After a few episodes, anime often gets out of breath. Why is that? Is that just a feeling? Or do anime often get worse towards the end?
It’s a prejudice, sometimes a meme, and yet there’s often a core of truth behind it. While the first episodes of a new anime are often exciting, the quality feels like it decreases as the season progresses. But is that really just a feeling? Or is there a core of objective truth behind it?
A lot of anime will delight you from start to finish. Recently praised series such as Demon Slayer, Heavenly Delusion or Violet Evergarden have consistently high quality across all episodes.
An indisputable fact, however, is that the quality of some series decreases towards the end. This is not only “felt”, but can often be determined by examples.
Reasons for a worse ending
The artists and animators are often under massive time pressure and simply cannot deliver the episodes in the targeted quality by the broadcast date. In such cases, a makeshift “recap” episode is inserted or other tricks are used:
Long flashback scenes where characters reminisce. Especially when these scenes are “unnecessarily” long and not just 1-2 sentences, this is often an indication.
Backgrounds are oversimplified or lack detail. This is especially noticeable when this was not the case before.
It can also be particularly clumsy if the characters are simply not shown during a dialogue. In the last spring season of 2023, this was the case with “I Got a Cheat Skill in Another World” in Episode 12. There, during a long, agitated dialogue, what you saw was simply a slow camera pan across backgrounds. Actual characters were missing, even though the dialogues showed that things were getting a bit heated.
Admittedly, such defective scenes are often corrected afterwards, but in the version that was first broadcast, this is contained negatively for the time being.
Another reason may be that the anime differs from the manga. It is of course very subjective whether that is really “better” or “worse”. This especially occurs when the anime has already “overtaken” the manga, and this can lead to scenes that are seen as unworthy or unthought out. Anyone who watched the final season of Game of Thrones will be familiar with the phenomenon – it’s the same with anime. The original bleach had to deviate a bit from the manga because the manga wasn’t even finished yet.
There are many reasons why an anime gets worse towards the end – often it’s more than just a feeling.
If you want some anime that is just good from start to finish, dive into these fantasy worlds.