After more than half a decade of waiting, fans finally received the long-anticipated third season of One Punch-Man in October of 2025, a dizzying 78 months after Season 2 signed off in April of 2019. What they got in return was not a triumphant comeback, but what many viewers are now openly calling one of the most spectacular animation collapses in modern mainstream anime.
Across forums, review sites, and social media, Season 3 has been met with overwhelmingly negative reactions, with complaints ranging from laughably low frame counts to outright production errors that look like they wandered in from a cursed AI demonstration.
Almost immediately, viewers began spotting character heads being sliced clean off at the top of the screen because the animation appears to have been traced directly from manga panels that reached the edge of a printed page. Just look at Atomic Samurai, here:
Episodes routinely rely on single still images for entire scenes, earning the show the cruel but efficient nickname “One Frame Man.” Even worse, accusations of AI usage erupted after multiple scenes displayed characters with six fingers, three breasts, or garbled, nonsensical text stamped across their bodies that does not exist in the original manga.
And then came the moment that truly broke the dam. The infamous “Garou slide” in Episode 2 arrived like a warning flare from the animation gods. Oh boy, indeed. From that point forward, viewers were treated to extended conversations where the only thing moving on screen was a single looping mouth flap, or worse, scenes framed from behind a completely motionless character while the camera slowly pans across a frozen background. It was less like watching an anime and more like being forced to watch a PowerPoint presentation accompanied by an anime Spotify playlist.
If anyone wants a single clearinghouse of public outrage, they need only visit the One-Punch-Man subreddit. The community has been absolutely flooded with side-by-side comparisons, animation breakdowns, reaction memes (many of which are equally clever and hilarious), as well as visual autopsies on just how badly things went wrong. What started as disbelief rapidly turned into gallows humor, and then settled into full-blown production conspiracy theories.
Nowhere did the backlash hit harder than with Season 3, Episode 6, Motley Heroes. On IMDb, its score has followed a gravity-defying trajectory straight downward. Nine days ago, it hovered at a dismal 3.3/10. Two days later it fell to 2.6/10, already sliding beneath the lowest-rated episode of the critically panned Velma, “The Candy Wo(man),” which sits at 2.7/10. Since then, Motley Heroes has continued to plummet, reaching an almost mythic 1.4/10. That score now makes it not only the lowest-rated television episode of 2025, but also the lowest-rated episode of television ever to surpass 15,000 reviews. The next lowest entry on the entire IMDb scale sits at a comparatively luxurious 3.0 stars.
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The rest of the season has not exactly been spared the firing squad either. The second-lowest episode currently sits at 2.4/10, while the highest-rated episode of the season barely claws its way to a 4.1/10. For a franchise that once redefined what blockbuster anime could look like, these numbers read less like disappointment and more like an obituary.
Inevitably, fans have begun pointing at least one of the six fingers, and more than a few of them are aimed squarely at Bandai Namco. Whether the company directly caused the collapse is difficult to confirm without insider testimony, but many argue that as a key player in the production process, it should bear at least some responsibility for allowing such a visibly unfinished adaptation to reach streaming platforms in the first place.
On the production side, animation duties once again fell to J.C. Staff, the same studio responsible for Season 2. That earlier season, while somewhat controversial among purists, looks practically divine by comparison now, with its lowest-rated episode sitting at a respectable 7.3 for “The Martial Arts Tournament.” By contrast, Season 3 feels as though it was assembled under emergency conditions in a dimly lit editing bay with a ticking doomsday clock mounted on the wall by a blindfolded raccoon high on opiates.
What makes this whole thing weirded is just how long all this has taken. Season 3 was officially confirmed in August of 2022, giving the production ample runway to do… more than three frames per episode, at the very least. That said, we know that leadership changes could have possibly shaken things up a bit. Shinpei Nagai replaced Chikara Sakurai as director, Sakura Murakami took over as art director from both Shigemi Ikeda and Yukiko Maruyama, and Yuki Hirose replaced Yoshio Ōkouchi as director of photography.
Is this upheaval the root of the problem? Possibly, though anime history suggests that disasters of this magnitude usually require the combined effort of tight deadlines, shifting production priorities, and a production committee more concerned with bureaucracy and red tape than the animation process itself.
At this point, the questions are flying across social media as many, us included, wondered what could possibly have been the source of such poor quality with years of production time. Was J.C. Staff only given a few weeks to animate an entire season? Did months of completed work vanish in a catastrophic hard-drive failure weeks before broadcast? Did someone confuse the render farm with a toaster? Viewers may never get a clean answer, but we can’t help but assume a combination of all of the above.
Many of us genuinely loved the first season, genuinely enjoyed the second, and then waited more than six years for what ultimately feels like a rough draft that escaped into the wild. At least the manga remains excellent, a cruel reminder of what this season could have been. Perhaps there is still hope that a future home-video release will receive extensive re-animation, or that the franchise will change studios entirely. But as things stand now, it is difficult to imagine many people paying for Season 3 in its current form that resembles flip-booking colored manga pages with a soundtrack.
