2025's Worst Anime

[00:02] already celebrated last year's best anime and its finest trash, but now it's finally time to dig through the real garbage. These are the worst things that happened to anime in 2025, brought to you by all of you. That of course means

[00:18] everyone who supports us on Patreon, where you can watch clean cuts of everything YouTube makes us censor for just one buck a month. but also anyone who hits the like button, leaves a comment, subscribes, or rings the

[00:31] notification bell, or just watches the videos in general. It wouldn't be possible to do what I do without all of you guys. And I am grateful to every single one of you. Though, I am slightly more grateful the more of all of those

[00:45] things I just said that you do. So, please consider doing them. And also, Reflection, and our buddy Miles talking at length about all the anime from last year, good and bad, on the latest episode of our podcast, Quest [music]

[00:59] for the Best. Do that later, though, cuz right now we're on a worst for the worst. And just like how we kicked off the best a year list by breaking my rule against short series, I'm breaking my nose sequels rule here for One Punch Man

[01:13] season 3, cuz there's no way we weren't going to talk about this.

[01:32] and straight up unfinished at others. To call the latest season of One Punch Man a disappointment, even compared to season 2, would be a gross understatement. almost as gross as the corporate mismanagement on the

[01:45] according to an excellent video from Sakuga Blogs Kevin and Totally Not Mark gave the belleaguered animators at JC Staff less than a year to produce the entire thing. Unacceptable conditions for any series, let alone one of the

[02:02] single most hyped titles on Shonen Jump's entire roster. Small wonder then that so many fans are frothing at the mouth furious over how it all turned out. Though unfortunately far too much of that anger has been piled on the

[02:16] staff crunching their asses off to salvage whatever they can from this sinking ship instead of the executives who plowed it straight into a shitberg full steam ahead. which is a big part of why this list is called the worst things

[02:30] why this list is called the worst things to happen to anime in 2025 instead of just the worst anime. For as bad as One Punch Man itself undeniably is, its impact on anime discourse has been worse. The director straight up deleted

[02:45] his Twitter over the harassment he's been facing, which is absolutely what it is. Saying you wish the Kioani fire happened to JC staff instead definitely is not criticism. And neither is telling veteran animators that they need to

[03:01] leave the industry over a few bad episodes when they were working harder to make the best of this nightmare situation in any given week than the people deliberately farming their ordeal for engagement have through their entire

[03:16] careers. Just so we're clear, that is not a jab at all commentary content. I have immense respect for creators like Moist Critical who can work without the safety net of a script and still make good stuff, but only the ones who

[03:30] actually bother to read up on topics before yapping about them into their webcams. Which is how Charlie was able to levy so much fair criticism at One to levy so much fair criticism at One Punch Man season 3 without attacking the

[03:45] people suffering most from the project's gross mismanagement. Because again, it is a product worthy of much criticism. A very bad anime that stings all the more

[03:57] very bad anime that stings all the more for how good we know it can be. Even though industry circumstances beyond anyone's control made it impossible to rebottle season 1's lightning, there is no excuse for the committee to give the

[04:10] animators this little time to adapt something this beloved. See also Uzuaki and Lucifer in the Biscuit Hammer. And if you have seen Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer, that does make it abundantly clear just how much further One Punch

[04:25] Man could have fallen without all the nice sakuga and illustrations that the animators did have time to draw and the story boards that accounted for all the time that they wouldn't have in advance. I'll take janky PowerPoints with nice

[04:38] composition and posing over janky offcenter powerpoints of guys just sort of awkwardly standing there any day of the week. And at least they didn't [ __ ] the week. And at least they didn't [ __ ] up the animation and the manga's story,

[04:51] which is why I can't in good conscience put this any lower than 10th place. I have no doubt that it's the worst anime a lot of you, quite possibly the majority of all anime fans have ever seen, but that's only because most anime

[05:05] fans don't go out of their way to watch Gohan's shows.

