Top 5 WORST ANIME of 2019

around this time a year ago I went through untold suffering to put together a list of the worst anime of 2018 it was an experience I never want to repeat in something I would never wish on my worst enemy but stupid a lot of people watch that video and I gotta eat so I guess I'm doing it forever now this year did give me some pretty good bad anime to choose from like that show about a lonely middle school teacher in his time traveling 14 year old grandma wife Nobunaga sensei's young bride you know the one where the entire plot of the second episode is a little girl visits an older man's apartment to get naked and talk about how dumb age of consent laws are no not ringing any bells there's also eNOS on mabuki Oh a light-hearted romantic comedy about a science prodigy sexually harassing her oblivious classmate until he goes out with her no really that's the premise what if sanku was a girl and also a sex past the first joke in the show is she tries to make him drink her pee now for the sake of my own sanity I've chosen to limit these rankings to full length anime on ly so neither of those shorter series ultimately made the cut but I have to know they exist and hey now you do too anyway if you've watched my other roasts you might remember hand shakers the terrible nauseating nightmare child of the old Higashi character sprites and this CGI tiger statue well guess what they made another one of those and it's at the bottom of this list so buckle up this is the top 5 worst anime of 2019 as I said the first show in our roasting pan today is the frigidly anticipated sequel to hand shakers titled is that a word I hold on they put the pronunciation under it that makes so much more sense I'm dumb obviously that's how you pronounce those letters what doesn't make so much sense is making a sequel to hand shakers at all and not just because it was terrible it was also more or less a complete finished story and toss Anna's character are kind of left him as an unstoppable Kirito tear Mary Sue so any follow up would kind of feel tacked on and forced to remedy this wise attempts to be one of those generational sequels that picks up after a time skip with a new cast of character who are almost exactly the same as the old ones in this case the timid want to be mechanic toss una has been supplanted by yukia a timid wannabe DJ whose nimrod is a sword made of CDs instead of gears because yeah that's about the level of character design effort I expected from this series Yuki is an irregular hand shaker who can enter the Technicolor Thunder drum of the ziggurat by holding hands with anyone not just one specific partner also he's the adopted son of the BDSM weirdos who tried to murder tazuna and koi re way back in hand shakers episode 1 because yeah turns out they were important and that's far from the only deep cut callback that all three hardcore hand shakers fans will appreciate why spends a good chunk of its time catching up with such iconic characters as the quiet girl definitely not SOTA and poplar from working and who could forget it's time to did it did it oh to marry your sister and yes for those of you who've been wondering lily and Masaru did in fact get hitched after hand shakers but it turns out he was adopted all along so that actually changes very little and it's still really [ __ ] weird and uncomfortable as excited as I was to see these familiar faces return I did worry that focusing on them wouldn't leave much time to develop the new cast but thankfully Gohan's has managed to effectively balance out the show's narrative so that everyone's about as paper-thin as everyone else around them as was the case with its predecessor wise is some 40% exposition 30% people repeating that exposition to other people 20% inane rom-com [ __ ] and 10% garbage fight scenes where the characters barely interact with each other like some kind of Pokemon game it's not all the same as before though bringing in Horry Miche Kanazawa to co-direct alongside Shingo Suzuki seems to have helped to rein in some of hand shakers worst aesthetic excesses take its camera for example the eye melting CGI tracking shots from the first season aren't totally gone but they're less frequent now and when they do appear the camera tends to move more slowly through them so as not to make you vomit and the animation within those scenes is often relatively speaking a lot more fluid and natural than it was before less linked my boy and more early 2000 studio trying to figure out these newfangled computers boxes if you can ignore the everything in the backgrounds it almost looks up to par with one of those Studio Dean shows that didn't save anime sometimes this shift toward relatively better animation and less drunk cinematography does cost the series a bit of that motion sickness factor that was such a strong part of hand shakers brand identity but wise more than makes up for that by allowing us to more clearly see the characters sliding all over the place like well like pieces of 2d animation placed on top of a pre-rendered CGI video by people who don't actually know how to do that despite the improvements to its animation the compositing and wise is still some of the worst in anime in lieu of actual color grading they're still using those ugly rainbow gradient