Top 10 Anime Fights That Didn’t Live up to the Hype (ft. Todd Haberkorn)

Ooooooh, yeah! Things are about to go…wait, that was it? Welcome to WatchMojo.com and today we are counting down our picks for the "Top 10 Anime Fights That Didn’t Live up to the Hype."

For this list, we’re looking at the brawls in anime that were set to become the stuff of legend, only for them to turn into the Japanimated equivalents of two YouTubers flailing about in a boxing ring. Get ready for crestfallen spoilers down the line.

Sister against sister. Killer vs. killer. A showdown of epic and emotional proportions that sees master assassin Akame take on her brainwashed sibling. Unfortunately for us, they manage to work out their problems waaaaaay quicker than we would have liked them to. Turns out years of bad blood can be solved rather quickly when a random monster steps in to interrupt their battle. Next thing you know, Kurome kicks the bucket, gets redeemed, and that whole subplot gets kicked to the curb faster that Sheele’s corpse.

Take the time-honoured tradition of two rivals battling it out for supremacy, set it in a pseudo-sports genre, sprinkle in some giant robots, and what do you get? A recipe for mecha success! And yet, this light-hearted entry comes out tasting a little bitter. Want to know why? Because we expected to see an awesome battle against the Char-clone of the Build-verse, not some corrupted version that’s clearly being controlled. It sours the mood, ruins the tournament, and gives us one beastly case of giant robo blue balls. #NotMyTatsuya.

Yes, yes, yes—we know Ains is unbeatable! He kind of proved that when he casually sacrificed seventy-thousand soldiers to a Lovecraftian God in order to summon giant, tentacled baby goat demons. And yet…we still thought Gazef would put up a better fight than this. After all, him standing up to the undead ruler was basically the core focus of Season Three. At least let him go down in a blaze of glory! Instead of, you know, being causally killed in less than a literal SECOND. Whelp, so much for plot armour.

Some video game bosses are built to be unwinnable, especially if said boss is the creator of the game in the first place and knows how to counter your every move. So what did our lead do? Put all that RPG knowledge to good use? Change the rules of the game? Do something even moderately clever? Nope. Used the power of love to glitch through his own death and land the finishing blow. The only thing more unlikely than him pulling that off would be if I dressed up as a Fairy King with no sense of personal boundaries.

Look, by anyone else’s standards this battle would be in the upper escehlons of awesome. After all, there are more explosions in this one fight than there are in a Michael Bay movie. However, we had just come off the pitch perfect clash between Midoriya and Todoroki—you know, the one so hardcore and epic and that it gave every fan a Habergasm? So by comparison, and through no fault of its own, this finale was just a tad on the underwhelming side. Not helped by Todoroki refusing to use all of his Quirk due to some internal commitment issues. Ah, I get it; Bakugo’s just pissed because he’s not putting out like he did for Midoriya…

Three times the charm, or at least it would be if these two ever got to settle their feud. With a win to each of their names, we were fully expecting this threequel match to show off the full strength of Ryuko’s ungodly badassery against the final member of the Student Council. It was all shaping up to be the series’ best… at least until the arrival of Nui Harime, who totally derailed the fight by sending Sanegayama into the abyss... after removing all his clothes, of course. If you really think about it, the only person on the Student Council who DIDN’T lose to Ryuko was actually our boy Shiro. Another win for the Haber-roster!

We had high hopes for this semi-final match. After all, it was pitting the two most angsty adolescents in the whole series against each other. Alas, it didn’t even turn out to be decent half-time entertainment. While watching Sasuke provide the sand-ninja with an electrifying love-tap was kind of cool, the whole thing just ended up becoming a precursor to a set of much more interesting skirmishes. But hey, if you’re a fan of watching Gaara suffer a mental breakdown then you go right on ahead.

Even the best of friends fight at times, especially when one of them has recently been resurrected with a brand new genocidal attitude. Now totally loyal to Mana and her desire to take out all of mankind, Gai finds himself clashing with his buddy Shu, willing to slay him for the sake of his old flame. Now both armed with the Power of the King, the set up was all there for a pretty sweet final fight...if it lasted more than two minutes. I don’t even think they got more than five hits in before the whole thing was over! You didn’t just disappoint your tyrant of a woman Gai, you disappointed us too!

Were promised a knockout worthy of Rocky, and all we ended up getting was an underwhelming punchfest straight out of Rocky V! By this point, Joe had managed to climb his way to the Magalonia finals, overcoming all manner of rival boxers along the way, just to arrive at this moment. The build up was perfect, the character development on both sides was exquisite, we even saw Yuri give up his gear just so the fight would be even. And yet… it just fell flat. The amount of cutaways and lack of fluidity just dampened the impact of the whole bout, watering down what was supposed to a moment of glory into “meh.”

We always knew it was going to come down to this; the man who knows everything against the kid with the orange hair. What we didn’t expect was the endless amount of meandering to get to the final battle… only for the show to write itself into a corner. By this point, Aizen had become so powerful that in order to put an end to him, Ichigo went through a last minute deus-ex-machina before taking him down with the Final Getsuga Tenshou. That’s not what we came here to see! We wanted to see him claw and scratch his way to victory. Can’t call it an underdog story if the dog in question is suddenly an uberpooch.