Back when it was first coming out, I made the poor (in quality terms) decision to watch Ex-Arm for my seasonal write-ups. And in all honesty, I was expecting it to be bad. The show had gotten some amount of infamy even before it properly debuted. What I wasn’t expecting was just how bad.
The show was so outright horrid, in mostly technical ways, that my wife and I couldn’t help but snark at it. Since that kind of thing is sometimes funny, starting with episode 2 we recorded these more or less live reactions and uploaded them, intending to get back to Episode 1. That… did not happen during the run of Ex-Arm. Can you blame us? The show is hard enough to watch once.
Well, we’ve done our miserable half hour to grant completeness to the audio commentary. Now if you want to watch Ex-Arm, maybe for the same reason people watch things like the Star Wars Holiday Special (which, having seen both, I honestly believe is a stronger production than Ex-Arm), you can have us along for the ride the whole way through. Isn’t that nice?
But, that’s not everything I took up a review slot to provide. Haruhi knows, revisiting Ex-Arm was enough unpleasantness for a week, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about the horror in a way and a place that can contain a reasonably detailed account.
Now, this isn’t going to be one of my typical spoiler reviews. I’ve already read Ex-Arm the riot act episode by episode, albeit without the benefit of hindsight. I’ll link those here and not summarize the plot unless I have to.
Ep1 Ep2 Ep3 Ep4 Ep5 Ep6 Ep7 Ep8 Ep9 Ep10 Ep11 Ep12
So with that out of the way, how does Ex-Arm look now, nearly four years in the rear-view mirror? Honestly, just as bad as the days when I had to watch it. In fact, there’s a solid case that Ex-Arm is the worst anime of all time and… I kind of agree that it seems pretty likely.
Now, when I talk about what things are considered to be, I usually use MyAnimeList as a major source. MAL at least represents some degree of consensus from the community, rather than one person’s take in particular. It’s not perfect in any sense; you’ve got a respondent bias, of course, and there seems to be a pretty big recency bias when it comes to particularly high or low scores. Also, there are marked skews even aside from the shows on which I have loudly and proudly disagreed with the takeaway – CG comes with a tax even when it looks good, while some franchises get bumps from the dedication of the in-group fans… but the statistics are still sometimes interesting.
When looking at the bottom of the score pile, it’s a strange place – filled with petrified OVAs that nobody watched or at least nobody admits to watching, lost media that according to one person should stay lost, three-minute arthouse productions, and other entries that don’t really have enough responses to form any sort of accurate mean number. But if you limit things to broadcast anime – full-length (or something like it) TV or ONA entries, the sorts of things that somebody really had to greenlight, where you would expect someone to try and where the material was bound to reach something of a wide audience, you can draw up a list of the worst. The bottom 50 start with an average score in the ballpark of 5.5 (exact numbers of course fluctuate as new ratings come in). Only 11 are below 5.0, and below 4.0? There are only three: two that exist in the neighborhood of 3.8, and Ex-Arm, at the very bottom, rocking a 2.8.
On a grading scale that mostly exists between 6.0 and 8.9, where more than ten thousand shows have been rated and hundredths of a point can mean vast gulfs of overall rank, Ex-Arm sits dead last. And it’s not even close. It’s essentially a whole point behind its nearest competition.
By this metric, I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic when I say that Ex-Arm is the worst anime of all time.
But, even though this is a case where I support the conclusion, I do still have to put an asterisk next to that. You see, Ex-Arm’s faults are primarily technical in nature. It would be pretty easy for a show to be more repulsive than Ex-Arm, just by digging into extreme and distressing subject matter. You can put images on screen and craft fictional scenarios that will hurt me more than Ex-Arm did. It’s not even that hard.
Instead, Ex-Arm is bad in the way that Plan 9 From Outer Space or The Room is bad. It’s so staggeringly incompetent as to be baffling, somehow getting nearly everything wrong, to the point where it’s hard to believe that it actually got made at all, rather than being consigned to development hell, mothballed, and forgotten. How did this manage to see release? And moreover, how did anyone turn out this result while presumably trying to actually put together a show that someone, somewhere would unironically want to see?
One element I think, rather than simple staggering idiocy (though I do believe that either idiocy or delusion was not in short supply) is a clear lack of skill and experience with anything to related to the production. At least, not on the people it needed to be on. My suspicions are somewhat confirmed in that while the five producers, three associate producers, and two “chief” producers of this thing (and that may be something of the problem) have plenty of other credits, even good ones, to their name… the director, “original creator”, character designer, and Series Composition man have none. They had no credits going in, and when your first work is Ex-Arm, it’s easy to see why they haven’t gotten any more. I have to assume somebody from that list was in charge of the script, or else it was a team effort from these guys.