filters to tie the lighting together which doesn't even work half the time even when they are colored correctly the characters still constantly clipped through things they're supposed to be interacting with those things still look like they were ripped straight out of a ps2 game and the wide-angle Google Street View photo backgrounds still managed to somehow look even less believable than the CGI elements you would think that a show about a DJ would at least have competent music and sound design but sadly that hasn't improved much either it still feels like the show's producers just bought a library of royalty-free lo-fi hip-hop beats to study slash Jam to and then through them randomly into the episode timelines with little regard for their emotional context and I'm not really in a position to throw stones here I did literally just loop the town music from Mega Man Battle Network under the entirety of my fall things I liked video but in my defense I'm not an entire anime studio making an original TV series and that's what really sticks in my craw about this whole hand shakers business it's one thing for a licensed anime to be this crappy but original anime is another matter entirely making original anime in the current industry all but demand some degree of creative passion and some of that is evident here but it's smeared on thick in some places and all but non-existent in others the half-assed compositing the unity asset store tears CGI and the brain-dead use of music all smack of a distinct lack of shits given on the part of the production staff possibly because they're not paid enough to care but that's just an educated guess meanwhile the show's writing and storyboarding teams are trying super hard some might say too hard but I don't know I applaud anyone who can get really passionate about making a statement with their art even a dumb one and while it's delivered with all the subtlety of Kufa vampire's surname the show does send a heartfelt message about how love comes in all shapes and sizes and all that really matters is finding the right person for you even if that shape just happens to look a bit like siblings getting married but I'm sure the writers of hand shakers just picked that example out of a hat and their choice to focus several episodes on that specific kind of relationship has nothing to do with how sexy anyone siblings or cousins may or may not be point is I don't think that trying too hard is really the problem with the writing here the real problem is that the writers clearly have no idea how to actually do any of the things that they're trying to do like they still don't know how to write actual characters so everyone is still defined by one trade or gimmick and the resulting absence of romantic chemistry renders all of their messages about love completely inert and while they're busy not improving their writing they leave figuring out all the technical [ __ ] they don't know how to do to people in other departments who as we covered don't really seem to give a [ __ ] it's in the conflict between those two sides of the production that this franchise's distinctive artistic identity was born caught between painfully low effort quick buck anime adaptations and overly ambitious but poorly planned original shows both hand shakers and wise somehow managed to be the worst of both worlds but wise is at least the product of some kind of ambition and I can't rightly rank that ahead of truly soulless garbage like our next entry a few years ago I made a video boom owning the present state of licensed card game anime calling for an end to the by-the-numbers insert toy to save world storylines that have plagued the genre since yugioh birthed it from its no doubt Spike Lee pube des moines card game anime is stale I said give me something anything different I begged and in some dark decaying corner of the industry alone gnarled finger on a monkey's paw curled in season five of Bojack horseman mr. peanut butter options the film rights to a birthday card which he then attempts to turn into a feel-good family picture titled birthday dad before ultimately pitching it to a TV station as an episodic supernatural drama about a ghost dad possessing people this whole plotline is a big joke about how studios will make literally anything so long as a sufficiently famous actor is attached and there's some existing IP to which it can be tied and what sells that joke is the universal absurdity of the movie's premise you don't need to be a Hollywood insider to understand intuitively that making a whole movie or TV show out of a nice-looking piece of cardboard with no real story behind it is a bad idea it's just one of those things that's so obviously dumb that nobody would do anything like it in real life that's what makes it funny on an unrelated note our fourth place winner Bermuda Triangle colorful past rel is a slice-of-life comedy anime about pastry eating mermaids based very loosely on some of the artwork from the trading card game card fight Vanguard this folks is what the bottom of the barrel looks like after you scrape past all the wood well actually to be fair I do think that there's some potential in the idea of exploring card game lore and a beefier narrative format and a lot of the clans in card fight Vanguard are based around really