2023's BEST, WORST & Most CURSED Anime

2023 has been a year of extremes for better and for worse but in anime's case at least it feels like better has mostly one out fight scene enthusiasts have been eaten nonstop non- isekai fantasies come roaring back with avengeance and a lot of folks who missed out on Zombie Land Saga were finally tricked into liking Idol anime still mostly is the operative word there this year's crop of bad anime contains some of the most atrocious I've ever had to sit through and as for the trash well let's just say sheay garbage diners have been eaten just as well as the Shonen Bros So today we're going to celebrate it all the best of the year and the worst and the anime that one way or another came out well and truly cursed I've split these into three clear sections so those of you who are here just for the recommendations or the roasting can find whatever you're looking for but I do hope you'll make time for the whole thing and in the interest of making that time as short as possible for you I'm just going to jump right into things after this word from our sponsor Opera GX howdy fellow nerds I'm Shin tooya from the hit Esports anime protocol rain here to tell you why Opera GX is the best browser out there for gamers Ando taku what what you've never heard of me or my anime uh well uh me and my friends we play this hero shooter together you know competitively to save our local Game Cafe or whatever and just look at the graphics on this thing man pushes my rig right to the Limit that's why I use Opera GX the gamer browser for gamers to control exactly how much RAM goes to my 700 tabs of hentai mean strategy wiks Opera GX also helps you open less tabs than that with instant access to social apps like Instagram Tik Tok and Discord built right into the sidebar and their handy dandy video pop out feature means you can keep browsing the web without ever having to stop watching my anime or you know what one you've actually heard of with the new GX mod feature you can even transform your entire browsing experience into an interactive love letter to your favorite anime you've actually heard of or the concept of anime in general by customizing your browser's color palette sound effects background music animated wallpaper and [Music] more you can try that cozy anime mod for yourself or any one of the massive and everwing library of community made mods and add-ons simply by visiting the GX store and if you don't have Opera GX yet their quick import tool makes jump and ship even simpler letting you bring over your history bookmarks and cookies in just a few clicks it's even compatible with every Google Chrome extension so what are you waiting for click the link in the dubloo to download Opera GX and then uh maybe use it to Google my anime please now that was a great example of the kind of anime we won't be talking about tonight because it's very mid frankly and we're here to celebrate the extremes For Better or For Worse or for other and believe me I'm as excited to get to those last two as you are but first i'm just as excited to tell you about the 11 best anime I watched in 2023 y 11 it's one louder also General lack of self-control sorry I just couldn't narrow it down to a top 10 honestly any one of these could have been anime of the Year any other year so the list isn't even in any particular order except the last entry which is my anime of the year I was able to make that one decision and it almost killed me also this probably would have been a top 12 if I was caught up on Vinland Saga which I'm not because I have been kind of saving it for a rainy day so sorry that that's not on here but please don't get too caught up on judging my taste for that one glaring Omission I know it should be you should be judging me for what I did put on the list you know now that I say that it might have been a mistake to start this with pure unadulterated horm trash like the hund girlfriends who really really really really really really love you but I already wrote this sentence so no going back now in case that audaciously bold title didn't clue you in 100 girlfriends is an entire anime made out of just the parts of anime that your parents always seem to walk in on and honestly it rules via a strange Quirk of Destiny and by Destiny I mean the god of love got distracted while filling out his paperwork raro I Jo has been assigned a 100 soulmates instead of the usual one and because because the universe punishes anyone who can't make it work with their soulmate with bad luck until the day they die which will probably be really soon on account of the bad luck he is Duty bound to find and cherish every last one of them until the end of their days ending the story with anything less than a horum of a hundred happy hotties will mean that rentaro has fundamentally failed as a man truly no anime heroes Quest has ever been more just or [Music] righteous and few have ever been this long either at its current rate of girlfriends per chapter the series is presently on Pace to hit a similar page count to Shonen manga epics like bleach and Naruto which it honestly kind of needs to do the premise it's promised properly it would be one thing to just throw a hundred random cute and marketable character designs into a couple hundred chapters of rent a girlfriend grade pandering and call it a day but 100 girlfriends aims to give each and every one of those girlfriends both unique depth as individual characters and fun interesting chemistry not just with renaro but also other sometimes a lot of chemistry put girls making out right there thank you and it does it all without ever feeling like any one of them is being neglected by the plot or their man because it doesn't matter how believably really really really really really lovable all these waifus are if it's not equally believable that they would all really really really really really love renaro back luckily it is because he's undeniably and unflappably the greatest boyfriend to ever exist or not exist as the case may be he is a drawing I'm sorry to shatter the Illusion for you the whole thing is just an incredible Flex of character design and writing skill elevated by an adaptation every bit as inventive and hilariously anarchic as bochi the Rocks only a coward would deny hundred girlfriends as the anime of the Year Contender that it absolutely is speaking of bochi the director who gave us her hilarious anime last year put out a new masterpiece this one that hopefully I won't have to spend nearly as long justifying especially since I already put out a whole video on the second Channel explaining why I thought freerun Beyond Journey's End could be the anime of the Year solely based on my experience with the manga I'm happy to report my experience with the anime has been just as great if you're craving a proper non-portal fantasy story that'll truly transport you to another realm that has zero basis in RPG mechanics it's been a long time but we are eating good this season though it does play with RPG story tropes to be fair as the title suggests this is a journey beyond the end of your typical Dragon Quest narrative following the thousand-year-old elf mage of the Demon King defeating Heroes party a hundred years after the fact as she embarks on a new 10-year quest to retrace their