The Worst Anime of 2020

at last we've reached the end of 2020. the world is breathing a huge collective sigh of relief that we survived it at all and here i am doing everything i possibly can to ensure i don't at the last minute because my end of year celebrations involved taking a grueling look back at the absolute worst that anime had to offer in the last 365 days and you can rest assured that this year's bad anime did its darndest to keep up with this year's uh everything else i think that's like the third time i've made some variation of that joke this month please forgive me i'm very tired and you're about to see why the fifth worst anime of 2020 is dragon's dogma a show about which i already spent jesus how long talking and thus have very little left to say uh i could point out that there are a lot of huge plot holes in it like ethan and hannah pass through don't do drugs or the hydro will get you town in episode four while heading to the mountain where the dragon is but then the whole reason they help the soldiers fight the lich in episode five is to learn where the dragon is it's really obvious that they wrote the episodes out of sequence and did some very slight doctoring to fit them together into something resembling an arc which makes the plot feel even more incoherent and scattered than i just told you shironeko project zero chronicle is but i don't know that doesn't really affect the viewing experience as much as any of the other stuff i already talked about in my video and in summing up why dragon's dogma is bad here i'd just be saying the same stuff again but shorter which sounds like about as much fun for both of us as writing a list of plot holes so instead i'm just gonna fill a bit of time complaining about the other bad anime that i had to watch to figure out what was actually bad enough to go on this list shachibato president it's time for battle is a gotcha game comedy anime that tries and fails to spoof its genre like many other fantasy comedy anime these days it's a series of very obvious jokes about bog standard rpg tropes with a very slight twist in this case what if adventuring companies were like actual companies so now the party leader is also a ceo and in addition to keeping track of equipment and strategy he's gotta manage finances and business strategy that sounds like it could potentially be funny i mean there's some real gold to be mined in the insane world of corporate bureaucracy but that kind of comedy kind of relies on keen attention to detail and an eye for the subtle absurdities and contradictions baked into corporate systems and this is an anime that thinks it makes sense to pay your inheritance tax upfront instead of you know out of your inheritance so instead of anything clever the puzzles in dungeons are just replaced with quizzes about business facts while the bosses are like bosses you get it like there's a cerberus with a management head that fights its subordinate head haha funny the jokes suck the characters suck the story makes no sense and sucks and the collectible waifu designs are all almost cute but just a little too busy and over designed like does not hotaru really need two different colors of hair wheel clip and a headband does not miku's overall skirt really need a heart cut out right over her crotch okay i've talked about that one for way too long lightning round time i'm a big theater geek steampunk is my favorite thing and the musical theater steampunk robot combat review of shin sakura tizen the animation still managed to bore me to tears also the animation's a good subtitle because they reused the same animation a lot of times with different cg models and the cg looks bad also boom got em next shadowverse has every problem with card game anime i listed in my video of the same name but worse the characters are totally flat the duels have no strategy but everyone talks like playing a big monster is a stroke of genius and whoever thought putting your smartphone into a wrist holster was in any way a substitute for the inherent radness of dual discs should learn from that mistake gotta go faster kings raid the animation world building makes no sense exposition dumps are way too long and that sucks because the action's actually kinda decent when it does happen super hx arrows got my summer ones to watch d monetized so i hate it for very personal reasons but also it's not funny or sexy and that's kind of a problem for softcore parody porn listeners absolutely gorgeous a true aesthetic experience op is a real banger but also absolutely no substance to back up all that style and in some places it's kind of an insult to the classic rock to which it pays tribute real big disappointment still more fun than anything else in this video lastly tamayomi look at the poster now look at the anime straight up deceptive advertising but even if the girls were cute and the animation was good cute girls doing cute things baseball editions already been done and this adds nothing new to the table from a character perspective or a sports anime perspective it is just plain boring alright that's enough time filling let's move on to number four generally speaking i stick to full length series with these lists it doesn't really feel fair comparing those directly to 5-minute comedy or etchy time slot fillers and longer shows also just give me more to say but when their episodes hit the 12-minute mark shorts can deliver more substantial stories worth critiquing and i really really couldn't let peter grill in the philosopher's time the eugenics-fueled ntrm anime pass without some kind of comment though to avoid getting this video demonetized i will have to choose my comments very carefully i suppose i should explain what that last terrible sentence meant peter grill is the strongest human warrior to ever war and after definitively proving his might in a grand fighting tournament he's got only one goal on his mind to marry his impossibly pure childhood sweetheart luvelia senpai and live out the rest of his days with her happily her father the adventurer's guild master has some doubts about peter though and despite being framed as the villain he is absolutely correct in that assessment because