interesting high concepts like the undead ghost pirates of granblue or the angelic doctors of the angel feather Institute or Oracle think-tank the fortune-telling mega-corporation whose CEO is the Sun God Amaterasu any one of those could make for a fascinating unique anime and yet they chose to go with the mermaid idols which I guess is still pretty novel except that they made this a prequel story so the only thing that makes this premise unique the idol part doesn't actually factor into this anime at all until the very end and even then just barely oh and also the characters spend most of their time doing things that are physically impossible underwater in a town that was clearly designed for foot traffic so beyond eliminating the need to animate walk cycles them being mermaids doesn't seem to matter much either so basically this is just cute girls doing cute things which doesn't sound that bad in and of itself I mean I love me some good wholesome mo a just as much as the next guy but good is kind of the operative word there mo a is an art form it takes a lot of care and craftsmanship to make an animated character who is simultaneously cute enough and believable enough to trigger one's protective instincts and not to be too picky but personally I find it a bit difficult to see the cuteness in these characters or suspend my disbelief as to their existence when it constantly looks like their faces are melting like seven arts pictures not to tell you how to do your jobs or anything but maybe if you let your animators sleep or whatever I wouldn't have to spend all day wondering if this mermaid colony is supposed to be situated near Bikini Atoll now at this point some of you might be thinking Jeff you're being a weird meanie this show is clearly intended to sell a card game to younger children and expecting it to live up to your mo a standards is being honest a little that kind of brony of you like maybe stop and take a hard look at yourself and I did in the middle of writing this but then I also took a look at the pg-13 rating on the shows mal page and all of the other things this studio has worked on including Trinity 7 basilisk vivid strike and Dog Days the latter two of which were directed by the same guy so I'm fairly confident that this is not a kid show despite every rough fiber of its aesthetic being screaming that it must be it is almost certainly supposed to be a mo a show it's just that bad at it and it's also just really really [ __ ] boring in general this is every cute girls pal around a small rural town anime you've ever seen only worse with zero original thought given to any of its characters themes or storylines its main heroines aren't even defined beyond cookie cutter archetypes you got the sweet one the cool one the Genki dumb one the indecisive one who's finally found something to believe in and the shy big city gal and their designs are so generic I don't think I even need to tell you who's who there is a plot here of sorts about the girls efforts to restore an old disused movie theater to its former glory but it's little more than a bare-bones skeleton on which the show's generic mo8 wrappings are hung Bermuda Triangle colorful past route is ultimately just a nothing show where nothing happens and nothing matters and while I don't hate it it's this hard to hate nothing as it is to love it after all I'm hard-pressed to think of anything this year that felt like a bigger waste of my time though if I had to my third-place pick pastel memories would certainly be a strong contender it's nowhere near as boring as Bermuda Triangle you could make an anime about watching paint dry and it wouldn't come close but then Bermuda Triangle never gave me any reason to expect better whereas pastel memories at least hints at a bit of narrative ambition in its pilot episode that episode introduces us to a nightmarish future vision of Akihabara where otaku media has all but faded into obscurity and most of the legendary electric town has been converted into generic storefronts so basically that that bit from steins gate only a whole series the rabbit shed shop cafe is one of the last remaining strongholds of otaku culture where customers can relax with a hot cup of coffee served by a waitstaff of cute schoolgirl made cosplayers and read some manga or light novels from the owners personal library at first this episode seems pretty dull it's just about one of those girls running around town asking after a rare light novel volumous unfunny moai antics and Sue all around her but as the episode ends the show drops a bombshell the slow death of otaku 'dom is not some natural phenomenon but actually a symptom of a supernatural virus distorting and destroying people's memories of anime and games and stuff but the shops employees have a secret way of fighting back by diving into anime worlds they can battle the viruses directly and save anime from destruction so basically it's Kingdom Hearts right down to the creepy cute heartless knockoff monsters only with our heroes visiting low-rent parodies of popular anime instead of iconic Disney worlds oh and instead of a naive shone in battle boy like Sora those heroes are a team of beautiful waifu's and cool low-key horny steampunk combat idol cosplay with weapons rip straight out of guilty gear and I