Christopher Farris

Worst Anime: In Another World With My Smartphone

Of course, there were technically more poorly-crafted anime produced this year than Isekai Smartphone, and I even watched a couple of them! But the difference is the amount of enjoyment I was able to wring from them regardless. King's Game was a hilarious dumpster fire, and even the most unsavory parts of Eromanga Sensei or A Sister's All You Need could pack in solid humor and character work. By comparison, Isekai Smartphone offered nothing. It's a shamelessly low-effort, self-fulfilling cipher of a series that didn't so much air as take up space. Assigning Isekai Smartphone as my self-appointed nemesis was all I could do to work up enough of an emotional response to write about it week after week. It worked maybe too well, and I hope it's a while before I encounter another series I personally loathe in this way.

Amy McNulty

Worst Anime: Elegant Yokai Apartment Life

After naming Elegant Yokai Apartment Life my worst pick of Summer 2017, it stands to reason I wouldn't have bothered to watch the second cour. However, Yokai Apartments is a wreck that's hard to look away from. It's bad to the point of being comical and it only got worse—and thus more amusing—in the second cour. Episodes are so random at times in theme and subject matter, made even stranger when you consider the supernatural environment in which main character Yushi resides and how secondary it is to his school or work life. Characters at his school in particular act comically over-the-top, and Yushi always seems to have some bizarre lecture ready to go, like how caring too much about someone is equally as awful as caring too little. The tone, focus, and even morality of the show shifts from one moment to the next, leaving behind a hodgepodge of standout moments, though none of them stand out in a good way.

James Beckett

Worst Anime: Hand Shakers

Yeah, despite 2017 being a banner year for anime in general, picking the worst series of the year wasn't difficult at all. I've covered a lot of terrible shows over the past couple years, but Hand Shakers is in a league of its own when it comes to being terrible. Putting aside the visuals for just a second, Hand Shakers suffers from a terrible storyline that focuses on two of the lamest protagonists I've encountered in recent memory. Tazuna's sole character trait is that he's good at fixing things, and his companion Koyori takes the “infantilized doll” trope to truly stupid extremes. The whole concept of the heroes having to hold hands to access their superpowers seems like the kind of contrived gimmick that only exists to capitalize on the fact that the studio responsible for creating this folly is named GoHands. It's all just really dumb, and even the prettiest of visuals couldn't have saved Hand Shakers from itself.

So it doesn't help that the show is one of the worst-looking products ever committed to celluloid. Hand Shakers combines an incoherent sense of visual direction with one of the ugliest aesthetics I've ever seen. To top it all off, these foibles are married with a computer-enhanced virtual camera that infamously gave me and a number of other viewers literal nausea. Hand Shakers isn't just a visual catastrophe, it goes out of its way to aggressively assault its viewers' senses until nothing but pain and regret remains. This is the kind of anime a Lovecraftian horror might binge during holiday, for to gaze upon the horror of Hand Shakers is to risk personal annihilation. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Lynzee Loveridge

Worst Anime: Anonymous Noise

I'll always be disappointed that one of this year's only shojo romance adaptations is an ugly, tone-deaf mess. This isn't a show that fell apart at the midpoint or tripped at the finish line, Anonymous Noise was awful from the onset. The first episode, usually where a series stockpiles most of its finesse to entice viewers to keep watching, included a barely animated concert sequence where the lead character growled through the vocals completely off tune. It also managed to make me hate “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” (and the alphabet by association), as its main character managed to yell through it upwards of four times in a single episode. Shojo romance anime are few and far between nowadays, so it only adds insult to injury that this actively awful production got the greenlight.

Rebecca Silverman

Worst Anime: In Another World with my Smartphone

I feel like I watched a lot of vaguely disappointing anime this past year (or maybe Welcome to the Ballroom just felt like it went on for the whole year), but I think that the worst thing I saw was probably In Another World with My Smartphone. Not because it's actively terrible or offensive, but because it just felt like it wasn't even trying. I can put up with a poorly done series or one that doesn't quite pull off what it set out to do, but this was so paint-by-numbers in characters and plot that I wasn't even sure why it existed. (I made it through one and a half of the original novels, just as a point of interest.) If it had at least tried to do something with the wish-fulfillment isekai formula, it would have been okay. But at the end of the day, this was just so bland that it ended up feeling like an even worse show than it probably was.

Lauren Orsini

Worst Anime - Masamune-kun's Revenge

Ho-hum high school soap opera shows are a dime a dozen, but Masamune-kun's Revenge stands out in a bad way for its excessive cruelty. Far from a likable protagonist, Masamune goes out of his way to insult everyone he meets, even those he says are his friends. The leading lady Adagaki isn't any better, and frequent public shamings are her torture of choice. As new characters are introduced, it's frankly jaw-dropping just what terrible people they all turn out to be. This anime should only be viewed as an example of how not to win friends and influence people. The best revenge is a life well lived, as in, not Masamune's approach.

