It's double list time, and we kick off with a best and worst villains in an anime, let me clarify that this is based on all villains within an anime not just one individual, with that out the way lets begin.
Dishonorable Mentions
Black Butler: Alois Trancey is one of the worst characters ever made but one bad villain isn't enough to put a whole series on this list, especially when he isn't canon.
Negima: Fate Averruncus was overused but really the show didn't have enough villains to justify it being listed.
Shaman King: Hao Asakura is a scary guy but I find him annoying, again one villain isn't enough for this list.
10. Trigun
My issues with Trigun's villains come from the fact that the early ones don't live up to the standard the series set out. Trigun is an excellent series and it should really grab you straight away and the first few episode villains fail to do that.
9. Digimon
Digimon has a problem with originality, the villains are either obviously dark looking devils or goofing comedy villains such as Elvis impersonator Etemon. The sad thing is, Digimon can do terrifying the villains, it's just that the creative team don't seem to use them often and their really good ones like Machinedramon don't last five minutes.
8. Dragonball
The franchise has a history of some goofy looking villains, the picture of Majin Buu says it all, but the real problem with Dragonball's villains from the original to GT is that older villains are made to look redundant very quickly; considering how terrifying many of them were built up to be only for them to be utterly humiliated later on is a very sad way to go, even Broly gets it bad and he's utterly terrifying.
7. Bleach
Bleach has some utterly terrible villains, couple of stand out ones include a professional wrestler and "Mr Self Insert Character" such a horrific standard for a series that started with some great characters only to fall from grace so horribly.
6. Naruto
Saying that Naruto isn't any better, for a while now, especially recently, they've made the villains completely boring, I can't pick out anything from Madara, Obito or Kaguya that I actually enjoyed, what's worst is that these are main villains, I'm not even going to begin on the filler ones.
5. Fairy Tail
I love Fairy Tail but my god are some of their villains really bad, I remember finishing Edolas arc thinking "There's a villain called Sugarboy?" other than the Oracion Seis, female villains and big name villains, the rest are really bad and stops me naming Fairy Tail best anime.
4. Panty & Stocking
In a series this colorful and crazy, you stick with complete opposites to the main cast, you kind of expect a series named Panty & Stocking to have a bit more too it than that but you'd be quite shocked to find that under it's anarchic sense of humor it's very grounded.
3. Attack on Titan
I can't help but laugh at the Titans these days, they look so goofy. A series with such shocking imagery fails to have ever lasting impact when another episode depicts the same creatures looking stupid. I remember one Titan running to the Benny Hill theme music in one AMV.
2. G Gundam
In a series so used to playing stereotypes, it can't make a decent villain other than Master Asia who you could argue isn't a full villain. The Devil Gundam doesn't look any better and side villains such as Gentle Chapman, Michelo Chariot & Prime Minister Wong can be best described as an aging drug addict, a rejected Street Fighter II character and an arrogant movie star respectively. Seriously this is billed as a fighting anime, you can do better than this Gundam.
1. Needless
Take your pick from these villains, either clones of Adam Blade or moe girls. Any other choices are quickly killed off. Again this series is crazy yet this is the best you can do with villains? Clones and little moe girls? My God do you lower the standards in anime Needless.
I’ve been wanting to review this for a while and I think now is the right time for it, especially seeing as it was brought up recently in a top ten list. So now to review the anarchy series that is Needless.
Needless starts off with a Nuclear war that takes out part of Tokyo, leaving just a barren land simply known as the Black Spot which is ruled by a powerful multinational corporation led by its insane director Adam Arclight. A number of rebels want him dead and that’s where the story begins. We cut to a kid named Cruz who manages to escape thanks to his sister playing the noble sacrifice, who then finds a Kamina-esque priest named Adam Blade & his meta-morphing sidekick Eve, who’s entire running joke is coming up with stupid names for people because she can’t be bothered to remember anyone’s name except Adam Blade’s.
Adam & Eve are Needless, beings who have specific superpowers; Eve can meta-morph into anyone and change parts of her body while Adam Blade we find out can learn any Needless power by analyzing his opponent. Cruz can’t do anything and quickly becomes annoying.
We are joined by a scientist named Gido who also can’t do anything and spends most of the series stating the bloody obvious.
Two other characters who join team Blade are Teruyama who names all his attacks after the Hiroshima bomb while the other character Disc is an android built with every technical upgrade possible and knows the Black Spot inside out.
One thing that you will understand very quickly is how much of a mess this series is, poorly structured story, randomly placed gags, shameless fanservice to uncomfortable levels, stupidly long drawn out battles and random shifts in art where you wonder if the artists were ill that week when they made the episode.