am all about that on paper at least and you know what that sounds like a show I'd watch All Things Considered it's not a bad hook for a series to throw out leading into its second episode unfortunately it's all downhill from there or possibly just from the third episode I can't say for sure because the second one doesn't really exist anymore apparently the parody world of welcome to the rabbit cafe was a bit too close to is this order a rabbit for the license holders comfort and the whole thing got nuked off the internet osomatsu Sanh style the day the last episode aired ironically turning part of this show about the tragedies of lost media into a piece of lost media itself okay that's not technically true it is the Year 2019 and that episode is obviously still out there for anyone who wants to find it but I don't honestly I'll take any excuse not to have to watch any more of this show because the last time I saw parodies this bad I was still reading gaming web comics in the third episode spoof of Rozen maiden for instance all of the show's iconic gothic lolita dresses have been replaced with track suits and that's it that is literally the entire joke almost every subsequent parody is equally flaccid if not more so and on the rare occasions that the show does come up with a halfway decent premise for a joke like the climax of the dating same episode where all of the girls in not tokimeki memorial are turned into murderous yandere z' it invariably flubs the execution of that joke with awkward pacing bad voice acting terrible writing and messy animation most of the time pastel memories isn't quite as ugly and stiff as either Bermuda Triangle or the next show on our list but even then it sure ain't pretty and given that one of its main selling points is its big cast of hot girls gainax bouncing around in form-fitting costumes who if the stupid horny IDI is any indication are supposed to look more like this that is a bit of an issue for it though perhaps not as big an issue as those twelve girls personalities which can each be summed up in a single sentence and which are defined entirely by one otaku hobby and one quirky mo a gimmick apiece I honestly could not tell you off the top of my head what any of their names are let alone which one star in each episode and that's not for the show's lack of effort when it's not making a sincere effort to murder the very concept of humor itself pastel memories attempts to tug it it's otaku audiences heartstrings by playing up how much anime means to people unfortunately as we've established none of these characters really are people so to say that these cloying scenes fall flat would be an understatement the only part of that entire Rozen maiden episode that got a laugh out of me was the bit where one of the girls really couldn't tell you who gets super sad because her friends no longer remember watching the show together or playing dress-up with their dolls under some random gazebo okay I get that the idea here is to evoke a general feeling of nostalgia but without any context as to who these characters are beyond I think one of them makes a lot of cat noises it's kind of hard to care and that really sums up my feelings on pastel memories as a whole this shitty mobile game adaptation has some interesting ideas and some extremely gross ones too actually but it's also bland and ineptly executed that I can't muster much in the way of an emotional response to any of it luckily while the next anime on this list isn't any better it is at least a lot more entertaining our second-place finisher try nights is the product of a rare collaboration between anime industry legends gonzo responsible for last year's worst anime list winner conception and seven the same studio that subjected us to Nobunaga sensei's wife who is a child the series is directed by Toki Hiro Sasaki whose other work includes that animated Amber Alert as well as King's game the animation a show that really speaks for itself although I won't let that stop me from roasting it in the near future anyway given the impressive pedigree behind this series I knew I was in for a real treat when I settled down to watch it and I was not disappointed though it did take a while to get there like many a formulaic sports anime this series follows a pair of handsome talented first-year high school sports prodigies with clashing personalities and complementary abilities who argue all the time because that's kind of like sexual tension I guess they eventually come together despite their differences to be good at sports and do better sports than other muscly sports boys at other sports schools you know the sports drill on the one hand we have Akira a handsome naturally born athlete whose physical abilities verge on the superhuman on the other there's Riku a quiet bookish nerd who really loves rugby but had to quit playing it in middle school because of anti twink discrimination this is at once only sport the team bullies insist when he shows up to practice the first time but Akira's passion and incessant stalking eventually inspires Riku to give the game another try revealing that he makes up for his weak physique with a keen mind for the strategy of the game in line with the paint-by-numbers Sports anime formula the first few episodes are all about these characters