[05:20] Gohanss is the only studio whose work consistently makes the phrase that hurt to watch completely non-hyperbolic. To their credit, they have come pretty far from the motion sicknessinducing timu photoable shots of handshakers, but not

[05:36] that far. Momentary Lily may not give you a full-on migraine, but you'll still walk away from most episodes with a serious headache and a newfound appreciation for the general health benefits of slideshows. And that's

[05:49] before you try to wrap that aching head around the story of this post-apocalyptic cute magical girls doing Terminator Salvations things cooking anime. No, neither of us just had a seizure. That was a completely

[06:03] accurate description. And honestly, if that was all I knew about it, I would immediately go watch this anime because I love crazy off-the-wall [ __ ] like that. Unfortunately, like all those crazy shots of waifuss jumping off of

[06:18] walls, that story's ambition far outstrips the ability behind it. Neither the events leading up to the apocalypse, nor the struggle to survive that follows are particularly interesting. And the waifuss doing all the surviving and wall

[06:33] jumping and chibi cooking tutorials are every bit as underwritten as they are overdesigned. From the very first aura that big titty Onaan aras to the very

[06:45] last comparison between current circumstances and video game tropes to come out of the gamer girls insufferably annoying mouth. only one thing that any of these girls ever says or does will surprise you at all. And that's only

[06:59] because they had the courtesy to avoid spoiling it in the OP, which is admittedly more courtesy than a lot of anime have. And while we're admitting things, I also think that OP kind of slaps. You can hear an actual clip OF

[07:13] slaps. You can hear an actual clip OF THIS SONG ON PATREON.COM. that actually really works. But even though the show it's attached to

[07:25] absolutely doesn't, I do deeply appreciate that Momentary Lily, like pretty much every Gohan's thing, at least tries to go there. They're a studio so preoccupied with never asking if they should, they forgot to figure

[07:39] out if they even could. And that makes them more consistent than almost anyone else in the industry at producing the good kind of bad anime. The kind where the sheer conceptual insanity and executional ineptitude of it all wraps

[07:55] all the way back around to being entertaining again. Though that said, we almost had one of those for husbando enjoyers too this year in Classic Stars. enjoyers too this year in Classic Stars. [music]

[08:14] private art school with a dark secret. Running nonvoluntary experiments on students where they inject them with the DNA of classical composers to create the ultimate boy band of super soldiers and dominate geopolitics via emerging

[08:31] holographic concert technology. Unfortunately, that sentence is the most interesting thing about the entire show. The twink and twink archetypes comprising the boy band make momentary Lily's waifu lineup look bold and

[08:47] creative. The overarching plot is barely a factor, at least as far as I could bring myself to watch it. The original soundtrack is dominated by J-pop remixes of classical songs that range from blandly forgettable to unbearably

[09:00] cringey, which is the exact same range the animation has in a fun coincidence. And the CGI dance sequences make wand dances look still bad, but not that bad. There is some possibility this one pops off after I dropped off. I do see some

[09:17] serious potential in the concept of Beethoven Alter's evil boy band, but nowhere near enough to keep putting up with the crap I did in the first few episodes. A premise this wacky should never feel that boring. Now, I'm a noble

[09:32] on the brink of ruins, so I might as well try mastering magic. That's a premise you expect to be boring. And boy howdy, does it ever deliver.

[09:49] into the title, Noble on the Brink is a bog standard lit RPG thing, notable mainly for how fast it speedruns through all the early game lit RPG [ __ ] you've seen a billion times before to get to the endgame lit RPG [ __ ]

[10:04] you've only seen a million times before, because most of these things never get a second season. Despite the show not being an isekai, Protag manages to achieve passive income by inventing instant ramen, master silent

[10:18] multiccasting, and attain a personal pocket dimension all in episode 1. Acquires three Harum girls and a knighthood by the end of episode 2, then upgrades that to a barren in episode 3, and soul bonds a [ __ ] dragon

[10:35] for good measure. Perhaps this pacing worked a little better in the web novel with five stat boxes between every paragraph, but whoever edited the print version must have accidentally gotten some meth in his cocaine if he thought

[10:49] it was even remotely acceptable there, let alone the manga or anime. I'm a sucker for a good progression fantasy, or even just an okay one. I'm currently nine books deep in He Who Fights with Monsters, but the thing that makes them

[11:05] so addictive is the progression part of the fantasy. If you skip over that, all you're left with is a shitty Dragon Quest fanfic where the plot mainly consists of everyone taking turns to see who can suck Erdri's the hardest. And

[11:21] this is just that animated by Studio Dean. Yet somehow, it could still be Dean. Yet somehow, it could still be worse.

