I'm going to open with a controversial clarification: while I tend to stuff these lists with Problematic Trash because of my own tastes, Gushing Over Magical Girls did not make the list. To make the worst-of list, it has to be not just trashy, not just gross, but bad.

There's been a lot of strife between the "if you look past the lolis it's a great story with a lot to say" and "but ewwwww" camps on that one, and even if I'm not into GOMG myself, as a fan of other works like Nanoha that have gotten the same discourse, I am tired.

Much like the best-you-missed list, I'm moving away from listing them in an ordered countdown because half the time the order is arbitrary anyway.

No sequels either. If you didn't like Arifureta or KamiErabi before, you probably won't like it now (and you have taste). And I'm going to be getting into spoilers for some of these just to talk about the content.

With that, let's get to the list.

2.5-Dimensional Seduction

But what if My Dress-Up Darling... were hornier... and sexist?

2.5DS is the story of an otaku who runs the school manga club (consisting only of himself) with a gatekeeping iron fist, chasing away anyone he feels doesn't belong. When (gasp) a girl shows up, he tries to chase her away thinking she's only into the shoujo anime he finds beneath him, only for her to declare her love for his waifu.

(Not in a gay way, though! She just really likes how pure and innocent she is while she battles in booty shorts and fawns over the bland hero! It's aspirational!)

She proceeds to beg him to take sexy cosplay photos of her as said waifu, and naturally, her cosplay is completely accurate even though she's never done it before, because tangled Party City wigs and crooked seams aren't hot.

And before you know it, Protag-kun has gathered a whole cosplayer harem, including his childhood friend the famous gravure model, his teacher, and a professional cosplayer who falls in love with him because he looks just like her favourite generic protagonist. (Of course he does, he looks like all of them.)

The pick-me main girl gives a bad name to female danseimuke enjoyers everywhere and the protag is regularly rewarded for being a selfish, hateful tool because it's okay, he only hates real girls because he has mommy issues. Just give us another My Dress-Up Darling season instead.

Delusional Monthly Magazine

This anime is about a group of men running the Weekly World News (and their dog and ten-year-old ward) who discover they're reincarnated Atlanteans and transform into buff furries to fight a corporation over a set of ancient artifacts

while both sides are being manipulated by a conspiracy to dredge up Atlantis (here "Mo Continent") and destroy the surface world.

So why is it so boring?

This show should be interesting! But half of it is taken up with the characters having the same arguments, the fights are a little dull, the plot is mostly crammed into the last few episodes,

the antagonists feel more than a little "he's only doing this because he loves her, she's doing it because woman bad", and I started to wonder why even have the two sides fighting over the MOParts in the first place.

I may not be the target audience for this show, but they deserve better.

Trillion Game

The story, told in fond(?) flashback, of a startup that got its two founders to be the first Japanese trillionaires. Haru and Gaku are a couple of middle-class twentysomethings who want to become the 0.1%, no matter what they have to do to do it.

This is supposed to be a fun, wild adventure, but it's simultaneously trying to be that with its unrealistic details yet too realistic to have fun with. Sure, scumbag protags are popular these days, and it definitely shows that none of these rich people got that way by being nice or ethical... but we're still supposed to side with the protags, I think?

Haru is "the world's most selfish man," but he calls himself this as a so-called reason that he deserves to be rich, and every time he does something cruel and/or stupid-but-supposedly-smart, we're reminded that the other billionaires are evil too and he saved Gaku from being mugged and quit his well-paying job day one in solidarity with him.

Then he starts deciding to scrap the whole thing out of nowhere, but then it's all a test for Gaku. Are we supposed to hate this guy or not?

The other thing is that for a rags-to-riches story, the riches come surprisingly quickly, and they weren't even poor beforehand either. Even before the bank president's daughter goes from "ugh these guys suck" to "sure, I'll give them my support to amuse myself," Haru got a well-paying job in, like, a day.

Anyone who has job searched even at the lowest levels knows that's even less realistic than the fact that Gaku's brand new laptop apparently runs Linux right out of the box.

