Some anime just fail to meet the high expectations placed on them by fans, and in 2020, these five series might be the most disappointing of the year's releases. While this year has delivered plenty of great anime, these duds attracted plenty of fanfare -- either through name-brand recognition or exciting promotional material -- only to culminate in something profoundly disappointing.
Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045
Ghost in the Shell is one of the most highly-regarded franchises in manga and anime history. Between the theatrical films and Stand Alone Complex, Ghost in the Shell enjoys a reputation as 'elevated' science fiction; capable of intense and deep introspection and philosophy. That why, when a new entry in the popular Stand Alone Complex series was announced for Netflix, fans rejoiced.
Then, Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 came out. If it were only the unpopular decision to replace the 2-D animation with a far more cartoonish CGI animation style, then the show might not have gone over as poorly as it did with viewers. However, the controversial animation style also came with a weak plot. The series takes place mostly in the barren wastes of America, resulting in an empty show that changes too much that fans enjoyed about the original. The ideas, while ambitious, feel either undercooked or too drastically different to connect with fans of the franchise. The series just ended being a slog to get through.
The God of High School
The God of High School is one of many Crunchyroll Original productions based on Korean manhwa that came out this year. While some proved very entertaining, others were less stellar. The God of High School was one of the most high-profile, new Crunchyroll Originals to launch in 2020 and, largely, it did not work.
The God of High School is a tournament-based fighter series that packs so much into its 13 episodes that it leaves little of a lasting impression on the viewer. Many characters are introduced who have little impact on the greater story, which, while not so bad for a tournament fighter that lasts 26 episodes, in just 13, results in the time that should be spent developing the key characters being wasted on ones who do not factor into the later plot significantly enough.
Despite its ambitious style and incredible animation, it results in a barrage to the brain that, much like being jabbed in the skull multiple times, leaves you feeling as concussed as the actual fighters.
Noblesse
Another Crunchyroll Original and an adaptation of another wildly popular manhwa, Noblesse was the other most-hyped newcomer to Crunchyroll's 2020 slate. However, despite having Production IG behind it (the same studio behind Ghost in the Shell and Psycho-Pass), Noblesse felt oddly disappointing to many fans of the manhwa.
In part, this is due to the fact that the anime made little sense early on if you were not already familiar with the prior Noblesse anime -- a one-episode ONA called Noblesse: Awakening. However, even then, Noblesse struck many as being stuck in tropes that had long fallen out of favor, in part, because Noblesse dates back to 2007.
For new fans who had not grown up with the manhwa, the new Noblesse series felt like picking up an old anime that embraced the clichés of their day. While not bad, it did not get enough new fans onboard its hype train.
Gibiate
Few anime triggered as deep loathing in the anime community as Gibiate did upon release. After an aggressive marketing campaign online, the series received overwhelmingly negative feedback from audiences upon release.
The series features time-traveling fighters being brought to a future in which a virus has turned people into monsters, overturning society. The heroes have to fight off said monsters while looking for a cure. While that sounds like it has some interesting potential, the execution not only fails to deliver on this promise but also finds new ways to disappoint its audience even further.
The animation is hard to watch thanks to its use of clunky CGI for the monsters, not helped by the action being hard to follow. The characters, on top of being bland, follow the tropes you're familiar with if you've watched just about any anime, while their historical influences barely factor into their actions throughout. Meanwhile, the plot, which itself falls back to clichés pretty early on, is also just as dull.
While an anime about people fighting a pandemic during the era of COVID-19 should have been a timely, maybe even cathartic, experience, it instead turned into a mess of gargantuan proportions.
Dragon's Dogma
Dragon's Dogma might be the single most disappointing anime of 2020. The series is a co-production between Capcom and Sublimination, but it could not escape comparisons between the American animation studio Frederator's Castlevania adaptation. While hype was high for Dragon's Dogma early on, some fans were put off, again, by the stiff and clunky CGI animation even in its trailers, fearing the show would turn out like the disappointing Berserk anime from 2016-17. Instead, Dragon's Dogma turned out even worse than Berserk.
The anime deviates from the game's plot almost immediately, which would not be so bad if the plot it deviated into was a compelling, dark fantasy tale. The creators of Dragon's Dogma tried to craft a story that explored humanity's sin in a nihilistic, fantasy setting. Sadly, they failed. The writing fails to create interesting characters; the script is both over-dramatic and artificial. Its treatment of female characters is especially frustrating since all of them feel like props more than characters. This might be excusable with some decent action, but again, due to the awkward animation, the fights lack the impact they so desperately need.
Dragon's Dogma feels like a Dungeons & Dragons campaign held by an edgy kid. It is by far the most disappointing anime in 2020, and one of the weakest entries into Netflix's original anime catalog to date.