Shonen anime is one of the most praised and loved genres within the anime community. It is enjoyed by all sorts of demographics, despite being aimed at young boys, and it has outlived many other kinds of series in relevance and popularity.
Unfortunately, not all shonen series are created equal. Some second seasons disappoint the audience that was so excited to welcome the new content with open arms, and some new premises fall flat or go so far as to make audiences uncomfortable. There are also perfectly decent series that take turns for the worst, seemingly because the creators simply did not understand what the anime community really wanted from their show.
10 Stale & Overdone: Isekai Cheat Magician
Isekai Cheat Magician‘s main flaw was that it put little to no effort into expanding upon the concept of the classic isekai protagonist. The battles all result in the main character using his tremendously overpowered skill to destroy an enemy, leaving little to no stakes. Should there ever be trouble within a fight, his female harem of side characters would come to his rescue.
This may have had a certain sense of character development and importance to it if said side characters were less stale and stereotypical. Overall, Isekai Cheat Magician fails to understand what isekai watchers really want: stakes, excitement, and involvement.
9 Fumbling The Horror: The Promised Neverland, Season 2
The Promised Neverland‘s hype was largely created by fans of the manga, so when the second season butchered the source material, the response from the community was not pretty.
The Promised Neverland’s first season was praised for the tension and horror atmosphere it managed to craft, and the second season was not able to follow up on that delivery. The season’s plot was very rushed, which damaged the feeling of investment key to many series, especially to those with a horror twist.
8 Ultimate Discomfort: Conception
Rather than simply bad execution on a relatively promising premise, Conception ups the bar on terrible isekai with a concept that was disturbing and uncomfortable from the start. The idea is that the protagonist has been chosen to procreate with a handful of girls to create superpowered children capable of saving the world.
Each female lead is little more than eye candy, and the setup, while meant to cause excitement, made most people uncomfortable with its forced intimacy and eugenics-like premise. Conception fails as an isekai and as an ecchi anime because of this.
7 Uncomfortable Relationships: Do You Love Your Mom & Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks?
The premise of this series was that the protagonist travels to another world with his mother, who is blessed with extremely powerful attacks while he gets next to nothing. Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks? had the potential to be a funny and possibly even heartfelt comedy about a mother and a son growing closer in the odd setting of a fantasy isekai, yet it completely fell flat.
The plot is oversaturated with overused tropes and comedy which has a tendency to fall flat. To make matters worse, the relationship between the protagonist and his mother is quite uncomfortable and too reflective of a harem dynamic for a mother-and-son bond to be at play.
6 Obnoxious Harem Protagonist: The Master of Ragnarok & Blesser of Einherjar
The Master Of Ragnarok suffers from the usual ailments of bad isekai, amplified by a factor of 10. It spends so much of its runtime creating an overpowered and constantly praised protagonist that it forgets the most important aspect for the creation of a good self-insert character: likability.
It also suffers from the tendency of telling instead of showing; asserting that the protagonist has the most amazing leadership skills and the most charismatic demeanor, all of which is hardly believable without any evidence coming from the plot itself. Similarly, the harem of girls that serve as side characters was hardly developed, making them uninteresting and sometimes even irritating to have on-screen.
5 Blandness From Stereotypes: Seven Senses of the Re’Union
Seven Senses of the Re’Union is another series that struggles with the problems often faced by self-insert isekai. The anime was adapted from a series of light novels which were rather long, resulting in a large part of the story being cut and the development being very rushed. This fact paired with a chronic case of character blandness makes it very hard to get attached to the story.
Seven Senses of the Re’Union is not necessarily the worst isekai ever made, but it certainly stings of wasted potential when it comes to the adaptation of a fairly successful light novel. Rather than a series that could stand on its own, Re’union was often criticized by the fanbase as taking the most interesting concepts from Sword Art Online and Anohana and butchering them.
4 Cringeworthy Side Characters: Hajimete No Gal
Hajimete No Gal was meant to be a dreamy and heart-fluttering romance between a nerdy boy and a popular girl, and it certainly had the potential to create such an experience. Unfortunately, most of the show ended up being uncomfortable, cringe-worthy, and hard to watch. A major cause of this was the introduction of mediocre, lackluster, and often irritating side characters. The relationship between the protagonist and the female lead was interesting and even entertaining at the start of the season.
However, the girls introduced to serve as a harem and a challenge to the protagonists’ romantic relationship did very little in terms of upping the stakes of the story and instead were very grating and frustrating to have on-screen. In addition to this, the protagonist’s nerdy friends are often seen saying very awful and uncomfortable statements. This was likely an attempt to create comedic relief in the form of capitalizing on the idea that they are social outcasts, but it ended up being extremely hard to sit through.
3 Storytelling Falls Flat: Assassin’s Pride
Assassin’s Pride, while having the potential to be a good isekai, suffers from a simple case of bad writing. It attempts to create a meaningful bond between two of the main characters; it attempts to shock the viewer with angstier and darker scenes; it attempts to excite its audience with a strong protagonist to imagine themselves as. All of these attempts fall flat, unfortunately. There is little to no chemistry between the main leads, which is a problem as the romance between them was supposed to be a major selling point of the show.
The characters are not only bland but inconsistent throughout the series, making it difficult to be attached to them, as the viewer has no concrete grasp of who they are as people. Assassin’s Pride does not take enough time to establish its stakes and characters and fails to serve its audience as a good isekai.
2 Strange Choice Of Ending: Darling In The Franxx
Darling In The Franxx is by no means a terrible show or even a bad one. It is, however, often seen by the community as wasted potential. It managed to build a huge amount of excitement at the time of its airing, and for good reason. The characters, while not necessarily extremely developed, were certainly very engaging. The visuals were beautiful and the series had the charm of a romance and an epic mecha anime.
The ending, however, was confusing, convoluted, and a large twist from the beginning of the series. It seemed an odd decision to change a formula that had worked so well, and a misunderstanding from the writers about what viewers really wanted from the show.
1 CGI Hell: Berserk
The manga version of Berserk has long been hailed within the community as toting some of the most beautiful art ever seen within a successful seinen series. It was quite shocking to its fanbase when an adaptation was released in 2016 which looked less than pleasing. It was entirely made with hard-to-watch and gratingly bad 3D animation.
The art style seemed a very odd choice for this show, but more than that, it was extremely offputting to the series’ original fans, who of course would have been most excited for the creation of the adaptation.
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