There are so many wonderful ways to screw up an anime, and in the course of my time watching anime I have seen a lot of those ways. From anime that are completely ruined by weird directional choices, to anime that completely misunderstand how to tackle a subject, to the anime that are just plain boring. But Ex-Arm is new to me, because this anime was destined for failure since these words were uttered out:

“What if we hired a director that has no experience in anime to make an anime?”

Yoshikatsu Kimura is a director who has directed several low-budget action movies. Most of these movies range from mediocre to outright boring, but all of them at least have some impressive action scenes. Before the airing of Ex-Arm, Yoshikatsu seemed confident that he could make an anime, despite having no experience in anime whatsoever. He was so confident in fact that in the trailer of Ex-Arm he “declared war on all Sci-Fi series”, one of the many declarations of war this season. That enormous amount of confidence would come back to haunt Yoshikatsu, because Ex-Arm has now become the laughing stock of not just the anime community, but the anime industry as well. But if we look past all the weird facts, tweets trashing the show and the memes, how bad is Ex-Arm actually?

Ex-Arm follows Akira Natsume, a highschool student who dies in a car crash in 2014. Jump 16 years later, and Akira awakes in a robot brain in a post-apocalyptic society. He is awakened by Minami and her robot AI companion Elma. Akira discovers that he is in fact an Ex-Arm, a machine type which grants the user sing its supernatural powers. The fact that Akira exists means he is a threat, but he and his new friends convince the Ex-Arm crew to let Akira join them to let Akira catch more Ex-Arms to prevent other criminals from using them.

For a story, it is honestly not that bad. The world is detailed well and every case the Ex-Arm crew tackles goes into a different part of this post-apocalyptic world. It has a nice sense of mystery and it has quite a lot of good ideas. But the story still has major problems. The powers of Akira and other ex-arms are often not that well explained, feeling like the ex-arms do either jack shit or are overpowered. The characters also don’t really help the story. Most of them are fine and the voice actors give waaay better performances then this anime deserves, but a lof of them feel very cookie cutter. The backstory they give don’t always make sense and the “secret” villain is especially annoying, even if his backstory is fine. Overall, the story aspect has interesting aspects, but it is boring most of the time. This isn’t even mentioning the fact that the story can be called uninspired in context of series like Ghost in the Shell. But honestly, it is really hard to focus on the story or the characters of this anime, because I am constantly distracted by what is in front of my eyes.

Ex-Arms' most infamous aspect is its animation, which is g o d a w f u l. This anime was made by a director who has never made anime before and. It. Shows. The anime is in CG, which is already a bad sign for many, but that doesn’t immediately make the anime look bad. Many anime have developed and improved CG in anime, like Houseki no Kuni and Beastars, but sadly Ex-Arm put CG in anime back to the stone age. The 3D models in Ex-Arm are terrible, with many only looking good from one angle. The animation on the models are laughable. When characters talk, they only move their jaw up and down. There is only one motion for talking, so when characters talk, they look like puppets. The environments aren’t incredibly empty and uninspired, but they are also 2D sometimes?

This brings me a major issue in the animation: Visual clash. This anime features 2D and 3D animation, which can look fine if it is highly stylised like Beastars, but in Ex-Arm it is not, so it ends up looking baffling. The 2D animation sucks by the way, barely any movement and the quality of lines range from fine to drawn on paint. This all isn’t even mentioning the action scenes, the weird visual effects, the inconsistent character animation, the fact that the anime hides moderately difficult things to animate off-screen or on-screen but with censoring, and the many, many bizarre animation mistakes. Ex-Arm is a visual cluster fuck that is hard to look away from.

Ex-Arm is an anime that perplexes me. Every episode there is some new animation fuck up I can’t believe. While its story is pretty boring, it is hard to focus on it with its entertainingly bad animation. I will admit that I had some fun with watching how bad this anime could get, but after this watch I will never watch it again. It is boring, uninspired, has one-dimensional characters and its animation is nothing short of baffing.

Ex-Arm is less of anime to be enjoyed, but an experience to learn from. It is a case study on what people can create when they get the budget but don’t have the necessary skills. It is a lesson on what you should not do while making an anime.
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It is an anime that deserves its reputation of one of the worst anime of all time.__