I'll be honest, I haven't finished it, but I'm halfway through the second season of Tokyo Ghoul and while it is nice, I'm really not enjoying the tired out concept of [race] against [race] and "they're the real monsters, not us"

The rest of it is pretty good, but it gets too much praise and no one points out its flaws.

While I am biased in the fact that I have watched Naruto and Attack on Titan, I can say that AOT is popular because it is very straightforward in its plot and the way the characters handle the predicament they find themselves in is more realistic than in most anime. In AOT, the characters are consciously rebellious and ambivalent which is a nice break from the cheery protagonists that always make it by through the power of friendship (not that there is anything wrong with that, but it is very overused).

I also find AOT to be very representative of humanity, people react the way (at least I think) real people do: they get scared senseless when they encounter a titan, the wealthy try to use their wealth to protect themselves, and people repeatedly fail to come together and unite against the titans amidst all the chaos. AOT really doesn't hold anything back, people die left and right and most of the time there isn't even time to lament over it because everyone is so busy fighting to stay alive which goes hand in hand with the humanistic aspect of AOT as well. Even with this in mind, each new death hits you harder than the last. Perhaps the main reason I find AOT to be enjoyable is because it always left me guessing who would be next? The element of surprise is always a nice way to keep an anime from getting too stale and foreseeable. Those are the reasons I like AOT, you don't have to agree with them, however, I do think they contribute to AOT's appeal and popularity.

On a side note, I think SAO and One Punch Man are somewhat overrated. I like that Saitama from One Punch is different from your average superhero in more ways than one, but I still don't understand why it came out to be as popular as it currently is. 

I agree with you for some of the anime series you listed, although I probably should not mention which ones. =P

As for me, I think that too often, people jump to conclusions about whether a series is "good" or "bad" without having seen enough of either the "good" or "bad" to begin with. Often, people either don't make a point of trying to watch the more obscure anime or they decide to ignore the "mainstream" shows and automatically deem them to be inferior just because they assume that most popular series have little substance or content. This is why I personally try to watch both obscure and mainstream anime series equally, although I do prioritize watching the ones that received some type of award or spawned some live action dramas or even musicals because more often than not, those series do tend to be better if they're not more interesting. ^^0;;

If I absolutely had to list one overrated anime at this time though... I guess I'd go with Sword Art Online. It's not that I didn't think Sword Art Online had any interesting concepts, it's just that I think they had so much to work with and they didn't do very much at all with any of it. oO;; The series had so much potential, but rather than exploring the concepts that made the series good at the beginning, it starting going off on random tangents that only served to distract and detract from the overall story (I actually liked Mother's Rosario for all that it was more or less filler, but I still don't know what to make of the Alfheim arc). From what I've seen so far, Sword Art Online also falls short when compared to another series called Accel World, which is also by the same writer. Sometimes, I think that if the writers/artists were given more time to think about or revise their stories (rather than always being pushed or rushed to publish random fillers), the quality of the anime series that are ultimately produced could potentially be so much higher.

Yuna1000 :

I can hear the argument against Sword Art Online, even if it is an anime I really like. It's not terribly original, but tries to sell itself as original.

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For me, the most overrated anime at present is probably One Punch Man. I like One Punch a lot, but it's so talked about that it's gone from being underrated, to being a cult classic, to being overrated in the blink of an eye. It's good, but it is not the best thing since sliced bread.

Naruto is the most overrated. That's been going on forever and just needs to be put out of its misery now.

No doubt about it, both One Piece and Naruto are the most overrated things of all time. I saw an episode of One Piece, and I wanted to die. I watched about 15 episodes of Naruto, and it was ok when I was like 12. Rewatching it now, it's just plain boring.

Yep as people listed.....One Punch Man, Naruto, One Piece I know for a fact that is overrated. That's why I avoid them really. I watch ones that are better than them ones that are not heard as much. Does Dragonball Super count as that as well?

legacyme3 : Well, there are so many anime series nowadays that it's actually kind of hard to be original sometimes and still have fans that enjoy that new original content. lol Some fans will literally only seek out specific types of anime, and if something is more original/not what they were expecting, they will refuse to watch it. ^^0;; As for Sword Art Online, have you seen the other anime (Accel World) that's by the same person, and if you have, do you think that one is more original?