Entertainment
Fans Waited Years For The Worst Television Season In History To Rip Out Their Hearts
By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
There’s nothing worse for fans than waiting, years, nearly a decade in some cases, only for the series that you love to return, finally, except that something is off. It could be the writing, it could be the editing, the performances, there’s something that isn’t quite as good as it used to be.
Anime fans have been waiting for One-Punch Man Season 3 for over five years, and while it hasn’t finished yet, it’s safe to say that it’s not a slight decrease in quality from Season 2; it’s the single worst season of anime in history.
One-Punch Man Season 1 Is One Of The Greatest Anime Of All Time
One-Punch Man Season 1 aired in 2015, a decade ago, and immediately received praise for the incredible animation, inventive fight scenes, and its incredible lead, Saitama, the bored superhero who hopes that one day someone will give him a fight. Saitama is at least a genuinely good guy who goes so far as to make himself look bad in order to make the other heroes look good and not like complete weaklings next to his incredible power. It was a smash hit and is still, years later, one of the best-looking seasons of any anime.
The second season, released in 2019, was a step down in quality, but the story was still capturing new fans, and Garou the Human Monster was everything he should have been from the original manga. One-Punch Man’s second outing didn’t reach the heights of the first, but it was fun and filled with worldbuilding that should have paid off with the “Monster Association Arc” and started down the path towards the climactic Saitama vs. Orochi battle. Years later, fans now wish that the series had ended right here, not even adapting half the manga would be preferable to what’s happening right now.
Season 3 Uses Every Cheap Budget Trick In The Book
Bandai Namco, the company that owns One-Punch Man, took all the goodwill Madhouse Animation earned with Season 1 and flushed it down the toilet by moving to JC Staff for Season 2. The same studio worked on Season 3, but with a drastically reduced budget, and it shows.
Every episode that’s aired so far is filled with slowly moving pan images, fight scenes that have no movement but plenty of shaky camera, and lingering shots on characters “powering up” in the old 80s style of Shonen animation to keep budgets under control. What should have been an amazing fight between Garou and the Monster Association has all the drama of HR staff presenting a PowerPoint training on the importance of strong passwords.
It’s not only the animation quality that has fans up in arms and declaring that the anime superhero series is dead, but also the pacing of the story. Episode 4, “Counterattack Signal,” covered an amazing 60 pages of Chapter 19 from the manga. That’s roughly half of what an average episode covers, and by comparison, it’s slower than Dragon Ball Z’s adaptation of the Saiyan Saga from the 90s. One-Punch Man Season 3 has done everything wrong.
JC Staff’s horrible animation has made fans appreciate the work of Bones (My Hero Academia), MAPPA (Jujutsu Kaisen), and Ufotable (Demon Slayer), all three of which have turned in amazing, kinetic, fluid fight scenes to the point that their worst sequence beats out JC Staff’s absolute best. The secretive nature of Japanese anime studios has prevented too much from getting out, but JC Staff and Bandai Namco have talked about the low budget and the tight timetable as reasons for One Punch Man Season 3 looking worse than City Hunter.
Overworked And Underpaid Animators Destroyed An Icon
It’s not a secret that the anime industry is propped up by underpaying and overworking animators to the point that burnout is inevitable. In a 2024 survey conducted by the Nippon Anime and Film Cultural Association, anime animators worked on average over 40 hours a week, with 30 percent saying that shifts lasting over 10 hours were normal. Yearly wages for younger employees run under 3 million yen, which is low, not to the point of starvation (unless they are trying to live by themselves in Tokyo), but ludicrous for the people responsible for one of Japan’s most popular cultural exports.
One-Punch Man Season 3 is embarrassing for JC Staff and Bandai Namco, but it’s heartbreaking for fans who have been following Saitama for over a decade. Three seasons in 10 years is worse than Stranger Things taking 10 years to get to 5 seasons, and at least in the latter’s case, the show is still good. One-Punch Man is so bad that there are hundreds of fan-made petitions to scrap Season 3 and let a different, better studio redo the whole thing.
Anime is hotter than ever before, making One-Punch Man Season 3 the worst possible mistake at the worst time because now there’s no way a recap movie will earn millions like Solo Leveling, or going from television to movies will pay off with a hundred million blockbuster like Demon Slayer: The Infinity Castle. It will take a miracle for Season 4 to get made at this point, but unless something drastic changes behind the scenes, fans won’t want it.
No one could have imagined the reception to Season 3 would be this toxic and this unanimous. No one likes what JC Staff has put together, and in a few weeks, no one’s going to care about One-Punch Man. It’s an amazing fall from grace for what was one of the most popular anime on the planet.
One-Punch Man Season 3 is now streaming on platforms like Disney+ and Hulu.
