The Worst Anime of Spring 2025

Which is more disappointing? A show with all the makings of a competent sci-fi thriller that fumbles it from the starting line, or a series backed by one of the industry's biggest stars that fails to deliver on its promises? Then there's everything in between: nonsensical character writing, lackluster visuals, and more.

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

I love .hack, and I love Fate/stay night. So in theory, I should also love #COMPASS2.0 ANIMATION PROJECT, which often feels like it's trying to be a weird combination of the two, right? Well, I also love ice cream and Reuben sandwiches. Still, that doesn't necessarily mean I should try substituting sauerkraut and Russian dressing for sprinkles and chocolate sauce next time I make a sundae.

#COMPASS2.0 ANIMATION PROJECT is an anime based on a mobile 3v3 battle game. Having not played this game myself (it's not officially available in English), I can't really speak on behalf of how this anime compares to its source material, and whether or not watching this anime enriches the experience of playing the game or vice-versa. What I can say with confidence, however, is that as a standalone piece of media, this anime is the physical manifestation of blowing a raspberry.

#COMPASS2.0 ANIMATION PROJECT is the worst kind of bad anime: it's a bad anime that's bad in boring ways. In a nutshell, this anime feels like what you would get if you set a bunch of other battle anime to 25% opacity and stacked them all on top of each other. Nothing fresh, nothing new, and zero effort into building its world up or even making itself look cool. It's hard to tell if it either doesn't have an identity of its own, or if that identity is so beige and boring that it's nigh impossible to discern.

This might be forgivable if #COMPASS2.0 ANIMATION PROJECT was at least doing what it was doing well—after all, anime don't have to be unique to be good, and unique doesn't always equal good in the first place—but it's just not. The story barely makes any sense, the laws of this anime's universe are poorly explained, and I can't remember the last time I watched a battle anime with such bland-looking fights. Arguably, this anime's cardinal sin is how the hero characters all look like generic video game characters; no characters aside from 13 and Jin (the main protagonists) really get much time to shine, and even those two don't come out of this anime being super cool. Usually, the one thing these gacha anime get right is at least giving its audience some fun characters (either in terms of design or personality) so as to incentivize them to pay money to roll them. And #COMPASS2.0 ANIMATION PROJECT can't even get that most basic of tasks right.

—Kennedy

Coming from the incredibly captivating and thought-provoking mind of Reiji Miyajima, the creator of Rent-A-Girlfriend, we have this series which dares to ask the incredibly bold question “what would you do, if you suddenly found out that the sibling had known for your entire life wasn't related to you by blood?” Unlike a lot of other shows that play with this taboo, it felt like the series was setting up some genuine conversations about the social and psychological issues that come with suddenly finding out that there is no shared blood between you and your sibling. Half the show is spent tackling questions from different angles like how a sibling might confuse admiration for love or how some boundaries might need changing after finding out that you are no longer blood related. I'm not against incest being used as a plot point as long as we actually do something with it outside of the typical anime taboo trend.

The problem is that the other half of the show is just kinda filled with the usual harem cliches like walking in on the girls changing, going on a fake date that turns out to be a real one or having our lead be a the typical white knight who helps the girls escape from a very specific situation. Almost every episode sets up excuses for why our main lead should not get romantically involved with any of his sisters—like how you can't just turn off knowing someone as a sibling for your entire life up until that point or how society might frown upon it despite it being technically legal. Some of his sisters even go out of their way to test whether or not their brother could be romantically interested in them by sexually harassing him (the show actually spends half an episode having one of the sisters explicitly attempt to turn her brother on using the game Twister). After those moments fail, because our lead understandably doesn't want to cross any lines and just be a good brother, THAT'S when the show decides to have his sisters fall for him.

At best it doesn't work because the show is throwing conflicting messages about what it's trying to say. Should I want this guy to fall for one of his sisters? Then why spend so much time telling me that he shouldn't? Why are we having the sisters fall for our lead when all he's doing is being a good brother to them? It's not like the show frames any of these advancements or developments from the sisters as a problem. If anything, the show gives these moments a sense of romantic fanfare with swelling music and gorgeous animation which actually makes things feel more uncomfortable then I think the show intends.