[11:43] time I became able to eat unlimited numbers of skill fruits that kill you. takes the bedrock lit RPG premise of a world with RPG- like skills and asks the riveting question, "What if you got the skills from eating fruit?" Are you

[11:59] riveted yet? Oh, right. I forgot to mention that the fruits kill you if you eat more than one of them. So, if you get a bogus skill, you're kind of just for life. And you'll never guess what happened to Protag [ __ ] Of course, his

[12:12] sexy childhood friend he dreamed of adventuring with got the bestest skill ever on literally the same day. So, she's immediately recruited into the Chadliest Heroes party while his virgin ass is stuck farming fruits of both the

[12:27] regular and skill variety back home. But then when his pet lolly that he has for dinner with ingredients out of the don't touch these they'lling kill you barrel,

[12:39] he realizes that his skill actually makes him get this able to eat unlimited numbers of skill fruits that kill you. So he does that and then he has a bunch

[12:51] of skills and everyone else only has one skills. So they're all like, "Wow, bro, able to kick the Chad's ass and rescue adventures together and get some more skills and go on more adventures and get

[13:05] more skills and eventually some other waifuss show up. And do you even [ __ ] care about any of this? Cuz I do not. Nothing makes me check out of a power fantasy faster than giving its hero the power to have all the powers. And no,

[13:19] I'm not going to give the anime credit for locking him up for a few episodes to make the waifuss do some stuff without him. It wouldn't have been a problem in the first place if they hadn't started from such an obviously terrible concept.

[13:33] In case you were wondering, the comedy is even cringier than the action. And if you're thinking, "Well, maybe at least the animation makes up for all that." You have definitely been listening to this video while multitasking. Funny

[13:46] story about that, though. If I had a nickel for every shitty fantasy anime year, I'd put them both in a Futuramaicide booth before watching Futuramaicide booth before watching Pharmagia again.

[14:08] [snorts] >> [screaming] there are probably inclined to jump to this anime's defense, as it bears the unmistakable, exactly six faces of a hero Mashima joint. Don't be fooled,

[14:22] though. The story of this monster collecting farm sim Muso thing is merely the product of two game designers with almost no writing experience between them doing their best impression of the fairy tale creators style of

[14:36] fairy tale creators style of storytelling and humor which UH storytelling and humor which UH [screaming] is excruciatingly unfunny because the guy with the dog phobia is the main

[14:52] character and his partner Pokemon are dogs. So, it comes up quite a lot. Meanwhile, the Mashim man himself's contributions begin and end with his quote creative genius bringing life to Felicidad with unique character and

[15:08] Felicidad with unique character and monster designs. Really, Xed copywriter unique? That's the word we're going with here. Anyway, the director of the fairy tale anime then took that entire video game

[15:21] and condensed it down to just 12 episodes, which went better than you'd expect pacing-wise. Cuz it turns out when you divide nothing by 3 hours instead of 30, you still get a whole lot of nothing. You've got your typical

[15:35] oppressive fantasy regime opposed by the obligatory orphans from an idyllic village that gets blown up in the first act, acting as the vanguard of the rebellion for some reason, which is even more baffling than usual in this case.

[15:49] Because the yappy ass protag has literally never accomplished a single thing in his entire life. Yet insists to anyone who will listen to him that when he does finally dig up his first Poke Crop, he is instantly going to become

[16:04] the best monster battler there ever was. And then he gets in one fight and loses and is immediately promoted to leader of the evil boss assassination squad. And I

[16:16] from there. They beat up a series of evil empire generals who can turn into big scary monsters, followed by the big bad who turns into a bigger, scarier monster. But then it turns out there was an even bigger bad working behind the

[16:31] scenes all along. So they go beat that guy up until he turns into the biggest bad of all in space. And then they beat him up some more until world peace is achieved. a fine enough excuse to engage in a gameplay loop for a couple dozen

[16:46] hours, I guess. But nothing worth adapting an anime over. And even by the standards of phoned in game commercials, Pharmagia feels phoned in as still better to see a mediocre game get that treatment than a story people actually

[17:01] treatment than a story people actually cared about.

