While it has a lot of haters, the My Anime List website is quite a useful tool for measuring the popularity of an anime series with hundreds of thousands of fans. There’s also a ranking for all anime series, allowing you to compare how a given show stacks up against others that are similar. Today I was wondering what the “worst” anime series were on the MAL website, and here they are for you!
What Are the Worst Anime in History? Let’s Check My Anime List!
Here are the rules I’m using to pick the 13 worst anime from the MAL website:
- The show has to be a TV series from 2010 or later and have a My Anime List score of 6 or lower.
- We’re not counting specials or random “anime” from China that no one has heard of.
- That’s it! Let’s get on with the list…
Stand My Heroes: Piece of Truth (5.76)
It’s not a good sign when I check the Wikipedia page for a game-to-anime-adaption and find that it only exists in Japanese and Chinese…meaning the awareness of the show on the English-speaking Internet will likely be zero. But I soldiered on, writing a blog post analyzing escapism in female-targeted anime and games, including this anime, about a young professional woman who’s tasked with managing six headstrong bishounen, all of whom fall in love with her.
Schoolgirl Strykers (5.71)
When a mobile game is a hit with users, the company that made it gets a huge financial windfall. Often they take this money and make an anime based on the game, to thank their loyal fans and bring in new ones, but also to soak up all that incoming money so they don’t have to pay taxes on it. Schoolgirl Strykers might have been a wonderful anime, but without a huge base of existing fans outside Japan, it fell flat.
School Days (5.53)
I’m fascinated at seeing School Days on this list. One of the most popular visual novels ever released by JAST USA, the anime’s super dark ending (which is not part of the game) caused a huge reaction among fans around the world. I’m positive a lot of the hate that the NTR genre gets is a result of this anime.
(The game is uncensored and has 21 original endings, only 5-6 of which are dark. If you haven’t played it yet, pick it up from JAST USA here!)
Truly the Worst Anime: Mayoiga (5.49)
It’s sad when an anime that had an okay concept dies in execution. Mayoiga: The List Village is the story of 30 people who decide to leave their lives behind and go to live in Nanaki Village, which they’ve been promised is a new utopia. It turns into a dark mystery, but not the good kind.
AniTore EX (5.40)
A fun show made during the “short anime” boom of the 2010s about a boy living with a bunch of cute girls who want to get more exercise. Pretty much every scene is us looking at the girls while they perform exercises, watching them from choice camera angles.
Cutie Honey Universe (5.41)
I was excited about the latest reboot of Cutie Honey, which promised to let fans experience the original show once again in an updated form. They did a good job, but some of the character designs and jokes that worked well in the 1970s weren’t successful today. I was also bummed that the nudity that made the show so legendary had been toned down almost to zero.
Nobunaga-sensei no Osanazuma (5.31)
A truly cursed anime, Mr. Nobunaga’s Young Bride is the story of Nobunaga Oda, a teacher who ends up with a harem of girls based on characters from Japanese history that no one living outside of Japan will likely know. The most horrific part is the censorship, using “super deformed” heads of the characters floating over their genitals.
My Life as Inukai-san’s Dog (5.11)
Have you ever wished to be reincarnated as a small dog, so you could look up at girls from a low angle, seeing their panties? That’s the premise of the My Life as Inukai-san’s Dog anime, and damn it, it was a lot of fun. Naturally, the prudes on MAL rank this as one of the worse anime series ever, because they’re not fans of culture.
Battle Athletes ReSTART (5.08)
I remember being excited for this show when it was airing. Sadly it’s hard to recapture the magic of a popular series after 20 years, and the show failed to find fans.
Ousama Game The Animation (5.05)
There’s a Truth-or-Dare type of game Japanese people called King’s Game in which everyone has to do whatever the current “king” asks. In this story, a group of people receives orders via text from a mysterious person who promises death if they don’t do as they’re ordered. It’s…just bad.
Bikini Warriors (5.11)
Another example of MAL disliking an anime for having too much visual fan service. What have they got against sexy women wearing bikini armor fighting monsters in a fantasy world?
Ore ga Suki nano wa Imouto Dakedo Imouto ja Nai (4.87)
One of the final anime of the Great Heisei Imouto Boom was The One I Love is My Little Sister But She’s Not a Little Sister, aka My Sister, My Writer, a truly awful anime offering from 2018. Suzuka is a high schooler who’s secretly a light novel author, famous for her stories about brother-sister relationships. Things get (slightly) more interesting when her older brother Yuu discovers her secret. The show had such awful production problems that the staff added a name 正直困太 to the ending credits, which can be read as shoujiki komatta or “to tell the truth, we’re in trouble here.”
Conception (4.60)
An anime that shows up on many lists of the worst anime, Conception is based on an already out-of-print PSP game. When Itsuki and his cousin Mahiru get isekai’ed, a stupid raccoon tells Itsuki that he must conceive children with his cousin and a bunch of Star Maidens. Cool, an anime about babymaking, right? Well, no, it’s a “spiritual” ceremony and involves no actual sexy stuff. Oh well.
Which Shows Would You Put on a List of Worst Anime?
Thanks for reading this blog post about the 13 worst anime series I could find on MAL. Are there any others that should have been included on the list? Tell us in the comments below!
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