Journey to the Demon King's Castle and reconnect with memories of that poultry 1 100th of her lifespan that somehow changed everything about her along the way she's followed and assisted in this Quest by two younger adventurers hottie genius Mage Apprentice Fern and Stark the Cowardly dragon slayer who slowly grow from innocent kids to awkward adolescence to capable and confident adults as the years and miles on the Long Road North go by frein is an undeniably epic and immersive work of fantasy that sucks the viewer in into its World of Magic and wonder with Lively animation and intoxicating music but as far as it can take us from our own world it still manages to hit incredibly close to home with well-observed portrayals of day-to-day life in slices and in time lapse and a rich exploration of The Human Condition a topic it highlights through contrast by focusing on characters like frean and and other darker things with distinctly inhuman perspectives it's a shining example of how great fantasy can deepen our understanding of our own reality and beyond that just a breathtakingly beautiful work of pastoral art and I'm placing it here so early in the list to make it clear I'm serious about that whole no particular order thing any one of these could have capped this list off under slightly different circumstances under slightly different circumstances Heavenly delusion probably would have topped a lot of people's lists specifically circumstances in which Disney gave even literally a single tweets worth of a about promoting it or any of their other anime which they have a surprisingly great lineup of actually from Indie gems like the sort of sequel to tatami Galaxy to show sh in Jump Blockbusters like bleach and Undead unlock you just wouldn't know it looking at any of their marketing or social platforms or even your own homepage even if you're someone like me who mostly watches anime on Disney plus though they do at least give a well-deserved Spotlight to the classic AMA so credit where it's due there Disney did one of last year's best anime summertime rendering insanely Dirty by not just sticking it in localization jail for the better part of the year but dumping it out in the middle of January with literally zero Fanfare again not even a single tweet and while they did at least have the sense to simoc cast Heavenly delusion thus allowing people who are you know watching it while it's airing to watch it while it's airing and talk about it while it's airing they ended up doing it just as dirty by tossing out the English title that fans of the manga were already using to D Rebrand it as ten Goku dako which if it's not obvious what's wrong with that title just ask yourself would we still be talking about shinekino Kyojin in 2023 if Crunchyroll had tried to sell us shiniki noyin in 2013 instead of attack on for the superior yena Onslaught I know that's an extreme example not every anime can pull that kind of mainstream clout but I don't say this lightly Heavenly delusion really might have if Disney put literally any marketing muscle behind it it's really that [Music] awesome mixing self-evidently top tier animated action with heady transhumanist philosophical themes and a genuinely clever post-apocalyptic mystery that I'm loath to spoil 10 Goku delusion is at once a somber thinking man's anime and a awesome late night Cavalcade of cartoon blood and tits and one of them condensed self-contained certified cool anime like Akira Cowboy bbop Ghost in the Shell or Vampire Hunter D bloodlust that people who remember what a VHS is are constantly complaining don't get made anymore turns out they do get made anymore Disney's just been holding out on us though not quite as hard as they they held out with summertime rendering which is one of the best mystery anime of any kind I've ever seen in my life and that's all I'm going to say about that you can see for yourself what makes it so darn good with the free month of Disney plus you're going to get to check out Heavenly dako speaking of shows you should go into blind though oino Co became the year's first new front runner for anime of it by Coming Out Swinging with a featurelength roller coaster ride of Premiere culminating in the mother of all rug PS which I will have to spoil at least vaguely to talk about the show like at all so skip to the next section if you haven't seen it and missed all my very good videos about it AKA akasaka constructed The Story of kagu yasama Love is War with deceptive Brilliance hiding complex continuity and dynamic reactive character arcs within the typically static format of a gimmicky episodic gag manga he combined Maison ikoku caliber character comedy and romantic tension with Death Note caliber mind games and romantic tension to create a Shonen is romcom unlike any other which was then perfected by the passionate team of animators who condensed and adapted it for the small screen with oino Co he's done it once again giving us a brilliant subtly Supernatural slice of Pop Idol life dramedy wrapped around a Death Note ajacent edgy smart boy Mackie aelian Revenge Thriller wrapped around a good oldfashioned murder mystery wrapped around a fascinating postmortem character study of the star of the different subtly Supernatural slice of Pop Idol life dramedy that we thought we were going to watch prior to the aforementioned rug pull look pal I warned you this segment wouldn't make any sense if you hadn't seen the anime it's not my fault that last sentence was like that tell akasaka Sensei to be less of a genius next time the Brilliance of his character writing is on especially strong display here with each one of the half dozen and Counting Principal cast members feeling convincingly like the protagonists of their own stories all of which intersect in the seedy underbelly of Japan's brutal and exploitative entertainment industry as aqua and Ruby navigate their way through it a setting that like all topics akasaka touches is impeccably researched and authentically portrayed and you know I I already said all this in a big long video essay this summer the length of which alone is a testament to how much I love this anime and it's a testament to how absolutely insane this year was that it's not in the top spot but to me at least it's even more of a testament that I couldn't give that spot to my top Scott Pilgrim that is takes off to be specific which I have to be since the new Netflix original anime isn't just the gorgeously animated retelling of Scott Pilgrim many fans were expecting but rather a fullon Evangelion style rebuild of Scott Pilgrim a chance for the original Creator to re-examine and reinterpret his characters and core themes to bring the story to a more mature emotionally fulfilling conclusion than he was capable of writing way back then one which aims to compliment celebrate and enhance the original comic and film and pixel art beat him up rather than contradict or replace any of that but that's not all it is it's also Scott Pilgrim 2 the new batch twin pilgrims a limited event series on [Music] Showtime and a little bit pilgrims 12 if I wanted to be cute and also accurate I could also call the series Lucas Lee's Pro Skater sex babom Mongolian chop Squad Gideon Graves gets it together and a ton of other incredible things I never knew I needed