Anime is awe-inspiring. For years, it has shaped generations, cultures, lives, and more with it's universal appeal and diversity. However, not all anime are amazing. Has there ever been an anime, which for some reason, you couldn't appreciate or respect? Be it for its animation, writing, characters, plot, there might be something off about any particular anime. I'm asking because I'm interested in your opinions, and would really like to know. Regarding myself, one anime I can't stand is Lucky Star. While it initially swayed me with it's cute visuals and music, the lack of anything of interest happening, along with the stiff pacing and characters, really set me off in the end.
 
What's your least favorite and why? What's the defining quality that sets apart good and bad anime? Are there a few others you'd like to mention?  Thanks for elaborating.

Of the anime I've seen a lot of (I hope you don't hate me for this), Hunter X Hunter is my least favorite anime. I watched a lot of it, and I regret much of it. I really liked the "Greed Island" arc...but I can't say I very much enjoyed much of the rest of the show. The "Yorknew City" arc was extremely dark, and so was much of the Chimera Ant arc (I quit at episode 100). Watching this show so much is one of my greatest regrets. It's not that I didn't ever enjoy the show. For example, perhaps my favorite part of the show was watching Gon and Killua train. Seeing them work hard to grow strong was inspiring, even if the cause they sought for wasn't a perfect one. I really liked Bisky's character. There are a number of things the show taught me that I'll keep with me the rest of my life...but that isn't enough to get me to keep watching. There are also a number of things that traumatized and desensitized me...and that's enough to keep me away, even if there is good in the interior. For me, it was like a peach that was moldy on the outside, but good on the inside, except I couldn't cut away the mold. I had to eat it first to get to the good...and because I ate it, I couldn't appreciate the good as much as I could have. I really, REALLY hope this doesn't offend you. Let me repeat, there was a lot of Hunter X Hunter that I liked. I may even rewatch the Greed Island arc in the future. But I just can't justify watching the whole show again. There was too much in it that I just plain couldn't enjoy.

My answer is a somewhat well-liked anime. So hopefully I don't offend anyone with it.

But my least favorite anime ever is FLCL. A lot of people insist it's a masterpiece, that it's a some coming of age story that you really have to look deep into to appreciate. Even so, I just cannot get into it. It was too random and nonsensical for my liking. There's more about it I dislike but won't get into. Maybe if I were to have watched it in my middle school years I would have appreciated it for what it is, but since I first watched it as an adult all I saw was complete nonsense.

In terms of what sets a good anime apart from a bad one? Not sure. I've watched and enjoyed anime considered "bad" while I've watched and disliked anime considered "good". I don't think there's any quality that make an anime good or bad, just a person's personal opinion on different anime.

Nexorla :

THANK YOU.

For so long, I have felt alone on this.

It is complete garbage.

I love Hunter x Hunter dearly, and I'm not offended in the slightest. If I broke down at the sight of seeing someone who doesn't share my opinion of something, this would be a friendly discussion; this would be a flame war. I commend you for speaking your mind, even if it sometimes doesn't resonate with everyone. Thanks for your honesty, pal.

I'm not gonna act like i'm some anime expert or something cause I haven't watched a lot of them.

My real pick would be something that isn't so family friendly (I was forced to watch it by a friend one time) but since its vizzed I won't mention it.

I hate pretty much all ecchi. But for one single anime that is my least favourite.It would be fairy tail. An uninspired story, completely generic characters make this an anime that I really don't like.

like I said haven't watched a lot of anime and and the anime that I have watched are nearly all critically acclaimed (including fairy tail)

legacyme3 : You're welcome haha.

I know that feeling. The anime seems to get nothing but praise by pretty much everyone. So it's pretty rare to find people that dislike. Nice to see more people share that opinion though. It's tiring to see unanimous praise for it wherever I go.

Well, least favorite huh. Sounds like fun, I guess I'll return to Viz by stating a few of my least fav.