Technically the last episode comes out tomorrow, but I'm feeling pretty confident putting this on the list now no matter what happens there.

The Foolish Angel Dances with the Devil

Romances were up and down this year. Hokkaido Gals are Super Adorable managed to stay off the list with the cute relationship between the leads, even though the sneezing-on-your-gloves-played-for-fanservice moment in episode 1 teetered on a precipice anyway.

Same thing with Alya, which had genuine chemistry that got sidelined for fanservice and that dreaded parasite, The Incest Character. And then... there was this.

Heaven and Hell are at war, and demon Masatora goes to the human world to search for help to inspire the demon army. He sucks at being evil, the candidate he picks turns out to be an angel, and she quickly puts a collar on him while he screams, and demands that he serve her or else she'll exorcise him.

The whole scene and stuff that follows after is incredibly uncomfortable (the visuals are practically screaming "this is a rape joke") and also completely at odds with the rest of the show.

At least when this stuff happened in Chained Soldier the same season, the whole show was a BDSM fetish thing. This is marketed as a fluffy romance, the OP and ED give that sense (tone clash and all), and after the first four or five episodes, plays itself as a fluffy romance.

It goes from femdom ecchi to "Budget Kaguya-sama except the female lead talks like a grandma in private" and back for the first half, then starts taking itself and its characters seriously, with fewer jokes, more focus on the action and plot, and no more... that.

It felt like Foolish Angel looked at the shows it was sharing the winter season with and decided it couldn't compete so it might as well back out. Maybe the source material actually did. Either way, I wasn't impressed.

Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included

And here's the other angel romcom, though unlike Foolish Angel's Lily, who is a two-faced sadist who talks like she's 100 years old, Towa is... well, she's the stereotypical magical-girlfriend love interest.

Extremely naive, completely devoted to improving the life of the first person she meets, and exists to cook, clean, and trip over Shintarou's porn magazines while having no idea what she's looking at.

Going to high school and living alone while receiving an allowance from his parents, Shintarou lives a dull life in an empty apartment, chugging energy drinks and working part-time at a restaurant.

One day, a girl named Towa shows up in his room, proves she's an angel when her wings pop out, and declares that she's going to live in his apartment and do all his chores. They start to fall in love while Shintarou gathers a harem at school, most of whom are also magical creatures.

This show looks straight out of one of those beige minimalist influencer TikToks. Everything is dull and washed out and white, especially in the early episodes when it's mostly just Towa and the apartment. There's a does-this-remind-you-of-anything moment with a spilled glass of milk and it can take you a second or two to realize anything's different!

That does improve a lot in later episodes, though, when they actually start leaving home sometimes.

Do the characters make up for it? No, they're all pretty by-the-numbers tropes for the genre; even the chuunibyou who turns out to be a real vampire was already done in ToHeart 2 decades ago, and at least Lucy had a plot and character arc to go with her.

Uzumaki

This had to be on here.

A long-anticipated horror adaptation, an international co-production that leaned into black-and-white stylization to capture the feeling of the celebrated source material... but it whittled the budget away after five years of delays. Despite being only four episodes long, that really shows.

While the trailer and first episode looked fine, the rest was clumsy, cheap-looking, and spoke to its troubled production. Producer Jason DeMarco stated on a now-deleted Bluesky post that the team had been "screwed over" and "I can't tell (the fans) who to blame it on... but someone is definitely at fault here, and we all just had to do our best."

The fact that the last episode doesn't even credit its director speaks for itself, though watch anyway if you want to see one episode that looks decent and the rest marred by stock animation, characters being yeeted across the screen Chargeman Ken style, and a spiral staircase that doesn't move with the camera.

Tonbo!

We've had "what if golf were a moe club anime" with Sorairo Utility and "what if golf were a weird, escalating battle anime" with Birdie Wing. Tonbo gives us "what if golf were boring." Which is impressive because golf is already pretty boring.

Igarashi Kazuyoshi is a former pro golfer who goes to live on an island in the middle of nowhere, and to his complete surprise, the villagers have basically turned half of it into a golf course for their own use and everybody knew this but him.