as either a Scott Pilgrim or anime fan which the Mad Geniuses at science saru have Voltron together in perfectly animated time with an incredible and eclectic Indie Punk chip tune soundtrack to form what I can only describe as the Fooly coolly followup we never got As for the ones we did get stay tuned for the worst and most cursed of course it would have been awesome to see the story I love so much from the comics properly animated but I can always reread those comics for that story they are very good comics and now when I do my enjoyment of them is only Amplified by the New Perspectives this version provides on their world and characters and on top of enhancing my enjoyment of the very good and fun comics and movie and pixel art beat him up now I get to watch Roxy RoR Inception fight Ramona through a paprika scape of action movie references before making out with Kim Pine I'm so happy to be alive right now if these entries were in any particular order Scott Pilgrim takes off would probably be second or third from the top but even then it would only be a hairs breath the head of the competition I can't even say for sure it's the best gamer anime this year cuz shangry La Frontier is here to expose every vrmmo anime before it VR or otherwise for the hack Noob frauds they all are well okay that's not entirely Fair fair or fair at all really Overlord still great so bowrey Log Horizon ixon Saga DT hell just this season Netflix dropped goodn night world and that absolutely rules with its Eve online inspired player politics and psychological horror elements but that's the thing all of those anime needs something beyond the game itself to hold our interest in their stories most Gamers have long since come to accept that non-interactive media will just never be able to capture the feeling of fighting a truly great boss in a god tier game like SEO with your own two thumbs the tension and drama inherent to those kinds of challenges is something that you need to play to really feel or so we thought shangry La Frontier proves we all just gave up on that too soon there's no death game to distract us here no effort to artificially inflate the drama by adding flimsy realworld Stakes just the alert L ing extremely specific science fiction fantasy of getting good at a theoretical perfect future game the full dive enabled Aid driven Elden ring of Warcraft Killers with nothing but your pride as a gamer on the [Music] line [Music] [Music] on paper series hero sunru isn't really all that conceptually different from your typical bog standard Kito a dude with such good reflexes and gaming skills he effectively becomes the protagonist of what's supposed to be a multiplayer game but unlike Kito he actually has a personality and also unlike Kirito he can actually lose at that game without the story instantly ending and he does a lot sometimes when it matters even and one time over a hundred times to the same basic mini boss with one cheap attack that just happens to hard counter his whole build who hasn't been there so we get a very textured authentic portrayal of the kind of emergent storytelling that well-designed game systems enable where success and failure feel like equal possibilities at any moment dependent on Our Hero's skill not his plot armor and where Sao ruined the illusion of its massively multiplayer setting by treating everyone outside kito's friend list and most people on it honestly like NPC's slf takes pains to fill its world with vibrant memorable self-motivated characters each playing the game their own way so no matter matter what kind of gamer you are be it a lore Hound a Pokemon collector or a sexy player killing Dy mommy you'll find your play style represented by someone in slf's sprawling hyper Advanced virtual world out of all the gamer anime I've seen or gamer manga I've read for that matter since I'm already nine volumes deep on book Walker nothing else gets it quite like shangry law Frontier it's not often I feel compelled to read ahead in the even after an anime I really like is over let alone in the middle of it so of course that says a lot for slf but Jujitsu Kaizen had that effect on me by like episode five of season 1 and I haven't hopped off that hype train since I haven't pulled yazzy aboard and even though she's not usually into Shonen she's fallen in so deep but lesser man might feel a little threatened by it not me though I'm right there with her saturo Gojo and suguru ghetto are two of the most fascinatingly flawed believably human superhuman rivals in any shown in manga not written by Togashi and they're not even the heroes of the main plot just the S tier 10 out of 10 prologue that's covered by the movie and the first five episodes of this season every single character in this series is simply written that good the characterization for heroes and villains major and minor alike is as nuanced understated and grounded in observ D humanity is the best Slice of Life dramas out there yet at the same time every last action scene in this anime whips harder than a pissed off [Music] [Music] Kurama and for as much effort as gay akutami clearly put in to developing these characters making them empathetic and likable he's also clearly not afraid to put his babies through the ringer when the story calls for real life or death consequences or just when he feels like it cuz he's kind of a jerk like that but those unpredictable jerk-like Tendencies are exactly what makes the shabuya arc which was current in the manga when I first binged it in 3 days flat the hardest hitting most memorable series of Shonen street brawls you'll see anywhere outside York new city so needless to say it's been quite exciting for me to finally see all of that animated doubly so considering how exciting all that animation is maa's outsourcing heavy production process may be held to work under but it does mean that each episode director and animator gets to put their own distinct cinematic often horny stamp on the manga's many iconic moments giving the animation a guran leganes experimental energy that makes each new fight and episode a delightful surprise even when you've read ahead though the aforementioned emotional depth of the dialogue also helps quite a bit with that this is one of those stories that only gets better on repeat viewings when you know what all the characters are really thinking and plotting and can dive deeper into their psychology which also makes the fights cooler and it's just it's just really good if you're looking for that kind of character depth with less risk of those characters uh disappearing on you in the middle of you you know feeling stuff about them actually this year gave us quite a few really great laidback dramas and love stories to sink our teeth into but out of all the non jjk shows that yazzy and I have become obsessed with this year insomniacs after school just hits different [Music] man a tale of two teens whose vastly different life circumstances have nonetheless LED them to pretty much the same shitty place Tangled in sweat soaked sheets at 6:00 a.m. staring at the ceiling trying and failing not to count the minutes till the sun comes up again scared of becoming burdens on those around them both the bubbly outgoing isaki and nerdy kagin Gant keep this condition a secret from their class