Worst Ranking Anime of 2022 and Mega Poll Results
Discover the Worst Ranking Anime of 2022 and our Mega Poll Results in our latest blog post! Unveil which shows failed to impress, and see how your opinions align with our community's votes. Join the conversation and share your thoughts on the most disappointing anime of the year!
We delve into the Worst Ranking Anime of 2022 and reveal the results of our Mega Poll! Join us as we uncover which shows failed to meet the expectations of fans and critics alike. We've collected the opinions of countless anime enthusiasts through our extensive poll, and now it's time to unveil the results. Get ready to be surprised, shocked, or even find a hidden gem that you might enjoy despite its low ranking. Let's take a journey through the ups and downs of the anime world in 2022 and discover what made these shows underwhelming!
Fruits Basket
You can call me prudish, but if there's one kind of love tale that annoys me more than any other, it's a teacher/student romance involving a child. It never appears to be anything other than grooming to me, regardless of how mature the youngster is or how kindly the adult treats them. Fruits Basket shows the audience all kinds of messed up relationships between messed up individuals, but the one where I had to put my foot down and say, "Absolutely not," was the one that gave rise to Tohru.
As I've read the entire manga, it didn't come as a surprise, but seeing it animated with swooning romantic music and flying seagull motifs was more than I could take. Except for the thirty-minute clip show at the beginning, I was thinking about all the recut Twilight teasers that recast Edward as a sinister stalker and how Katsuya and Kyoko's relationship begged for a similar treatment throughout the entire movie. I was outraged by his family's description of him as careless and how no one appeared to believe he should have raised a red signal before he snatched up a 15-year-old evicted from her parent's house and married her shortly after. Katsuya should have been listed as a sex offender instead of being considered a romantic hero. Although I adore Fruits Basket, this particular section of the plot might have been eliminated. Regrettably, -prelude- had to move it back.
Tribe Nine
Even the most gifted athletes experience failure occasionally. After the mind-blowing heights of Akudama Drive, I had great hopes for the Danganronpa team's entry into the anime genre, but Tribe Nine is a far more restrained affair. Regrettably, that wasn't done on purpose. Tribe Nine advertised itself as a ridiculous sports cartoon about Xtreme Baseball. After the dramatic opening episodes, the plot was never much more than average sports anime. It doesn't help that Blue Lock appeared months later and nailed the appeal that Tribe Nine should have had. Tribe Nine wasn't the worst anime of the year, but it was too middle.
Attack on Titan The Final Season Part 2
While I have watched programs that were duller, more offensive, or generally grumpier than this middle installment of Attack on Titan's last saga, the oddly subtly angled Final Season Part 2 was the program that felt like the most significant work to get through. Contrast has a role in that. Attack on Titan has been dependable, compulsively entertaining entertainment for almost ten years, while it wasn't always a favorite of mine. Regardless of its flaws, it could always produce exciting action scenes that would keep you hooked to the screen. As a result, I was always eager to see more of it, even though it was often terribly clumsy with its political allusions and loud, intense, and provocative.
However, we did receive our answers this season, and they were unquestionably not worth the wait. At least, it seemed that way after wading through countless floods of confusing flashbacks and exposition while attempting to make sense of all the twisted foreshadowing that had come before. Unfortunately, this program episode looked the worst thus far, thanks to the Final Season's change in art direction, which buried every frame in a sea of washed-out sepia that attempted to be gritty but made every bit of imagery look like mud.
The biggest crime was how little story momentum remained, despite the anime's best efforts to prolong the plot for one final (we promise this time) season the following year. As a result, characters are forced to follow plot lines that are dead ends for several episodes. The impending doomsday is said to begin in the middle of the season, but it starts just before the closing credits, with little to show for the meantime. There was obviously nothing else to be done, but by the grace of God, we needed another season to maintain sales, so keep kicking the dead horse until it collapses under your feet!
It wasn't for my enjoyment; instead, I had persuaded myself to continue with it using the "sunk cost fallacy." It transformed an activity that had once been enjoyable and exciting into the anime equivalent of putting up with a bad roommate for the last few months of your lease. That is sufficient evidence to declare it the worst of the year.
Love All Play
Rarely do I get as far in a series as I did in this one before giving up in frustration and leaving. But this awful program started off so well that I kept telling myself, "Well, it'll get better," week after week after week, until I eventually gave up with two episodes left. If credit is due, it handled the coaching element of varsity sports much better than practically any other program I can think of. Even still, the pacing felt terribly off, occasionally skipping over topics that should have been given more time and other times stretching out a plot thread much over its prescribed duration. A sports show appeared strangely reluctant to actually feature, you know, sports. It had some good moments, but not enough of them, and it was one of the rare occasions when I truly wished I could take back the time I had spent.
My Hero Academia Season 6
I typically only have time to watch high-quality anime. So for the preview guide, I watch 1 episode of each show, and if it doesn't grab me, I'm done. Yet, my decision is surprisingly simple if we're talking about the year's worst anime.
Given that multiple previous seasons of My Hero Academia have been among my favorites, it shocks me how much I wouldn't say I like this season of the show. Nonetheless, here we are. I feel like I do for two fundamental reasons: Pacing is the first issue. High tension has been present all season. There isn't any time to pause and take a breath. It's a never-ending, life-or-death conflict with two fronts and numerous last-second turnabouts. Watching is exhausting, and the only genuine resolution is always more fighting.