[17:13] Game is actually really good, but you wouldn't know it from the anime, which is one of the boringest commercials I have ever sat through and the only one with the audacity to dedicate most of an episode to the main character doing a

[17:29] gotcha pull. At least as far as I've seen. The Last Period anime actually made a pretty funny running gag out of the characters trying to solve problems with the gacha mechanic and repeatedly pulling absolute trash, but that's not

[17:42] quite the same thing. It is possible that some other gotacha anime made an episode out of it, too. But I wouldn't really know cuz I don't exactly make a habit of watching these things past episode 1, except I am fully caught up

[17:54] on both Uma Cinderella Gray and Twisted Wonderland episode of Hearts Le. So, I guess I kind of did make a habit of it this year. And that last one in particular makes for an especially unflattering comparison to this magic

[18:08] husbando collector where all the characters are loosely based on classic western stories from the public domain. Admittedly, Promise of Wizard the Game does have some advantages in that department due to reaching beyond your

[18:21] typical Disney fairy tale bubble for influences ranging from FA to the secret influences ranging from FA to the secret garden to the Bible to Also, it kind of accidentally lifts an anti-semitic slur from The Merchant of

[18:34] Venice. And as far as anime goes, it loses in every department. Where Twisted Wonderlands focus on a small subset of the gotacha roster gave it room to tell a concise story with surprisingly deep character development. promise of

[18:49] Wizards clumsy efforts to equally service every fan of every member of its service every fan of every member of its insanely bloated 21 husband cast while also juggling its whole overarching plot about how Protag Chan is the only one

[19:02] who can bring all the bickering twinks together in time for their annual fight with the moon ensures that almost none of them get enough screen time to meaningfully satisfy those fans, let alone go through anything resembling an

[19:15] arc. And while all of those too many husbandos are drawn decently handsomely, that's only until you see them move, which you won't generally because this is one of those anime that's only animated sometimes is a little treat.

[19:30] Even so, that's not quite the dirtiest that a popular fantasy story was done that a popular fantasy story was done this year.

[19:42] san manga written by some guy whose main takeaway from Berserk was blood revenge takeaway from Berserk was blood revenge and titties. Uelat is definitely one of them. A pretty successful one at that. And edgy even by berserk clone

[19:54] standards. How edgy you ask? There's a reference to the horse, you know the one in the first chapter. And by the end of the first arc, Protag's been on both ends of a semivoluntary pegging and slaughtered hundreds of dudes for the

[20:11] crime of getting in his way. It's not good, but it is charmingly shameless with a legitimately badass airship over ancient ruins aesthetic that does quite a bit to paper over the faux sane and tuniness of the writing. Its sizable fan

[20:28] base has been clamoring for an anime since it started way back in 2004. And you're already looking at clips of the thing, so I don't have to tell you how that went, at least in terms of preserving the badasserie. This random

[20:42] footage probably isn't doing much to capture the severe pacing issues, which aren't quite on the level of the seventh place speedrun, but 5.4 Four chapters per episode is nothing to sneeze at, especially with all the sy proper nouns

[20:58] this show expects you to keep track of, and it makes itself even harder to follow by completely skipping its own prologue just because it had too many >> babies. This ties into another problem that you're not going to see in the

[21:13] footage because Amazon Prime explicitly ordered the studio to cut it entirely from the source material. Titties and sex in general, which is a pretty big omission from a manga notorious for turning into straight up and in its back

[21:29] third. though somehow they didn't cut the bit where a very young orphan girl is forced to put on lingerie while the hero repeatedly tells her your name is

[21:41] pee pee now and refuses to let her correct him in episode one but you know long as no one sees a titty I'm sure the international Amazon Prime audience is

[21:53] going to have no problem with that to be fair I actually didn't see the show catching any diddy accusations on release, but that's probably because absolutely none of the people who might make them even slightly wanted to watch

[22:08] it. So, that's one way around the Mushoku Fensei problem, I guess. Just make the anime terrible. Not that it's even remotely comparable to that. At best, this [ __ ] would have been Goblin Slayer tier, but at its worst, which is

[22:23] Slayer tier, but at its worst, which is how we got it, it's just plain sad. Even [music] There are few things in this world more pathetic than a dulled down edge lord. Though off the top of my head, I can

[22:37] Though off the top of my head, I can think of one. [music] exactly four chapters short of giving me an animated version of that meme. So,

[22:49] it's not even worth breaking my sequel rule again to dunk on. Somehow Rei Miaima and Doakobo managed to make something.

