The Listless List: 5 Worst Anime of Summer 2017

Disclaimer: Due to things being pretty busy these last few months, I didn’t get the chance to watch absolutely everything this season, meaning some shows that could have made this list may not have. Furthermore, I’ve yet to finish a few of these entries, meaning this list is based on how I feel at this current moment in time.

It’s that time of the season where once again I pick out the shows I thought were the baddest apples of the bunch.

As per usual, these are simply my own personal picks and I’d love to hear your own. Feel free to share yours in the comments!

5. 18if

It seems that almost every season there’s at least one show I really look forward to that winds up falling ridiculously short of my initial expectations. And it seems that this season, 18if is that show.

I  really wanted to life 18if. I really wanted to get behind this show, just like I wanted to get behind Sakurada Reset from last season.

It had an interesting and unique premise, an interesting and intriguing setting and one of the most striking, whimsical and fantastic looking visual styles I’ve seen from Anime in the longest time.

But the content of the show itself is just so uninteresting to me. Despite taking place in a fantastical dream world setting, the show does almost nothing fun or interesting with it at all aside from making things look trippy and colourful. And that’s all fine and dandy, but I wanted more than that.

The whole series felt like a humongous waste of potential, and I’m extremely disappointed with how it turned out overall.

18if isn’t bad, but it’s incredibly disappointing and unfortunately it made this list as a result.

But I won’t deny that it looks absolutely incredible. Those visuals are just… Fantastic. If you’re an appreciator of visual eye candy, you’ll be absolutely spoiled with this one.

4. New Game!!

I know this is going to be a controversial, and maybe even unfair, pick but hear me out.

I didn’t like the first season of New Game. I also don’t like this season of New game. I don’t like New Game. At all. And I’ve tried to, oh I’ve tried to.

Being someone with a passion for the games industry, I’ve wanted to get into New Game for the longest time, but I just can’t because… It’s nothing more than a really boring iyashikei show with the games industry as its choice of backdrop to have cute girls be cute and do cute things, and maybe sometimes, on occasion, make video games. Maybe. Sometimes. Perhaps.

And that would be completely fine if the characters were individuals who’s antics I enjoy watching unfold on-screen, but they aren’t. They’re just cute girls. Who sometimes make video games. I still can’t remember their names.

However, I will give this second season credit where it’s due. Unlike the first season, which had nothing of interest happen whatsoever, this season did have some developments which were fairly interesting. It’s just unfortunate that it wasn’t enough to catapult the series out of the realm of mediocrity.

God I wish someone would make a real game development Anime already.

3. Knight’s and Magic

From the moment I saw that unnecessary apostrophe in the title, I knew this show wasn’t going to win me over.

…But in all seriousness, Knight’s and Magic just isn’t anything special. At all. It’s a weird combination of medieval fantasy and mecha, which is cool on paper, but has been executed far better by countless shows before it.

And the story itself just isn’t all that interesting.

Much like 18if, it’s not even that bad a show, it’s just really, really boring and as a result, it was a real struggle to get through the episodes I did watch. And I still need to finish it.

But the robots are cool at least.

2. Dive!!

I knew this was going to make the list.

I just knew it.

When I started watching Dive!!, the PTSD I received from watching Free! Iwatobi Swim Club back in 2014 immediately kicked in and I was absolutely terrified.

Free! is my least favourite Anime of all time. The show has next to no redeeming qualities at all and Dive!!, is more or less the same thing as Free!, only far less bland and uninteresting. But it’s still pretty bad.

The characters aren’t entertaining, the plot is barely worth mentioning at all and the amount of man-service is just unbearable for me.

This could have been a really cool show about diving, but it’s anything but a cool show about diving. It’s just Free! again, only it’s about diving instead of swimming and, personally, I could do with one less Free! clone in my life. HELP.

But the diving scenes are nice.

1. Fate/Apocrypha

If you read my First Impressions post for Fate/Apocrypha, you’ll likely remember me saying that I don’t like Fate very much and that, while I get what everyone else see’s in the franchise, I find it all kinda boring.

And unfortunately Fate/Apocrypha did very little to change that. In fact, if anything, it served as a fine reminder of why I can’t stand this overblown cash cow of a franchise and further reinforced my belief that I should stay as far away from anything even remotely related to Fate as possible.

I rarely say this about any Anime, but I seriously hate this show. I don’t enjoy it. I get nothing out of it when I watch it. It’s boring. It’s full of technobabbly nonsense that takes an entire episode to explain in place of the really cool fights that should be there instead. When characters do fight it lasts 20 seconds before getting interrupted by more exposition or some other kind of ridiculous form of divine intervention, and it’s a show about a death tournament. The episodes are ridiculously slow and the series has absolutely no business being 25 episodes long. The characters aren’t fun or interesting individuals at all. Even the production values, which are normally the biggest strength of this franchise, fall short because A-1 Pictures. And this is coming from someone who believes that the “everything A-1 Pictures makes is terrible because Sword Art Online is a 1/10” meme is nonsense and needs to die.

I wanted this to be the Fate series that won me over. But it wasn’t. It was arguably the worst one yet, and I thought this franchise could only get better.

I’m not looking forward to the Heavens Feel movies.

Just make Fate/Prototype a full length Anime already.

Share your worst:

What were your worst shows from the Summer 2017 Anime Season? Feel free to share yours in the comments!