The 10 Most Unwatchable Anime of All Time

Every anime fan has a show they quit halfway through and never mention again. The ten below are the ones people still bring up years later, usually while wincing or laughing. Some look like they were animated in a rush. Others lose you fast.

One runs a mere nineteen minutes and still sits at the very bottom of MyAnimeList’s scoreboard. We’re going in release order, starting with two infamous OVAs from the mid-2000s and ending in 2021. Grab a snack, keep your thumb near the skip button, and get ready to regret your curiosity.

1 Skelter+Heaven Sits at the Very Bottom of MyAnimeList’s Rankings

Skelter+Heaven holds a 1.89/10 on MyAnimeList, the lowest rating the site gives any anime. Idea Factory released it as a 19-minute OVA in December 2004, based on its own PlayStation 2 game. A mysterious entity appears over Tokyo, and a squad of artificial young women climbs into mech suits to stop it. That’s about all you can piece together. Scenes jump around unexplained, and a few 3D touches clash with everything else. Even people who played the game come away lost, which says a lot about how little the OVA explains.

2 Mars of Destruction Crammed an Alien Invasion Into 19 Minutes

Mars of Destruction packs a whole alien invasion into 19 minutes. A spacecraft returning from Mars breaks apart on reentry, strange monsters called Ancients start showing up around Tokyo, and a teenager named Takeru Hinata climbs into a special suit to fight them. Idea Factory produced it in 2005 from its own PlayStation 2 game, and the same director handled Skelter+Heaven. You get stiff animation, scenes that get chopped off mid-thought, and classical music that rarely fits the action. By 2020, it was MyAnimeList’s lowest-rated horror anime.

3 Pupa Crammed a Horror Manga Into Twelve Four-Minute Episodes

Pupa took a gruesome manga by Sayaka Mogi, which ran from 2011 to 2013, and squeezed it into twelve episodes that run four minutes each. Studio Deen made it in early 2014, which adds up to roughly a 48-minute movie cut into scraps. Siblings Utsutsu and Yume catch a strange virus. She turns into a flesh-eating monster, and he can regrow his body, so he lets her feed on him. There’s barely time to feel anything before the next scene. Lots of gore, not much story.

4 Vampire Holmes Handed the Case to a Detective Who Won’t Reason

Vampire Holmes is basically a game trailer stretched into twelve short episodes in spring 2015. Yoshinobu Sena, who created the smartphone game, directed it, voiced Holmes, and wrote the music, so it’s a very personal project. Holmes is a London detective who doesn’t reason or explain mysteries, yet he hunts vampires anyway with his assistant Hudson. The show skips most of the actual detective work, and the story feels like an afterthought. It sits at 3.34 on MyAnimeList, which is not a number anyone wants next to their show.

5 Mayoiga Sent 30 Strangers to a Village That Made No Sense at All

Mayoiga puts thirty strangers on a bus headed for Nanaki Village, a place rumored to be a utopia. They find it empty and falling apart, then people start disappearing. Solid setup. The mess comes after, when the story stacks up cliffhangers, secrets, and character drama faster than it can sort any of them out. Mari Okada wrote it, Tsutomu Mizushima directed it, and Diomedéa animated all twelve episodes in spring 2016. It’s an original story, not an adaptation, so the confusion is all its own. That’s a lot to untangle in twelve episodes.

6 Berserk (2016) Turned Guts Into a Puppet on Invisible Strings

Berserk (2016) is the odd one out here, since fans are split on it. The complaints mostly land on the look. Guts, Casca, and the rest were built as 3D models that move like puppets, and the sword fights lose their weight because of it. Kentaro Miura served as executive supervisor, which makes the stiff results sting a little more. It ran 24 episodes across two seasons, from July 2016 to June 2017. The Blu-ray box sets later swapped some CGI scenes for hand-drawn ones, so somebody noticed.

7 Hand Shakers Blasted Viewers With Neon Colors and Wild Camera Angles

Hand Shakers has a neat hook: Tazuna, a mechanic-minded high schooler in Osaka, grabs the hand of a sleeping girl named Koyori and lands in Ziggurat, a strange world where pairs fight for a wish from God. Let go of her hand, and she dies. Then GoHands piled on so much color, and so many swinging camera angles that watching felt like staring into a disco ball. It ran twelve episodes in early 2017 as an original story. Reviews were largely negative, yet a sequel called W’z still arrived in 2019.

8 Knights of the Zodiac Rebuilt Saint Seiya Like a Video Game Intro

Netflix and Toei Animation took Saint Seiya, a fan favorite since 1986, and rebuilt it in CGI. Yoshiharu Ashino directed it, and twelve episodes dropped in two batches, in July 2019 and January 2020. It’s a loose retelling rather than a faithful one. Seiya became a Japanese-American teen, Saori was aged up, and some familiar faces disappeared completely. Add fights that feel weightless, and you get about a 5.2 on MyAnimeList, while the 1986 original sits near 7.8. That’s a pretty big drop for one name.

9 Ex-Arm Made a Superweapon Story Feel Like a Broken Video Game

Ex-Arm‘s pitch is wild, for sure. A teenager named Akira Natsume gets hit by a truck in 2014, wakes up sixteen years later, and learns his brain now lives inside a superweapon. Then the 2021 anime from Visual Flight shows up, and everything moves like a stiff game cutscene. The production team was new to anime, and it shows. All twelve episodes look this way, and Crunchyroll streamed the whole thing. It sits around 2.9 on MyAnimeList, and is among the anime so bad you need to avoid.

10 Tesla Note Sent Spies Chasing Tesla’s Crystals Through Jerky CGI

Tesla Note wants to be a slick spy thriller. Botan Negoro, a ninja-raised agent, teams up with self-proclaimed top spy Kuruma to grab Nikola Tesla’s leftover inventions, stored in crystals, before other countries do. Great pitch. Then the CGI shows up. Characters move stiffly, and 2D and 3D pieces clash in the same shot, which plenty of MyAnimeList reviewers grumbled about. It aired for thirteen episodes in fall 2021, the same year as Ex-Arm. Michio Fukuda directed it at Gambit, based on a manga written by Masafumi Nishida and Tadayoshi Kubo.

What are your thoughts on our list of the most unwatchable anime of all time? We’d love to know your opinions in the comments below.