immediately after he wins the tournament and makes his engagement to levelia official peter is approached by a pair of oni girls lisa and mimi whose goal is to have the strongest baby in the world which they think only peter can give them because they have a medieval understanding of heritability then again this loser clearly didn't get where he is with hard worker discipline so maybe they're on to something it only takes one brush against their crudely animated boobs for peter to abandon all of his morals and values and betray the love of his life which is not a great starting place for a hero we're meant to root for or i think the series wants us to pity him actually it constantly frames its jokes joke like look at this poor dumbo he just wants to live a happy life with his pure cinnamon roll life but all these salutes keep jumping his bones oh no and the funny the thing about that is if you don't want to cheat on your fiance you just don't like yeah the show fades out like he's blacking out to emphasize how he's losing control to the horny but he's not even intoxicated in a lot of these scenes he just doesn't have any self-control and is making bad decisions and it is not funny to watch a guy feel sorry for himself over that it's just irritating to be clear peter's not at fault for every one of his escapades there's this elf girl who puts a curse on his you can guess what that can only be cured by you can guess how and that is a crime so yeah i don't think it's funny but i do feel really bad for him on that count she's a monster what's that she's a recurring waifu i'm supposed to like her character ugh you kind of [ __ ] that one up harem comedies are ensemble comedies ensemble comedies rely on having likable or at least relatable and interesting casts of characters and i'm sorry but absolutely none of these pitiful excuses for human beings fit that bill even slightly well maybe piglet the gag of an ugly orc being hot to humans is tired but not entirely unfunny her insecurities are relatable she's got real feelings for peter for some reason and she's even okay with him being paulie which is clearly what he wants and could have and enjoy instantly if he just stopped lying to the very nice lady who he clearly doesn't love enough to be faithful to and i think that's the real problem here i mean underneath the elements of the story that i personally find to be distasteful or straight up insulting for what they seem to be implying about my gender the whole joke of the show is premised on peter not getting the thing he wants because of the things he does but he wouldn't do the things he does if he actually wanted the thing he wants as much as he thinks he does so he's not actually suffering he's just doing bad things with zero consequences and then complaining and that's not funny it's also not sexy and that's kind of a problem for softcore parody porn i can at least give this show one thing the crunchyroll subs contain an absolute treasure trove of creative and varied [ __ ] puns i mean peter's genetic material is the central plot mcguffin so it only makes sense that they'd need to find a lot of ways to describe it to avoid the dialogue getting too repetitive that unfortunately doesn't help much with the repetitive jokes or plot but at the very least if you watch this anime you will walk away from it with several dozen delightful new ways to say baby batter and that ain't nothing which by default leaves this hanging above the next three entries what i'm saying is the real demon soul starts here i don't think that generic and cringy are particularly helpful words to use in criticism lots of good things are emblematic of their genre and cringe is very much in the skin of the becringer yet i don't really know what else to call our third place winner shironeko project zero chronicle which i can only describe as an extremely faithful adaptation of your teenage deviant art gallery it can be your angle or your devil and either way it comes brandishing a very big very silly sword that said it is also based on a real thing shironeko project is a 2014 free-to-play action rpg that hit big in japan but not so much anywhere else partly owing to a [ __ ] lawsuit from nintendo over the game's control scheme which was sort of like the wrist strap thumb pad controls in super mario 64 ds but it's really obvious that they were just trying to help out their competing game dragalia lost it's a whole thing and frankly all of that is way more interesting than the anime itself which is not a straight adaptation of but rather a prequel to that game a chronicle of its world starting from zero if you will now i haven't played the original game but as far as i can gather its backstory goes a little something like this long ago the world was split between a kingdom of light in the sky and a kingdom of darkness on the barren earth below an endless war raged between the guardians of light and the demon army until one day the prince of darkness met the queen of light and they fell in love seeking peace the dark prince took up arms against his king and their love that should not have been through the world out of balance and reshaped the very land and sky did you get all that okay now imagine me saying it all again changing nothing only so slowly that it takes me five hours to finish it that's this anime okay i'm being a little unfair there are a few wrinkles of nuance that i left out like the land of darkness has crap agriculture and is under constant threat of monster attacks and the prince is an orphan monster attack survivor who wins the right of succession through a series of duels that sound way more interesting than they actually are and only take three episodes to get through also the land of light is sort of hoarding all the good resources so things aren't quite so black and white except they are because the king of darkness is a huge dick with mind control powers and that's literally the only reason a war is happening also the queen and prince each have a companion who's secretly in love with them to help stretch out that side of the story and yeah okay now i've really covered everything this anime is almost 100 padding divided 70 30 between drawn out