[23:15] gasast that the uh Oh, Step Bro anime went too far. My gripe is it didn't go nearly too far enough. As I made quite clear in my seminal video essay, the fake incest harum for cowards, RI's latest love healike is the most

[23:31] fundamentally worthless haram thing of the entire decade. A dish so safely bland, it makes English cuisine look exotic and spicy. I am loathed to invoke

[23:43] AI when critiquing artisal man-made slop, but if you asked chat GPT to write a horror anime about adopted siblings, this is almost beat forbeat and bar forbar exactly what it would spit out. I

[23:58] never thought I'd say this, but this show and the manga that follows it made me appreciate just how much soul Rent a girlfriend really has. Like at least Rayi cares enough about one waifu in that thing to draw her over his actual

[24:13] wife in vacation photos and insist that Kazuya get a self-insert makeover before he's allowed to her. Even if that's just a cheap viral marketing gimmick, which I strongly suspect that it is, it's still a memorable and creative gimmick that's

[24:29] probably rooted in some degree of truth. Like maybe Ragi and his editor were out drinking and he said, "Ah man, that girl's so hot. No one else should be able to have her." And then both their eyes lit up and they started outlining

[24:43] the whole social media campaign. Or maybe he is just legitimately psychotic. Who am I to doubt the man's honesty? Someone who's watched this show. That's [ __ ] who. Shanji Family Children is nothing but a soulless side hustle. a

[24:58] quarterass mix of boilerplate tropes and recycled ideas that weren't even good enough for rent a girlfriend bodgeged together in whatever time Reagi had left before the latest chapter of that. It's only saving grace the self-evident

[25:13] quality of its production values. But in the anime's case, those only make me hate it more. In an industry stretched well past the breaking point where every animator is run ragged on almost every project and [ __ ] One Punch Man can't

[25:30] project and [ __ ] One Punch Man can't catch a break. There is no show less [music] Just imagine if even a fraction of the talent and effort that was spent polishing this aggressively five out of

[25:44] 10 turd had gone into bringing One Punch Man or Apothecary Diaries up to the visual standards of their first seasons or adding extra episodes to Gundam Gquex

[25:56] and Koon Generic Romance or literally any other anime you can think of where they just clearly didn't have enough time and people to do their vision justice. Obviously, it's not quite that simple. They're not even the same

[26:09] studio. I guess they could have done another season of Noakiun OR SOMETHING. BUT THAT'S where my hatred really comes from. It's the anime equivalent of staring at ROMsticks and graphics cards on Newegg.com while lights flicker

[26:23] ominously overhead and you can faintly hear construction sounds on the new data center up the street. On that note though, there is a second reason I called this the worst things that happened to anime in 2025. Worst place

[26:38] goes to inshitification in all its shitty forms, especially the AI shitty forms, especially the AI generated ones.

[26:51] rest can rot in the dirt like the youthless scrap metal that you are. youthless scrap metal that you are. Kenon Shro.