sorting out their differences which are symbolized in this case by an incredibly [ __ ] stupid argument about whether athleticism or strategy is more important to winning rugby games in these early episodes try Knights appears to be nothing more than an aggressively averaged unsubtle yaoi baiting pretty boy Sports anime albeit one rendered with a bit less finesse than is typical of the sub-genre the writing is quite clumsy the suggestive dialogue is a bit non you anymore oh my knee could be well let's get him cardia ocular blunt the editing and pacing leaves a lot to be desired we see about ten minutes of these characters talking about rugby for every one of them playing it there's also a lot of Dawa Oguma some awkward pauses and I'm not sure if you've noticed yet but the animation and art isn't the best the flaws are fairly subtle but anyone with a trained artistic eye will pick up on the fact that human bodies don't do any of that at all while anime connoisseurs like myself will also spot the subtle compositing errors that give away the show's otherwise seamless use of CGI and if you can manage to tear your eyes away from the incredibly beautiful beshe boys at centre stage you might also notice some of the background characters and missing a few pieces here and there I don't know where this guy's face went but I do know where the rest of hims going into my nightmares forever oh sweet Jesus Conan moves it would be easy to fill out this entire roast with nothing but cheap jabs at the show's production values it is kind of just leaving itself wide open to them like metaphorically speaking this show is basically just standing there with its arms spread and a pathetic longing slack-jawed look on its face staring at me almost like it wants me to hit it like it knows it deserves it and I mean it is already dead inside anyway so what would it really hurt to just wail on it a bit I did all out you know no no I must resist because to paint try Nights is being merely an obscenely ugly example of a sub-genre that is specifically all about pretty people would be to miss the exquisite hidden delights of this disaster piece for only after a full three Episode test does this seemingly innocuous generic Sports anime reveal that it is in fact completely and utterly cuckoo for cocoa puffs in Episode three our rookie protagonists learned the tragic backstory of the team's former captain who had to give up on sports forever after playing an entire game of a violent contact sport on a busted knee without telling anyone he was hurt you know like an idiot would do moved by this story the first years realized that the best way to motivate their disheartened CEMP eyes is to defeat the school that happened to be playing against them that one time there captain [ __ ] his own life up and then they lost anyway real compelling stuff so far I know but trust me this is worth the build-up the first years convey this plan to their seniors in something vaguely resembling dialogue where the captain is all like we couldn't beat Seki Rae high school before but now that you guys are on the team it feels like we might be able to beat them this time but then first year glasses cone is like you think we can beat them well I know we can beat them to which the captain immediately responds what we can beat them I never thought of that yeah anyway after that we cut to the other schools Rugby Club receiving their challenge in the [ __ ] imperial throne room that is apparently their Clubhouse we're dressed in red and black evil Rugby Empire track suits they sit on ornate velvet cushioned chairs around an actual round table surrounded by checkerboard tile stained-glass windows and a frescoed domed ceiling and this is the music they play to introduce their captain who apparently has some kind of grudge against glasses boy Deak yeah try night stakes the night's part of its title a bit more literally than I expected going in while our protagonists come off as mostly obnoxious exaggerations of more generic high school sports anime idiots the sechura team spends every second there on screen LARPing essentially lots of dramatic bowing and gesturing formal language rallying and charging onto the pitch like an army that sort of thing they really commit to the bit and I'm pretty sure the show thinks this is supposed to make them look cooler and more intimidating somehow which only makes it funnier this show kind of does a better job making fun of itself than I ever could I'm learning that someone I'm Sasaki strengths as a director so I'll leave this at that for now and encourage you to check out the rest for yourself the next time you have some hammered buddies and intoxicants handy sorry I didn't get this out before New Year's Eve before we get to crowning our champion I do have a few dishonorable mentions to mention for those of you who want to know more about bad anime for reasons magical girls SpecOps osku is perhaps the edgiest iteration of the edgy magical girls concept to date and if you're looking for a hilarious hate watch it is a fun one so is assassins pride and if you haven't seen my roast of it yet that's just watching that after this Grim's notes the animation is basically Kingdom Hearts at home but even less sensical somehow like come on guys Don Quixote is not a Grimm's