10 worst anime of 2019 and Here is why

It’s true that we always looking for the best possible anime. No one wants to watch crappy pieces of rubbish, unless you’re me, watching everything, from the beginning till the very end and sometimes it’s a really hard path. As my debut, I’ve been asked to present worst, in my opinion, anime series (and a movie) of 2019. While I’m very strict with ratings, some of the titles are here simply because of huge disappointment they delivered and absolutely didn’t live up to it’s hype. There’s as well couple of anime recognised amongst the best of 2019 and while it can look like I’m talking gibberish, there’s reason behind every single pick on this list, so rest assured, by the end you’ll know why.

Let’s begin with one the biggest disappointment of the year…

10. Enen no Shouboutai

Anime that had a truly great start. Fire Force tells somewhat original and interesting story of group of young individuals that knows how to control fire and thanks to that they fighting Infernals, violent fire creatures that used to be humans. They’re called Pyrokinetic. Our protagonist, Shiro, lost all his family in mysterious fire 12 years ago and his personal goal is to become hero that will save people from the terror (Emiya Shirou anybody?). His past is hidden in the darkness and throughout most of the show, he’s struggling to get the answers and at the same time become his dreamed hero. What is even harder as the Fire Force itself is far from being perfect. It seems pretty interesting and the first few episodes deliver some great entertainment. What a shame. The biggest problem of the whole structure is poor writing as to where it can really entertain it’s actually… boring.

Over the course, there’s a visible downgrade of the animation as well and at some point, whole character development is being thrown in the bin to justify one single moment in the series. Yall know what I’m talking about if you saw it. It’s a perfect example of a show that completely destroyed the hype for the sake of what, cuts? Apparent smoothness of the storyline? That’s just worth nothing words as considering some big changes to the manga it’s really hard to explain what exactly went wrong. From a show that was highly anticipated, show that I could rate at strong 8 it ended up having a mere 5. And that’s only because it ended after 24 episodes. There’s a second season coming this summer, let’s hope they’ll fix what went wrong. Otherwise, there’s no saving to this newly formed franchise.

9. Psycho-Pass 3

Story with this franchise is truly depressing. At first it was my huge hope for bringing after years some fresh and new mature cyberpunk anime to life. First season unfortunately was just fine, full of boring characters, cliche storyline and ultimately just another mediocre cyberpunk show. Second season killed it all delivering huge downgrade from far-from-perfect first season. So having that in mind I had no expectations from it at all. Imagine my reaction when it ended up as the worst installment so far (the sequel movie was just as bad as this but overall more enjoyable). So we picking up the story as our two inspectors are sent to investigate the ship carrying immigrants. As it’s the world without crime, of course, they soon begin to realise it was no accident at all AND there’s some shadowy organisation that is closely observing them AND, of course, they’re not the only one observing them.

So far cliche as it can be, animation of course very nice, same goes to ost and moody of the technical aspects, so you ask, what’s wrong with some good ‘ol cliche mystery. Well, nothing, the problem is how creators delivered it. Apart from our utterly boring protagonists, there’s one main issue, lack of trust in the viewers. We know everything and easily can predict with nearly 100% accuracy how it ended. But that is just a small part, the biggest sin is treating us like idiots that need an explanation to EVERYTHING. While having some good cyberpunk mystery it’s always nice to not knowing anything. Ultimately we ended up with a terrible written show that could be any cheap hallmark crime drama. Unenthusiastic, boring, extremely overloaded with pointless plots and stupid cliches. It’s very sad. Production I.G. really needs to start thinking about getting their viewers serious as so far every new franchise of theirs fail ultimately.

8. Knights of the Zodiac: Saint Seiya

Netflix constantly delivering some terrible shows, but what they did to Saint Seiya is an abomination. In every possible way you can think of. And changing sex of one of the characters is nothing. I’m not going to waste any more time with plot as probably everyone knows well original. First of all, this show is completely pointless, there’s nothing wrong with original adaptation, more to say, original is nearly perfect considering it’s age. Second, this bloody awful CGI is just the worst, poorly animated with terrible quality is just unwatchable, even if it’s actually anime for kids.

What they did to this franchise is unforgivable. Now I’m even more terrified with the upcoming Ghost in the Shell. Having such a great manga series they could do some justice to it, but instead, we’re received politically correct, a boring, awful mere shadow of the original. A perfect example of how you are NOT supposed to do remakes. I can’t even write anything more about that.

