So Bad It's Horrible/Anime

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Ignore for a few moments the great Subbing Versus Dubbing debate among the anime fandom. There are certain shows or works in that medium that fail on their own merits and prove that being So Bad Its Horrible is not exclusive to any one side of the Pacific. You know it's bad when even fans looking for a Widget Series exclaim "WTF?!?!?" after viewing. Feel free to curse these titles, anime haters — the fans don't bother defending them, anyway.

Important Note: Merely being offensive in its subject matter is not enough to justify a work as So Bad It's Horrible. Hard as it is to imagine at times, there is a market for all types of deviancy (no matter how small a niche it is). It has to fail to appeal even to that niche to qualify as this.

Second Important Note: An anime isn't horrible just because Professor Otaku, Don East or any other Caustic Critic reviewed it. There needs to be independent evidence, such as actual, professional reviews, to list it. (Though once it is listed, they can provide the detailed review(s).)

Examples (more-or-less in alphabetical order):

• The adaptation of Otome Game Amnesia is an even worse adaptation of a Visual Novel than Togainu no Chi (see below). In an attempt to keep with the mystery of the original game the producers decided to keep the No Name Given Amnesiac Heroine nature of the protagonist, but somewhere in the translation they transformed her into a absolutely flat Too Dumb to Live creature no one wanted to root for. The love interests, already sketchy by the standards of the genre, became full psycho here and their routes got overload with heaps of misogyny that was not present in the original work (not that the original game was misogyny-free, mind, but the anime turned itUp to Eleven). The plot is made unnecessarily convoluted to avoid Road Cones, and ends with one of the most wallbangey plot "twist" in recent anime history. The designs and the animation are of incredibly low quality, even for Otome VN adaptation standards. But the most baffling thing is that, because the original game was translated and officially released outside Japan, this series received a full, legitimate English Blue-ray release as a promotional accompaniment, to the rage of fans on both sides of the pond who considered this anime unworthy of that much effort.
• Art of Fighting had an absolute mess of a 45-minute OVA, with a ridiculous story, depressingly predictable plot twists, and not one interesting or likable character. Heck, the one thing you'd expect it to be able to deliver (spectacular fights) falls flat. And from a video game player's point of view, it has nothing to do with the story of the games beyond the premise of "Yuri gets kidnapped, Ryo and Robert try to save her", none of the signature special moves appear and Ryo has black hair for some reason.
  • Fun fact: The voice for Yuri Sakazaki in this clunker is J-pop singer Ayumi Hamasaki, who made her first (and thankfully only) voice acting role.
• The Cosmopolitan Prayers, a.k.a. Cos Prayers (not "Cosplayers", Cosprayers). The broken English in the title is the least of its problems. The characters are incredibly idiotic, inconsistent, and one-dimensional. The girl who loves the male lead makes out with the main (female) protagonist, and the other girl also likes the guy, and there is no motivation for the Triang Relations. There is random unnecessary Fan Service alongside loads of rape imagery which makes anything potentially titillating just plain creepy. There are no transitions — one minute, everyone's chained up in a cave; the next, they're on a pier fighting with tennis rackets (a power upgrade, by the way). It has a plot that must have been thrown together between rounds and the conflict and characters never give the audience any reason to care. It culminates in an extremely lazy Gainax Ending with singing and rainbows...no, seriously. The whole thing was made by the company M.O.E. (Masters of Entertainment), but they don't show their mastery here.
  • To add insult to injury, there's two spinoff shows which portray this as bad in the Recursive Canon, to the point where in the second series, it turns out the identity of Cosprayers's writer is kept secret from the public eye.
• The Eien no Aselia: Spirit of Eternity Sword OAV adaptation. The game's great; the OAV... not so much. The plot is nothing like that of the game. The pacing is horrible, the animation below average, and the background music is copypasted from the game. The characters have almost no resemblance to their video game counterparts. It's as if the staff made this anime on a lunch break. Thankfully, it's only two episodes long.
• The OVA adaptation of Eiken is particularly infamous. Originally a very generic harem manga whose main gimmick is that it takes place in a World of Buxom where almost every female character sport enormous Gag Boobs (and the biggest set is attached to a 12-year old girl with all the implied sexualization), it evidently appealed to someone given that it lasted 18 tomes. Its OVA adaptation, on the other side, takes all the Fanservice and the Gainaxing Up to Eleven, but it's done so ineptly that it becomes Nausea Fuel. That the plot is incredibly nonsensical even for ecchi comedy standards, that the characters are all either dull or unlikable, and that the voice acting in both Japanese or English is very grating only adds to the disaster. The reviewers of THEM Anime aren't very fond of this OVA, and they aren't the only ones.