conversations and bad jokes that mean nothing and go nowhere and flashy jrpg boss fights that mean nothing go nowhere and barely have any continuity or choreography to speak of with any remaining time filled in by flashbacks to those other things i would say it feels like watching grass grow except that is literally a thing this anime makes us do see the kingdoms of light and dark form a brief alliance to fight this god of destruction called ball which gives the prince as an envoy and the queen along with their respective entourages a chance to get to know each other and they spend that time doing a very unfunny outfit swap sketch eating food that the white kingdom doesn't put enough seasoning on which is almost a funny joke by accident and wandering through the mountains in an herb picking contest and that last activity i [ __ ] you not takes an entire episode during which the only conflict that happens is green big titty demon lady and royal night captain guy get a bit jealous of the main couple and an irritating kid goes missing for two minutes but he's fine while looking for him the prince knocks the queen into a pond resulting in what's clearly intended to be fanservice then they eat some tempura that's it i did not skip anything a significant portion of the episode script is just names of herbs and i mean i like slice of life [ __ ] i could put up with that if the characters were characters or if any of it went anywhere like say if the herbs or food or outfits that get swapped or maybe the relationships that develop between the characters in these episodes had even the slightest tangible impact on the rest of the plot but they don't after a couple episodes of [ __ ] around the king of darkness just hits the make a plot happen button and the prince's buddy adele is consumed by darkness and pulls a euphonator only somehow even less narratively satisfying so the prince has to chop him in half then the prince gets arrested and kicked in the face for the crime of saving the queen's life in front of everyone royal guard captain dude immediately forgets all of his character development up to that point and starts being racist against demons again even though it's really obvious there's some black magic [ __ ] going on with his former friend so it's up to the queen to bust the prince out of jail and feed him some lines that would make padme and anakin cringe [Music] then he goes back to the kingdom of darkness to confront the king no no he just goes and fights some random monsters in a canyon the army of darkness invades the realm of light while he's busy doing that night captain guy goes on a mcguffin hunt to fix the queen's depleted magic circuits and fill time and then after teleporting back to town the prince finally gets taken to the castle to fight adele who says you really thought killing me would be enough to make me die only completely unironically and then turns into a full-blown demon after whipping his ass twice the prince grows wings and flies back to the kingdom of light somehow arriving just a few seconds too late to stop the queen from triggering the progenitor runes self-destruct protocol or whatever and ending the world as we know it and at no point during any of this do any of the characters we just spent several excruciating episodes watching get to know each other interact or even talk at all honestly i could barely follow the last few episodes of this show and not for lack of trying it's just that all over the place like there's this bit near the end where the queen runs inside leaving her mage friend behind to fend off the king of darkness then he engulfs her in dark energy and we zoom into her mind where suddenly she's consumed by thoughts of jealousy toward iris the queen then she wakes up and claims she's not corrupted but she's actually telling the truth she keeps fighting the bad guys never betrays her friends it never comes up again and that whole scene did absolutely nothing but fill time despite being an episode ending cliffhanger and that's time that could have been spent i don't know there's nothing in this story that's really worth expanding on but a bunch of characters just sort of teleport around to places with no rhyme or reason in the climax and also despite some sakuga in the middle of a few fights all of the conclusions of those fights are a confusing mishmash of fast cuts and incoherent choreography so there were definitely less terrible uses for it actually they made a really big deal out of adele catching feelings for the mage girl so maybe like they could have done something with her trying to pull him out of the darkness or them saving each other or he could have dueled the night captain his former friend instead of having that duty fall to the prince's swordmaster butler guy who never met the captain or any of the kingdom of light characters prior to that moment and thus has no way to meaningfully engage with any of them beyond trading cliche anime fight one-liners looking back i actually cannot think of a single meaningful plot thread that connects from the start of this anime to the end of this anime besides the romance thing which is barely resolved in the most contrived tragedy imaginable not that there's much to resolve the only thing these lovers have in common are their jobs a general agreement that war is bad and the aforementioned propensity for making me cringe out of my skin that is to quote yazzie some real amv tear [ __ ] but at least it's not boring or confusing unlike pretty much everything else in this train wreck of the show in second place we've got an anime that i was actually kind of excited for after watching its first episode though it only took about a minute's worth of the second to completely dash those hopes as anyone who saw last year's list knows i was a bit of a stage magic dweeb back in elementary school and on top of that i've always had a strong affinity for heist movies so there's long been a special place in my heart reserved for kaito or phantom thief characters masters of disguise and illusion who use stealth stage pageantry and misdirection to lift precious treasures right out from under the noses of wealthy villains and incompetent cops playing a