mates until the inevitable day they run into each other in their school's most Primo nap spot the old Observatory and discover that they're not as alone as they thought suddenly the interminable void between Dawn and Daybreak is the time they most look forward to and the observatory becomes their secret Oasis from the light of day eventually the school finds out of course but that just means they need to start the old astronomy club back up which fuels a slow growing passion for nature photography in Gant and gives them both a good excuse to wander around after curfew giving us in turn a great excuse to soak in some soothing enaka after hours Vibes as we get to know them their friends and family and the Cozy small town they all call home this is one of those anime where it just feels like you could jump into the screen and start living in its world at any moment and like the characters could do the same with equal ease which is pretty much my favorite kind of anime and amazingly it's not the only one like that this year with similarly obsessive attention to detail overtake brings the medium Stakes world of formula 4 racing f1's lesser known amateur little cousin to life which is honestly a much better setting for a story than F1 biopics like Rush not withstanding for the same reason that high school sports are generally a better basis for Manga and Anime than the pro leagues it's you know little hard to sell a guy as a compelling Underdog when he's only got slightly less millions of dollars behind him than the other more successful guy but a passionate young racing Prodigy held back by clunky old machinery and the need to literally ration the rubber on his tires because they're like 10 grand a set now that's drama that's a story and that's exactly what burned out photojournalist Coya Moka thinks he's found after a chance encounter with the scrappy fatherson mechanic team at komaki Motors and their struggling Underdog racer Haruka asahina so he decides to sponsor them and then later when he realizes how much the tires cost find sponsors for them in hopes that seeing haruko win will reignite his own long burned out passion for photography it's what I thought I'd found in this series too at least at first the compelling thoroughly researched s tier original Sports Anime in the vein of hiq in that the rivals are just as empathetic and likable as the hero meaning that each Victory and defeat feels equally hype and Bittersweet and also in that those Rivals are literally just oawa and the wisi in Gro Mark's glasses [Music] [Applause] for it certainly delivers on the hype part of the equation Alki who might lowkey be my favorite anime director uses Dynamic camera work and crunchy authentic sound design to put you right in the heart of the racing action and it just never stops being exciting but as the characters Racers and supporters alike reveal more about their lives away from the track what drives them and what holds them back if you know your Sports Anime you'll soon come to realize this isn't an S tier series like haq after all it's Trip s tier like pingpong a story where the sport serves mostly as a catalyst for a rich exploration of obsession ego impostor syndrome from survivor's guilt and other essential aspects of The Human Condition a story about what it really means and really takes to bet your entire life on a talent that could fail you at any moment be it a sport or a creative hobby if you crave maturity and depth in your anime you don't want to miss out on overtake and you really don't want to miss out on Pluto Naki urasawa is almost undebatably the greatest living manga if there's any significant flaw in his work it's only that he's too good at drawing to realistically adapt like berserk canara mirira his art is just so intricate and detailed that animating it is just impractical since 1994 urasawa had five different manga serialized in bi-weekly or weekly San magazines four of which are widely held among the greatest manga of all time and the fifth one Idora probably will be too once it's finished yet for as widely acclaimed as these manga are it took over a decade for the first of them monster to get its adaptation and in the 19 long years since that 74 episode Behemoth of an anime has been the only one for admittedly good reason in the overworked understaffed anime industry of today the the only way to really match that level of consistent quality would be to make your anime a movie but a asawa's stories are all very long and complex so that format just doesn't really work for them if only there were some way to release say eight films all at once perhaps via the Internet enter Netflix with a giant cartoon sack of money get to safety no Adam what are you doing what is that stay behind me OD [Music] on Pluto is the third of urasawa's Masterworks serialized in 2008 between 20th century boys and its 21st century epilogue and out out of all his stories it might be the most distinctive because it's not entirely his instead it's a groundup reworking of a classic Astro Boy Adventure the greatest robot on Earth that reimagines Osamu tezuka's iconic world and hero in a more mature and grounded form suited to urasawa's style while reframing the central mystery of an OP robot serial killer from the perspective of robot detective gessi a supporting character in the original manga also of course he made a lot of other smaller changes that make the mystery feel tighter overall lend greater depth to basically every character major and minor alike expand the World building in a fascinating Asimov esque Direction and lowkey turned the whole thing into an incredibly poignant commentary on the dire human consequences of Middle East forever Wars you see terrorists everywhere but there aren't any here you and your peaceg giving forces dropped a bom my sing baby so yeah this is a pretty heavy watch but also a deeply necessary one for anyone who can stomach it especially now thankfully it's also a deeply satisfying watch the kind of anime you really want to savor one episode at a time as you spend the nights between just sort of staring up at the ceiling there is a strong case to be made here that Pluto is the objectively best anime this year but as for my personal favorite Z 100 bucket list of the Dead is everything I look for in an anime really it's got action suspense comedy big floppy titties zombies zombie BS zombie sharks zombie sharks tummy tummy tummy not to mention gut punching emotional moments that forcibly rip my tear Ducks open every time I watch them and truly profound philosophical observations that have changed the way I look at pretty much everything also top tier fart jokes which are obviously the most important thing because for anyone who can make farts funny again making zombies good again would be a trivial matter and indeed zom 100 does make zombies good again very very good did I mention the shark and hey if you don't like animals they also got all the human zombie types such as shamblers walkers sprinters and thrillers clearly zom 100 likes to have fun with the whole Zombie thing so if you were hoping for yet another boring gritty realistic survivalist prepper power fantasy like every othering post Snider Zombie Thing look elsewhere or just you know throw a rock and hit one or maybe don't actually you