The Most Watched and the Best-rated Summer 2021 Anime

Every week we publish the Weekly Rankings: The Best and Worst of the Season So Far According to Readers. These scores are based on weekly episode votes for all the anime we’re tracking. At the end of the season, we also get a cumulative score, which is the average of all the episodes. It’s pretty interesting to check out, and here are the overall results for the best-rated anime of Summer 2021:

1. Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid
2. Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-kun
3. Kageki Shoujo!!
4. Love Live! Superstar!!
5. The aquatope on white sand
6. The Case Study of Vanitas
7. To Your Eternity
8. That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime
9. Sonny Boy
10. One Piece

However, the average episode score often might not reflect what people actually thought about the series as a whole, especially if there was a really strong, or really weak ending. These weekly episode ratings, especially towards the end, are based on the votes of people who have continued to watch the series. So they don’t represent the opinions of people who abandoned the series partway through.

And finally, we simply don’t get enough votes on most of the anime that we aren’t reviewing (we use the reviews to drive votes), so several series are missing from the weekly rankings, including the highly-rated, but not particularly popular (with our readers) IDOLiSH7 Third Beat!

So, at the end of the season, we decided to ask our readers what they thought about the season as a whole. We asked people to rank every show they watched in the End of Summer 2021 Giant Anime Survey. 3,300 people from around the world voted on the various anime.

The top 10 highest-rated anime were:

The 10 most-watched series of the season are:

1. My Hero Academia (TV 5)
2. Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid S (TV)
3. That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime (TV 3)
4. To Your Eternity (TV)
5. Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-kun
6. My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! X (TV 2)
7. The Case Study of Vanitas (TV)
8. Tokyo Revengers (TV)
9. How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom (TV)
10. Tsukimichi -Moonlit Fantasy- (TV)

The 10 worst-rated anime were:

*Only 22 voters (out of 3300) watched Ahare! Meisaku-kun, so its rating would not be considered statistically significant

The top 10 most abandoned series (series that people started, but don’t intend to finish)
of the season were:

1. The Detective Is Already Dead (TV)
2. Drugstore in Another World: The Slow Life of a Cheat Pharmacist (TV)
3. Scarlet Nexus (TV)
4. The Great Jahy Will Not Be Defeated! (TV)
5. Girlfriend, Girlfriend
6. Tokyo Revengers (TV)
7. Peach Boy Riverside (TV)
8. The Dungeon of Black Company (TV)
9. The Case Study of Vanitas (TV)
10. Battle Game in 5 Seconds (TV)

And finally, the ten least-watched shows of the season among ANN readers were:

4 under-appreciated gems

So what are the hidden gems of the season, the shows that not a lot of people are watching, but those that do rate very highly? If you’ve never checked any of these shows out, you should consider giving them a watch. All of them have scores above 4.0, a low number of readers who watched them, but also a very low number of viewers who said they would not complete them.

1. IDOLiSH7 Third Beat! (TV)
2. Kingdom (TV 3)
3. Kiyo in Kyoto: From the Maiko House (TV)
4. Kageki Shoujo!! (TV)

Honorable Mentions: Love Live! & Case Closed. These hyper well-known franchises aren’t watched by a lot of our readers, but are quite well-rated by our readers.