I think I've reached the holy grail of terrible anime. This is Maze.
In a fantasy world full of war and conflict, the Jaina Holy Group have nearly taken over the world with only Princess Mill left to capture, but a mysterious girl named Maze appears out of nowhere, possessing powers known as Phantom Light power, she reluctantly becomes the world's last hope for victory against Jaina using Dulga, a giant organic mecha to stop them, but there is more to Maze than you might think as Maze suddenly changes gender at night to a more aggressive, wild male persona.
Where to start? I don't exaggerate when I say this is the holy grail of terrible anime, in fact I say this is the worst 90s anime period.
It's the type of bad where every decision that was made caused you severe whiplash in terms of "Wait WHAT?!"
The story is horribly paced and constantly backs itself into a corner with it's own narrative only to pull a reset button just to escape.
The few characters that are good are under used and suffer for it.
Female Maze is an insufferable protagonist who some how acts and dresses like Shinji Ikari.
The few times male Maze gets screen time he wastes it either being a pervert or repeating his lines over and over.
Mill is a clingy little bitch whose only mode is cheerfully annoying.
The need to make sex jokes every chance they got was distracting and don't get me started on Episode 26.
The Japanese had so little faith in it, the west only got the edited version of the tv series and the OVA with the unedited version on vhs and laserdisc only, so no movie or episode 26 as that was laserdisc only and episode 26 was also banned from broadcast a full two years before Excel Saga did it.
Then there's the dub which is incompetent in every way; no emotion in dramatic scenes, female Maze under sells her performance, dub mistakes are frequent, the fairy switches between high voiced to helium voiced every other scene, another voice actor was changed halfway which only made the character sound worse, Mill is painful to listen to, male Maze is trying way to hard and to top it all off they forget to add dialogue in some scenes HOW DO YOU DO THAT?
After all that, is there anything I like? The opening music and the other main party members Rapier, Aster, Woll, Solude and Randy despite the fact that they are horribly underused and Randy sounds like she snorted helium. I've also seen worst villains, Chic and Gorgeous have their good moments.
Final Verdict: if you can get over some of the creepier in context moments I'd watch the OVA, that is passable. The tv series on the other hand is an epic train wreck that manages every scene to have something wrong with it. It's every single bad 90s anime trope wrapped into one anime, sure there are anime that are way worst than Maze, but the badness in this is so bad that it's almost artistic in it's delivery.