Much like Rent-A-Girlfriend, the problem with The Shiunji Family Children is that there's all this effort put into a show that seems terrified to commit to anything. The constant desire to point out how weird its premise is before just doing what it says that it shouldn't legitimately made me mad. It wants to comment on the incest/step sibling angle—but not too much because then we can't pair our male lead with the rest of the girls. But when you take that stuff away, all you're left with is a very bland harem anime. So pick, do you want to be uncomfortable or do you want to be bored? No amount of pretty animation and fun voice acting is going to save that. Do not give this anime your attention if you can help it.

—MrAJCosplay

I'm not above enjoying my share of trashy fun, and yandere characters and dark elves are both things I am on board for. Unfortunately, Yandere Dark Elf was a letdown. On the surface, the concept of an obsessive elf girl who is so in love with an isekai hero that she chases him back to Earth in an attempt to get in his pants sounds like it would be spicy, but the show we actually get is extremely bland. For one thing, the titular Yandere Dark Elf Mariabell hardly even qualifies as such. Sure, every episode features at least one failed attempt by her to whisk her beloved Hinata away somewhere secluded so she can bone him, and she might occasionally talk about not letting anyone get between the two of them, but for the most part, she's harmless. In my day, a character would only count as a true yandere if they were willing to perform a kidnapping or two, and stab anyone who so much as looks at the object of their affection.

Comparatively, Mariabell never really crosses any lines with Hinata's boundaries and even ends up becoming besties with her romantic rival, with much of her development being about her learning to be comfortable around people other than Hinata. All of this certainly makes her less problematic than the average yandere, but being problematic is also part of the appeal, and as is, she's a lot less fun to watch. Hinata, for his part, is only ever intimidated by her advances rather than put off, so all that leaves us with is the escapades of a timid guy and his mildly aggressive girlfriend and while that's cute I guess, it's also not exactly what you come to a show called Yandere Dark Elf for.

Although if you don't care about any of that and you're just here for the smut, the show doesn't really succeed there either. It's barely animated, and the art isn't nearly detailed enough to compensate for that, so there frankly isn't much here to enjoy looking at. This is only further hindered by HIDIVE only streaming the censored version, which, in addition to covering up all the bits you'd expect, also outright mutes out some of the dialogue, resulting in an experience that feels awkward to watch from nearly every angle. I'd rather not come down this hard on a show that isn't aiming to be much more than trashy fun, but even trashy fun has to strive for a decent level of entertainment quality, and people should be able to demand better from their smut. The only thing worse than being too trashy is being too boring, and in a sea of similar shows with better execution, there's not much reason to make this yandere elf your new obsession.

—Jairus Taylor

There was a moment near the beginning of the season when I thought I'd been too hard on Go! Go! Loser Ranger! Fighter D gets stuck in a time loop and uses his mimicry and tenacity to sniff out the boss monster at the center of the mystery. If only the rest of the season could have been equally clear, concise, and compelling! Despite its incredible style, Go! Go! Loser Ranger! Season 2 tapered off into disarray until it became worthy of the Hulu purgatory it is stuck in.

Just like the first season, my favorite parts of this show were the beginning and ending sequences. The music! The dance moves! The puppets. But even puppets couldn't cover this show's expanding flaws. For a while, Fighter D's story was able to coast on its viewers' familiarity with the super sentai genre that it parodies, combined with its edgy brand of darkness. As the story progressed and tossed out a massive number of shiny plotlines to attempt to catch our dwindling attention, the show unfortunately ceased to make sense. I have not read the manga, but it feels like a huge amount of manga material got crammed into a very short time. What ought to have been shocking and significant didn't get the space it required to make an impact. I'm particularly talking about “Come and Join the Monsters!” which dropped nonstop reveals one after the other. For example, I hadn't even processed the shock that somebody was killed before it was revealed they were alive again—it tossed out more lore in ten minutes than any other show would in a full season.