This shows, and this is something I highlighted in my seasonal write-ups, in how the show evolves over its run. It doesn’t just stay the same kind of bad; in episode one they can’t (or can’t easily enough to do it unless it’s absolutely necessary) animate two things moving at the same time, like some kind of horrible hardware restriction was in place. By the time Alma has to fight the African warlord’s maid robot, they can move a little more fully, but they move with a painful slowness and lack of weight where you can practically feel the puppeteer sweating bullets trying to not get their strings tangled. In the show’s last fights, Ex-Arm might actually convince you that somebody tried to “animate a fight”. It still seems like the computer they rendered it on probably ran on punch cards, but at least after ten or so episodes the crew is at the point where they know how to use their tools about as well as somebody with a couple hours of youtube tutorials on Blender.
But it’s not just the purely mechanical aspects of the show where we get to witness this train wreck of a learning curve. If it were only the mechanical elements, Ex-Arm might not be forgiven, but it would be more forgivable. Hell, I ultimately gave a decent rating to Shikizakura – a show that clearly had no budget, took some time to get its feet under it, and that awkwardly used 2d animation to patch what they didn’t have the skill or budget to do in 3d. In those regards, a show not entirely dissimilar to Ex-Arm. But Shikizakura, in addition to having no budget, was a clear passion project in that the creators along the line clearly had passion for their material, wanted to deliver something good, and tried their hardest within the constraints of their production to do so, Those constraints do hold the show back, but they can’t kill the actual effort and skill that go into writing and directing one of these things.
Ex-Arm has approximately none of that. In addition to being even more tragic, even at the level of the raw still images before the inability to animate comes into view, Ex-Arm has inconsistent writing that can’t seem to rise above generic crud and directing that, while it follows a trajectory somewhat like the animation, feels like it cares even less about improving.
Let’s tackle the direction first. While later episodes try out more creative shots, I get the impression that the people involved in getting those shots were asking if they could do it, not if they should. Sometimes it happens to line up with what a scene might actually want or need, but then a stopped clock is right twice a day so I don’t know rightly how much of this involves actually coming to understand Cinema 101 and how much of it is all about seeing what somebody else did and attempting to replicate it.
I’ll also blame the direction for the trouble in the voice performances. Ex-Arm’s voice cast is pretty respectable. Police girl Minami’s VA also played Marika Kato, and she uses at least her B material. Android girl Alma’s VA also plays an eerie human doppelganger as Kate in Shadows’ House, but in Ex-Arm I think she realized where this show was going and decided to not try. Either the director never told her to do another take, or actually wanted the incredibly stilted delivery because, hey, the character is a robot, right? (She also voices Iwanaga in In/Spectre and Tsukasa in Tonikawa. She can act, and chooses not to here). But the crown jewel coprolite of Ex-Arm’s performances goes to Beta’s nasal baby talk. Replacing his lines with the nonsensical chittering of a BETA would be an upgrade. And the fellow who voices that beyond awful antagonist? Also delivers a great performance as Leonardo Watch in Blood Blockade Battlefront. Somebody had to tell him “I want this more whiny, more nasal, and with a more pronounced lisp. That is the sound of our primary antagonist.”
As to the writing, it is consistently annoying in one sense or another, yet inconsistent in how so. Scenes frequently cut in disjointed manners. Early on, it comes off as perhaps the least bad technical element. It’s not great, but nobody’s being asked to deliver any particularly heinous lines and you can mostly follow what’s going on, at least as far as you’re supposed to.
As the show continues, though, more of the problems stitching it together rear their ugly heads, with some very backwards reveals, a random episode that feels completely out of context, and then a propensity to kill as much screen time as possible delivering long-winded speeches that don’t line up with what we’ve seen… even, at times, the same topic, speaker, and target more than once in rapid succession. Look, in your average game of Dungeons & Dragons, when a player botches a persuasion check, even most novices will typically have the grace to try a different angle for their next check rather than just rolling again the next round on the same dang thing! That’s not to say you can’t try your friendship or epiphany speech more than once, but typically something with meat has to happen between attempts to change the dynamic.
Unlike choices in visual and sound, where the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of the Ex-Arm production team, I don’t know exactly how much of this can be blamed on the screenwriters. Unlike Shikizakura, which had the guts to at least be an original anime, Ex-Arm technically has a manga source to pillage. Manga is often one of the easiest things to adapt into anime, with many shows recreating their source material panel-to-shot and even word-for-word. To do a really good adaptation you have to do more than that, but suffice to say that being extremely true to the source is an option.