delicate game of wits and planning generally against a rival great detective who is their only true match where the slightest miscalculation can spell disaster for either side well that's how it's supposed to go anyway and when resident protagon and delusion enthusiast makoto goes to apprentice under a master magician in his kooky secret-filled mansion only to discover that he his wife and their daughter hathana are actually master thieves hathana illusion does seem to be moving in that direction but sadly that's the only misdirect this anime ever successfully pulls off hatana hails from a long line of mages who can imbue ordinary objects with magical abilities including sentience what these artifacts do depends somewhat on the emotional state of the mage who enchants them but mostly on whatever anime or hentai the author was watching when he wrote that part now sometimes bad people use these artifacts to do bad things like a mob boss helping his daughter cheat in a violin competition is is a real plot point in this anime and there's a sizable criminal underground centered around the artifacts too so hatana's parents must use their touring magic show as a cover to steal them back sounds like a decent basis for some good old-fashioned phantom thievery right not that far off from dn angels stealing cursed art shtick except those artifacts are also the phantom thief tools and their powers largely supersede the need for any conventional illusions so our heroes don't actually need to be particularly clever or tricky to do phantom thief stuff and the villains all have access to the exact same magic equipment so yeah this isn't actually a phantom thief anime at all it's just a regular shonen battle thing with a burlesque-esque aesthetic where the characters sometimes run around in the dark for a few minutes before the fight start which isn't necessarily a flaw in itself the part of me that was looking forward to seeing a clever mix of stagecraft and strategy feels pretty let down doubly so when the anime makes allusions to makoto learning sleight of hand from we have major armstrong at home and using illusions in battle but doesn't actually explain how any of those tricks work so functionally it's just a way to let him do anime stuff while the plot turns the powers off but regular shonen battle things can still be a lot of fun even if they don't satisfy my very personal craving for realistic sleight of hand emphasis on can be though because this one is completely basic and brain dead the key to every single robbery i refuse to call them heists in hatana illusion is just using more force than the other guy or the other blonde lady in bondage gear since that's literally every antagonist in this entire thing they do bring in a fat blonde lady in an evening gown to shake things up a bit as an early minor villain but then she gets an artifact that lets her turn into an evangelion ninja [ __ ] didn't say it was a cohesive aesthetic and from that point forward her tubby form is used exclusively to make unfunny jokes about her wanting to [ __ ] the house or to be specific the spirit embodying the concept of a butler that the magic house projects to serve its inhabitants it's complicated actually no it's not it's just incredibly convoluted mostly because they just seem to be making this [ __ ] up as they go along and there's absolutely no aesthetic or functional consistency between anything in this power system one artifact is a futuristic box that makes lightning another is a pair of mind-reading sunglasses that make your hair fall out when you use them one's a transforming made uniform and then there's a ball that negates all other superpowers at no apparent cost let's not even get started with the self-heating molester slime perfume or the weaponized origami animals artifacts can be anything and do anything sometimes they take a physical pull on their user sometimes the writers forget they're supposed to do that it's difficult to make an anime power system that feels less cohesive coherent and consistent than stan's but by jove they've pulled it off here and it makes the battles feel like a mess even without the janky incomprehensible animation though that does not help neither does the incredibly lame arsenal that our heroes come packing hatana's signature weapon is a scarf that can transform into don't worry honey we have trigger anime at home style weapons she calls it muffkun which pairs nicely in several ways with makoto's smile stick a dinky little magic wand that transforms into a bigger but no less dinky cardcaptor knockoff staff that can uh do literally whatever the plot needs it to at that moment so can mufkin for that matter so if you were looking forward to the characters say adding to their arsenals with the artifacts they steal over the course of the story don't that would be too cool for this the other thing is while makoto is able to instantly master his artifact with basically no effort hatana despite having had hers for way longer can barely use it and is constantly [ __ ] up getting in over her head and needing to be rescued by makoto of course that is what happens in three out of the five robberies that she participates in in this 12 episode phantom thief anime with her name in the title for what it's worth there are only eight thefts in the series total and our heroes are the targets of three of them they get bamboozled and out stealth more frequently than they do that to the bad guys which is the opposite of what i came here for one time it's by hattana's aunt who was posing as the lady butler of her rich childhood friend to gain access to their mansion even though a few episodes later we learn she has a magical claim to the property which allows her to come and go as she pleases and also evict our heroes and take their stuff like i said convoluted anyway after auntie robs them that first time hatana chases her to the docks to get back what she stole immediately [ __ ] everything up and has to be saved by makoto now the other two times she gets damseled are pretty much identical in how they're written to a frankly eerie degree a mean older lady in hatana's family tells her that if she steals a particular artifact her