That’s a lot of bad things right off the bat, but it’s excused when you consider that Needless is meant to be like that and anything less than a mess would seem out of place.
If there are major flaws in Needless, there are just as many to name.
For one, Cruz is established as the main character fairly quick and in a series where you essentially have a cast of X-Men, Cruz is the most pathetic character ever made which gets worst when he essentially takes up 90% of the screen time and is made so essential to the plot that the stronger better made characters are made worst because of it. They even felt the need to take out Adam Blade & Eve for a few episodes despite the fact they are the main characters, equally villains such as Saten & Arclight don’t even get that much screen time despite the fact that they drive the plot.
Equally Mr Obvious, Gido gets far too many spoken lines as well, and don’t get me started on how tenacious the girl’s squad is. They were supposed to be a mid-boss battle but fought Adam Blade & co more times than the actual main villains. Finally a few late entry characters get pushed to the back as quickly as they were introduced.
But the worst element of this series is the god awful dub.
I brought this up briefly in my top 10 worst dub voice acting list and the main fact of it is that there was no excuse in getting this wrong on a series with Excel Saga level madness.
At times there were scenes where certain scripts were written poorly, such as when Arclight announced that he was god without even trying to make an effort in his voice and this is the guy who previously played Genjo Sanzo; other times Cruz is over acting to the point of screeching backed up by a few scenes of wasted redundant dialogue, this affects a number of other side characters as well or in the case of Solva, not acting enough.
Only a couple of voices standout; Adam Blade which should be a given, Disc despite sprouting the obvious all the time she’s at least easy on the ears & Kuchinashi who is a mute and only speaks two words. I know for a fact that there are far worst dubs & far worst acting but the thing that made this number one on that list was the fact that all the actors chosen for Needless are veterans within the industry and the ADR Director has equal talent in dubs.
Maybe I should have taken the warnings the DVD gave me. In the UK release of Needless, the disc is defaulted to subtitles and you have to select the dub manually while the episode is running otherwise you get no sound. Comes to something when the DVD is telling me the dub sucks.
Final Verdict: If you want a testosterone heavy show with mindless structure and a lack of care for the rules of the world then watch Gurren Lagann. (Even though Needless predates Gurren Lagann) The only way you can watch this series is to stop thinking and enjoy the madness on screen; the mistake I made was watching this series and questioning why certain things happen.
Madness cannot be appreciated when you question why it’s there.
After a small dose of writer’s block I’m back with a really juicy top ten, in fact I have a double feature this time with the top ten best & worst dub voice acting.
Before I begin these top ten lists are a judgement of voice acting & scripting not the full dub itself so I cannot use cuts & edits as an argument for poor dubbing nor can I use the excuse of the anime being bad. One of my dishonorable mentions will sum it up better. So now I start with the list of the ten worst dub voice acting.
Our voices shatter your speakers
Dishonorable Mentions
One Piece (4Kids): As bad as the dub was, most of the criticism aimed at the 4Kids One Piece dub was to do with the horrific cuts & editing, when your left without cuts the actors aren’t that bad at voicing the characters, and I’m probably the only person in the world who thinks a Brooklyn accent suits Sanji.
The Wallflower: This series doesn’t have a volume button, everyone shouts louder than a Dora the Explorer episode, but a great script managed to save it.
Virtua Fighter: Dub acting was pretty bad but then again so was the anime and I cannot use bad anime as an excuse.
10. Wedding Peach
Wedding Peach needed some tender loving care and it never got it, one decent lead voice but the other two leads don’t back it up well, especially Angel Daisy where she is a tough bruiser type girl with the voice of Velma on laughing gas; the script isn’t any better with inserted Americanisms that so plagued early ADV dubs.
9. Yumeria
A series where one word is mentioned so many times that the impact is lost before the series even begins. The trailer for Yumeria never helped them to begin with, it was like Love Hina but Keitaro is being punched every minute of the series rather than every ten minutes.
8. Sister Princess
The voices of the numerous female characters are creepy and in a series where it is such a big plot point to have an extended harem, I don’t feel comfortable watching it.
7. Disgaea
The anime had some of the most irritating voices I’ve ever heard. Now I don’t know how significant the verbal tic “Dood” is supposed to be in the franchise but I do know that I don’t want to hear it ever again.