But what bothers me even more, is the fact that the series was able to make me lose my ability to suspend my disbelief. Don't get me wrong; I'm prepared to believe a lot in a world where people have strange superpowers like those featured frequently in My Hero Academia. Yet the problem isn't the shown powers; instead, it's the opposite. Some laws govern this world. And following them, without their abilities, persons ought to resemble regular, earthbound beings. But this season, we're expected to accept that a skinny but muscular youngster stripped of his superpowers can nevertheless leap hundreds of feet into the air and punch the air forcefully enough to avoid super-fast attacks, explosions, and fire blasts. It's one thing to be "genetically altered" to reach the pinnacle of human conditioning, but this is pure magic. And it makes what should have been an enjoyable anime experience into a jumble of sighs, eye rolls, and frustrated swearing on my part.
But I'll continue to watch next season.
The Rising of The Shield Hero Season 2
To put it mildly, Shield Hero's first season was contentious when it debuted. Some considered it the perfect illustration of how deceitful women can ruin men's lives. Others enjoyed it because they thought it was a gritty interpretation of the isekai genre. However, with some fantastic music and an intense character journey for our protagonist, I felt it was alright. There was an opportunity for the universe to be expanded in a subsequent season, especially now that the core emotional character arc had been resolved. Still, the show was weighed down by somewhat dubious worldbuilding components that seemed to be there for no apparent reason. Imagine, therefore, everyone's amazement when this continuation failed to do any of that and even went so far in the opposite direction that viewers felt tricked.
Oh my God, where do I even begin? What about the fact that our major character—the most intriguing aspect of the entire production—was reduced to a supporting role and hardly spoke until the very end? Perhaps it was because the show offered intriguing concepts without deciding how to use them. Or was it that I had to watch some episodes more than once to ensure I understood all that had happened? In addition, this season completely ruined the original work by rearranging storylines and cutting out exposition crucial to comprehending the plot aspects. I know that a new season will be coming up shortly, but I have no idea how a follow-up will compensate for the diminished goodwill this season has caused.
Tokyo 24th Ward
You all undoubtedly assumed that Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World would be my least favorite anime of the year. Still, Tokyo 24th Ward was the dumbass Trolley-Problem simulator! Even so, it wasn't a difficult decision. It was frustrating to evaluate Harem Labyrinth, but once I was done, I was relieved that I wouldn't have to think about it as much in the future. On the other hand, every few weeks, I would sense the phrase "The KANAE System is something that can destroy the humanity that makes humans human" swell up and burst into my head, like a Manchurian Candidate activation phrase.
You guys, Tokyo 24th Ward, were just so goddamn ridiculous. It's a political quote-unquote thriller that was arrogant in its adherence to anti-intellectual centrism, which made it excessively certain of its brilliance. It's amazing because, as I recall, the primary concern surrounding Tokyo 24th Ward during its initial airing was production issues. The biggest surprise was that this pathetic attempt at a suspense series' writing exploded before its animation did.
World’s End Harem
I enjoyed myself with a big portion of World's End Harem. The show's offensive and intrusive censorship style unwittingly helped its sex-averse protagonist in many humorous ways as the transparent desire fulfillment of its porno narrative rubbed against him. Although idiocy alone doesn't make a lousy show humorous, World's End Harem occasionally displays transcending ignorance (e.g., the random bear attack).
However, with its stinking incel politics and dreams of nerd vengeance, the series' B-plot quickly overshadows the silly hot sci-fi intrigue. The show gets actively uncomfortable to watch as it glorifies the path of its nebbish Übermensch through sexual conquest. I started cheering against the show instead of laughing at it. The only good thing about it is how incompetent it gets worse, speeding up to a continuation that will undoubtedly never happen. Only the morbidly curious would consider it a failure.
Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove It.
There wasn't much I saw this utterly terrible year, which disappointed me because I hoped to have a series to pick apart. Instead, I tried to prove that science had fallen in love, except for it. I never expected to change the world of this animation. Visually, it's a mediocre production that follows a tried-and-true rom-com formula. The show was not hilarious but more of an "inward chuckle" kind. But I adored watching it with my spouse each week since it was my show. In an attempt to give the audience a self-insert character with some form of trauma that would change their lives, in the second season, we decided to veer off course in its final story arc. If you're interested in additional details, I wrote more about the precise events in the performance for our Best and Worst of Spring. However, suffice it to say that I didn't sign up for the romantic comedy about measuring attraction for gang rape threats.
Best of 2022 Anime Series
- Spy×Family
- Chainsaw Man
- Bocchi the Rock!
- Kaguya-sama: Love is War Ultra Romantic
- My Dress-Up Darling
- Lycoris Recoil
- Mob Psycho 100 III
- Attack on Titan The Final Season Part 2
- Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
- Made in Abyss: The Golden City of the Scorching Sun
Best of 2022 Anime Films
- Laid-Back Camp The Movie
- One Piece Film Red
- Kaguya-sama: Love is War -The First Kiss That Never Ends
- Sword Art Online The Movie - Progressive: Scherzo of Deep Night
- Fruits Basket -prelude-
- Bubble
- The Quintessential Quintuplets the Movie
- That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: Scarlet Bond
- Odd Taxi: In the Woods
- Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero
Worst of 2022 Anime Series
- Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer
- Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World
- Rent-A-Girlfriend Season 2
- The Rising of The Shield Hero Season 2
- World’s End Harem
- Peter Grill and the Philosopher's Time - Super Extra
- Don't Hurt Me, My Healer!
- A Couple of Cuckoos
- Housing Complex C
- I've Somehow Gotten Stronger When I Improved My Farm-Related Skills