fairytale kimono friends season two was about as bad as everyone expected it to be after they fired the only guy who made the last one good stand my heroes piece of truth has perhaps the least appealing high-concept i've ever seen in an anime it's an auto main game adaptation where all of the love interests are narcs you know the fun cops and it very nearly made this list on the strength of that pitch alone but sadly it's mostly just boring and unexceptional I was also tempted to throw out do you love your mom and her to hit multi target attacks on here after it got a little some might argue predictably incest II but I didn't want to make this video oops all yokai and there were plenty of other strong contenders representing the genre picking just one the feature was actually real challenge the standout at least as far as the Internet's concern seems to be re faretta which is a bit of a disaster though nothing quite like the one that happened behind the scenes from what I've been able to gather the original light novels author Ryo Shira koumei was purportedly unhappy with white Fox's interpretation of his characters and his complaints led to their work being scrapped in production switching studios just a few months before the show's originally scheduled air date of April 2018 the very predictable result of that decision was that new director Kenji Yoshino had a year and a half to remake the entire show more or less from scratch at a less established studio with less money and it shows it really shows particularly in the abysmal first episode but underneath the bad underlit animation the terrible CGI the giant enemy crab x' and the jittery pacing re faretta does at least have a story with characters in it like men and women with personalities who aren't the protagonists some of whom make in character decisions that affect the story in meaningful ways and that's something I think more anime should do also the OST is straight fire [Music] we need more jazzy dark fantasies All Things Considered it's kind of a miracle that Ari faretta is as watchable as it is in spite of all the problems it faced and for all of its faults at least it has a personality by contrast to see just how creatively bankrupt ISA Kai cheap magician is you need only take a peek at its Opie which uses a noticeably phoned-in performance from myth Android you know the same band that opened for our easy row overlord and Tania the evil to underscore footage of painfully generic fantasy fights as well as a shot of that one town from kono Suba and the wise man's grandchild and shield hero the entire point of this Opie seems to be to remind you of other better anime you already like in the hopes that the positive association might prompt you to give this one a try too because aside from some truly embarrassing animation oli Sakai cheap magician really has going for it is right there in the title it's yet another Issa kai where a teenage nerd uses cheap magic powers to be the success he could never be IRL and land a bunch of hot girls who worship the very ground he walks on it adds exactly one wrinkle to that formula by having his childhood friend come along for the ride and making her slightly less Opie than he is which has the potential to create some interesting conflicts by say having her be more eager to return home than he is just for example but then it immediately squanders that potential by just making her another subservient girl in his harem oh and quick side note to the author if you're listening I get that you probably spend a lot of time coming up with backstories and names for all the towns in this fantasy nation of yours and I commend the effort I think that's really cool but just a suggestion maybe having the characters sit down pointed a map and rattle off those backstories from memory isn't the most organic or engaging way of conveying that information to your audience just a thought despite all my gripes with cheap magician it is mostly just boring and unexceptional again and while it's doubtless one of the worst made anime this year speaking personally there's one in particular that I think is way worse overall to its credit our first-place loser high school prodigies have it easy even in another word does at least do something a little different with its yokai premise instead of one overpowered audience insert protagonist coming to another world from Earth we have seven who represent a wide range of skills specialties and personalities all working together to improve the strange world full of oddly hot elfin dog people they've landed in there's Tsukasa a political genius who killed his dad Shinzo Abe a I think to become the Prime Minister of Japan at 17 Misato a brilliant businessman and the richest teenager on earth ringo a physics and programming prodigy who's AI can build anything and whose genius is the product of basically eugenics wait what Shinobu the world's greatest ninja slash reporter kind a beautiful teenage doctor who's essentially mercy with the medic psychosis so that's fun ow hey samurai who can stand toe-to-toe with modern militaries and prince akatsuki a showboat each child magician on paper all of these prodigies are proper heroes with their own part to play in the story but in practice only two of them no points for guessing which ones