7. Stand My Heroes: Piece of Truth

This anime was just bad. Crime drama about anti narcotics police squad called STAND. It’s more like gallery of poorly animated beautiful boys and extremely stupid girl. And that’s about it. It supposed to tell the story of acceptance, fighting crime and looking your place in bigger picture but instead it delivers some of the worst fanservice I’ve seen in years, focusing on pretty faces, pointless talks and the plot? Plot disappeared somewhere in the middle of the 3rd or 4th episode.

Bad animation is supported by terrible character design and development, psychological depth is ending before it even starts to grow and voice acting is so, so soulless like actors were the as a punishment. It’s a mere few months after it finished and I already forgot nearly everything that concerns this production. Some of the truly worst anime series in few nice years. Been truly wondering about writing more about that but actually this is what this series ultimately delivers, emptiness and nothing, a huge waste of time. As I stated in the first sentence, this anime was just bad. In every way, you can think of.

6. Girly Air Force

Okay. Here were go with some of the most ridiculous shows I’ve seen in some time. What about girls who fight deadly alien forces? Nice, yeah, but how about making them pilots of weird airplanes? Even better, what could go wrong? Well, the pint of this particular show is… everything. And I mean that. Since the first teasers came out I felt there’s going to be some issues with animation, lack of frames at least, really showed me that lack of frames was the least problem. The whole world-building and pacing show awful tendencies to use cliches older than the works itself. Anime about girls is a genre by itself, indeed, but in this show these girls are supposed to be a strong role model, what we receiving instead is a bunch of stupid, horribly written cliche characters with no soul and even slightest amount of intelligence.

Proceeding further, dear lord, what they did to the character design is one of my 2019 nightmares, first promos gave some real hope for another well-presented character, I was wrong there too. Boring, exceptionally bad in planning and horribly written series. And that’s from a studio that brought beautiful White Album 2 and surprisingly great Macross F among many other at least fairly nice shows. Well, to give some credit, music ain’t bad and songs used for opening and ending credits were catchy. But that’s not enough, instead of sweet, action-packed anime about fighting girls, we’ve received yet another cliche, idiotic and boring series that promises a lot but delivering nothing. Disappointing to say least.

5. Fairy Gone

So, we’re in the top 5 worst 2019 anime already. And well, Fairy Gone was easily the biggest let down and disappointment of the year. Please note that I consider the show as one 24 episode run instead of 2×12 as it was presented. The anime was one of my biggest hopes of the year, not only because plot was very interesting and seemed mature but as well studio behind had brought some of my all time favourites. And the start was fairly good, interesting, showing world divided by wars and blood, delivered nice tension and introduced characters as it supposed to. I rewatched the whole series already, just to confirm everything once again. It hurts how terribly you can let down your audiences. Bad, terribly writing showed it’s marks right in the second episode as having interesting plot and original storyline the only thing I felt was actually being forced too hard into the world that hasn’t been yet properly acknowledged not to mention introducing.

Unfortunately, it took creators literally the whole series to build and deliver interesting world. And yes, by the end of the show it finally gets to the point and delivers some true entertainment. So what went so wrong? Missed plotlines, misguided, never explained subplots, unreliable character development, bad, bad writing and being boring while still having an interesting main plot. 24 episode run was on the other hand way too long, by cutting all useless twists, shortening events and sacrificing some airing time the series would be much better, from the pacing to the ultimate entertainment, 14-15 episodes would be just fine. But the biggest sin was misusing great characters, giving them some of the cringiest and clichest psychological growths I’ve seen in years, not to mention that whole series showed tendencies to be truly great, just look at the final episodes. I have no words to describe how disappointed I was. Beautiful music, some decent animation, and best character design in regular tv show was literally killed by lack of ideas on how to deliver it properly, boringness, awful pacing, and horrible mess. Shame P.A.Works, shame af.

4. Mahou Shoujo Tokushusen Asuka

Yet another bad show produced by good studio. But here I received exactly what I was expecting. While my all time favourite anime is Madoka Magica franchise I can’t help it but being disappointed with any other attempt to deliver mature and dark magical girls series. And answer to that is simple, while Madoka series did it by deconstruction of the whole genre and some of the best plotlines in anime history the rest of the attempts by other creators are usually cheap and more or less misplaced copying. Yes, this particular show meant to be dark, violent and gritty, ultimately it was at it’s best an fun disaster. And the plot was actually nice, schematic, generic, but nice. The evil and bloodthirsty alien race Disas destroyed literally whole world leaving it vulnerable and defeated and it’s last grow became magical girls that could forge some kind of alliance with the Spirit Realm and ultimately won the war. They’ve been known as the Magical Five and after the war disbanded. Most of them stayed in army, while their leader retired and came back to school. But the real threat and darkness is only on the horizon and coming. I loved the idea of mixing space military war drama with magical girls shoujo anime, but ultimately the show failed in both and literally became a disaster on it’s own.