mom will come back home she just believes them despite having been betrayed by each of those women in a previous episode and having negative reasons to trust them it then turns out that the predictable liar lied and it was a trap and then hatana gets bondaged up in a tea pose and moans and grunts a lot while the definitely not an audience insert character fights to save her now personally i don't find this to be particularly engaging or satisfying storytelling i got bored with it around my 30th video game or so your mileage may vary depending on your tolerance for the sexist cliche so cliche that it's a cliche to call it a sexist cliche and to be fair there is an argument to be made that hatana's growth as a phantom thief and person is the central arc of the story and thus we need to see her fail a couple times before she can succeed but when she falls for the exact same trick twice in episodes 4 and 12 you have made the ark a line and that argument falls apart along with the entire story clearly despite being the title character hatana's mainly here as a lingerie and top hat clad accessory for makoto's magical adventures and she's not the only one most of the supporting characters are girls many of whom have feelings for makoto including his apparently male stage magic rival who is revealed to be mulaning it when he has to rip her shirt off for medical reasons says the show that had its characters all go to the pool to teach the neat hacker elementary school emoto who makes a point of saying she doesn't wear underwear how to swim while they were in the middle of being evicted with the woman who was evicting them who is also wearing a bikini yup sure there was definitely no other way they could have dealt with that bullet wound in her arm okay yeah it's pretty obvious what kind of anime this really is or if it wasn't it will be when i say that it's based on a light novel not a manga and it is not a very good one of those almost all of the plot stuff i've talked about so far is packed into 10-minute mountains of content spread two or three episodes apart atop a vast unshifting open plane of characters exchanging tedious exposition over t and horrum anime cliches that were already tired when love hina stole them from ronma back in the 90s like hathana just hates boys for no reason except that's the trope you do when a boy lives at a girl's big house in an anime sure the boys at her school are typical annoying harem background characters so i can see why she wouldn't like them but they're not borderline rapists trying to beat her into dating them like the ones akane dealt with so when hathana walks in on makoto her butler in training cleaning the tub for her and her friends after they were caught in the rain and instinctively beats the [ __ ] out of him for it it just makes her come off as if you'll pardon the derogatory language a huge [ __ ] she's not likable her outbursts are not endearing and they do not give her character depth she's just needy incompetent and mean to the people who try to help with those things but she's got big titty and she's tsundere so we're just expected to like her and that's pretty much par for the course as far as characterization goes in this series hatana's aunt is just needlessly cruel until suddenly she's not it's really obvious that she was supposed to be a central villain and the author changed their mind about her motivation and backstory halfway through book two hathana's friend with the green hair is just the main harem girl's green haired friend from everything and their maid who's also the student council president but also also their surrogate older sister because she's a war orphan their mom took in as a child slave don't think about it too much is also also also an otaku lolicon sex pest which is not the most appealing combination of characteristics and also not played for any successful laughs she doesn't even drop any decent references old man jeeves just says is this like one of your japanese animes to her every time the show does a cliche and then the younger sister is just kinda there a boring box-ticking angelic emoto non-entity she really loves her biological sister and makoto nissan of course but also she's good at everything and always happy to help technically she has flaws and brings about conflict she doesn't want to go to school for a bit and it takes [ __ ] three episodes to fix that but the reason behind it is that she's got a personal problem that she doesn't want her sister to worry about so that's not a flaw actually that's just one more way she's better than everyone she is not a character and don't think that i didn't notice that literally every female character in the show's secondary motivation is wanting to be more like hatana's mom that's some real lazy [ __ ] this whole show is just a whole load of pandering nothing and because it's so goddamn ugly and poorly animated it can't even try to pander successfully most of the time these characters barely even look human let alone attractive so it kind of goes without saying that every single attempt at fan service falls embarrassingly flat if it's not straight up creepy but even if the art and animation was as detailed as it needs to be for that sort of show the script would still be 90 exposition the characters would still be boring and irritating the fights would still suck and the phantom thief elements would still be woefully underutilized it is just disappointments all the way down with this one and yet somehow there's an anime this year that managed to be even worse and even more disappointing though not cumulatively it's more the sort of disappointment that hits you all at once how would you feel if i told you there's an anime about a trio of sengoku warriors a razor wire wielding ninja a club brandishing battle monk and a mighty samurai who dual wields a katana and broadsword who get whisked away to modern day tokyo in the middle of a zombie-ish apocalypse and must team up with a group of soldiers and survivors and some escaped convicts to protect mankind's last hope from the mutant monstrosities sounds pretty rad right how could that not be dope well these are the mutants these are the samurai and this is