I reviewed both shows. I won't regret the day that Übel Blatt no longer blights my Amazon Prime Video queue.

Übel Blatt was sold to me by manga-devouring friends as a dark fantasy in the vein of Berserk, which I adore. “It's edgy,” they said, “but fun edgy.” My expectations were initially met by a reasonable couple of opening episodes before being ground to dust by a succession of desperately poor narrative choices. I was aware the first volume was infamous for its explicit, sexually violent content, and fully expected it to be sanitized by the adaptation process. What I never expected was for director Takashi Naoya to wholesale excise the story's entire beginning, robbing the viewer of essential context, character, and setting information, making subsequent events incoherent.

I'm all for stories that deliberately withhold information to build intrigue, but Übel Blatt's anime takes a hatchet to its plot without substituting anything in its place. We're left with characters who apparently know each other already, referring obliquely to past events that manga readers were privy to, but anime viewers were kept excluded from. Naoya's approach to the material is a bizarre mixture of cavalier and slavish. Aspects that might understandably trouble the censors are removed wholesale, while everything else is copied from the manga without consideration of the missing material. A competent adaptation makes changes to account for change of media format, streamlining and smoothing the narrative for reader/viewer comprehension. Übel Blatt makes no such concessions for non-manga-reading viewers, while also greatly disappointing pre-existing fans.

Incompetent approach to narrative and structure aren't Übel Blatt's only failings – it also looks terrible. One might expect an action-heavy anime to feature some actual animation, but Übel Blatt's impactless action scenes amount to little more than vibrating still images with lurid blood splatter painted over them. While the dark yet vibrant backgrounds and severe architecture of the world generally look good, the flatly-drawn characters are grossly out of place, their overly clean and cutesy designs alien to the tone of what's meant to be a gritty revenge story in a grim, hopeless world. At least the soundtrack is excellent.

Director Naoya's interview, published on ANN during the series' run (but conducted prior to its initial broadcast) is particularly damning. “I believe that, ideally, it's best to stick to the original work without adding any unnecessary personal interpretation,” he states, immediately derogating his job as director. I don't expect a competent director to claim “I try to make myself as invisible as possible, to remove myself from the process,” nor to conclude “I think it's better to read it in the manga.” If the director has no confidence in his own abilities, then why should the audience? Naoya's statement “If you can enjoy it, then that's a stroke of luck,” doesn't exactly inspire confidence. As a promotional tool for the manga, Übel Blatt's anime is staggeringly inept. Previously, I planned to read the manga after watching the anime, but now I don't care. I can't wait for my time with this cursed production to end.

—Kevin Cormack

When I was in high school, my English teacher read us an old review of a production of Hamlet that included the phrase “bum-numbingly boring.” It was at that moment that I knew I wanted to write reviews, and here, at last, is my chance to co-opt that phrase: Promise of Wizard is, in fact, bum-numbingly, tush-tinglingly boring. It pains me to say that, because goodness knows we don't get as much female-oriented anime as we could or should, and being based on a mobile game doesn't have to be a death knell for a series. But Promise of Wizard doesn't do anything with its material. It acts like throwing scads of mostly attractive pretty wizard boys with names ripped out of classic literature is enough, and that its audience will be happy to just watch the heroine stare at them slack-jawed while she tries to figure out what the hell her role in all of this is. Spoiler alert, women are humans who enjoy plots with their eye candy, and all the pretty boys flying around on phallic objects in the world isn't enough to make up for a lack of one. Even I got bored of cataloging the literary references by episode three - me. Bored of literary references. If nothing else communicates how dire this is, that ought to do it.

Perhaps this would have worked better if the creative team wasn't hellbent on throwing every possible gacha character into the show. Maybe things would have been more interesting if the heroine had a personality. Possibly putting in a cohesive and coherent storyline would have helped. But none of those things happened, and even the hauntingly lovely opening theme (the best part of the show, honestly) could save this from its own aggressive mediocrity.