could probably learn a thing or two from the series resident X prepper bestg girl shisuka who in turn learns from wage slave turned amateur superhero best boy Akira and his best bud best boy Ken show that there's no real point in survivalism if you never make time to actually [Music] [Music] live not that these zombies pose a particularly dire threat to any of the m characters between Akira's shark suit and the full set of Samurai armor worn by Buxom German weeaboo bestg girl beatric even sizable hordes of the things are a very solvable problem and for the most part the undead just end up serving as Team Rocket style rapid up buttons on the story of whatever items being crossed off the bucket list this week stories which can get extremely heavy and emotional Truck Stop of the Dead is probably one of the best explorations of abuse I've seen in like any medium but just as often their light-hearted educational asides about random topics ranging from fossils to class struggle to Japanese Hot Springs there's probably as much dror Stone DNA in this show as there is Dawn of the Dead as a sort of Walkin tour of neat factoids about Japan and honestly I'm fing here for it I love learning about Japan ah life is study what I I'm not you're drawing boobs actually jokes aside I've been doing some serious story planning in here like real scene by scene plot outlining with a I think a fairly realistic monthly word cam Target not just idle World building and Z 100 directly inspired me to take that leap after letting my dream of writing a novel languish for the last s years of youtubing this anime is powerful like that a truly lifechanging life affirming work of art that uses its Undead as an everpresent reminder of just how short and precious all our lives really are I cannot recommend enough that you give this show a shot I wish I could just keep on recommending good anime for the rest of the video there's definitely enough this year to fill it but I know a lot of you are only here to see me suffer and if I want YouTube to keep recommending my stuff I got to give the people what they want so you've heard about the best anime I watched this year now it's time for the absolute worst coming in fifth Legend of Heroes colon trails of Cold Steel hyphen Northern war isn't quite the worst anime this year obviously cuz it's in fifth but for me personally it was the biggest disappointment by far if you haven't played or seen my videos on the trails series of jrpgs it's a massive fantasy epic spanning multiple years and a sprawling fantasy continent with each subseries taking us to a different country with a very different perspective on lamia's whole geopol iCal Outlook the depth and complexity of the series World building is all but unrivaled within its genre of course that can also make the games a little intimidating to get into but a full TV anime could have been a great jumping on point for new fans and a perfect excuse for me to evangelize one of my faves some more what's more that subtitle Northern war promised something very exciting a brand new Side Story exploring a corner of Zur area the games have never reached North Ambria the home country of several key characters throughout the series and the legendarily fierce Northern Jagger mercenary Corp who've come up quite a bit in past games meaning even if the anime failed to grab many new fans the existing ones would at least have some meaty new lore to chew on so what could possibly go wrong oh right the anime industry of course visuals aren't the be all and endall especially not for fans of a game series that started out looking like this in 2004 but unfortunately the stories also kind of like 70% complete garbage 90% if you don't count the new lore there are some interesting ideas and plot points sprinkled in especially toward the end like a big couet top that complicates the titular War and the characters do have their moments even if their back stories are kind of one note and their designs are uh this guy has literally glowing blue hair streaks but then in many other moments those characters are suddenly just too stupid to order ice cream right so they end up wandering around town aimlessly trying to balance a teetering 15 scoop Tower until they randomly wander into a terrorist plot between a clown and his malevolent Army of mascots to blow up a fancy rich people party because they uh somehow nebulously betrayed the People by um it's not entirely clear [Music] actually no no no my [Music] then they [Music] wrestle [Applause] [Music] so yeah it's just fundamentally not a very good TV show and I know that's not going to stop a lot of Trail fans out there from watching it for the lore sure didn't stop me I had to it's Canon but be forewarned you will suffer for the few measly scraps this show throws your way that said if you're in the market for some Exposition dumping boy do I ever have the anime for you summoned to another world for a second time is a rare innovator in the isekai space a bold experiment in narrative structure that asks what would happen if all the stuff in an isekai story already happened so instead of watching it happen we get to listen to a bunch of people talk about it years after the fact for literally hours all while following a much less interesting story about one of protag cun's old Pals doing a conspiracy to start the demon human War back up because he put on some magic jewelry that turned him crazy and evil not that that conspiracy actually goes anywhere cuz naturally protag kun's already friends with all the leaders of every country country in the whole world except the ones who are hot women they're all in love with him of course so all he's got to do is like go around to all their houses and be like hey maybe let's not do war and then they're all like oh yeah okay no war and then hey no war bro someone call the UN we got to tell them about this also on the way he runs into other less geopolitically influential ladies from his past and also new ones who are also in love with him also of course he's even got permanent camping spot Reserve to top mount Sunder and in a fun twist we get to watch protag kunun easily kick everyone's asses with all the overpowered abilities he got from having beat the game already which is you know just such a refreshing change of pace from watching your typical generic protagon easily kick everyone's asses with all the overpowered abilities he got from God turning cheats on now all this might lead you to wonder how such an in inovative isekai could end up on a list like this but frankly this one might be too groundbreaking for its own good I fear the world just isn't ready for this level of subversive sophistication in its anime why ly why you always lying good question the answer to set up this segue Liar Liar is a 1997 Hollywood comedy starring Jim Cary as flet Reed a filthy lion lawyer who wait sorry my mistake U liar rail is a 2023 Japanese anime about a futuristic Island full of highly competitive high schools for gifted students classrooms of the elite if you will which cultivate the next generation of world leaders by making them compete in extremely convoluted augmented reality games for meaningless star-shaped virtual status symbols instead of you know actually learning literally anything our hero heroo is a