While the writing is just another cliche, the biggest issue here is actually how it was done. Cheap, with no real idea how to proceed with the series and finally really bad character development. As for the war/military drama part, it was just terrible, full of older than the genre cliche ideas, totally horrible pacing and probably one of the worst villains I’ve ever seen in the show of any kind. For the magical girl’s segment, well, they tried too hard with complexity and been overconfident with the ideas that were actually nothing else but very cheap rendition of not only Madoka’s character growth, but the whole psychology went into the bin as soon as they had to came up with their own ideas, sad, but again, completely expected. If you want to do proper dark and mature series in the genre you need to call Gen Urobochi. Sure, series looked lit, music was good, design beautiful, but the anime itself was a complete disaster. Disaster with some nice ideas. And fun

3. Arifureta Shokugyou de Sekai Saikyou

Top 3 anime on this list comes with rare 1/10 rating. Firstly, we starting from Arifureta, abomination above all. It’s even hard not to swear while writing about this show. This is perfect example of anime so terrible and awful that even gods hiding. How the hell this bad parody of anime have 6,52 rating I have no bloody clue. Easily amongst worst animes of XXI century. It’s isekai and to be fair with you, I hate the genre as you can see by whole top 3. But even in this genre there’s some truly great productions. I can write whole essay about this piece of crap and how bad is it. Without even small amount of irony. Let’s just start off from the plot, another boring, cliche isekai plot. Hajime Nagumo and his class is summoned to fantasy world to save mankind. While his classmates are gifted with great powers and useful abilities he’s left with transformation ability that lacks in everything and soon he’s betrayed and thrown into the abyss where he have to fight monsters and then himself to stay alive just to find that he’s in the labyrinth with a imprisoned vampire and after freeing joins him with few others along the way to find the way out of the labyrinth.

I forgot to mention that Hajime ultimately going to be the strongest? Well, that’s more than obvious. I’m actually finding it’s hard to find anything positive in this anime. The animation is bad, CGI is an abomination, the plot is even worse, characters are cliches of the cliches, development does not exist, the story is progressing in exactly one way and it’s predictable from the very first episode and fanservice is terrible and offensive. Yeah, there’s nothing positive. I have no idea what was the idea behind this chaotic mess and who the hell give money and approve to air this disaster. It’s like someone looked at the record of worthless in the swimming pool and said ‘Hey, it’s fun, let’s greenlight it!’. Seriously? Since I started watching anime in 2003 I’ve encountered only a few titles that were worse than this. I could say more about pacing, how awfully boring it was or how offensive the fanservice was, but wash I truly want to focus on is… CGI. Bloody hell, 2006 Studio Deen’s Fate/stay night dragon animation was better and it’s one of the most criticized parts of this anime. And it was criticized back in 2006 and we talking about 2019 production! If you don’t know how to do something, don’t touch it. Apart from awful CGI creatures design there as well as fights choreography which you can actually put under two letters ‘XD’. Budget issues were actually visible everywhere, dark animation, framerate changes every so often, bad design and animation and a lot of ridiculous, pointless and literally impossible to understand twists. It could be easily one of THE WORST anime of the decade if 2019 didn’t deliver the other two disasters.

2. Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo!: Kurenai Densetsu

And here were go, now we can start to be afraid, why the hell you even put this anime on this list you can ask. Well, there’s more than a few reasons. The whole point of this list, however, is not a simple worthless posting without explanation but as well trying to prove my point. And the truth is that KonoSuba is terrible but this sequel movie took it way further in terms of how worthless this franchise can be. I want to remind you that I perfectly understand that this anime is a parody of the genre and as it is usually with parodies, they’re bad. In this particular franchise, it’s even more visible as isekai genre by itself is a parody and spitting in the face of the audience. 95% of isekai are exactly the same, with same plotlines, same characters, same ideas and just copying each other all the time. What saved KonoSuba tv series was its hilarious humor, what killed it was terrible characters. But even that I rated it at 4-5.

