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What are some adaptations with huge disparities in quality between the source and the anime?

This question straddles all three of anime, manga, and light novels, so I figured I'd just drop it in the anime community first. Though if it doesn't belong here, feel free to delete it and I'll go somewhere else.

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I've only been watching anime for a few years. This year, I've started reading manga and LN of some anime I've seen. There are a few titles where I feel like the anime adaptation was just as good and there are some where I feel like it was better. Fortunately, I haven't encountered any cases where I think the anime completely dropped the ball, but I know there probably are some like that.

What are some titles that have huge disparities in quality between its anime adaptation and the source?

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18 comments

  • The Way of the Househusband's anime adaptation was more of a voice-acted slideshow than an anime.

    The Mob Psycho 100 manga's writing was excellent but the art was merely passable. Studio Bones took that simple artstyle and went absolutely nuts with it, turning it into one of the most beautifully-animated works I've ever seen.

  • Source > Adaptation

    VNs (Steins;Gate/Steins;Gate 0, Clannad)

    The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan

    A Silent Voice

    Adaptation > Source

    4-komas, typically (Bocchi the Rock, K-on)

    Music anime (Your Lie in April, Sound Euphonium, also the aforementioned Bocchi and K-on)

    Simple art styles, extrapolated (Senpai is an Otokonoko, 4-komas)

    Almost anything KyoAni touches (Violet Evergarden, counterexample in A Silent Voice)

    Selective adaptations (Insomniacs After School, Usagi Drop)

    Say I Love You (except for episode 12, which I think is anime-original)

  • My personal list:

    Anime > Source:

    -Haruhi Suzumiya - LN - Anime somehow remains nearly 100% faithful to the LNs yet takes what was otherwise kind of a silly and meaningless story and elevates it to masterpiece level. Maybe a hot take: KyoAni already adapted all the best parts of the LNs, it's almost like I can feel Tanigawa's creative exhaustion seeping through his words in the later novels

    -Mushoku Tensei - LN - The LN just took the web novel and published it. Yep. This was definitely an amateur web novel, a step above fan fiction. But the anime is terrific.

    -Jujutsu Kaisen - Manga - The manga itself is a rough gem. The excitement and genius is here. All of Akutami's humor and personality is fresh here and was adapted faithfully into the anime, though the sheer coolness and style is unique to the anime. Also, some of the character designs look cuter in the anime, notably Nobara.

    Source > Anime:

    -Oshi no Ko - Manga - I personally disliked the anime while liking the manga a lot more. To me, the real substance of this story comes from its characters and their well-written psychologies, which is something that is just inherently more difficult to show in anime format as opposed to writing.

    Source ??? Anime:

    Now that I think about it, these bullet points don't even belong in this discussion topic, sorry I got carried away nerding out over anime lol

    -Sousou no Frieren - Manga - Actually the source itself is terrific. The anime takes that already terrific source and jazzes it up a bit more. The anime hasn't even gotten to the best parts yet.

    -Kobayashi-san chi no Dragon Maid - Manga - Bwahaha. They are both extremely good. Though similar to Haruhi, I think all of the best parts have been adapted so far.

    Edit: edited for better organization

    • -Haruhi Suzumiya - LN - Anime somehow remains nearly 100% faithful to the LNs yet takes what was otherwise kind of a silly and meaningless story and elevates it to masterpiece level. Maybe a hot take: KyoAni already adapted all the best parts of the LNs, it’s almost like I can feel Tanigawa’s creative exhaustion seeping through his words

      On the other hand for me: Nagato Yuki-chan manga > anime: let's just say I yearn for a complete animated adaptation. The story itself, I love it very much. The anime stopped at an awkward point.

      • I haven't gotten around to reading the Nagato Yuki-chan manga yet, though it is on my list of stuff to check out.

        I watched it immediately after watching the entire Haruhi series for the first time, which is probably a mistake - they are two completely different types of shows that just happen to take place in the same universe. Maybe for the first 8-9 episodes (whenever the black and white episode happens) I wasn't in the right mindset to properly enjoy the laid back slice of life type that was Nagato Yuki-chan. Also, I couldn't stop comparing the art style and animation to the KyoAni series, which is naturally going to be an unfair comparison lol.

  • I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet, but there's the entirety of Full Metal Alchemist's first TV Series that starts pretty close but ends up diverging significantly. Many people find the ending of this original anime to be a huge disappointment -- to the point where they completely redid the anime.

    Trigun manga and the original TV series diverged, but it's really up to debate whether the TV show is "worse" as I really think the quality of the show is mostly good but starts to show rough edges on the occasional episode. The last episode is pretty fantastic though, so they stuck the landing IMO. I think the story of the most recent Trigun Stampede is quite a bit worse than both the manga and the original series, though I would say that even the manga made some of the same mistakes but in different ways if... that makes sense lol.

    Also, and this is a bit of a cop-out, but many of the Leiji Matsumoto manga projects are adapted completely differently with each movie / series / book having a completely isolated but similar continuity. This is an intentional design and is even true with all of his individual manga works. I's part of his "Rings of Time" system, which allows characters to exist across multiple continuities and timelines. Anyway, while most of these projects resulted in some of the greatest shows and movies of anime legacy, there are also notably a few duds so it's always worth reading reviews of a specific series / run and see whether people recommend a different series if you are interested in the characters.

  • What are some titles that have huge disparities in quality between its anime adaptation and the source?

    Source > Adaptation

    One of the recent big-name disappointments would be Chained Soldier (source: manga).

    Another prominent one is One Punch Man season 2 (source: manga).

    For non big-names, Bofuri season 2 dropped the ball (source: novel).

    I also felt that the anime adaptation for Undead Unluck could have been way better (source: manga).

    Adaptation > Source

    Probably most adaptations involving music, such as K-ON! (source: manga).

    There are probably lots more out there but these are just the ones where I have consumed both the adaptations and their source materials.

    I find that in most cases, when a non-original anime is crap to me, it is because of a weak story and poorly-written characters. As such, the root cause of the crappiness is the source material.

  • Samurai Deeper Kyo, without a doubt and the anime is objectively pur trash. In the anime they changed samurai ennemies into aliens with sekigara battle becoming an alien invasion. In the manga we are in a classic seinen chanbara with light fantasy (the two biggest fantasy element are kyo and kyoshiro sharing the same body and nobunaga's almost immortality with his body rotting).

    • I haven't even heard of that title before, that's interesting. I wonder if those differences were made out of creative intent or out of compromise somewhere in the production process.

      • it's an old manga. the change on the anime was to tone down the story and makes it appeal to younger audience (the manga is highly adult only with a lot of bodies cut with lot of blood but because in the anime the ennemies are monsters blood was changed to vomit kind of green). The sad thing is that the manga is reaaaaaally, lots of action, tragedy, politics and highly deserve the Shaman King treatment of a kai version (even badly animated as long they stick with the story, characters personnality and background because it would be better than what we had)

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