one-star nobody who ascends to the rank of sevenstar the top student on the entire Island on his very first day after asking the previous sevenstar for directions and then accidentally beating her in a very convoluted staring contest through a series of increasingly stupid misunderstandings but the thing about that is he's not actually the seven star at all he only won one star from the previous champ which just happened to be a special star with the power to make One Lie come true which he has to use to pretend to be the Seven Star so the company that owns the island can save face cuz it turns out the ex-champ was the president's granddaughter except actually she's just a standin for the real granddaughter who's been kidnapped but then actually actually uh you know what you can just go check out the spring ones to watch if you want to hear me lay into this Show's never-ending string of stupid plot twists hi future Audio Only Jeff here obviously uh you will not find me tearing into stuff in a once to watch video uh that's the summer hottest trash that you can find that um I'm sorry we have been working on this for two straight weeks and I'm very tired back to your regularly scheduled program liar rail represents an important milestone in the evolution of the emerging Baka and Test likee genre where new writers have started copying the copycats like Kake guui and thus drifted so far from the original concept that they just have noing idea what the point even is the games the kids play here aren't even designed in any way to prepare them for the harsh Doge eat dog real world anymore not even in Stupid Ways like classroom of the elite they're just half baked ideas for AR smartphone games the writer came up with and wanted to do something with in a story with each Arc basically forcing us to learn the rules of a new game in order to understand anything that's going on only for the hero and possibly villain to reveal how they cheated at the end and rendered all those rules completely irrelevant to the actual conclusion of the story then we never see that game again and it's time for a new Exposition dump about the next set of rules that also won't matter in a week or two yeah I honestly don't think this anime could be less satisfying to watch if it tried though at least it is sometimes stupid enough to get a sarcastic laugh or two out of me which is more than the rest of these things made me feel in second place we find my second biggest disappointment of the year Fooly coolly grunge which came as a serious surprise to me because I genuinely believed that my expectations for the Fooly sequels were as low as they could physically go we all saw that trailer I mean nobody was expecting great things from the CG animation in this thing but even then man I did not think the parts they weren't showing in the trailer would be this hilariously inept to be clear it's not all bad some of it's pretty good even there are a few moments where a talented animator swings for the fences and totally hits with a gorgeous sakuga shot or two or some experimental blend of trippy visuals and music that actually hits in a similar way to the original OVA but even when that happens chances are good that music's been recycled from that OVA and any good animation you see will end up being recycled in this one like two to three times over thanks to the series gimmicky triple protagonist story structure and to be clearer most of it is bad very very bad we're talking jrpg cutscene level animation where characters just stand or sit around flapping their lips for what feels like days on end they also do that thing where they put 2D characters next to the 3D ones because there's literally only 30 total models in this entire 90minut show and The Clash of styles that results is somehow even more jarring than when xarm did that that's just embarrassing the show is also just criminally unfunny like for some reason they decided that now the head lump things that turn into robots and other stuff can't just be knocked off not now's head anymore now haruka's got to literally Jerk It Off first cuz you know if there's one thing people always complain about Fooly it's that it's too subtle but as atrocious as all this stuff is as insulting as it is to The Originals Legacy as a landmark work of Animation that gimmicky story structure is by far the worst part again I do see the vision three different types of kid coming of age at the same time viewing the same world changing event from their own unique angle the son of a sushi Artisan trying to decide for himself if that's really the life for him the daughter of a sick old swordsmith whose mother passed away years ago and an alien immigrant struggling with discrimination his brother's need to do crimes to make ends meet and the fact that his entire the thing at home species is genetically destined for alcoholism which this segment's running way too long as it is so we're not going to unpack any of that on paper not a bad idea except like everything about the rock aliens in practice it gives each of those three kids like 20 total minutes to develop their characters in between the story development plus the five or so shared minutes of reused cont I mean the cool bits where their stories syn up so each of the heroes ends up being paper thin and because she's the only recurring supporting character who shows up in all three episodes haruko the franchise's iconic inscrutable force of chaos and source of Comedy relief ends up getting more screen time and character development than any of the supposed protagonists that is soing backwards and not in the clever subversive way that youd hope for from a Fooly followup that actually gets it because haruko simply does not work as the main character it's like trying to make a Pirates of the Caribbean movie with Just Jack Sparrow or a friend spin-off with only Joey there is no point to Comedy relief if a story has no heavier emotional arcs from which to be relieved the other Fooly follow-ups may have been unimpressive and unnecessary but grunge is just unbearable still for as awful as it and every other anime we've talked about so far are at least none of them tried to sell me [Music] nfts K alil is the worst most Shameless piece of vtuber cross promotional media crap ever created and I'm including 30 follower V Tweeter posts in that statement this show fails on literally every level it looks like the acting's mostly the plot is non-existent the storyboarding is confusing and repetitive it reuses one of the Idol songs it's trying to sell so often you'll be sick of it two episodes in it's got five main characters with maybe three personality tra between them and none of them are kizuna ey you know the famous vtuber the anime named after she's barely evening in it the premise of the show is that I was this legendary vtuber who disappeared from the spotlight at the height of her Fame after winning five straight nfts inspiring a new generation of virtual Idols to attend Aiden Academy basically metaverse Hogwarts in hopes of winning the prestigiously non-fungible lap Andor award just like their Idol though our main heroine Miracle Chon also hopes to discover what really happened to I and prove she never abandoned her fans the mostly girls go about pursuing these goals mostly by