what the sakuga looks like the worst anime of 2020 is called jibiate and i jibby hate it you're probably starting to agree with me already just from that immense letdown but trust me it gets much worse honestly i don't even know where to begin with this one every aspect of it is bad writing direction voice direction animation compositing cgi sound design even the op is atrocious like they clearly just cobbled together a bunch of test animations and random show footage over some background music [Music] so i guess if everything's terrible it makes sense to start with the parts that aren't that song may not work as an op but it does feature some pretty skilled shamisening courtesy of the yoshida brothers who also scored the we would like to play commercials fun fact the show's background art is very detailed and technically impressive painting a vivid picture of a ruined overgrown japan and ah it's got some pretty dope concept art too though that is also the root of a lot of its problems yoshitaka amino is a brilliant watercolor illustrator best known for his work on final fantasy who painstakingly crafts surreal intricate dreamscapes with inimitably fine brushwork i can imagine someone with a keen eye for art looking at his and asking why can't all anime look like that the answer is that animation involves a lot of people drawing a lot of drawings in roughly the same style very quickly it is an art form built on rapid imitation so when you base animation on designs by an inimitable artist who takes a lot of time to add a lot of tiny details and subtle color gradients to the things he draws you're gonna run into some issues and the thing is those are known issues amino's a famous dude over the years a lot of studios have tapped his talents for anime out of those only a few movies and ovas which typically have higher budgets and looser schedules than tv anime have even come close to emulating his style and all of them trade off for it with stiff awkward animation there's a reason the heroic legend of arslan only came to tv after hiromu arakawa redesigned all the characters for her manga adaptation what i'm saying is there is no excuse for an anime production working with amino in 2020 to be unprepared for the unique difficulties his distinctive designs present and to be fair the gb8 production committee had a solution director masahiko komino previously translated hirohiko araki's notoriously fiddly designs from stardust crusaders to animation so in theory he is the man for the job in practice though all of the characters in gb8 just look like jojo rejects with weirdly thin lips and now as a bonus we get to see how those sort of designs animate without any of the heavily stylized effects and transitions that define the jojo brand answer they don't also gibi8's solution for emulating the subtle watercolor gradients of amino's paintings is to slap the purple green handshaker's vomit filter over everything love that there is not a single frame of this show that looks good or even decent and in motion it's straight up unwatchable half the time the camera is jammed up some dude's nose pointed away from whatever's moving and every animation we can actually see is slow awkward and devoid of impact whether it be hand-drawn or terrible cg and the worst part of it all is most of the designs they made these sacrifices for aren't even that good the two main characters kathleen and sensui are decently distinct and amino-esque but then the group lancer ken roku is literally just lancer but a ninja kathleen's mom is just an anime mom dr yoshinaga fell out of some random er otome game and the goons who trouble the group through the story's midsection are just the first things you imagine when you hear the words yakuza mafia ninja and otaku i guess punk pole vaulter's a pretty new one of course we can't talk about ugly characters without at least touching on the titular monsters the jibya nocturnal arachno reptilian things that make more of themselves by stabbing humans with their mutagenic stingers and when i describe them with words that sounds cool resident evil mangaka naoki sarazawa certainly has the creature designed chops to make them look cool too and maybe they would have if they weren't optimized for the gamecube but even if they weren't even if komino had figured out how to work with domino's designs effectively or they just hired an actual animator to design the characters instead gb8 would still be one of the worst anime i have ever watched series writer creator producer planner supervisor and production committee chief ryo aoki's previous anime script credits include bonjour sweet love patissieri a mediocre short form reverse haram ona made to sell an unreleased mobile game the project draft for end ride which might just be the worst anime based on a released mobile game and that's it that's literally all he's ever done as far as any of the sources i can find tell me and boy does it show jibi8's script is straight up unsalvageable this is a show that thinks the best and also only way to acquaint us with a character's personality and motivations is to have them directly tell us what makes them tick in a video confessional at the start of each episode you can't just have your characters announce how they feel that makes me feel angry that's also how it delivers most of the exposition about its apocalypse scenario combined with some newsreel clips just in case it wasn't hacky and cliched enough already the first episode's intro also heavily implies that kathleen is recording her confessional while the jibiah infection sets in hearing the sound of dripping water is the first symptom of the mutation and they make a point of showing that sound effect over and over again during the sequence but you better believe that never comes up again unless it was planned for the sequel series that he tries and fails to bait in the very last scene i seriously doubt aoki thought that far ahead though if i had to wager i'd say he just doesn't know any other way to write an ending because boy every episode of gb8 sure does conclude in a roundabout fashion if you catch my meaning actually i meant the scripts are padded to hell and back and every potentially