Further dragging down this once-great show was the obvious production dip in Season 2. The art and animation were inconsistent, and characters appeared off-model more often than not, drawing a clear line in quality between the seasons. But overall, it's the pacing that is Loser Ranger's downfall here. While Season 1 successfully stuck to the Recruitment Arc and effectively introduced a huge cast all within its time, Season 2 ramped up into a chaotic mess. It had so much potential, which makes it even more of a shame how it turned out.

—Lauren Orsini

It would be a moot point for me to discuss the failures of The Beginning After The End's adaptation. The many ardent fans of both the original webnovel and webtoon have been so vocal in their rejection of the anime that TurtleMe, the author, felt he had to publicly distance himself from the production. How do you get more damning than that?

However, I'm not going to attack the adaptation. I'm actually going to defend it. Gather around, ye TBATE diehards, and hearken: this isn't that bad. It's not good, of course. Let's not be silly. The show is barely animated to begin with, and the slightest hint of action transforms the scene into a pan-and-scan PowerPoint presentation. The character designs are bland, the settings are even blander, and at best, the composition on screen approaches the threshold of “functional.” Nevertheless, I need TBATE fans to understand that it gets so much worse. There are screencaps from Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer that will break your heart. Producers deliver episodes that are self-evidently unfinished. Shows stop airing because of behind-the-scenes mismanagement. Meanwhile, Studio A-Cat gave you 12 on-time episodes that, to my eyes, were completed within their means. That's a passing grade in the current overstuffed and overtaxed anime industry.

The Beginning After The End deserves a spot on this list due to a far more fundamental sin: shoddy writing. It's all tropes and zero personality. The setting, like most isekai, lacks any flavor beyond the generic fantasy tropes of magic, elves, bandits, dragons, etc. Characters have no depth or function besides enabling the protagonist to look badass and be correct. Grey/Arthur originally struck me as the one promising component—a sci-fi tyrant getting isekai'd is at least a crumb of an original idea. In practice, though, there's little separating him from a teen prodigy who learns how to trust others and be a better person, and those are a dime a dozen in this space. Worst of all is the plotting, which would be laughably haphazard if the results weren't so painfully uninteresting. Grey might as well hold a clipboard with a “Hero's Journey Checklist,” as we watch him go down the list with all the passion of an actuary. There's no creativity. There's no zhuzh. It feels like the first novel of a writer who, absent the discipline of an editor or experience, just makes it up as he goes along.

TBATE's saving grace is that it's not offensive. On the spectrum of isekai protagonists, Grey hasn't approached the “horny slaveowner” terminus yet (his previous life's war crimes notwithstanding). Nevertheless, the story's focus is annoyingly myopic.

Characters only exist to further Grey's development. The elf girl he rescues is a princess because that allows Grey into their walled-off society. The king's scheming mage attacks Grey because that gives Grey the opportunity to pwn him with magic. Worst of all, Sylvia, his dragon mentor with the only cool creature design in the whole series, sticks around for a single episode before she dies protecting Grey. It's all so trite and predictable.

Despite the fan backlash claiming the contrary, I think this adaptation did an adequate job of rising to the standards of the source material. The real problem is that those standards rested at ankle-height.

—Steve Jones

What a crushing disappointment. Lazarus was supposed to be an action-packed thrill ride of a Shinichirō Watanabe joint that combined his passion for telling science-fiction parables about modern social issues with the high-flying action and adventure that made shows like Cowboy Bebop and Space Dandy so successful. The show even has Chad Stahelski, the director of the John Wick movies, contributing his genius to the fight planning and choreography. I'm not so foolish as to expect any series from any director to just casually drop and become instantly comparable to an industry-defining classic like Cowboy Bebop, but come on. This should have easily been good, at the very least.