School Days

This anime for a long time was the worst anime I've ever seen. I'm sure people might know about the "Nice boat" meme that popped up because of stuff that happened. But without getting to spoiler (Watch any review of it online, they'll spoil everything if you want a spoiler review... or if enough people pm to, I'll review it.... for the second time in my life) basically almost all if not all of the cast are horrible people, the plot is the worst thing, and the things that everyone does is... just bad. The ending is kinda satisfying but not worth the watch... As someone who's seen it twice. (Once to just watch it and once to review it) I think I can safely say it's not good, if you value your sanity then avoid it.

Boku No Pico

Please don't watch this one. Even out of curiosity. It's that bad and worse. It is a disgusting show that does so much horrible. The only reason I'm bringing it up is because I want to get as many people to steer away from it. So please Do NOT Watch It!!! Unlike school days I don't want to get into too much detail because it's just that bad/offensive. Keep away at all cost.

Those are my least favorite anime. I have some that I didn't enjoy but they aren't my least favorite.

I'm going to go a bit obscure for a bit. Mine don't typically make "worst" lists.
My least favorite of all time is MM!, but I'll also give a "bottom five" for fun.

Colorful
What a waste of my time. I pretty much watched it just to say I watched it, but it's forrealdo the biggest waste of time anime I've ever seen. What a trashy mess.

Haruchika
A pathetic knock-off of Hibike! Euphonium that contained a plot barely revolving around music and a cringy dues ex machina every single episode. Plus, neither of the main characters have any redeeming factors at all for their awful personalities. Plus, there is some really awkward romance(?) between students and teachers, but it's one sided. Plus, one of the main characters is gay(?) and it kind of ruins the situations he's in. (No offense, it's just the crappy character.)

MM!
I hate each and every one of these characters. I would say that they are painfully generic stock characters, but they are far worse than that. The ending theme is good though. That's really the only reason I even finished the series.

Strike Witches season 2
Don't get me wrong, the first season was really, really good. Good enough to make me excited for Brave Witches despite its train wreck of a second season. (The OST is also spot on.)  The second season, however, is not as lucky.  Pretty much all but one episode is filler. It's not even good filler either. It's boring filler that makes 20 minutes feel like 90. Blegh. At least we have Brave Witches.

Chu-Bra!
No. Not terrible, but pretty no.

Nexorla : I've never heard of this anime until today that is....I looked it up I don't think it would be an anime for me to watch anyways.

As for me it would be school days gawd I hated how the anime is like seriously after watching the whole thing. You realize the story plot doesn't make sense and things that should had happened did not. Instead the opposite happened. And you just realized also you wasted your time watching it. I know I did I was angry for days on it I was in hock really and when it happened I wanted to break my laptop screen. Seriously why make an anime like that which will upset a lot of people? >.>

Eniitan : They tried to be different. It sure worked, but not in the way they wanted. They may have abandoned some of the more standard elements of anime, but they also happened to forsake some of the more...vital parts. Like making it tolerable.

[Warning, this might contain some spoilers for Future Diary]

Mirai Nikki / Future Diary.
It sounded amazing, a survival games where each character can read the future? It sounded like something awesome with good psychological twists and turns. It turned out to be a disappointment.

Was there things I liked? Yeah. The art and animation is pretty cool. Some characters are OK, but most are terrible.

Now let's get to the bad stuff. While the premise is amazing, the story & script are very poorly written. It lacks the maturity and depth needed to handle the kind of story it offers. It's childish, and not deep enough to offer the story it promises. The twist and turns are extremely predictable.

The concept it offers (The future diaries, which can read the future) are barely used, barely taken into detail, and overall feel like a gimmicky gimmick instead of a plot line. A lot of crucial details are overlooked, which just ruins the entire atmosphere of the show, this show has a nasty tendency to have its world just forget about some of the big events related to the diary holders. Normally the media would be all over a series of bombings, massacres, etc... but here? Nah, it's just Tuesday again. It's astonishing how everyone can easily get away from anything.

The worst part? The characters. I'm going to rip the main characters apart without mercy, be warned.