He meets Tonbo, a playful young golf prodigy and the only kid her age on the entire island, and decides to train her and try to convince her to go pro even though she has no interest in leaving Nowhere-Land.

Sports anime are generally, you know, exciting, but this one regularly made me fall asleep and it definitely didn't make me excited about golf.

We also can't really get a good sense of why Tonbo is a prodigy since we almost always see her either practising alone or with Igarashi, rather than matched up against regular players and then increasingly stronger opponents, and their solution to that is to stand around explaining everything she does --

which, again, has been done way more effectively elsewhere.

The worst part is that this got two seasons just this year. Pour one out for everything that's still waiting years later for a second cour that might not ever come. The second-worst part is that Amazon cheaped out on the dub and it's unlistenably poorly directed.

Tasuuketsu: Fate of the Majority

The death game genre is a complicated thing, but most examples in commercial fiction are bleak, exploitative, and always trying to out-edgelord each other.

This one, done via a poll where everyone who gave the most popular answer dies (as does everyone who skipped the question), offers the endgame prize of getting to meet the mastermind, the Emperor, as well as giving "privileges" (special powers) to those who can figure them out.

It sounds interesting, and sure, at points it is -- there's a twist in episode 10 that I'm surprised more murdergames haven't done (though I could name one or two). But the cast itself is pretty bland and one-note, they rely on a lot of exposition, and character development often happens offscreen and then we're told about it later.

A lot of death game shows fall into that trap just because they have to start with a lot of characters and whittle the cast down over time, but the emotional impact of, you know, all these people dying and being manipulated by anonymous polls doesn't really ring true as something they're feeling until maybe halfway through the show.

When you've had maybe five minutes of screentime and all we know about you is the exposition you gave in three of those minutes, how do we feel the pain you're talking about before you get exploded?

I can't even be happy that they pulled out a decently foreshadowed time travel golden end. "Decently foreshadowed" in this show is "it was maybe mentioned one time way too late in the game."

Highspeed Étoile

There are great racing anime. There are great 3D anime. There are even great anime with casts way too large for their runtime. This is none of those things.

Rindou Rin, former ballerina and dedicated gamer entering a car race with AI companions in the cars and baffling rules like "you can't pass someone who's lapped you" (what's the point of doing laps on a course then?), wants to be the best in the sport.

Note that they introduce her twenty minutes into episode 1, after we've sat around following a race with mostly unnamed characters and a few top players.

You know, usually when these shows start with the best to show who our protag will be beating at the end, it's less than a minute or two and then we spend the rest of the episode getting to know the actual main character.

The storytelling makes similar weird missteps regularly. Why is one of the top racers in the business declaring her rivalry for Rin after she does one cool thing one time, despite Rin losing every race by that point and not being able to replicate the move?

Why do they have an episode all about how work-life balance is important and then go right back to the Training From Hell trope? And why do the racers come up with their own nicknames, wouldn't that be something fans do organically?

I don't get it. I wish anything about this made sense.

Re:Monster

Uuuuuuuuuuggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Dude gets stabbed, dies, reincarnates as a goblin, grows to adulthood in three days thanks to one of those "enemy skill absorption evolution" skills (seen elsewhere this year in The Unwanted Undead Adventurer, which is dull as dirt but at least not outright offensive)

that he apparently carried over from his last life because he was a psychic vampire last time around or something? You know the deal.

Well, you know most of the deal, because he also finds a bunch of sex slaves in the back of the goblin caves, decides not to think about it, later goes "hey what if instead we put them to work bettering our society by building stuff I remember from Earth and cooking and sewing?",

and then they're extremely grateful for this despite still being in, you know, slavery.

And then he marries them all, has a bunch of kids, and discovers that some of his skills are also sexually transmitted to his (ex-?)slave wives.

Most of said wives aren't even named until very late in the show, only being referred to by either their job or something about their appearance. Just in case you thought this show actually cared.

If I were still ranking these, this would be the worst of the year. Mistake.

OH GOD I FORGOT THAT DOGSHIT RE:MONSTER GOT AN ANIME

Unwanted Undead was at least... marginally watchable. The rest of these... not so much.