• Garzey's Wing, a 1996 OVA set in the world of Byston Well. It's got wooden dialog, almost no localization, and even less effort actually put into dubbing it. It also has an utterly generic story that, despite featuring such weirdness as people's souls being kidnapped by giant geese and soldiers riding freakin' velociraptors, utterly fails to entertain. Sage and Spoony are willing to share their review with you. The former refers to it as "the Battlefield Earth of Anime". Another review on ANN can be read here, also referring it as the Battlefield Earth of Anime and also comparing the dub to an Ed Wood production. The review from the Gundamn! podcast agreed that it was the worst thing Yoshiyuki Tomino ever directed.
• Genma Wars, a spinoff of Harmageddon, of all things. There are two major reasons why this series from 2002 failed so very, very hard:
  • The Gratuitous Rape. Now, to be fair, the series is predicated on one sexual assault: A young woman offers herself up to the Evil King to save her clan from raiders, and conceives half-breed twins. But then, one of the twins is taken to eke out a miserable existence among the Evil King's subjects. After he grows up and leaves the King's castle, he meets a woman and, after being at least somewhat friendly and decent to her, decides to assault her, too. Without so much as a "get away you bastard", she doesn't fight him off or anything. She doesn't even seem to understand the way that she was violated, and pontificates to the effect of, "It felt like his life force was entering me..."
  • The horrible, horrible animation. It is so cheap, so awful, and so very digital. For example: the "good" Wild Child twin has a wolf for a guide after his mother perishes, and he can talk! The problem? His jaw flaps up and down in a most ridiculously limited fashion.
• Master of Martial Hearts clearly tries to be a shocking deconstruction of the Panty Fighter genre, not unlike what School Days was to harem anime or Funny Games was to slasher films. In practice, it's four episodes of fanservice with only a vague hint of You Bastard (so it's less thematically clear than Funny Games), then one episode of awful things happening to characters who, while bland, weren't really that objectionable (so no catharsis like when the selfish and shortsighted protagonists of School Days came to ruin).
• Ninja Resurrection, marketed in the US as a sequel to Ninja Scroll despite being completely unrelated, has horrible no-name voice acting that makes the words "Tokugawa Shogunate" a Brown Note, extremely gross and misogynistic fanservice, and a nonsensical plot about Amakusa with a Devil in Plain Sight Evil Chancellor leading to the pointlessly squicky resurrection of Amakusa into Satan where his new evil cronies begin slaughtering townspeople...and on top of all that, the series finally ends there due to people wisely avoiding any further trick-marketing.
  • Some could argue that the series ended just as it was about to get good (it actually ends as the antagonist groups leap off-screen, implying a big showdown and/or massacre to come). It also features Mataemon Araki, the only likeable character by virtue of being a gigantic badass who kills ninjas with Combat Tentacles entrails. He has barely three lines, but is somehow one of the most fleshed-out and interesting characters.
• Pilot Candidate/Candidate for Goddess: Horribly-integrated CGI even for its era, plot holes practically from the start ("Only men can be Goddess pilots... except for the lady here"), and Zero Enna is possibly the most aggressively unlikable Shonen or Seinen protagonist ever. He's like Ash Ketchum crossed with Amuro Ray, only without the redeeming qualities of either and with a failed attempt at Hot-Blooded. The greatest failing, however, is that every piece of the story is incomplete. Several characters and concepts are introduced but never explored, each battle is an unfollowable mess with key points missing, and while the focus on cadets should make for an interesting angle, the main characters are barely involved with the plot. And to top it all off, even though the story is too thin and weak to support twelve episodes, it still has a Gecko Ending with And the Adventure Continues overtones.
  • Interestingly, the series was based on a sightly longer manga by the author of D.N.Angel, but the company who animated the series declared itself bankrupt after releasing the last episode as an OVA. It also made the author very hesitant to allow D.N.Angel to get an anime adaptation. Eventually, Xebec (producer of this series and of Martian Successor Nadesico) made a competent adaptation.
  • The version shown in America had, in top of the above problems, an awful dub, and was edited to comply with Toonami standards (back when Toonami was an afternoon action block) in a way that made the series even more nonsensical. For some inexplicable reason, this version was the one broadcast in Adult Swim, from where was pulled after the sixth chapter. One [AS] bumper declared "Pilot Candidate: never again".
