The Worst Anime of Summer 2024

While there were many great anime this season, there were also some… not so great ones. From the boring to the outright painful, here are the editorial team’s picks for the worst anime of the summer 2024 season.

Richard Eisenbeis

Worst: Tower of God: Return of the Prince

Before I get into everything terrible about Tower of God: Return of the Prince, I want to mention at least something it does right. So let’s go with the music. I like both the opening and ending—and the general soundtrack is just full of bangers. Of course, the downside is that an aspect of this good makes the contrast between it and everything else in the anime all the more clear.

Return of the Prince fails in nearly every important way. Both the animation and art style have degraded immensely from the first season. Every budget-saving trick seems to be at work here, from mostly static shots where only the mouths move to cutting away from fight scenes rather than showing them. And the combat we do see is anything but fluid—not to mention that the choreography is abysmal.

But even that would be forgivable if the story was told well. It isn’t. Bam’s new party is almost entirely one-dimensional. For most of them, their backstories are summed up in a single sentence (if that). The same could be said for both their personalities and motivations. Heck, I’m not even sure what most of their special powers are—much less how they work.

And as for the old cast, they’re largely absent. The only big returners (besides Bam, of course) with notable screen time are Khun and Rachael—and our time with them is heavily diluted thanks to the introduction of another entire team of similarly one-note characters.

The story, or rather how the story is told, is also an issue. It moves too fast—feeling so heavily abridged that the big emotional character beats don’t have the time they need to land. Moreover, without those beats hitting like they should, what we do see feels like a waste to have watched at all. This feels like one of those shows that needed double the runtime (not to mention double the budget). What we’re left with is little more than an embarrassment.

Christopher Farris

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© 篠崎芳・オーバーラップ/ハズレ枠の状態異常スキル製作委員会

Worst: Failure Frame: I Became the Strongest and badabadablahblahblah

You know, it’s kinda sad that some shows can prove to be reliably bad. Here I was once again, due to my infallible taste, having not watched a bad anime all season. But you know, I don’t get paid unless I can pick out something that sucks. So, like Hansel and Gretel just begging to get baked by an enterprising witch, I went hiking into the forest of isekai, looking to get my day ruined by something I’d sampled earlier. Not Raising Kids While Adventuring, though, I need to stay awake for this to work. So, Failure Frame was the set of tracks I tied myself to, and sweet merciful mediocrity did it deliver. Man, I’ve seen ARIFURETA, at least that series eventually stabilized into something decent. Failure Frame feels as if ARIFURETA were ten times stupider, gave twenty times fewer shits, and hated isekai almost as much as I do, but in a way that somehow made me feel sorry for that pitiable genre. In a very “take it out back behind the shed” manner, I assure you.

Just looking at Failure Frame makes you hope that the executives sponsoring it got the smallest tax break possible for doing so. I assume the real reason our heroes can so easily win fights against these CGI monsters is because they’re clearly begging for death. Maybe that’s part of the inherent commentary on the nature of humans as the true monsters, though, since the anime switches all the humans to janky computer-generated homunculi as soon as it needs them to do anything more complex than turn their heads or flap their mouths.

But that’s all the show hardly needs to do, as the main character wins all his fights with naught but three spells for the first half of the show, requiring only point-and-click application of the most basic status effects in RPG history. There’s little creative application of min-maxed abilities, as usually seen in this sort of series. It’s like the author actively resents having to detail an isekai setup or expand on the lead’s motivation beyond raw, projected misanthropy that he can’t even commit to anyway. You gotta love how every single bad guy who appears in this show has to loudly declare that they’re a rapist just so our limp leading man won’t feel too bad for killing them via full-body lockjaw. Even the subs for this show don’t care, unable to decide if the main dude’s name is “Touka” or “Tooka.” At that point, what the hell am I supposed to do? At least it’s “nice” to know that whenever I need a simple seasonal sandbag, an incompetent isekai will be reliably waiting there for me to punt into the stratosphere.Godspeed, you ugly son of a bitch.

Rebecca Silverman

©米澤穂信・東京創元社／小市民シリーズ製作委員会

Not for Me: SHOSHIMIN: How to become Ordinary

I expect that I will have quite a few people telling me I’m somehow wrong not to have enjoyed this show, or perhaps I didn’t get it. That’s fine; everyone is entitled to their thoughts, and mine are that I didn’t care for SHOSHIMIN. My dissatisfaction stems from a few places, the most obvious being that the pacing was glacial. It was, of course, all in service of highlighting the ordinary aspirations of the characters while hiding the fact that Osanai may not harbor any such aspirations at all. But it robbed the storyline of any urgency or impact, and if I had to hear one more conversation about sweets while our leads “solved” a mystery barely worthy of the name, I really might have lost it.

Even if the point was not to have any urgency, it still needs to make an impact, and that’s not something I felt it did at all. It felt as if SHOSHIMIN was too enamored with its own concept. It wanted to be smart and maybe a little edgy, and it wanted to point out the fallacy that Kobato was operating under all along – that he took joy from not being like everyone else to the point of overlooking how he very much was an ordinary boy. I might have liked it better had I read it, but when the series ended, it left me feeling nothing, except that maybe my time would have been better spent somewhere else.