The Worst Anime of Summer 2025

In a season full of great anime, we had to dig a bit deeper to find the clunkers; most of the series on this list are competent but otherwise dragged down by unlikable characters and tired, one-note jokes. If anything, it's a testament that even a world of cute and furry cats isn't enough to overcome bland background visuals and a singular gimmick.

Below is the list of the editorial team's least favorite anime series from this season.

Sometimes these one-joke anime shows work out. Sleepy Princess in the Demon's Castle was one of 2020's best comedies, and I'd happily slice apart a hundred sentient ghost shrouds in sacrifice for a second season. Sadly, Nyaight of the Living Cat doesn't do enough with its single-joke premise to justify its bloated twelve-episode runtime.

The idea itself is a fun one – “what if zombie apocalypse, but cat?” The world has collapsed due to the rapid spread of a virus that turns infected people into adorable furry little pussycats. Any brief physical contact with any cats, whether former humans or not, can trigger the trans-moggy-rification of an unsuspecting victim. Cue scenes of people running in terror through darkened streets from hordes of friendly felines, just like Night of the Living Dead, but cuddlier. The first few episodes milk this idea for all its worth, transposing the “terror” from one dimly-lit urban area to the next.

Sadly, the show rapidly runs out of steam, partly because it can't think of anything new to do with its single idea. Every episode is more or less the same – some characters need to get from point A to point B, or need to retrieve something, and there are cats in the way. Rinse and repeat. None of the characters want to harm any of the cats; they make the repeated point of describing them in high-pitched baby talk as “cute”, and this story conceit gets tired, fast. At first, it was funny when the government seemed to elevate cat welfare over that of human taxpayers, but eventually, the idiocy of the entire situation became exhausting.

It also doesn't help that this isn't one of the season's better-looking shows. Sometimes the CG cats that appear in the busier scenes look embarrassingly janky. With many scenes occurring at night or in grim urban settings, the color palette is uniformly gray and brown, which looks boring. Characters are little more than ciphers who exist either to fight cats off with super-soakers and dangling toys, or to succumb to cat-ification, shedding their clothes in piles on the ground.

As much as I wanted to enjoy the show, by the halfway point, I found myself utterly bored and struggling to reach the end of each episode. As I signed up to write a full season review of Nyaight of the Living Cat for reasons I'm still unsure of, I'll report back later to confirm if the final episodes pull anything other than the same old cat out of its bag.

—Kevin Cormack

In a worse anime season, Apocalypse Bringer Mynoghra likely wouldn't be an entry on this “Worst Of” list. The show doesn't espouse misogynistic values as overtly as other male power fantasies in the isekai genre, like Rising of the Shield Hero or Uglymug, Epicfighter, nor are the production values so poor that it the makes a viewer question how it was allowed to air, like the anime adaptation of Uzumaki. Instead, it's just bland and wholly forgettable, which makes watching it a painful experience during a season that exemplifies the breadth and depth of anime as a medium better than perhaps any other in recent memory.

Rather than being pancaked by Truck-kun, this isekai begins with our same-faced soft boi protagonist, Takuto Ira, passing away in a hospital while playing his favorite game, a Civilization-style real-time strategy game. After he dies, he's reincarnated as an Evil Lord within the game and tasked with building up his empire from scratch, with the help of a cute elf-girl assistant who's an archetypal “cold servant of the Demon Lord” to everyone else but cute, fun, and even doting to him in private. If I had to be generous, one interesting idea that the anime deploys is that our main character only looks like an actual person while conversing with himself or his assistant, but appears as a vaguely humanoid shadow monster to everyone else. The show doesn't really do anything with this idea, though. It even works against it in a few instances, like when the Dark Elves who align with him give him ceremonial clothes, despite them not seeing him in clothes either before or after they give him this gift, making it strange that they would ever think to make this kind of offering.

This lack of foresight and planning is present in nearly every aspect of Apocalypse Bringer Mynoghra. The story moves at a snail's pace, with seemingly important characters being teased or outright introduced within the first few episodes, but then not appearing again or mattering outright for several more episodes after their introduction. A tedious amount of deliberation also precedes every decision a character makes. The show is clearly trying to fit this isekai into the mold of a political thriller. Still, it fails to generate intrigue because most of the results feel like foregone conclusions. The opening episodes dedicated a considerable amount of their runtime to establishing whether or not a band of Dark Elves will join the Dark Lord's budding nation, when it's painfully apparent that they will. I know I play way too many fantasy RPGs, but anyone even tangentially familiar with fantasy as a genre could guess that the Dark Elves are going to end up working for an aesthetically evil guy!