  • Locomotion, a (now disappeared) Latin-American animation channel, gave the series a very good dub into Spanish, but that only means that the series had very nice voices saying the terrible lines of the nonsensical plot. They gave it a first run in prime time, and then, years later, a second run just in time for the closing of the channel.
• Pupa, a horror manga about a brother and sister who become infected by a virus, is known for its disturbing gore. Its anime adaptation, however, sabotages any potential the manga had with its short runtime (each episode is four minutes long), making a proper adaptation of the story impossible. Instead, it offers a butchered storyline, horrible pacing, terrible character development and baffling censorship in its TV airing, which destroys the manga's horror appeal. Anime News Network gave it a "Flushable" score in its Shell Life review, and Marow of Anime Viking called it the worst anime he has ever seen.
• Root Search, a 1980s OVA with stiff animation; unlikable, poorly-developed characters; and a pretentious and incoherent plot ripped off from Alien. Here's a review.
• The Thunder Prince. A Cliché Storm that makes Inheritance Cycle look original, it contains inconsistent character designs that make Jack Chick's shittier illustrations look like Dave Gibbons', and a spectacularly gory scene of the sidekick monkey playing around with the constituent humors of a snake's eyeballs, which the creators felt the need to Flash Back to for no apparent reason. The Big Bad undergoes instantaneous Badass Decay, and the back of the tape gives away the ending.
• The anime adaptation of Togainu no Chi has been panned by fans of the original game for good reason. Admittedly, given the nature of the game and its multi-route system, some elements had to be removed for the censors, but it still doesn't excuse the fact that so many things were removed from the story, people being introduced to the series for the first time didn't know what the hell was going on. Terrible animation (to the point that Episode 12 nearly completely consisted of animation recycling), constant deviation from character styling, and a mediocre script combined to make a fairly celebrated BL game into an animated train wreck.
• That the famous Visual Novel Tsukihime needed to streamline and sanitize a bit its plot for its animated adaptation, given the content and nature of the game, was expected. What was not expected at all was the butchering of the storyline (where plot points were introduced and then forgotten or decontextualized), the atrocious pacing, the astonishingly low quality of the animation (where a character falling was accomplished by merely moving a cell down), and the incredibly dull and boring soundtrack (where only the opening song has some sort of quality). The result was a 12-episode mess that only got worse in localization, and you get the kind of series the fans of its source deny their existence. Rubbing salt in the wound was that the manga adaptation, who followed the same route the anime adapted, was infinitely better done and is universally loved by the fandom.
• When Transformers Kiss Players was announced, most American fans generally chuckled at the concept of girls kissing Transformers to bond with them and power them up... but the manga scans depicted vore, blatantly suggestive scenes (such as the Legions' infamous "penis-tongues" and the endless stream of implied-rape imagery), the misogynistic antics of Atari Hitotonari, and late teenagers appearing to be eight years old. American fans were left disgusted and the Japanese fans feared this would've set a very poor example for the perception of anime in the West. As a result, most fans tuned out. Not even a retool to make the series Lighter and Softer, with the fanservice drastically toned down (albeit the girls were still drawn in the same Puni Plush style their made them look half their actual age) and the plot streamlined to actually makes sense, could help them. The TF Wiki has the details on the concept and how badly it was executed.
  • It's sad because They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot. The EDC, led by Marissa Faireborne, alongside the Autobots in an Evangelion-ish battle against mutated cyborg beasts and what turns out to be a Gambit Roulette by the creator of the technology? If they'd made a serious effort instead of just going for shock value (which the creator admits to), then this could have been a worthy addition to the Transformers saga.
• And yet, Kiss Players wasn't even the worst Japanese Transformers product. That "honor" is shared with Transformers: Super Link (known as Transformers: Energon in the West) Very thin plot (even for toyetic franchise standards) that's even repetitive within self to boot, stock footage galore, horrible animation, characterization decay, an English dub that killed the already little sense the original dialogs had, and the worst sin of all, not even selling the toys well. The TF Wiki has details on the many ways this series failed to deliver.