6. Yu-Gi-Oh Zexal
I only watched two episodes of this series and I wanted to rip out my ears. Was the fallout with 4Kids so bad that they felt the need to punish us with such a horrible dub of Zexal? Seriously I used to give the 4Kids voices free passes because despite working for a company that destroys the integrity of anime, it was never the fault of the voice actors, they were just doing their job but even they must of thought that the acting they were doing in Zexal was terrible.
5. Jubei-Chan
I believe I mentioned this one in my review; Jubei-Chan has some of the most emotionless voice acting I’ve ever heard, the amount of scenes I went through which needed some emotion was many and only once did they get it right. It also felt as though all the actors were exhausting themselves with the long winded explanations they had to give.
4. Goldenboy
This is one of my favorite anime of all time but the dub is one big mistake, a character eager to learn in every job he does, who is also very intelligent, a bit of a pervert as well, but big-hearted and yet they give him the stupidest voice in dubbing history. To further emphasize this, his original voice in the Japanese is brilliant.
3. Street Fighter II Victory
This anime had two dub attempts to get it right and failed them both. The scripting is a mess, both voice casts were two dimensional in their performances and even those who did get it right never stayed any longer than one episode. I’ll say again, two attempts!
2. Any Anime ADR Directed or ADR Written by Gary Dehan
ADR stands for Automated Dialogue Replacement, and it’s up to the ADR Director to make sure the dubbing goes smoothly without any problems. Gary Dehan worked in the early ADV Films era and he lent his talents to a number of their earliest dubs.
But his list of work is the likes of the Tekken Movie, the Sonic Movie, Sakura Wars TV, Sakura Diaries, Legend of Crystania, City Hunter, Shuten Doji, Maps, Variable Geo & Ninja Resurrection and a few low grade anime; all of which are quite bad dubs and some are notoriously bad anime as well but even better shows like Queen Emeraldas & 801 T.T.S Airbats didn’t really do very well either. The problem is the casting wasn’t particularly good, the voice acting in many of them were either two dimensional or emotionless. ADV Films were lucky, they had strong links to Evangelion to keep them afloat but poor runs with low grade anime came back to bite them when they went down.
1. Needless
But Needless is the worst dub I’ve ever had the displeasure of listening to, the script writing was awful, the dialogue was vomit inducing and these are well known professional dub actors as well, with a full list of decent credits among them, a lot of them were also ADVFilm veterans around at their prime and many of the others are current first choice Funimation employees. There are only three decent voices in the whole series. Adam Blade was good, Disc was very well done & Kuchinashi who is a mute and only says two words in the entire series. It comes to something when a mute is the best character in the dub; the rest are either lazy, try too hard, don’t try enough, utterly irritating or plagued by a horrible script.
Not even some of the worst anime in existence can claim to have a worst dub than Needless.
This feature covers certain topics too small to make into a full post, the name "Endless Wardrobe" refers to my own wardrobe that housed my entire collection of anime dvds before I moved them under the bed and is now a place for videos I only keep because there is nothing to replace them with, so here begins the Endless Wardrobe.
Needless did it first
Anyone who watched the Needless anime the first time around complained about the apparent blatant ripoff of Gurren Lagann, however the Needless manga predates anything Gurren Lagann related and you'll find that Gurren Lagann ripped off Needless' unique designs. Saying that Gurren Lagann is still better.
Wrath of Tobias
Ash Ketchum has had his fair share of defeats in Pokemon Leagues over the years but by far the most controversial loss was against silver haired Gary-Stu character Tobias near the end of the Sinnoh League. He had largely no background, very little characterization and has a team of Legendary Pokemon. Even after Darkrai is finally defeated he pulls out a friggin Latios. It's unclear whether the rest of his team were legendary Pokemon or not but the point is it ruined what was a really good series but the gamers are as much to blame for this as well. Tobias represents what a lot of Pokemon Trainers get to in the games long after finishing, beating everyone with a group of legendaries and standing above all else looking down on the region with a troll like smile.
I'm guilty of this as well, especially in the first few games, I'm so confident in certain Pokemon that I get this happen when they lose.
Goku & God
Anyone still keeping up with the Dragonballz franchise is familiar with the new anime film that comes out next week in Japan in which Goku battles the god of destruction. Everyone should know the Dragonballz story by now but at this point I can't believe how much it still goes on nearly 20 years after the anime finished, not to mention how embarrassing the stories have got.
Within the last few years, Vegeta has a brother, Bardock is thrown back in time where he is actually the legendary super saiyan, a live action film happened.........And now to make sure trolls always win "Who'd win fantasy battles" argument, Goku now fights and will surely defeat a god. Toriyama please kill this franchise.
Only three today, may have more another time.