Apocalypse Bringer Mynoghra also has a weirdly rudimentary morality system and wastes what could otherwise be a great opportunity to examine the aesthetics and assumptions around things like “Good” and “Evil.” While the Dark Elves are coded as refugees and explicitly end up allying with the protagonist after experiencing forced displacement, the world this anime takes place in treats morality like an alignment in an old-school RPG, like Wizardry. It's more of a designation than a social construct. It makes their growing conflict with neighboring “Good” nations feel predetermined rather than something motivated by resource scarcity, clashing cultural or religious values, or any other factor that could lead to a more believable conflict in this kind of setting.

Instead of enriching its plot or characters, Mynoghra instead spends a tremendous amount of time and energy explaining its 4x Strategy game systems and progression tree. While I'm glad the isekai genre is starting to dip its toe into exploring types of games beyond Dragon Quest and early Final Fantasy-style JRPGs, and I do think there's a wealth of material to be mined there, I wasn't a big 4x Strategy guy before watching this anime and I'm certainly not after watching it. I love games with crunchy systems that beg exploration, allow for wide player expression, and reward mechanical understanding, but all of those things are best experienced directly, and it just isn't enjoyable to watch Mynoghra's protagonist go through the motions of these video game mechanics.

Again, Apocalypse Bringer Mynoghra is not terrible. Still, it does feel like a waste of time during a season that features a ridiculous number of shows that are far more worthwhile. If this anime came out last season, it likely would not be on this worst of list; though then it likely wouldn't be discussed in any context, which is perhaps more damning.

—Lucas DeRuyter

Some of the hardest shows to watch and review are ones that only really have one joke. The “ugly bastard“ archetype has been around for a long time, both in standard anime and in adult anime. Why the trope is so popular is a conversation I'm not ready to have on this website, but suffice to say, most people have a specific image in their head when they hear that term. This show dares to ask that bold question, “What if we had a really nice guy look like that and then just put him in a generic fantasy setting? Does the show do anything interesting or engaging with that setup? I mean, it could have, but it really doesn't.

This is a shame because the show starts strongly, talking about real society issues like how people who are seen as conventionally ugly generally have a harder time living a normal life than most other people. It's easy for them to get framed; they have to work that much harder to appear like a good person to satiate the comfort of others, and the damage to their self-esteem could have a domino effect down the road. The show tricks you into thinking that it'll do something meaningful with its premise. We take our main character, make them even uglier, and then give them the powers of a God, but it feels like the show pulls its punches by episode two, reeling in its premise so hard that all I'm left with is a pretty boring show that feels like it doesn't know what it wants to be about anymore.

I like laid-back stories where a bunch of characters talk and figure things out. There are even some interesting mechanics when it comes to the overall setup of this fantasy world. The problem is that this is all the show really has going for it because while our main cast do bounce off of each other, their conversations don't amount to anything interesting. A lot of the show is just focused on Shigeru trying his best to make other people happy because he's a perpetual people pleaser due to those aforementioned circumstances growing up incredibly ugly, and the show needs him to hide his abilities for reasons that I don't think the show ever fully justifies. It's almost as if the show is taking on the passive disposition of its lead, and while it can be clever, it is ultimately boring from a narrative and entertainment perspective.

Even when the show does have the occasional sharp-witted line or cute bit of physical comedy taking advantage of the large stature of our lead, it ends up running those jokes into the ground so quickly that it's worn out by the end of each episode. It doesn't feel like the show is building anything or saying anything meaningful, and ultimately, it just isn't as funny as it's trying to be. I think part of the reason why I'm so harsh on Uglymug is because it had the potential and even partially promised to be about something so much more when it started. Ultimately, what I'm left with is something that is far too uninteresting to recommend to anybody.

—Bolts

I can't decide whether I think Watari-kun's ****** Is About to Collapse (henceforth Watari-kun) is doing way too much, or if it's not doing enough.