standing or sitting around talking forever interrupted on occasion by shitty unpolished motion capture dances to the same handful of songs over and over and over also they briefly play an online VR game at one point which technically means on top of being the worst mo/ Idol anime of the year and possibly all time this is also the worst vrmmo [Music] anime there are few anime I'd call truly vile but kizo alil is certainly one of them it's ugly stupid excruciatingly boring and worst of all cynical beyond measure there is not a single morsel of joy to be found in this thing not even the ironic kind if you're looking for that well that's why cursed anime get their own category now though I'm sorry I did trick you a little the first entry in that category is just unironically good mushok cense 2 could have easily been on my best of year list it would have been in fact if I hadn't thought of this ingenious scheme to sneak a top 12th entury onto the cursed list but that doesn't mean it doesn't belong here from a mainstream perspective this anime is as cursed as it gets you cannot post a single positive thing about jobless reincarnation in public without someone popping in to point out the protagonist is a gross 30s something actual literal pedophile reborn in a kid's body and you know fair I can see why someone might get a little hung up on that but I promise you this anime is really good not in spite of that uncomfortable stuff but directly because of it unlike so many boilerplate isekai protagonists rudus grey rat is a fascinatingly flawed deeply human character driven not by some Noble need to save the world or even a selfish desire to indulge and Escape but a powerful yearning to Simply become a version of himself he doesn't have to hate well in the long term at least in the short term over the course of season 2 his goal is to cure his erectile dysfunction no wait don't leave no seriously don't the Quest for that cure is actually tied up in a fascinating exploration of his abandonment issues and other problems and the whole time he's on it he's surrounded by equally flawed equally deep equally human characters all struggling with their own insecurities and vices and all like Rudy seeking love and acceptance in spite of themselves because that's what humans do Mushu kensei is honest and raw and absolutely bursting with life in a way that only the very best literature fantasy or otherwise can even hold a candle to if you're picking up what frein's putting down and want more like it outside of Spice and Wolf and ascendants of a bookworm you will not find anything closer than this mush ensei is as worth its deeply uncomfortable price of admission as made in abyss and it carries the same curse as maen Abyss where it desperately makes you want to talk about it but every time you do you summon at least one K-pop stand though that is arguably better than the curse on kamikatsu working for God in a Godless world where every time you try to tell someone that the show's pretty good actually they just look at you like you have an anime head on a real human body which again pretty understandable because I mean just look at this fing thing run if you missed my coverage of G8 and X arm it is entirely possible that you've never seen a more obviously bad hideous anime in your entire life and I'm not going to tell you looks are deceiving here it is bad aggressively hilariously ey searingly so that's not good but that doesn't mean it can't also be good in fact kamikatsu is the very best there is at being terrible on purpose the show shows you right out of the op that it can do top-notch sakuga and yet it consistently chooses not to instead opting to construct a very strange athetic out of stiff sloppy line art inexplicable style shifts random shots of 16bit Sprites and of course jarringly out of place CGI all over the place hold on where are you going hold it hurry we might still be able to make it in time this show legitimately hurts my brain to look at sometimes I'm sure some of these clips are causing you pain right now but when you actually sit down to watch the show in context it all somehow works at least for me as a crap connoisseur it's very refreshing to see animators making mistakes I've laughed at in other shows with the intent of making me laugh instead of just cuz they you know up the strange Beast is coming pleas are stories counting on you as a bad idea that said if you're not a custom Med to bad Andor trashy anime this one does go from zero to CPR in less than a minute after protag gets iseki by way of his dad's Cults ritual Gone Wrong by the way and by the Midway point of the story he's infiltrating an actual sex called alongside a literal nyphomaniac The Village pervert and an ancient primordial God who happens to look like a 12-year-old girl so you know expect a stop torrent of anime from this one but on the other hand that Village pervert is constantly being subjected to horrible and well-deserved violence so maybe that'll be cathartic for the manetta haters and offset to anime it's hard to say honestly it's hard to say if anyone will like this show until they actually give it a try all I can say for sure is watching it will make you substantially less susceptible to cult propaganda and recruiting tactics for reasons I've completely run out of time to explain so I guess you'll just have to watch it to find [Music] out speaking of anime where the hero's gets whipped out in the very first episode it's time to make good on my promise from the fall hottest trash and finally give Yoko taro's death game anime Kami Arab God app The Roasting its fugly CGI ass so righteously deserves is what I wish I could say but I've hit a bit of a snag there see the reason I didn't do the roast initially last month is I ran out of time to watch enough of the show and the three episodes I did test were so obviously terrible in so many ways I knew it was an absolute shoe in for this video but then when I finally got around to watching more I kind of didn't want to stop and the harder I looked for stuff to roast the more I realized this Show's kind of cooking for starters the powers at play here are way more interesting than most death games at first it seems like we're on standard Mei Nikki rules everyone kills each other and the last man standing gets to be God just with slightly more varied if still basic power sets for the participants like big knife or see slightly into future that is outside of protag kung Goro who has the power to rewrite causality itself at the very Hefty cost of ruining his own Karma and dooming himself to never get a girlfriend for example gradually though it's revealed that basically every Power set is on that world shaking level and the other characters just needed to figure it out one villain can make the entire world believe any fake news story he comes up with and fabricate evidence for it another can take over people's minds by convincing them to open their hearts it's really clever stuff stuff not just for setting up cool fights but for testing and exploring the characters and those characters are really good they definitely don't leave the best first impression with how try hard quirky they come off but then neither do a lot of great Yoko Taro characters how many times have I told you don't roll around in