For starters we have the male protagonist, Yukki. He might just be one of the worst written characters I have ever seen. No hyperbole there. It's because he's absurdly inconsistent. Most selective memory of all time, gullible when not paranoid (never with the correct timing), ability to forgive that defies common sense and, later on, he can't even settle on a personality. Worst part is, his personality shift happens suddenly; at the beginning, he's creep out and almost hates Yuno, which makes sense, however halfway through the story he begins to love her, like devoted adulation, which makes zero sense. At the end of the story more, he loves her more than he loves being a literal god, and there wasn't any real event that made him change is opinion of her. He just begins to love her out of the blue, it's baffling.

Then we have our female protagonist, Yuno. She's actually more popular than the show. The creator knew of this, so s/he made her the most complex character in the whole cast and genuinely fun to watch. Unfortunately, that complexity only really shows up in the last few episodes, so until then she's pretty much a one note character - crush, kill, Yukki!. Moreover, the yandere trait eventually wears off, meaning she can get kinda annoying afterwards, even with all the carnage she provides.

There's really only one character I like in the show, Akise, who should have been the main character in the show. He's smart, he's a detective, and his personality and abilities are a perfect match for the show. He's amazing, but he barely gets any screen time.

In conclusion, Mirai Nikki is a huge disappointment. Its messy story and weak characters are simply not fit for the genre it belongs to.

Hidden Phantom : Yeah....I can see to that as of why. But they anime is a big disappointment. Its fine to go into a different direction with it. But then...it just turned out so badly. And as you said it didn't go the way they wanted it to. '-'

Powerpuff Girls Z is a very clunky mess of an Anime, everyone becomes a magical girl, and professor Utonium suddenly has a son.
The animation looks bad, and the plots are always stiff and nonsensical.
On a much better note however the opening to the first Season is wonderful, it's one of my favorite Anime themes.

Higurashi (or When They Cry for you dub heathens) is the worst anime I have ever seen.
Its a disjointed mess. I can't understand why people like that show so much, or as a matter of fact, at all...

There is a lot of School Days hate... to each their own I suppose...

So by least favorite you mean one that you like but not as much as others? Or one that you just hate? The ones I like the least happen to be some of the mainstream ones, such as Attack on Titan, One Piece, and Bleach. I have tried to get into all three if them either on my own pr because of my friends and I can't seem to get myself to enjoy either of them. I either find the majority of what I see in them either boring or just outright dumb.

Out of the ones I've seen, my least favorite anime would be Sword Art Online. The first arc is the most ridiculous thing ever. It has a bunch of filler in the middle and then it just ends like that. I'm still going on with the second part, but it's not as important to me anymore because It just was a really big letdown for me because this could have been something much more if they only thought about it more.

My least favorite anime series so far would probably be either Psychic Detective Yakumo (13 episodes) or Pita Ten (26 episodes), until I can think of one that I dislike more than those 2. For Psychic Detective Yakumo, I had high hopes for the series since the manga was recommended to me by a friend that's super picky about good manga, but we watched the anime for Psychic Detective Yakumo together and even my friend was very disappointed with the way the anime turned out. (They told me the manga is "wayyyyy better." I have added the manga to my list now, but since the anime was so mind-numbing, I'm putting off reading it until after I finish another series.)

In short, half an episode into the anime series, I noticed that the episode had some pacing problems (it would start off the story a little too slowly and then rush to the end of the episode with nary an explanation at times). We decided to continue watching the series anyways in case the anime studio was just having some problems with adjusting its pacing for the series, but the pacing problems only became progressively worse, not better. =/ After over 10 episodes of the bad kind of non sequiturs (which is absolute torture for people that enjoy storylines without too many holes), we turned to each other, asked "why did we do this to ourselves?" and then I went to look up the anime studio responsible for the mess. (To clarify, an example of good kinds of non sequiturs would be the ones in King of Bandit Jing.) Now that I think I've received my answer as to why the anime for Psychic Detective Yakumo turned out the way it did, I'll go ahead and recommend another anime series called Ghost Hunt, which appeared to have a similar goal to Psychic Detective Yakumo in terms of what it was trying to achieve, except everywhere that Psychic Detective Yakumo failed (storyline, music, interpersonal/romantic relationships, even the jokes!), Ghost Hunt succeeded. Both series were about a group of young people that get together somehow to explore some supernatural phenomena, and I'm still trying to process exactly how Psychic Detective Yakumo managed to so gloriously botch up such a promising storyline, considering that it aired about 4 years after Ghost Hunt already aired in 2006.