The Case for: It's doing way too much
In a move more classic for a battle shonen than a romcom, the titular Watari-kun has dead parents and has become the sole provider for his younger sister, to whom he has more or less devoted his life. Except lately, he's starting to spiral a bit about that. Also, he has a stalker who's also his childhood sort-of-friend who once upon a time ruined his family's garden for some mysterious reason. And did I mention that she's super horny and loves messing with him? But there's also a cute girl at school who thinks that, unlike all the other nasty boys, Watari is very chaste and chivalrous, and she loves that about him. Except that's not Watari at all; he just met her during unusual circumstances. Is a clumsy, rich, anthropomorphized kitchen sink with glasses, twintails, and a tsundere-streak, who's also Watari's long lost step-sister, but also is his school's new nurse, and also is being pursued by the FBI for some reason (“tax evasion” she'll say if you ask) also lusting after Watari, or did I miss something?

The Case for: It's not doing enough
If you're going to have such try-hard characters, at least, you know, try harder. Commit to what you're doing. Either give these characters some dimension—something they're starving in—or at least go all in on making them cardboard. Go completely over the top with it. Actually, give the audience that aforementioned girl, whom I'm going to nickname Sink-chan. More com, less rom. But given that this anime tries to incorporate some psychological elements, I think the former would come more naturally to it. And yet, there's painfully little effort into actually giving any of the characters (especially the girls) any crumb of a personality. Worse, they sometimes come off as being downright obnoxious. And romances of all types live or die by the likability of their characters. And unfortunately, Watari-kun doesn't really have anything else to fall back on—say, a good narrative, or funny jokes. In fact, if anything, it's lacking in these departments as well.

In either case, the fact remains that this anime is a total flop. The only thing any of these characters makes me feel is exhausted; each of the possible romances feels forced at best, and there's just nothing holding the audience's attention. All this, and it's not even all that funny, or dramatic, or otherwise interesting. Watari-kun's ****** isn't the only thing on the verge of collapse—this anime leaves me so thoroughly bored and unenthused that I honestly wonder if I could use it to help me take a nap.

—Kennedy

I knew about halfway through Episode 2 of Tougen Anki that this show was as cooked as a cheap Thanksgiving turkey left in the oven for a dozen hours too long without a single gravy baster in sight. The completely inept heaps of lame exposition that filled every single second of every scene of just that second episode was enough to send me running for the hills, but morbid curiosity and professional obligations drew me back to drudge through several more hours of the gormless muck that is Tougen Anki.

This did nothing to improve my feelings about the series.

As it turns out, the only thing worse than watching a couple of episodes of a crappy anime is watching nearly a dozen of them, especially when it's this kind of crappy anime. It would be one thing if Tougen Anki was a literally unwatchable affront to the very art of animation, like anything Studio GoHands has produced in the last decade. I wouldn't even mind so much if this was a tire-fire in the vein of Big Order, which was the kind of brazenly stupid and unhinged trash that we used to treat ourselves to back when terrible anime was allowed to be fun. But, no, Tougen Anki doesn't even have the decency to suck in a slightly interesting way. It's just a rote, sauceless remix of the least memorable cliches and stock characters that have filled the chapters of forgettable Shonen Jump also-rans since time immemorial.

Our “hero,” Shiki, is just another shonen cipher whose whole shtick is “What If My Edgy Gaia Online OC Could Guns Also Bloods?” We're stuck training at the stupid Momotaro school that Shiki gets roped into joining in after his powers awaken for so much of this first season, because nothing of consequence ever actually happens in between all of the training and exposition and villain vamping. Every single location and character looks like an asset flip of the stock portraits and tiles you get from a basic edition of RPG Maker, except all of the female characters have had the “Tig Ol' Biddies” sliders cranked all the way up in the editor. If you told me that the creator of Tougen Anki was just a pair of horny middle-schoolers stacked on top of each other in a trench coat, I would believe you without asking a single follow-up question. I'm pretty sure the only reason it exists is so the regular reader polls have an option for people to choose if they need some random junk to fill the last-place slot.

—James Beckett

I've watched a lot of bad anime. And as anyone who's watched a lot of bad anime knows, there are shows you actively hate, shows so dull that you wish you could muster some feeling for them, and shows that you mostly just feel bad for. Solo Camping for Two is in that last camp. It's not hard to clock who this anime was for or how it might've found its target audience. Camping series are having a moment, romance is reliable for adding some solid spice, and lord knows so many of us are crying out for anime starring grown-ass adults. The fact that this series missed out on that many zeitgeists, even if through its own failures, makes me feel sorry for it.

