The current Winter 2021 anime season is the best one I can remember, with something like 15 must-watch series that I’m following. We’ve got the relaxing joy of proper new seasons of Yuru Camp and Non Non Biyori. The incredible isekai worlds of Jobless Reincarnation and Kumo Desu Ga, Nanika?, and the sweet love story of Horimiya. Exciting resolutions of beloved series like Attack on Titan and Re:Zero and Quintessential Quintuplets. With all these great series vying for mindshare with fans, it’s natural that some shows will get left by the wayside, resulting in some “failed anime” that don’t quite live up to their expectations.

Ten “Failed Anime” Series That J-List Isn’t Watching!

Tatoeba Last Dungeon

A fantasy anime based on a light novel, Suppose a Kid from the Last Dungeon Boonies Moved to a Starter Town? might be a good-enough series. But when it’s up against anime titans like Jobless Resurrection, Re:Zero, and That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime season 2, it sadly didn’t stand a chance to become popular with most fans, making it a failed anime in the end.

Uma Musume Pretty Derby 2

We all love to bang the table for second seasons of shows we enjoyed, though all too often fandom fails to embrace that new season when it arrives. I was a fan of the Uma Musume series in which cute horse-girls run races and do cute things. The horses are all based on famous racehorses in Japan, and Mrs. J-List, who follows horse racing, was thrilled to see all her favorites show up. I haven’t yet had time to start the second season, sadly.

WAVE!! Surfing Yappe!

A surfing anime that looks quite good, and seems to have some dramatic twists to its story. If you love bishie characters hitting the waves, give it a try!

SK∞ The Infinity

A decent-looking anime that delves into the world of competitive skateboarding, it looks okay. But I just didn’t have the time to give it a proper spin, and now the season is almost over.

Armored Girls/Soukou Musume LBX

An anime about “cute girls getting into tanks and doing battle” based on a DMM game. As is often the case with anime series that are made to promote an existing mobile game IP, I had trouble connecting with the characters.

WIXOSS Diva(A)Live

An “idol battle” game that’s part of the long-running Wixoss card games, letting fans watch the characters they’ve been interacting with inside the game in animated form. Again, I had trouble connecting with the characters because I don’t know the card game, and sadly there isn’t a pool of “rule 34” sexy fanart to pull me into the fandom, as there was with Princess Connect! Another failed anime that didn’t make a splash.

(If you want the above image as a poster, it’s included in the current issue of Megami Magazine!)

Idolls!: Idol Survival

An anime I wasn’t kind to in my write-up of the currently airing idol anime, I gave this anime a perfect score on Peter’s CGI Hate-o-Meter. The only thing it’s got going for it is that the voice actors themselves are doing the motion capture for their characters, which kind of adds a dimension of realism not seen in animation before.

Osomatsu-san 3rd Season

We all know of some series that never get that much-needed second season, while other shows seem to go on forever, with more and more seasons released despite the fact that the major fandom has mostly moved on. “Mr. Osomatsu” — a smart revival of a series that started in 1962 — continues with its hilarious gags and BL jokes, though I wonder how many fans are tuning in.

World Witches Take Off!

A cute series of comedy short episodes, this series unites the Strike Witches and Brave Witches team for the first time. But without the intense quality of a proper series, there was less to hold my attention. Not a failed anime, but not one that fans seem to be talking about much.

Redo of Healer, a Failed Anime?

I wanted to like Redo of Healer, a series about a healer magician who’s abused by others around him to the point that he snaps and becomes evil. He uses his magic to return to the past so he can get revenge on those who have fucked him over in the past, literally fucking them endlessly as punishment as he executes the ultimate revenge plot.

I tried hard to get into Redo of Healer, in the end, but I’m still stuck on episode 3. Of course, I love some ecchi anime and consider Interspecies Reviewers to be one of the few good things to come out of 2020. Anime is often about escapism and creating characters viewers can “self insert” themselves into mentally. I found myself drawn much closer to Jobless Reincarnation — about an unlikable and tragic NEET who gets reincarnated into a world of magic where he works hard to become a powerful magic user and a better person — than to this anime about wanting to get sexual revenge for wrongs done in the past.

Did You Agree With Our List of Failed Anime?

Thanks for reading this blog post about ten anime series that failed to achieve major buzz with fans, or didn’t live up to expectations in some other ways. Did I make a mistake, and list your favorite show here in error? Are there any other series that you dropped this season? Tell us in the comments below, or on Twitter!

Spring is almost here, and that means an excuse to enjoy delicious new snacks from Japan. The new J-List Box snack boxes are ready for you to order and will start shipping out around the middle of the month. Order your snack box now, or read a blog post on all the good stuff that’s inside this month!