—Rebecca Silverman

I’m Living with an Otaku NEET Kunoichi!? feels like it was designed in a lab to piss me off. At first pass, there's a solid amount of potential in NEET Kunoichi?! Its premise could easily lead into a fun odd couple situation, Shizuri makes a ton of fun expressions and has the potential to be a vehicle to explore social and romantic reclusiveness, and her gifted and talented kid to burnout backstory hits me where I live. Rather than execute on any of the more interesting elements of this show's premise, NEET Kunoichi?! instead chooses to be the most boring version of itself and panders non-stop to a presumed male, cishet audience that's only here to watch the women in the show switch between being hilariously incompetent or sexually objectified.

This anime cannot go more than a minute without inserting a crotch, bust, or ass shot of any of the women in leading roles. Moreover, the leading man and audience frame of reference character, Tsukasa, is so devoid of personality that he might as well have most of his face shaded over so the boring dudes this show panders to can more easily make him their self-insert. Also, this show is profoundly insensitive towards queer and trans people.

The character Ayame, voiced by the admittedly always delightful Fairouz Ai, is introduced crotch first as a “Crazy Psycho Lesbian,” and is unbelievably horny for the titular neet kunoichi, Shizuri. However, in the second episode, it's revealed that Ayame is a man using a ninja magic disguise so they can get closer to Shizuri and earn her attention and affection. This is super gross considering the characterization of trans women as deviants looking to deceive women and gain entry into women's spaces for sexual intentions is a harmful and unfounded characterization of this marginalized group that conservative actors have repeatedly and falsely elevated to suppress the human rights of trans people.

Beyond the LGBTQIA+ insensitive, I’m Living with an Otaku NEET Kunoichi!? is filled with a lot of weird decisions that I find incredibly annoying. Most of the show's 24 minute episodes are broken up into two distinct storylines, and separated by back-to-back ED and OP sequences. That means that nearly three minutes of every NEET Kunoichi?! episode goes to the doubled-up opening and ending sequences, and it makes me feel like the show doesn't have enough content to fill a full episode of television.

I’m Living with an Otaku NEET Kunoichi!? advances some wildly irresponsible ideas, squanders any potential built into its premise, and is too bland to merit any further vitriol or analysis. It's one of the worst anime of Winter 2025 and you won't miss anything if you don't watch it.

—Lucas DeRuyter

Bad anime is bad. Bad anime that has potential and then squanders it is worse. Bad anime that has potential, which demonstrates that potential at first only to swiftly implode—well that's just plain not fair. It honestly oughta be illegal to let a series like Ameku M.D. open with its tiny anime-girl version of House M.D. work alongside Columbo to solve the mystery of a guy who got murdered with a T. rex skeleton if the show is just not going to live up to those lofty heights for the rest of its run. I'm no doctor detective, but I can still diagnose the tragedy of what happened here: an ambitious Icarus that could only soar so long on wax wings before hubris caused it to ingloriously smash head-on into the cliffs below.

Flowery, I know, but I've got to put some sauce on this after Ameku M.D. turned out drier than a hospital-grade Salisbury steak. "Clinical" technically fits as an adjective for a show that takes place in a clinic, but titular Doctor Detective Takao's delivery of diagnoses has none of the drama, none of the pizazz of standard-bearers like Detective Conan—or Undead Murder Farce, to make an apt comparison with a more recent, much better mystery show also starring a cool mean lady. Aya Rindo didn't even have a body to gesticulate with and she still articulated her observations with more flair than the diminutive doctor here. Maybe it's not all Takao's fault, since she's given so little to work with. Some of the "mysteries" she startlingly solves are pedestrian problems that just reflect badly on the hospital she occupies for not being able to figure them out without her. Not that the ways she goes about it are thrilling; at one point she diagnoses characters with epileptic seizures by inducing epileptic seizures in them. I don't think that's even the funny kind of malpractice. And maladies like photosensitivity or mold poisoning are hardly "he needs mouse bites to live" material anyway. But then this is a show that even manages to make spontaneous combustion seem boring just in how long it takes to get to that human fireworks factory.

It all sucks because of how it squanders an underrepresented genre setup in the anime space and some cool-ass characters. Takao is an angry genius gremlin who's sharp, belittling all around her. If she smoked she'd be the perfect anime woman. Her beleaguered assistant is the only thing more dangerous than a doctor: a doctor who knows karate. They have a resident at their hospital who moonlights riding motorbikes, one of which Takao winds up ramping into a fire. I know it sounds like I'm describing the coolest show on Earth here, and that's the issue. Ameku M.D. is an anime that wastes all that with the driest, slowest, most uninterested meandering through that material. Plus it doesn't look all that great and it's grappled against numerous production delays just creating what it has. Maybe this would have worked better as a series of tightly paced movies instead. There's a cool anime in there somewhere, and I don't blame people who jumped on it for the very particular idea it was selling—I should know, I'm one of them! But given the disparity between that potential and what was ultimately delivered, I have half a mind to sue for malpractice.