To be clear, it's the show as an existence that I'm mustering sympathy for. As a piece of media and as a story with characters, Solo Camping for Two is downright contemptible. Star Gen is mostly sympathetic by default at the outset, but being a hot old guy only gets him so far as he vacillates between being a performative grouch and a monotonous camping trivia See'n Say. Daiki Hamano can do better than this. Even slipping in awkwardly timed flashbacks to his stupid solo-camping tragic backstory can't summon sympathy due to the banality of it all. I can't care that Gen had so little interest in the woman he was banging that he wouldn't even let her try camping with him.

Not that I trust Solo Camping for Two to manage anything resembling romantic entanglements, since the only reason Gen even briefly registered as agreeable is that he was performing opposite Shizuku, a character who might be a monument to doing everything wrong from every conceivable angle in this sort of role. You know that character in hobby anime whose purpose is to bug the experienced character to let them into their club or show them the ropes or whatever? Sometimes it's cute in a school setting if they aren't too pushy or anything. Well, Shizuku attempts to fulfil that except that she's a grown-ass woman, and she's so oppressive about getting Gen to camp with her that at one point she floats blackmailing him. Fun!

Never mind that Shizuku is so incapable that the main reason Gen's willing to assist her is less because any of her prodding works and more that he probably rightly recognizes he's the only one that can prevent her from getting eaten by a bear. Don't worry though, lads, because when Shizuku isn't stumbling around in her underwear or remarking at how she enjoys being scolded by Gen, she's happily cooking him up the best meals he could never make for himself!… This show is lucky that it looks like such campfire-cooked ass I can't concentrate on all those implications for too long. Maybe it's a symptom of the fact that they inexplicably planned the Solo Camping anime out for two cours, but Synergy SP is conserving their resources like a camper who packed for a single afternoon and got snowed in. It's a piss-poor move since the beauty of the great outdoors and the tasty camp-cooked meals are, you know, kind of the entire point of a show like this. Then again, I already hate these characters, so maybe it's appropriate that the animation regularly makes them look like they're begging for death. But I guess fumbling the presentation down a steep cliffside is par for the course in an anime that had my body tensing up any time its lead duo came within any proximity of each other. It's positively tragic that a series like this couldn't even rise to the level of acceptable.

—Christopher Farris

I've spent a surprising amount of time considering why I didn't enjoy this season of Shield Hero. Now, to be clear, it's not like I am predisposed to hating it: I was all in when it came to season one. I enjoyed the story of a young man brutally betrayed who was not only able to get his revenge but also learn to trust again–even if said trust was conveyed only to a few very specific individuals.

However, in the seasons since, the anime has declined significantly. Season 2's turtle battle was somehow both rushed and boring, and the entirety of season three felt like little more than a series of side stories and the tying up of loose ends. The sole point of light post-season 1 was the back half of season 2, which added both an endearing new character and fleshed out the world and overall conflict in vitally important ways.

Now, is season 4 the worst the show has ever been? No. But that's hardly a compliment. If nothing else, major events happen in season 4. Naofumi and the crew play pivotal roles in the futures of two different countries. However, the issue lies in the fact that there is no real emotional connection to be found. Naofumi doesn't give a damn about saving Siltvelt or Q'ten Lo. To him, both countries are simply an annoyance standing between him and keeping Raphtalia safe. And because he doesn't have a personal stake in the events happening in either place, it's hard for us to care either.

The story tries to make us care by connecting the events to Naofumi's party members–Fohl for Siltvelt and Raphtalia for Q'ten Lo. However, this leads to the next major issue. The characters are, for the most part, static. Fohl acts generally the same both before and after taking revenge on his father's killer, and is hardly an endearing character you want to empathize with in the first place. And as for Raphtalia, she's always been a bleeding heart predisposed to help the helpless. Deciding to become empress to save the suffering common man isn't even close to being a decisive character beat.

And to top things off, there's also no character development for Naofumi to be found this season. He is and continues to be an unsympathetic asshole, stand-offish at best to anyone outside of his core group. The only reason his personality doesn't cause more issues is that his friends (read: sycophants) are constantly covering for him. He's exhausting to watch, and it's hard to root for him despite him being in the right most of the time.

All in all, these complaints may seem like nitpicks–and perhaps they are. After all, the story makes logical sense, and the heroes stay in character throughout. However, if you take enough nitpicks and put them together, you get something that can ruin a story–and make an anime feel like a boring slog despite rousing music and flashy fight scenes. But who knows, maybe things will get back on track when the phoenix we've been waiting two seasons for finally shows up… But I wouldn't hold my breath.

—Richard Eisenbeis