Alas, while Lazarus has several individual elements that frequently rise to the occasion of being consistently excellent, such as its production values and the aforementioned Stahelski contributions to the action scenes, the product as a whole falls apart completely on account of its completely fractured and half-assed screenplays. I'm no stranger to Watanabe anime that play fast and loose with things like logic and characterization to get their points across—I'm on the record as a defender of the often maligned Terror in Resonance, for goodness' sake—but almost nothing about Lazarus' plot or characters comes together like it should.

The core premise of the world being held hostage under the doomsday clock of a moralistic mad scientist's killer cure-all is perfectly sound in theory, but Lazarus fails at every turn to communicate any of the urgency that should be the driving force of every episode. Team Lazarus constantly follows seemingly random breadcrumbs of Doctor Skinner's trail, only to encounter a bunch of nonsensical and thematically incoherent side-plots that only ever lead to more breadcrumbs. The series' music is another culprit here, which might sound strange considering that world-class soundtracks are practically Watanabe's signature by now.

The problem isn't that the music is bad, since the cuts contributed by Kamasi Washington, Bonobo, and Floating Points are all great little slices of sound in a vacuum; rather, the sleepy lo-fi beats and jazzy brass notes just make the already listless plot feel even more limp and aimless. It might have been possible to forgive these glaring shortcomings more if the characters and their relationships could make up for them, but therein lies Lazarus' true Achilles'-heel: It has no characters, and no relationships worth giving a damn about. I am not exaggerating when I say that David Ayer's 2016 mangling of Suicide Squad probably does a better job of establishing a team of anti-heroes with identifiable motivations and personality traits. I'm not saying Lazarus is as terrible as that film, since Lazarus's story and presentation are at least mostly coherent. However, the fact that I could even bring one of the most embarrassing box-office failures of the last decade into this conversation at all should make it clear why Lazarus has earned a dubious spot amongst the worst anime of the season.

—James Beckett

I should have liked this show. It's a sci-fi police procedural mashup between Ghost in the Shell and Psycho-Pass, two franchises I adore. Cyber-inspector Echika Hieda and her android partner Harold Lucraft investigate crimes using the titular Your Forma technology to access suspects' and witnesses' memories, complete with psychedelic Major Kusanagi-style brain dive sequences. Based on a well-regarded series of light novels, director Takaharu Ozaki took the utterly baffling approach of failing to adapt the integral first volume that introduces the characters, their backstories, and relationships while explaining the world's mechanics. Last season, Übel Blatt's ill-fated anime adaptation made the same idiotic choice, and look how that turned out. Sadly, Your Forma joins Übel Blatt in the “disastrous adaptation” dungeon of shame.

It's almost as if there's a reason that, in general, stories are given beginnings. Arguably, they're as important as endings and middles. What I mean to say is, if you're going to start your story in medias res, you'd better have a damned good reason for doing so, and provide enough connective tissue for your viewer to hold onto without floundering in confusion. Your Forma does not do this. No allowances are made for anime-only viewers who haven't read the first novel's several hundred pages of—not backstory—actual relevant story, and we're left with little but frustration.

Turns out that trying to parse complex character relationships and vague, unexplained references to seemingly very important volume one plot points is a supremely irritating experience for most viewers. I was given the unenviable task of reviewing both Übel Blatt and Your Forma weekly, without the benefit of reading either show's missing material, and now I'm starting to think someone wanted me to suffer! I swear, if any of my assigned weekly review shows next season also suffer from missing beginning syndrome, I'll have some kind of messy psychological breakdown.

What's really tragic is that there's some interesting material in Your Forma about the limits of artificial intelligence, and how a society full of human-like androids might function, but its adaptation is so spectacularly inept. It's not just that great quantities of essential information are missing; it's that it looks boring, the music is boring, and Echika, the supposed main character, is completely incompetent at her job. At last count, she was kidnapped four times this season, each time requiring her robotic partner to rescue her. Perhaps that exposes a weakness in the source material. Normally, if I've enjoyed a show, I'll seek out the source novels to read. I'm unlikely to do this with Your Forma, the bad taste left by its incompetent adaptation is likely to completely spoil that experience.

—Kevin Cormack