actually get to make significant decisions that affect the direction of that story though they were ISA Qaeda in alongside them and they do get more opportunities to do things that are cool than a background character would the rest of the prodigies end up functioning almost identically to the battle harem Zin more generic ISA Kai like cheap magician or Ragnarok deferring to the wisdom of the male heroes pretty much whenever they're around and using their talents mostly in service of others plans even if those plans involve a master samurai and the most brilliant doctor on the entire planet prancing around in bunny suits to sell people religious mayonnaise and look I'm not going to complain about a show depicting my exact fetish but I do think that this approach is a lot less interesting narrative Lee speaking then letting all of the so-called main characters actually act like main characters out of all of them Prince Akatsuki is probably the one I hate the most part of that's his obnoxious personality but most of it comes down to the way his characters handled conceptually I'm actually a big fan of magic Penn & Teller specifically so I was really looking forward to watching an anime character go through the process of constructing illusions and I was profoundly disappointed when I realized that highschool prodigies doesn't even do that once I can't believe I have to explain this but if you take a really talented illusionist character and then place them in a setting with real magic you kind of need to show us how those [ __ ] illusions work to justify their entire existence Akatsuki is supposed to be from the real world right but when a lot of the plot revolves around his ability to fly and make buildings disappear with zero explanation as to how he does it that kinda renders the magic system irrelevant and makes it all but impossible for me to suspend by already weighty disbelief toward this series despite these issues the anime does have its good points the animations consistently well done especially when it comes to fanservice and action scenes those action scenes are pretty well directed at least compared to their competition and the script is decently written in the sense that a lot of the jokes land and are pretty funny also on a conceptual level I think the characters are unique and interesting even if the execution of those concepts isn't the best and they just end up falling into anime tropes a lot of the time if I were judging these series on their technical merits alone I don't know that high school prodigies would have even made this list let alone topped it but you know I just got a real bone to pick with this show a bias against it if you will because putting everything else in its story aside boy golly gee whiz are its politics specifically ever dumb and I'm not just talking about the eugenics thing that is only the tip of this yex burg now before any of you come at me for not keeping my criticism apolitical and objective or whatever I just want to remind you that the main character of this anime is a politician who the show repeatedly calls the world's greatest politician and its main plot is about him building a new system of government with his good politician powers one of which is shooting people so it's not me bringing politics into this they are already here in the most blatant obnoxious unsubtle way possible and it physically [ __ ] hurts me to see a show come forward with such audaciously preachy political ambitions as let's tell the story about a bunch of teenage geniuses using modern technology to rebuild entire fantasy worlds political system from the ground up in their own image only to turn around and reveal that what they're building is just another modern capitalist democracy I'm not saying that milquetoast liberalism wouldn't be an improvement on this world's fascist Empire almost anything would be obviously but there's other options you know there are a lot of things about the real world that suck - so like maybe you could use this never in a lifetime opportunity to aim a little bit higher than the status quo tsukasa buddy you have the power resources and knowledge to implement basically any political system you can dream of in a place with none of Earth's baggage and your idea of a glorious People's Revolution is to just kill the one ugly bastard who's most directly in charge of things where you are and then let all of the nobles who facilitated his reign of tyranny not only keep all of their money but also run the new government I'm just saying man these people were the agents of a feudal regime whose official policies included using the army to kidnap local women for the Lord to abuse and maybe some most or all of them deserve to pay for that with their lives or at least their stuff and maybe letting them off the hook because their wealth and connections are useful in the short term isn't the best way to ensure that the new Democratic state you've put them in charge of building for some reason will be just and resistant to corruption in the long term the show tries to write around the issue that it's revolutionary heroes aren't actually all that revolutionary in the same way that sao gets around its total lack of interesting characters by having its villains be so cartoonishly evil and gross that even