But this movie lacks everything, Megumin became even nite stupid and whorish than usually, Aqua is even more useless, character development regressed and animation, above all, by some miracle, is worse than in the tv series. A complete disaster of a movie with a WHOPPING 8,66 rating. People, seriously? That’s all you need to put it in the top100 anime of all time? This movie is a pure example of treating viewers as idiots and retards. It’s not only ‘more, hotter and louder’ type sequel, but it’s as well way more stupid and pointlessly ridiculous. It’s like someone gave you toy to play with and you instead start to cut it and write on it. I mentioned animation before, yes, it’s worse, but still amazing, what truly regressed is characters. Megumin after this movie literally went into top2 most annoying and bitchy stupid anime waifus of all time. How’s that possible I don’t know, not to mention that Aqua has officially become the most useless character of all time. The plot here does not exist, it’s there only for the awful fanservice and more pointless explosions. Truly awful piece and I’m finding it hard to understand the point of creating this movie other than vulgar and offensive, bad quality fanservice. OST nice, animation still lit, voicing amazing, the movie – damn cancer.

1. Sword Art Online: Alicization – War of Underworld

And here we came to the final title. Apparently THE most popular anime franchise in the world. Biggest problem? I can actually write a book about that. Unironically this is most cancerous and dangerous anime of our time, it delivers some of the most cringe fanservice I’ve seen, amount of plots that barely anyone can follow, chaos and pacing changes whenever creations feel like it and complete disaster in storytelling. This is only the beginning. I’ve never dropped single piece of anime and I’m proud of my no drop policy and I never doubted it even with previous installments of this franchise. This is the only production since 2003 I actually considered to drop, seriously. Watching this show truly hurted my intelligence and changed what I used to think about anime. This is without doubt not only the worst 2019 anime, not even the worst of the decade, it’s definitely THE WORST anime I’ve seen in my entire life. I realise it’s harsh and probably somewhat unfair considering that there’s meant honestly worse titles. Indeed, there are and none of them ever gave me any problems with finishing them while finale of this abomination took me nearly 3 hours. For 24 minute episode.

SAO franchise always had problems with flow and keeping everything in order, it was a chaotic and very low effort in working on that. The series actually never really cared about storyline more than taking its characters from checkpoint to checkpoint, everything between was a complete and utter disaster, writing, characteristic and storytelling disaster and I’m pretty sure even die-hard fans wouldn’t be able to tell what exactly is going on in this franchise. So many empty subplots never finished stories, left and never picked up characters, annoying tendencies became even harder in 3rd season, while 4th took it in the areas never experienced by me. Going further, the bigger problem with the latest installment lies within whole 8-year long world-building that makes no sense as every season adds more and more nonsense that it’s really hard to follow the main arc, character development exists only in theory, changing every single time, the main love story is actually a bunch of sad and boring cliches and on top of that it’s possibly the most unreliable romance of all time, villains, or not to disrespecting even weak villains, the others against our pair of mc’s are… just another passpoints and if you think that’ll change in the continuation, think twice, cliffhanger? It’s more like an annoying hangover. Supporting characters are so forgettable and pointless that even without them you wouldn’t even notice that they disappeared. This season have problems in possible every single part of it. Pacing is even more chaotic and what left of the plot seems awfully speeded up just to mark plot nonsense probably. I found myself heavily confused about the whole idea of what the hell happened in the finale, cheapest truck in the book and now all that left is to wait for the grand finale of Alicization installment. But don’t you think it’s the end, novels contain much more material for at least a couple of spinoffs and sequels. And finally, this is the series that A-1 picked over Seven Deadly Sins. Yeah, explain that other easy that SAO is probably the best easy and cheap money machine in Japan. A cancerous abomination that causes an overall decrease in low anyway quality of popular franchises. This is how anime dies, in applause and scream of 14 years olds turned on by cheap fanservice. But even tho, animation is amazing, can’t take that, character design is flawless same with location and choreography designs, it’s basically one big show off and still bit behind studios like KyoAni or SHAFT. But what’s really flawless there is the soundtrack, my beloved Yuki Kajiura never failed to deliver interesting and immerse music, same goes to opening and ending credits. And that’s about it. I’m truly afraid of what comes in the finale.

That concludes my debut here, just a few controversial picks but I can’t help it. Thanx everyone and see yall soon!