The other anime that I disliked since many years ago is called Pita Ten. I try to give every series a chance before I drop it, but I had to drop this one after episode 1 (and yes, I know this one was made for a younger audience, and I did watch this when I was a lot younger, but still disliked it for most everything about it). Now that I think about it, the only thing I probably kind of liked about the series was its "cuteness factor." For a series with a somewhat better storyline (it's a bit different though), I would recommend Full Moon wo Sagashi te instead (I had to put a strategic space in the title so it wouldn't be automatically censored, and it's also called In Search of Full Moon). For those of you that are wondering why I didn't just mention Aa! Megami-sama! instead, it's because Ah! My Goddess! isn't exactly for a younger audience, unlike Pita Ten and Full Moon.

Anyways, if you value your time, I would recommend that you refrain from watching the anime episodes for Psychic Detective Yakumo and Pita Ten (I'm going to try their mangas instead). If you absolutely must watch one episode for Psychic Detective Yakumo though, I'd point you to the middle of episode 10 where an older gentleman talks to a little girl about life. That was probably the main redeeming scene for the series, and one of the few scenes that actually makes sense. To put things into perspective, you don't even really need to know anything about any of the characters and you'll understand what that exchange was about. My friend and I joked that the studio that drew the series must've concentrated all of their efforts on that one scene... ^^0

Now I am perfectly willing to admit that YuGiOh is a silly and overdramatic show that takes things way too seriously and that's all fine and good. However I absolutely despise YuGiOh ZEXAL for being too kid friendly at first and it tries to do the opposite towards the end with characters dying left right and centre simply for the sake of it. What makes this even worse is that

One of the worst aspects about this YuGiOh series is the male and female leads, Yuma and Kotori (Tori in the dub). Yuma is such an annoying protagonist and relies way too much on his ace card Number 39: Utopia and its evolutions so to speak - and he barely uses any of his other Number cards (which are relevant to the plot). Yuma is also really stubborn and doesn't get any significant character development compared to the other male leads, especially when compared Yuya who gets plenty of development right from the get go of ARC-V. My current avatar is not Yuya or Yuma.

Yuma also gets access to a form known as ZEXAL which is the equivalent of cheating. Again, this happened in previous series where a character uses a new card as the just the right moment but in ZEXAL it's more blatant. For comparison they deal with this criticism in ARC-V in only the second episode.

Kotori is by far the absolute worst female lead in the history of YuGiOh - her only purpose is to support Yuma, though unlike Anzu/Tea Kotori cannot even duel. Also to Anzu's credit she at least got her own small arc in the original series and manages to step up to Seto "Screw the Rules, I have Money!" Kaiba. What is even worse is that there are much more interesting secondary characters and villains than her but she gets to appear in practically every single episode of the series. The head writer for ZEXAL has gone on record to state that if he was left to his device there would be very few female characters which has seriously bad implications.

It gets worse when the previous lead from 5Ds Aki/Akiza was such a well written and awesome female lead, though she got screwed over by real life events in Japan. Long story short, Aki was part of a cult due to being different from other Duelists, and in real life a Japanese Roma Sophie cult was gaining a tone of negative press and a seiyuu was suspected as being part of said cult - yeah it doesn't end well o.o'. As a result, 5Ds was drastically changed and she was forced into the sidelines for most of the 3rd and 4th story arcs.

There are some good aspects but few and far inbetween. If anyone ever wants to watch a YuGiOh series, watch Duel Monsters, 5Ds or ARC-V but make sure it's the Japanese version if you choose ARC-V because the english dubs went downhill after 5Ds.

Naruto and One Piece are pretty much total crap. I tried watching, but if you can't make me care about anything by episode 3, or have more than 300 episodes, then yeah no thanks.