So Bad It's Horrible/Anime

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):

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 Cosprayerss 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.
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, 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 likable 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 her"), 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.
- Interestingly, the series was based on a longer (and much better) 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.
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.
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.
- 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.