—Christopher Farris

Very few things have made me “NOPE” this hard. I can get behind the morbid, the vulgar, the crass, and whatever else you can throw my way. The trick is: you have to make it good. And Beneheko is...not. It suffers from being an otherwise generic fantasy anime that would be forgotten if it were not for, you know, that one thing. If the anime is to have any legacy, it's that it may one day be used as fodder for those who falsely believe that anime is a medium made for deviants who frequent vending machines laced with panties. This is not praise.

I watched Beneheko without giving it a shred of the benefit of the doubt, and in just three short episodes I dropped it like a two-ton brick. This anime is so bad that I almost feel like I should apologize to Solo Levelling. Solo Leveling is certainly boring, but at least something is comforting about its dullness playing like ASMR I'd listen to lull myself to sleep at night. The same cannot be said about Beneheko. Just...why does this exist? Why?!

—Jeremy Tauber

While Momentary Lily has taken my colleague James on quite the journey, I'm sitting and wishing it could have done the same for me. I'm just here, at my desk, a little older, and a little more tired.

Studio GoHands' latest animated abomination needs no introduction. One needs only watch a minute of Momentary Lily to soak in all of their old tricks: oodles of rainbow lens flare, ugly color palettes, uncomfortable bosom momentum, spectrally possessed hair follicles, incomprehensible action scenes, and dozens of other baffling creative choices made with utmost unearned confidence. I respect that. A GoHands anime looks like a GoHands anime because GoHands wants that. They pour blood, sweat, and tears into replicating the uncanny and amateurish animation principles of the mid-'90s pre-rendered CGI cutscene from a long-forgotten adventure game. There's something pure about that. It's an abomination, but GoHands owns that abomination. Nobody else does it like they do.

More to the point, the aesthetic of Momentary Lily is the least of its problems. It's the easiest thing to make fun of, but once you dive deeper into the show, you quickly realize that its idiosyncratic style is its only somewhat interesting quality. Its true terror is the total lack of storytelling aptitude. We can point and laugh atGoHands' animation, but it still follows the basic principles of the medium. It takes still frames and arranges those in a sequence to create the illusion of movement. It gets that much right. I can't say the same for its writing. Adjacent scenes crash into each other with all the grace of an asteroid impact. Characters speak to each other like they have a string on their back and five unique phrases for kids to enjoy. The tone oscillates more violently than any anime I've seen in recent memory. I feel like I have whiplash after finishing an episode. I may need a neck brace when the finale airs.

Momentary Lily's deadliest sin is trying to be too much at once. A single episode will pivot so many times that, by the end of its 20 minutes, it'll feel like the story hasn't moved at all. There's Madoka-esque magical girl melodrama mixed in with aggressively unfunny slice-of-life shenanigans, post-apocalyptic conspiracies, grotesque fanservice, and instructional videos for cooking. Point A never leads logically to point B. Moreover, the anime executes none of those aspects competently. Even the fanservice, the easiest reptile brain slam dunk available to any trash series, gets undermined by GoHands' insistence on its uncanny animation quirks. Momentary Lily is a show in conflict with itself. It feels like a brainstorming session that never got further than scribbles on the whiteboard.

The characters are as atrocious as the storytelling, too. Their designs are bad to look at. Their personalities are nonexistent. They're like caricatures of themselves, with brains the equivalent of microchips that choose a catchphrase at random every time they open their mouths to speak. Without getting into details, there's a set of twists late into the show that had me thinking, for the briefest moment, that Momentary Lily might have been doing something clever with their shallow characterization. It wasn't. Every big swing the show takes has as much impact as a strand of cooked spaghetti. I'd call it baffling if it weren't so consistently boring. It's no cult classic. This is a show I can only recommend to the diehard GoHands fans, and if that describes you, then I can only wish you the best. You'll need it.

—Steve Jones