[27:08] and abroad that I didn't feel right making any one anime its poster child. Especially since the most obvious choice, Twins Hinahima, is not anime at all. It wasn't drawn by Japanese hands, nor was it made for a Japanese audience,

[27:24] or indeed any human being with a soul. and its prompt monkeys have absolutely no history or credibility in the anime industry. So, sorry. Wait, no, [music] I'm not. Either way, doesn't count. Mechanical Marie, on the other hand,

[27:38] absolutely is anime. A pretty fun one, even when director Junji Nishimura isn't [music] tainting it. And the entire legacy of Osamu Daki with his vile

[27:50] postcard hallucination [music] freeze frames. But while I would rather watch all of Shunji family again than look at any of those AI abominations for even a second, they aren't the whole anime or even 2% of it. Plus, it's not

[28:04] even his first time doing this [ __ ] so it didn't quite feel like the right piece of crap to sum the year up either. Besides, the worst things that AI did to anime in 2025 didn't even happen to anime from 2025. Damn it, everyone's

[28:19] crowding into this tiny space. I need space to move. Skipper, no. Please. No, Skipper. >> Hey, stay with me. You're still good >> What? >> I told you you're a piece of [ __ ]

[28:33] Nothing but an overgrown fat pig. >> Back in November, Amazon ran a little beta test experiment in ruining dubbed anime for everyone on a few of the highest profile as yet undubbed classics

[28:46] in their anime catalog. And also the No Game No Life movie. for some reason, even though it already has a dub that you can buy on Blu-ray right now. >> All I need from you is your adorable head. The rest of you I will bury in the

[28:59] dirt because that is exactly where scrap metal belongs. K9. >> And lest [snorts] any sub [music] watchers get characteristically smug about that, our side of the hobby is even more vulnerable to this crap.

[29:13] Machine translated subs have been worming their way onto Crunchyroll and other platforms for years now, though they are always removed after the inevitable backlash. Most recently, they completely ruined the debut of Studio

[29:26] Gokum's summer original Necronomo and the Cosmic Horror Show, whose mashup of Fallg Guys and the Cthulhu mythos wasn't great, but certainly deserved better

[29:38] than the 5.59 score that it launched with due to being literally incomprehensible. Now, that actually wasn't Crunchyroll's fault. streamers to use their provided subtitles, even if they suck. But the

[29:54] busted ass subs we saw on literally every new anime at the start of fall absolutely were a result of Crunchyroll transitioning what's left of their translation department from open-source software designed explicitly for anime

[30:09] to the same one-sizefits-all crap employed by every other streaming site that can't handle translating on-screen signs or multiple characters speaking over each other or any of the other little things that make anime watchable.

[30:24] All part of a long-term plan to reduce their reliance on fan subtrained freelancers [music] in favor of the same bulk translation services that do shitty subs like these for Netflix and other streamers.

[30:37] streamers. [music] confirmed that Crunchyroll is still moving forward with these plans even after the backlash which wasn't quite big enough to stop them. And we may

[30:51] start seeing the results on anime released as early as the current winter about the situation linked in the doobly-doo if you want to maybe help make a larger backlash to do something about it before it's too late. But all

[31:05] of these problems are really just symptoms of a much larger one, which is that the purpose of companies is not to meet consumer demands for goods and services at the most broadly acceptable price point that still covers their

[31:18] expenses. like how the liars at your school told you it's supposed to work, but rather to perpetually inflate their own stock prices to create infinite speculative investments. This in turn

[31:32] requires companies to show growth in profits every year and quarter forever, even if the markets become effectively saturated due to say everyone watching anime during a pandemic or just you know the inevitable reality of living on a

[31:46] finite planet. Either way, from there, the only way to really keep the line going up outside of Ponzi schemes is to cut corners and raise prices, paying fewer people less and less to create worse and worse products that we in turn

[32:00] must pay more and more for every year and every quarter forever, or at least until the uncontrolled cancer economy eats our civilization alive. So yeah, that's the worst thing that happened to anime and also everything this year and

[32:16] last year and next year and the year after that. And yeah, you get it. I'm sure in 2026 I'll just go back to laughing at dumb writing and bad production values to numb the terrible awareness. But this year it got a little

[32:28] too terrible and close to home to not, you know, scream about it a little. On the bright side though, enough people did scream at Amazon to make those AI dubs lost media already, which is a nice reminder that they only have the power

[32:43] to ruin everything so long as we let them. And hey, some things are still really good, like the best and trashiest anime of 2025, which you can watch my videos about both of those on screen right now. Not to mention all the good

[32:58] new anime coming out next season, which you'll get to see not one but two videos about in the coming weeks. I'm Jeff Thu, professional anime dumpster diver, professional anime dumpster diver, saying see you then.