a milk dud like Kirito looks kind of heroic next to them I mean it copies that dynamic right down to the part where the greasy rich blond villain chains up a busty elf and tears her clothes off in front of the hero with a knife and of course it rings some fanservice out of that sexual assault Oh another Hedo career damn it scary to see at all what don't wanna miss it Akana hey writers if you understand why that exact thing is bad then why are you doing it with your show that you wrote this stuff is gross and lame enough in your standard power fantasy anime but it's a particularly pernicious writing trick to employ in such a preachy politically-charged plot because it ends up implying that the problems in this world are purely the result of a few inherently bad people holding power the hierarchical power structure they're abusing meanwhile is framed as a morally neutral tool that you don't need to worry about so long as an inherently good persons in charge of it okay the problem with that line of logic is of course that most people aren't morally pure super geniuses with heterochromia or genetically evil ugly bastards and one day inevitably the system Tsukasa is building will imbue a handful of very average mildly competent morally fragile human beings with more power than any normal person can be expected to responsibly wield but that just kind of conveniently never comes up it is also wild to see an anime in 2019 talking a big game about people's revolutions when one of its main characters is a billionaire whose first big world-changing plan is to blackmail a mayor into giving him a business license so he can then use it to charge all the working-class merchants in town rent but that's okay you see because the guy who was doing it before was charging them even higher rent and being a real dick about it and much like governments monopolies only ever cause problems when bad people are in charge of them Misato literally doesn't do anything except acquire hoard and spend money and the series by way of a lolly cat girl who seems purpose-built to be a Twitter avatar treats him like he's some sort of godly mega genius for it you know you wanted probably like this but really Masato works as a stand-in for any billionaire philanthropist who's trying to find a way to save the world that conveniently doesn't involve them giving up any of their way too much stuff just like how Tsukasa works as a stand-in for any milquetoast centrist who pays lip service to progressive ideals while licking the boots of those same rich [ __ ] basically this show is about chuni Pete Buddha's agent has been shown in billionaire backers starting an entire magic civil war just to recreate the world we have now and while other anime this year have been uglier and boring grrrrrr and at times even more rage inducing grrrrrr none of them come anywhere near being that existential II depressing for me to think that an artist could go to the lengths of constructing an entire anime fantasy world and writing out a grand serialized epic narrative about its utopian evolution only to end up saying this is as good as it gets because for all that imagination they've failed to dream up anything better that kills me a bit inside I'm not saying this show would be better if it starred anime Bernie Sanders or whatever but no actually that is what I'm saying Bernie Sanders should be in this anime and also every anime is specially Corey in the house that is the point of this video okay not really I mean all of that is objectively true and also I'm right about everything but the real point is for all of us to have some fun at the expense of anime with problems that I personally think are funny and given how my brain works this is the one that gave me the most to make fun of by far high school prodigies may not be as poorly cobbled together as wise Bermuda Triangle try Knights or cheap magicians but in a way that only makes it worse because surely there must have been a better use for all of that talent and passion than manufacturing this political mayonnaise but that's just my opinion and I'm sure a lot of you have opinions of your own so I'd love to hear in the comments below which anime this year bothered you the most and why be it for ridiculous technical failings or intensely personal reasons both of those are really fun and if you loved hearing my opinions on this topic and have some friends who you think would also love them maybe I would really appreciate it if you'd share this video around even more than most of my videos it took a lot of time and hard work to get done anyway I'm Jeff through professional [ __ ] signing out from my mother's basement [Music] you

Channel: Mother's Basement

Views: 1,546,024

Keywords: Anime, Worst anime of 2019, worst anime, Mother's Basement, worst anime of the year, high school prodigies anime, Bad anime, terrible anime, anime 2019, top anime, Anime Analysis, Video Essay, Roast, funny anime, toplist, conception, try knights, bermuda triangle, colorful pastorale, awful anime, bad animation, anime roast, seasonal anime, handshakers, w'z, Pastel Memories, Arifureta, Assassin's pride, isekai cheat magician, SAO, Sword Art Online, master of ragnarok

Id: 1zKApUjYQGs

Length: 41min 40sec (2500 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 05 2020