Users of my MyAnimeList can be very generous with their scores for individual anime titles. Perhaps because it’s possible to give any specific title a rating out of 10, anything below a 6 or even 7 can be seen as ranking something poorly as opposed to simply “above average.” This means that many shows, even when they fail to impress mainstream Western audiences, don’t rank particularly low on the site in the grand scheme of things.
This also makes something like 2021’s Ex-Arm -- as of this writing, the single lowest-ranked televised anime series on MAL -- a major standout. With a current rating of 2.95, Ex-Arm has earned unquestionably terrible reviews across the board. But is Ex-Arm really that bad, or was it simply the target of bad ratings due to being an all-CG affair, which some anime fans tend to dislike for that fact alone?
Granted, the animation is the very first aspect of Ex-Arm that any viewer, whether they’re an anime veteran or someone newer to the medium, will notice, even before any details whatsoever about the plot have time to emerge. To put it as simply as possible, it’s bad. Not simply below average, nor even poorly animated at certain times or in certain ways. Objectively speaking, Ex-Arm looks less like a professional production that was given the green light to air on national television and more like a student project gone horribly wrong.
To be clear, this is not a matter of being an all-CG production. As has been proven plenty of times in the past, such anime titles are capable of telling good stories and gaining mainstream popularity -- recent years have seen the likes of Ajin, Knights of Sidonia, Land of the Lustrous, Beastars, this year’s Night Head 2041 and the currently airing Blade Runner: Black Lotus, all of which look average at worst and at best amazing, despite tending toward the action-heavy. This is not the case with Ex-Arm -- and the problems with its visuals don’t stop at its awkwardly choppy, PowerPoint-like animation amid its janky action shots.
The artwork as a whole is just as singularly dreadful. The characters’ unnaturally wide-eyed, frozen expressions make them look like possessed dolls that are about to star in an off-brand Five Nights at Freddy's. Their faces rarely change much, if at all, regardless of the emotion reflected in their voices, and their mouths seem to open and close almost at random, with little to no bearing on their actual speech. Moreover, because the anime is so littered with still screens, the painfully plain backgrounds become even more obvious; the small amounts of detail here and there are rendered more or less unnoticeable thanks to the flat, one-dimensional blocks of color.
Nonetheless, it’s important to look beyond mere appearances (however difficult that may be in this particular case). After all, artwork and animation should ideally make up roughly only half of the appeal of an anime -- what about aspects such as scripting, pacing, voice acting and music? Unfortunately, Ex-Arm doesn’t do much to endear itself to audiences in these regards either, although it would be fair to say that the show doesn’t fail as spectacularly here as it does with its visuals.
This is perhaps part of the problem. If the rest of the production was as horrific as its appearance, Ex-Arm may have gone on to become something of a cult classic in its own way, circling all the way around to “so bad it’s good” territory. Unfortunately, outside of its looks, the anime could reasonably be said to be mostly entirely average. The story begins in media res, which should work to draw the viewer immediately in. However, this effort is rendered pointless thanks to the show’s bland and mildly dislikable characters and their somewhat over-the-top line delivery.
This is a shame given the story’s potential, which begins when high school student Natsume Akira is hit by a truck and awakens not in the year 2014 but in 2030. At some point in his 16-year-long coma, his brain has been removed from his body and transferred into a device called an EX-ARM. Recovered by police officer Uezono Minami and her android partner Alma, Akira becomes part of the EX-ARM Countermeasure Prevention Team – a formal division that fights against those who control other EX-ARMs for their own nefarious purposes.
To be sure, this is not the most unique of plots; anime has long since featured sci-fi stories starring high-tech robots and other devices controlled by humans, sentient androids, and people who wake up after accidental or induced comas to vastly different settings than expected. Still, what lets Ex-Arm down isn’t its premise, which is perfectly serviceable, but rather its execution. The series embraces a largely “tell, don’t show” mode of storytelling that fails to make much of an impression other than a resounding “meh,” with chunks of exposition sandwiched between lackluster action scenes.
In addition, the writing and general direction is riddled with about as many cliches and moments of pointless fan service as there are static frames. This means that although there’s nothing wrong with the story in and of itself, nor even with the pacing with which it’s told, it isn’t given any chance to showcase what it could have been capable of. Again, the source material seems entertaining enough, so it’s hard not to point to this as being a failure on the part of the adaptation rather than of the manga on which it’s based.
Sound-wise, the music is just as forgettable as the show’s characters. In fact, there’s relatively little background music at all, while the OP and ED tracks don’t do much beyond existing as a vehicle with which to plaster on screen, bewilderingly, the character designs as though they’re masterpieces of the medium. It’s easy to tell that the main cast is at least giving the project their best shot, but the mostly decent voice acting simply isn’t enough to save the show’s other glaring faults.
In short, Ex-Arm probably can’t be said to be literally the worst televised anime series of all time, if only because the core material isn’t awful enough to warrant being called offensive. However, it’s also difficult to defend most of its attributes -- and all too easy to see why viewers are so eager to condemn it. An argument could be made that there are worse titles out there, but Ex-Arm will go down in infamy for good reason.