I love monster reincarnation isekai cause I have trash taste and I dropped that shit so fast when I was reading the manga, it's so much worse about being a power fantasy than so many other series

Yeah, I didn't like Unwanted Undead Adventurer but these were worse.

although when I read the manga I recall him finding the goblin brood sex slaves and like...giving them a knife to do what they will and they don't come back cause he's too busy capturing OTHER SEX SLAVES but it's okay cause they aren't human and also were gonna kill them.

Unwanted Undead I give credit for being a series that is like...an excellent example of why isekai has gotten to a point you can just make a fantasy series without isekai at all and still have every other element and just...move along at least semi competantly

i wanted highspeed etoile to be at least watchable...

also my least favorite part about Re:Monster (in the manga at least idk if the anime does this, i didn't deign to waste my time) aside from it's outright grossness is like...the lead themselves is such a fucking cardboard cutout boring shitbird with nothing going for him personality wise but he like narrates over literally everything

more like him explaining shit over the course of days instead of actual dialogue, it was insufferable

oh my god

either way sounds like an unfortunate year

"oh my god at what?" yes

they really animated that shit... wow

I guess I'm not surprised considering it got like a very generic shitty Tower Defense game within like a year of the manga's publication

Kinda shocking it took THIS long I guess

(it's always so weird seeing the like different releases over time of anime, like how SmartPhone Isekai got an adaptation before That Time I Reincarnated As A Slime)

(but then Shield Hero got adapted like FUCKING IMMEDIATELY almost by comparison)

Kadokawa makes no sense as a company sometimes

2.5d was the only one here that I actually glimpsed by coincidence (i immediately got bad vibes from it and pushed it out of mind (which, glad to see I was 100% correct) but remonster getting animated...

Maybe this means the well is drying up and they'll have to start doing more Manwha (hopefully like...good ones and not generic power fantasy that throws away it's development potential for their lead like Solo Levelling)

(god I hate Solo Levelling)

catgrumps: oh that was in the anime too, the constant "DAY 1" "DAY 2"

and Solo Levelling was interesting for like one episode then nope

OddEyes: 2.5d merch is everywhere now too...

Solo Leveling is fast food for me, since as far as power fantasies go it's pretty good. As long as you know you're going in for yknow, a power fantasy

like narratively this shit sucks but its good when you just wanna turn your brain off and watch an edgy dude beat shit up

me staring at 2.5d stuff and constantly thinking "this shit is like, ass even by male fantasy standards"

My big problem with Solo Levelling is as soon as the MC became like powerful and competant he LITERALLY turns into a generic cookie cutter stoic OC

like...damn dude you could have at least not cut your hair so you don't look literally just like "power fantasy protagonist number 7320"

bro lost any character....

literally just...looks like Kim Dokja from Omniscient Reader, who part of their story is everyone commenting of how generic and unattractive he is compared to Jungyeok

which I feel like is meant to be a fucking joke by the author but nobody gets it

*joke about the media industry

Either way I hope in the future there's more like...Unwanted Undeads than there are Re:Monsters but anime trends seem to prefer edgelord slop over just fantasy world tropes still

god what other isekais are there gonna be in 2025... the only one ive heard about so far is the red ranger isekai

which I will. admittedly be giving a shot.

God I'm so excited for it after reading the manga

and I hope it gets more than one season cause my favorite part I know isn't getting adapted

oh theres a manga? damn do I check it out or wait...

who am i kidding now that i know im definitely gonna check it out

I always reccomend reading manga cause it's easier to do [COMPLETELY LEGALLY, HOW DO YOU DO FBI AGENT] than anime

STARTED READING IT... ITS PR GOOD

thank you for making these lists. I always read them

athensbrat: Glad to amuse! It's fun to do every year.

A lot more fun than these are to watch, anyway.

happy to report dress up darling season 2 is happening in 2025

phainein: thank you anime for saving us from the depths of other, worse anime

Save us Dress-Up Darling, save us from the hell of 2.5d by being better in every way, both writing and fanservice