Anime Sunday: Worst of Winter 2016

Michael Blaker
Game Industry News is running the best blog posts from people writing about the game industry. Articles here may originally appear on Michael's blog, Windborne's Story Eatery.

This week for Anime Sunday I’m going to cover the absolute worst Anime of the year thus far. It’s the Worst of Winter 2016!

Reikenzan: I really, really was hoping this wouldn’t turn out the way it did. First off with Studio Deen animating this series, and that no one picked this up for international broadcast. No legal streaming service, not even illegal fansub groups. It was terrible animation, and while the original story might be interesting, I’m so unhappy with the way the Anime was handled and by whom it was handled, that I’ll need to cool off for a long time before I even touch the original source material with a mile long pole. This killed any opportunity for any amazing Xianxia series to become an awesome Anime. Which is a pity, as there are some amazing stories that would absolutely blow people’s minds with a well made Anime adaptation.

Saijaku Muhai no Bahamut: I knew that the original source material was lacking coming into this season, but even if it was lacking, the directors could easily have handled it like they handled Rakudai. Instead they chose to rush the story to push the Harem sub-plot and killing any real plot build-up that could’ve happened by slowing the story down from two episodes of Anime from one volume of Light Novel to four episodes of Anime. But they didn’t and the show suffered for it. I’m sure some people love series like this, but I don’t.

Phantasy Star Online 2: If the above two were known potential duds coming into the season, this series wasn’t as much as it was unexpected in the first place. Despite the fact that the game is ridiculously popular in Japan, and still hasn’t been released in the West, they chose to make the Anime so unrelated to the game’s storyline that it’s laughably horrible to watch. If it wasn’t chock full of cringe worthy moments, I might say watch this just for how bad it was for a good laugh. But I won’t because I can’t ask anyone to watch the Anime equivalent of Twilight.

That’s it for this week’s Anime Sunday, next week I’m covering the Best of Winter 2016!

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