theing mud [Music] and while Taro didn't actually write the dialogue the screenwriter who took over for him the Kaku City actors Creator jyn is no slouch in that department so everyone really grew on me the more time I spent with them over time even my complaints about the CG started to fade I mean part of that was definitely that I just watched Fooly coolly grunge and SD Gundam force would look good next to that but weird hands and limb proportions aside the main character models are actually pretty well designed especially in the faces and they animate with a lot of Personality not to mention the show's overall direction is incredibly stylish of course it's only the mains who are modeled that well the background characters are literally faceless gray blobs which makes everyone who's actually part of the death game stand out like a destructible Rock in DBZ but the show doesn't really need to keep the god candidates identity secret to maintain tension not when the plot that jyn and Taro have cooked up has way Wilder surprises in store like when Goro's favorite Idol accidentally finds the porn on his PS3 and then the star of that porn pops out of the TV to ask them all for a favor now without question this anime's got a lot of flaws that need looking past but if you can it is a ton of fun and a genuine breath of fresh air in an incredibly stagnant genre so as a substitute I've decided to give this spot to the near automata anime instead not that the content of that anime is particularly cursed but boy howdy the production sure was anyway I'm sorry if I've disappointed you by being so positive in this section so far but I promise you the next two entries are going to make up for it some anime curses are a little less obvious and therefore a lot more Insidious this footage for instance will seem innocuous to many of you if not adorable it may even stir up fond memories for some who watched the anime years ago and never looked up anything else about it but those who know about the manga will react almost certainly with pure revulsion because they also know about the plot twist right after the anime ends where it turns out this was a romance all along and they were the love interests obviously that was a bit of a shock for anyone who was emotionally invested in the whole heartwarming found family thing the anime had going on but the new fall anime a girl and her guard dog has figured out the perfect solution to usagi drop's biggest problem you take all that wholesome crap throw it out the window and quadruple down on the smut the series follows isaku orphan granddaughter of a yaku zaon and Kaa young Yakuza Thug who's been assigned to protect her by the Dawn and promised long ago that he'd become her quote mommy and her daddy even her big brother and anything else she wishes in the present day against her wishes he's temporarily added stalker to that list using his crime connections to pull a reverse 21 Jump Street and infiltrate her new high school to prevent her from talking to boys the anime calls his behavior a little overprotective personally I'd call it a little [Music] psychotic but then of course he's really hot or you know he would be if the art was less janky so that psycho behavior is by no means a deal breaker low key she's a little into it even I mean obviously this is 50 Shades adjacent girl trash we're talking about here the only reason she says no to anything to begin with is the target audience thinks it's hotter if he has to convince you a little but of course that means there's no real conflict driving the story at all just a flimsy illusion of romantic tension so as a substitute they got to do things like have rival Yakuza thugs show up to kidnapper sparking off a big crazy car chase scene and by big crazy car chase scene I [Music] mean then she gets kidnapped again literally four episodes later in the middle of the obligatory School play Arc by slightly more molesty Yakuza thugs because that's how many ideas this anime has it's honestly a little impressive how quickly this show turns a premise as audacious as Yakuza ageg Gap pseudo incest into Bland formulaic shjo slop and that might be the most cursed thing about it that feeling of desensitization when you look at an anime that's twisting itself in knots to be as edgy and offensive as possible and can only think ah another one of those huh it's the sort of thing that makes you wonder how much all this anime has really gotten to you twisted your mind and warped your perspective on what's normal but if you ever find yourself in doubt like that just consider have you ever looked at a dog's tail and thought man that sure looks like a super suckable cuz if not my life as inuk kais son's dog is proof positive you got a long way left to fall inuk kaan's dog is built around one very simple question what if you got turned into a dog somehow and were then adopted by your crush and then your crush turned out to be a sick zoophile freak and in a shocking coincidence so are all her hot friends it's not a very good question to base a story on kind of answers itself the second you ask it really but then just going out on a limb here I doubt this Show's target audience cares all that much about the plot though considering the show looks like warmed over dog anyone coming for the plot probably won't leave all that satisfied either now if you're watching on YouTube rather than patreon you may have to take my word for it that there's some very bad art and animation behind all these adorable animals there's just not a lot of this show that YouTube will let me show you not that you'd want to see it anyway unless maybe you're very drunk with some friends you're very comfortable with because I won't mince words here this is the don't watch an anime called Boku of beastiality if you're curious to know more about the very cursed specifics of its plot though yazzy dropped a little roast of the manga over on her Channel a while back that I'd encourage you to check out when we're done here which is now actually oh thank harui I'm finally free also thanks Opera for sponsoring this whole thing and most importantly thank you for sticking with me through this lengthy look back at one of the most exciting years in anime history unfortunately there wasn't time to Spotlight all the great or terrible shows this year but if you want to hear my thoughts on those that's what the ones to watch and hot as trash are for and if you want to share your thoughts on those I'd absolutely love to hear what you think are 2023 is best worst and most cursed anime in the comments below I'm Jeff th professional too much Anime Watcher and I think I'm going to go play some video games for the next week

Channel: Mother's Basement

Views: 571,675

Keywords: Mother's Basement, Anime, anime recommendations, anime roast, best anime 2023, worst anime 2023, 2023 anime, top anime, top 10, anime review 2023, oshi no ko, heavenly delusion, frieren beyond journeys end, shangri-la frontier, mushoku tensei season 2, cursed anime, inukai san dog, zom 100, 100 girlfriends who really love you, FLCL Grunge, kizuna ai, legend of heroes, northern war, pluto, overtake, insomniacs after school, yoko taro, kamierabi

Id: g7ehGZB1YB0

Length: 72min 52sec (4372 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 17 2023