The Biggest Disappointments of Spring 2025 Anime, Part I

We don’t always come across only amazing works, and the spring of 2025 was a huge example of that. There was a lot of good stuff, of course, but what stuck with me the most were the disappointments. You know when you start an anime with high expectations, or at least with the hope of finding a fun surprise, and end up thinking, “Seriously, was that it?” Yeah, I lived through that several times this season.

So I decided to turn that frustration into text.

Here I’ll talk about the worst anime of the spring 2025 season, at least in my view. I don’t want to trash-talk just for the sake of it, but to share with you the feeling of someone who followed these titles week after week and saw them waste the chance to be, at the very least, interesting. To avoid making this too long at once, I split it into two parts. This first one will cover four series that, unfortunately, ended up on the blacklist.

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COMPASS 2.0 ANIMATION PROJECT

I’ll start with COMPASS2.0 ANIMATION PROJECT, an anime I thought had everything to work for me. I really like Fate/stay night, I enjoy .hack, and when I saw the concept I thought it could be something along those lines. But the result was the opposite.

An anime without soul, without charm, and without anything that makes it remotely memorable.

The anime is an adaptation of a 3v3 mobile battle game, but since that game isn’t even officially available in English, I can’t judge whether it was faithful. What I can judge is the experience as a standalone series. And honestly, it was boring. It feels like they grabbed a bunch of battle anime clichés, threw them into a transparent layer with 25% opacity, and stacked it all up. The result is a beige blend without personality, without impact, without emotion.

Even the protagonists, Jin and 13, who should have been the backbone of the narrative, fail to show any charisma.

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The rest of the cast is completely forgettable. Usually, in these gacha-based anime, at least the side characters are fun enough to make you sympathize with them or even spend money on them in the game. Here there’s none of that. It’s like watching a long, poorly made commercial for a product you don’t even want to buy.

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The Shiunji Family Children

Now let’s move on to The Shiunji Family Children. This anime had the potential to at least be controversial and spark discussions.

After all, it came from the same author as Rent-A-Girlfriend and promised to explore a delicate theme:

What happens when siblings discover they’re not actually related by blood? But the result ended up being a mess that doesn’t know what it wants to be. Half the time it seemed like the series wanted to seriously address emotional and social issues: confusion between love and admiration, the need to redefine boundaries, the psychological impact of such a revelation. That was fine I was willing to go along with it. But then, out of nowhere, the other half of the anime was just cheap harem clichés of girls changing clothes, forced dates that turn romantic, and comedy situations that quickly slipped into fanservice.

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And the worst part isn’t even using that kind of resource, because fanservice is part of the industry.

The problem is the confusing message it sends. At one moment, the anime seems to say “look how problematic this is,” and in the next it plays a romantic soundtrack to reinforce exactly what it had just said was wrong. It creates a weird conflict: am I supposed to root for the protagonist to fall in love with one of his sisters or find that repulsive?

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Yandere Dark Elf

This one felt almost like a personal offense. When they announced Yandere Dark Elf, I was excited.

After all, I like both yandere characters and dark elves.

The idea of combining all that in an anime that sounded trashy but fun seemed great. But what we actually got was a lukewarm anime, lacking courage, and without any of the qualities that could have made it a guilty pleasure.

The main character, Mariabell, was supposed to be the yandere driving the plot. But she barely qualifies as a yandere. At most, she’s a clingy, slightly aggressive girlfriend, but nothing that conveys the obsession or madness that defines that archetype. The protagonist Hinata never seems truly threatened, just a little intimidated.

This turns something that should have been intense and disturbing into… cute. And seriously, no one wants an anime called Yandere Dark Elf to be cute.

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Even in the spicier scenes, the anime fails. The animation is weak, the directing lacks creativity, and the version that landed on HIDIVE was censored way too much, to the point of cutting not only images but entire dialogues.

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Go! Go! Loser Ranger! Season 2

Finally, in this first part, I want to talk about Go! Go! Loser Ranger! Season 2. This was a case of progressive disappointment. The first season, while not perfect, still had its charm, especially in how it played with super sentai conventions. The second season even started promising, with the time loop arc, but everything soon fell apart.

The biggest problem was the chaotic pacing. The story tried to cram in revelation after revelation without giving anything room to breathe. The “Come and Join the Monsters!” arc was the most glaring example: it felt like every five minutes there was a twist, but none of them had any impact because there was no build-up. Things moved so fast I felt more confused than excited.

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On top of that, the animation quality dropped a lot compared to the previous season. Characters were off-model, the action scenes lost their shine, and even the visual style which had been a strong point became inconsistent. I even tried to hold onto the openings and endings, which remain creative, but not even that was enough to save it.

BAD...

Wrapping up Part 1

So that’s it these were the first four names on my list of the worst anime of spring 2025. Each one, in its own way, managed to disappoint me a lot. Some for sheer lack of identity, others for not knowing what they wanted to be, and others simply for delivering nothing but boredom.

That’s all for today.

I want to hear from you did anyone else watch these anime? Did you feel the same way, or do you think I was too harsh?