I really, dearly hope that Ex-Arm the manga is being badly misrepresented by Ex-Arm the show. The idea that a storyline as badly botched as the one here, built from acts as lame as the ones here which are themselves constructed from scenes as poorly delivered as the ones here… the idea that something like that could shamble to completion rather than cancellation and get green-lit for an adaptation even by a studio with no money and no experience making anime is just too insane to bear. I’d sooner believe that there was some sort of money laundering scheme involved than that anything we see in Ex-Arm the anime was faithfully translated from a source of similar quality with the intent to make something good.
Of course, while extremely faithful adaptations happen, so do incredibly botched ones. I’ve seen truly great source material turned into mediocre dreck for an anime outing, so for the manga of Ex-Arm there’s at least hope.
On the whole, the sense I at least get off of Ex-Arm’s production is that someone, probably many someones, looked at a show and thought “I can do that. How hard could it possibly be?” and then they decided to leap right in to creating Ex-Arm without actually addressing what the answer to that question might be. They never did a second take on anything, never sent a scene back for revisions, because what they had done, little and poorly, felt great and wonderful to them. The only exception might be episode 1, which seems a little more competent than the other sequences that were recut for the opening and thus were clearly put together before the first one aired, suggesting it might have gotten an actual polish pass, though I shudder at the thought that such a thing counted as polished. I think most of us have the experience, learning a new skill or hobby, where achieving something that’s vaguely success-shaped feels amazing, only to realize later on once more skills have been acquired that the early effort was at best basic, and possibly deeply flawed. How did Ex-Arm get to screen? It scaled the ultimate peak of confidence that is the Dunning-Kruger effect.
And hell, that happens to everyone. My oldest attempts at most of my hobbies are objectively poor even if they seemed so good to me back when. Even my earliest reviews for this blog, I hadn’t really found my voice for, nor a perfect sense of where I wanted my metrics to be. I’ve toyed with going back to shows like Noein or Dusk Maiden of Amnesia and completely revising those reviews… but who knows how I’ll feel in another five years about the reviews I’m writing now? There’s a degree to which letting the old reviews stand is more honest as well. Perhaps the next time the anniversary of the blog rolls around I’ll do a round-up of the anime I found most recommendable, most surprising, most memorable, and most heinous. And you can be sure Ex-Arm will get a mention in the last category.
Most of us, however, don’t put our real worst Dunning-Kruger era efforts in front of tens of thousands of viewers – maybe even hundreds of thousands or millions – the world over. I may look back with some regret on my earliest reviews, I may even have things I would do differently if I tried to tackle my first published book today, but I didn’t try to sell the world on the crappy book reports and stories I wrote in ninth grade that seemed oh-so-brilliant to my teenage self. Ex-Arm doesn’t have a study, doesn’t have a foundation. It’s the middle school tier offering that professionals backed.
And that’s my assessment of the technical and creative side of Ex-Arm, my attempt to decipher from public information the form, truth, and reason of the worst anime of all time as though that would allow a certain medicine seller to slay the beast. But what about the experience of watching Ex-Arm?
In all honesty, the price you’ll pay to be able to say that you have watched the worst anime of all time is less than one might expect. Don’t get me wrong, there’s no unironic enjoyment to be had from this show. And I’m not usually a person to go in for “So Bad It’s Good” material, but in the staggering failure of Ex-Arm, it does seem like the kind of thing you could have fun at the expense of. Bring a friend! Bring my dumb audio commentaries! But if you know what you’re getting into, that you’re watching this because it’s the worst anime of all time and you want the cred for having watched it? You just might survive.
As a reviewer, I don’t get to watch anime just for pleasure any more. I have to watch bad things, things that I know I’m not going to like, because this is a job. And many of those have hurt me more than Ex-Arm ever managed. In a way, it’s so inept that it can’t even be really harmful the way Koi Koi 7 or a certain show that will remain unnamed taxed my stomach and my sanity. Hell, the only show I’ve actually bailed on (if not the one I most should have bailed on) is Don’t Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro, and to say that the one episode I watched of that had worlds of quality up on Ex-Arm would be an understatement.
This becomes the one speck of light that comes with looking back on Ex-Arm, the one way in which it might bring a smile to anyone’s face: when it’s done, it leaves, having taken nothing from you but the time you willingly gave it.
In that way, this is once again similar to a Plan 9 or Star Wars Holiday Special sort of scenario, and thus I sort of crown Ex-Arm as an academic and constructive worst, rather than a subjective most awful.
All the same, I come to bury Ex-Arm. To once and for all put this thing behind me, knowing that the most happiness it can cause is in being gone. I’m sure there will be other terrible shows, and that I’ll have to watch those that come after as well as those that have gone before. But with this, Ex-Arm at least can be put to bed and consigned to its place in Anime history.