Review of Katanagatari

I will try my best to be as spoiler-free as possible, but there will be some spoiler-ish content in this review. I typically try and be as fair as possible when watching anime; I try and give praise for interesting or unique things an anime does (or on a deeper level look at the questions and answers an anime raises on topics like society issues, the human condition, etc.). With that being said - Katanagatari is without a doubt the worst anime I have ever seen and will ever see, and it is the only anime I will ever bother to give an x/10 rating to.I only scored it a 1/10 because it wasn't possible to give it a 0/10.

You might be asking yourself - "This anime is rated over an 8/10 overall on MAL; how on Earth can it be as bad as this guy is saying?!" I will answer that as simply as possible... The ending.

The ending of this anime is bar none the worst ending I have ever seen and will almost certainly ever see. It is the only anime I've ever felt regret from watching - as the roughly 10 hours invested into this anime is time that I'll never get back unfortunately.

Now when I say that the ending is bad, I don't mean it's like Death Note. Death Note's ending was not great, and compared to the rest of the anime was a bit of a let down... But Katanagatari's ending is so infuriatingly bad that it makes Death Note look like an S tier masterpiece.

If the ending was "just" bad - I'd likely still give this anime a 7/10 - as the animation is incredibly unique and very beautiful. The sound is pretty great too with some pretty good songs overall. The characters outside of the ending are all pretty great as is the story. Overall excluding the ending this is definitely worthy of the 8.0+/10 that this anime has.

Now again I assume you're telling yourself "Man the ending can't be THAT bad - surely this guy is exaggerating!" I really REALLY wish I was because up until the ending I thoroughly enjoyed this anime. Then the ending came and it just went completely against everything else the story had built up to in that point. It's execution was bad, it made literally negative sense, and then somehow it got even worse as it continued. Then to add insult to injury the actual "final" part of the ending (like the 'final scene') was just the worst possible outcome and made absolutely no sense at all and made it feel like the entire journey you went through watching the first 10 episodes mean absolutely nothing at all.

I cannot stress enough that you should just avoid watching this all together. This anime is just a huge waste of time and not even a good waste of time at that. You can probably fit almost 3 other series into the time span you'd spend watching this and I fully suggest you doing so.