dramatic moment is ruined by some character overreacting to it and then another character overreacting to their overreaction and then they say some combination of oh no and each other's names three or four times and how has that monster not killed them by now but now that you mention it a lot of those scenes do also cut to a to be continued screen about three seconds before the problem is very easily resolved and if it's not resolved there's a decent chance that whatever tragic awful thing is implied to be impending will happen off-screen like the monk guy who becomes kathleen's surrogate father figure and is the only one she has left after her mom gets infected walks her in a building so he can valiantly defend her from an army of jibiah including her mutated mother whom he was in love with and all we get to see of that dramatic battle is its bloody aftermath surrounding his already cold corpse meanwhile adam the soldier gets this big dramatic sacrifice where he blows up a whole hoard of jibya and the highway they were running on with a remote c4 charge that could have saved him from getting infected in the first place if he just blew the bridge a little earlier but whatever and as he dies they send him off with this sad montage of all four of the shots he was in because he is literally a background extra and that's not even the worst example of the series focusing on the wrong characters and key moments the entire emotional through line of the series climax is the relationship between that generic yakuza guy i mentioned earlier and his cop daughter both of whom are introduced in episode 6 out of 12 but i'm getting a bit ahead of myself i haven't even told you the narrative through line of the series itself yet which is that there's a doctor who's just about done with a vaccine for the apocalypse virus and a bunch of tough dudes have to help him get to a research facility on the other side of the country to finish it off you know the generic zombie story in standard formulaic zombie fashion most of the series minute to minute plot involves characters trying to go to a place or get a thing only to be swarmed by surprise at which point a very bad fight breaks out and there's a 60 40 chance that someone who doesn't matter will die or turn these battles are usually bookended by scenes of characters sitting around talking about either the thing they're about to do or the thing they just did or else a sengoku era fanfic battle from their backstory very little of this advances the actual plot they make you think that there might be some faded reason that all of these heroic warriors were reunited with each other and their favorite weapons in an unlikely present perhaps connected in some way to these strange creatures you know some dope mysticism to complement the martial arts part of the package but nope it's just aliens uh spoilers for anyone who cares so it turns out the jibia virus came off an alien spaceship that crash-landed in venice but some parts broke off of it and stayed in orbit where kathleen saw them and thought they were shooting stars so she made a wish for everyone to be saved and okay get this the spaceship parts were made of mind reactive metal that interpreted those thoughts as i want you to time warp three random dudes from the sengoku era into tokyo how can scrap metal do time travel don't ask aliens we find this out because doc's an alien and the vaccine was actually just a cover for some yellow brain juice he was working on to revive the intelligence of his deviated alien girlfriend meteora but literally as he was putting the finishing touches on it she crawls up out of the ocean to go find him and of course the survivors all team up to kill her like they have been doing through the whole series it's a real romeo and juliet moment only incredibly stupid so even though it's entirely his own fault for not telling them what was going on doc decides to take revenge on everyone by turning yakuza dad's tonfa cop daughter into a final fantasy boss with his make-a-wurst jibiah juice that happened to be a byproduct of the brain juice and then he uses both juices on himself to become a palette swap of that final fantasy boss only it can talk which results in two really bad fights like [ __ ] wow just look at this i have no words then at the very end samurai gets stung maybe but if he's not stung ninja lancer and girl are [ __ ] off to china and he's free to follow a gps transponder which he knows how to use because to find them in the sequel though it is awful presumptuous to think they're getting one considering there's nothing i can do to roast this anime harder than just describing what happens in it then again handshakers got a sequel so if there's a will there may be a way look ryo aoki is probably a perfectly nice guy i don't want to presume things about someone i don't know but my brain does it anyway without my permission and this really strikes me as a prime example of an idea guy who thinks that coming up with a neat high concept is the same thing as writing a good original impactful story with characters and a plot it is not plots are not just reasons for action figures to bang into each other especially not when you can't even make the action figures look good please whoever allowed this anime to happen don't make the same mistake twice even if you're ryo aoki's friend especially if you're his friend you would be doing him and the rest of the world a huge favor if you just told him to practice a little bit before he tries show running again please these bad anime lists are always an excruciating experience but this wasn't even fun bad you could have squeezed the entire plot and all of the characters from this 5 hour tv show into a tight 90 minute movie and it still would have felt a little light on content i was so [ __ ] bored it took me days to get through this show because i felt so exhausted after a couple of episodes and while killing your harshest critics through sheer bloody attrition is a legitimate strategy i guess you could also just not please or i guess i could just stop subjecting myself to bad anime and try to be happy nah i'm jeff though professional [ __ ] bag and i'll see you next year