Paul Jensen

Worst Anime: Yowamushi Pedal New Generation

The first Yowamushi Pedal TV series was something of a guilty pleasure for me. Sure, the writing was perpetually over the top, but there was a straightforward enthusiasm to the series that always made it fun to watch. This year's “New Generation” may not have been a truly terrible show, but it lost some of its predecessor's redeeming values. The new characters never came close to filling the enormous gap left by the departing third-year riders, and too much of the new Inter-High race seemed like it was just recycling old plot points. For all its loud rivalries and passionate monologues, the new season felt dull, as if it was just going through the motions. It left me questioning whether or not I should keep watching what had once been one of my favorite sports series.

Nick Creamer

Worst Anime: Hand Shakers

If we're going with shows I actually got a serious distance into, I'd have to pick Seiren for simply being bland and mediocre. But that itself is a boring pick, so I'd rather highlight the singular Hand Shakers. Many shows try to be good and simply fall short, but Hand Shakers is the rare production that seems like it's actively trying to be as hideous as humanly possible. Its ridiculous Geocities-blog-era fire effects, astonishingly terrible CG, and monumentally misguided directorial choices all help it stand out in a crowded field of awful anime. Congratulations Hand Shakers, there are few shows this good at being bad.

Mike Toole

Worst Anime: In Another World with my Smartphone

It's not strictly necessary to watch bad anime past an episode or so anymore, so this category's always a tough one. Of the few duds I saw in 2017, I'll go with In Another World with My Smartphone, simply for the way it adheres to a weak genre with few real surprises and somehow manages to underperform anyway, as protagonist Touya doesn't even need his smartphone very often to play the smug otaku who has all the answers. For stories like this, it's all downhill after No Game, No Life, and it's a long way down.

Anne Lauenroth

Worst Anime: Berserk

My pick for the worst anime of 2017 certainly wasn't the worst anime of the year. But as lack of time forces me to make heavy use of ANN's preview guide to bring down even the number of first episodes to check out, I'll have to go with the greatest disappointment out of the titles I followed all the way through the bitter end. And to my greatest sadness, despite Rage of Bahamut: Virgin Soul's ambition to trump the king of ambition, this spot still goes to Berserk (TV 2017). Oh, Berserk. I would say my love for you knows no words, but then again, I've written over 3000 of them. Tragically, most words that went into my weekly streaming reviews of your 2017 season that didn't gush over your source material's greatness were spent on contemplating what went wrong in adaptation. How can one of the best things I ever read end up on a worst of the year spot in a different medium? Was it merely a question of budget? Hardly, given how your 1997 adaptation could look like a PowerPoint presentation and still managed to do its themes and characters justice, even though it barely stayed on model for the entirety of some episodes. Yet despite all its shortcomings, Naohito Takahashi's focus on character development exemplified a focus and understanding Shin Itagaki only ever showed brief glimpses of. Not knowing when to shut up or be still, this year's incarnation of Berserk saw me longing for the times where stuff not moving was the biggest cause for complaint.

Gabriella Ekens

Worst Anime: Neo-Yokio

This is one of those cases where the story behind the show is important to understand it. Neo Yokio was written by Ezra Koenig, the lead singer of the band Vampire Weekend, for Fox's now-defunct ADHD animation block a few years back. The show never ended up airing (I wonder why?) and was left to rot unseen in a storage bin hard drive somewhere… that is, until Netflix swept in. They bought the show (presumably as cheap content to fill up their expanding anime library) and a legend was born. Sorry Garzey's Wing, “so bad it's good” anime has a new king, and it's all thanks to Jaden Smith and the band Vampire Weekend.

Once you see the thing, it's obvious why it never ended up on TV. For all his lyrical prowess, Koenig is adept at neither storytelling nor writing dialogue, and the whole thing amounts to an awkward string of his personal fixations (mostly upscale brands) on top of a premise lifted from the 2010 Disney film The Sorcerer's Apprentice. It was storyboarded by Studio Deen (the main reason why it Counts as Anime) only to be shunted off for animation in Korea. From there, the show appears to have been made for a nickel, with coloring book-esque character designs, a color palette that resembles someone's unfinished amateur DeviantArt commission from 2007, and animation that makes Homestar Runner look like Gurren Lagann. And this isn't even getting into Jaden Smith's performance as the main character, Kaz Kaan, which is a major contributor to why absolutely everything that the character says comes off like a lower-case twitter shitpost. 

And that's just talking about how the show looks. Content-wise, it's impossible to tell whether anything that's happening is meant to be a joke at the expense of the super-rich or just the sincere product of a worldview shaped by Koenig's years as a member of NYC's brandster elite himself. Reviewers are similarly split along these lines, with some calling it a brilliant Tim and Eric-style satire of that lifestyle, and others arguing that its status as the hottest bougie garbage is fully unintentional. Personally, I'm in the latter camp – but that's not to say that I think the show has no value. As a glorious disaster, it's still one of the most entertaining animated experiences I've had in years, absolutely must-watch television – if only so you can get caught up on all the memes. “You don't deserve this big toblerone,” indeed.