Channel: Mother's Basement

Views: 1,407,943

Keywords: anime 2020, mothers basement, anime, anime roast, bad anime, worst anime 2020, worst anime, top 5 anime, top 10, toplist, bad animation, hilariously bad anime, worst anime of the year, anime review 2020, master of ragnarok, my sister my writer, Gibiate, shironeko project, dragon's dogma, tamayomi, shachibato, Hatena illusion, peter grill, top anime, funny anime, thing bad, listeners, king's raid, sakura wars the animation, anime review, mothers basement worst anime

Id: eKTKRS71whE

Length: 48min 39sec (2919 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/DirkDasterLurkMaster]

Gibiate is one of those anime I desperately need some insider info on. Like, how does something like that get greenlit? And get some actual talented names in on it? It looks a lot like one man's incredibly tone deaf vision, as these things often are, but he still needs to move a lot of money to make it happen. To be a fly on a wall in those production meetings...

[u/metalmonstar]

1. Dragon's Dogma

2. Peter Grill

3. Shironeko Project

4. Hatena Illusion

5. Gibiate

​

Dishonorable mentions - President it is time to battle, King's Raid, Tamayomi, Listeners, Shadowverse, Hxeros, and Sakura Wars

For those who don't want to watch the video.

[u/meiinfretrr]

The magician anime halfway through the vid is basically just knock off akame ga kill

[u/DarkAudit]

Not to speak ill of the dead, but Hatena Illusion was garbage, just as Maerchen Maedchen was garbage before it. Can we PLEASE stop adapting this dude's stuff?

[u/Fools_Requiem]

Holy fucking shit, I am not about to listen to someone ramble on about the worst anime of 2020 for almost 50 fucking minutes. Would have totally watched it if it was like 10-15 minutes. 50 minutes is definite overkill.

[u/SeitarouHiguchi]

was Babylon this year, or was it last year? either way, it was just absurdly terrible.