Prince of Stride: Alternative

"Stride"—an extreme sport that combines parkour, free running, relay, and sprinting—is what made first year high school student Nana Sakurai enroll in Honan Academy, after being captivated by the school's stride team. Sharing the mutual intention of joining the team is fellow first year and stride maniac, Takeru Fujiwara, and together they request to join. Much to their dismay, however, the stride club is no longer active due to lack of members, and they are now operating under the shogi club.

In order to revive the stride club, Nana and Takeru recruit first year Riku Yagami—a fast runner who is interested in almost every sport. With this new team, the club now aims high at a new goal: to win the prestigious End of Summer competition, and bring the Honan stride team back to their prime.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Yagami, Riku Main

Kimura, Ryouhei Japanese

Fujiwara, Takeru Main

Okamoto, Nobuhiko Japanese

Kohinata, Hozumi Main

Ono, Kensho Japanese

Kuga, Kyousuke Main

Suwabe, Junichi Japanese

Hasekura, Heath Main

Ono, Daisuke Japanese

Kadowaki, Ayumu Main

Shimono, Hiro Japanese

Sakurai, Nana Main

Hanazawa, Kana Japanese

Suwa, Reiji Supporting

Miyano, Mamoru Japanese

Hasekura, Diane Supporting

Ohara, Sayaka Japanese

Himemiya, Yuuri Supporting

Yamashita, Daiki Japanese

Cook, Justin Producer

Ishizuka, Atsuko Director, Episode Director, Storyboard

Aketagawa, Jin Sound Director

Shiraishi, Michita Episode Director

Reviews

Mar 22, 2016

karlstein12

Recommended

Prince of Stride: Alternative was one of the first new Winter show to be announced just as the new year arrived. It was also among the first ones to be aired in the season, much to the build-up that was added to it. With one of the masters in the industry working behind it, i.e. Studio Madhouse, Prince of Stride: Alternative was well worth the hype it had accumulated thus far, but as the season progressed, it quickly started to fade away. Why? Let's look into it in detail.

The show brings no creativity at all to begin with. It has been done countless time in ... sport anime's before. Famous high school club now in ruins and desperate for new members. Atleast try to be a little more creative. The game of Stride does bring a sense of freshness to the show. Basically its a sport where you run all the while competing with the another 'Strider' within your block. It consists of five different members running from start to finish as all the five team members play a part in the whole sequence and give a touch for the next teammate to continue running. One of the problems with the show is that twelve episodes were always not enough to begin with. There are have been countless other similar shows being successful solely based on the fact that they run for a longer time. Time was an important asset to them and they had plenty to utilize it with the execution. This is something Prince of Stride: Alternative lacked big time. On a side note, I cannot understand why there's a 'Alternative' in the title. I've come to light that the source material was a visual game and the show can be taken as a spin-off of that.

The characters on the show do it no good, with all honesty. All of them are like a basic stereotype with nothing to set them apart from any other generic characters. The MC is a light-hearted and silly guy with a dim-wit personality who just likes to run and is aiming to be on as many of the high school clubs as possible. There's the very cold looking teammate who acts as a direct rival for our MC and who doesn't talk much, and of course, does not get together early with our MC. Then there's the only girl in the show who's in fact the very first characters to be showcased and is another main character in focus in every sense who is inspired by the Stride club's achievements in the past and is aiming to be in the team as a manager. She eventually acts as a Relationer in the team who serves as a guide to the running teammates offering guidance with a speaker directly to the Striders. Then there's always a trap in the group along with a nerd who isn't interested being with the club to begin with. Two more senior characters are there in show, one's a cool, handsome looking guy who seems to be a senior worth relying on, and the other, literally having nothing worthy of praising, in my opinion. The manager however, was an interesting characteristic with his regular inspirational proverbs with a traditional discipline to them. Sad that he didn't get called a "King" when someone who only afterwards in the show arrived got to be called one.

The art totally makes the show cool, and the aesthetics are on the positive aspect of this show. The OP/ED sequences with the music, too, do justice for the show but no OST's or background musics or other character songs worthy to be talking about. But all in all they're on the better side of the show. The frequent use of English in the show, as for the club names and the outfits, really make them appealing to the western audience too.

Prince of Stride: Alternative also suffers from the problem of not being able to convey the story properly in my opinion. It could've have become a good show even with the distinguishable flaws it had, if it had put more effort in giving the concept of Stride a little more spotlight. The sport is cool by all means, but for me it fails to properly deliver some important stuff to the viewer. For example, the tournaments the Stride Races take part in are a little difficult to understand. They do time-trials at times but nothing on the opposing team is showcased (And trust me there are some) on how they got so far. This is where as I said the time limit plays a huge part in. Stride races also offers a lot of cool moves and spectacular jumps, if they had put on something like additional points for that, then I think the games would've become a lot more enjoyable.

Prince of Stride: Alternative was never a profound show to begin with, as is the case with most of the sport shows. But what make them great is the reality aspect and the execution for it, that's where Prince of Stride: Alternative won and lost 50-50 for me. With the pacing and time limit the show had been given, I could see the ending being like that from a mile away, still Prince of Stride: Alternative has the little charm that's the beauty of every sport show, even if it was a short anime with just twelve episodes.

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Mar 25, 2016

kopczix

Mixed Feelings

This review contains minor spoilers.

After watching "Haikyuu!!" I became so hyped up about sports series that I decided to try "Prince of Stride: Alternative". I can't say I'm disappointed, but compared to aforementioned "Haikyuu!!", "Prince of Stride: Alternative" looks bland and, on the whole - average.

The story is as generic as it could get. It revolves around the new extreme sport called "Stride" which is similiar to parkour. "Stride", however, is not new, neither it is extreme. Sadly, the runners just run, sometimes they jump over some obstacles and somehow, this attracts large crowds and makes runs a big city event.
As with all school clubs ... in anime there is a girl, and a boy and another boy who have always dreamt of running in "Stride". They join the "Stride" schoolclub which, obviously, is running out of members and our protagonists miraculously save the club. Then, all of them are training and running. Also, in each episode there's someone talking about how "Stride" connects people with a mandatory, super-cringeworthy shot of high-five of the runners in the background. And that's pretty much the story, or what supposed to be the story. Very predictable and unoriginal.

The art is mediocre. It has its ups and downs but there's nothing particular in it. The characters' faces seem really weird as they look like they have different shapes in different shots, but overall the characters are nicely drawn. Run sequences are fairly well animated, although there is too little running and too much thinking-while-running shots.

There's also nothing particular in sound. During the run sequences there's always some music but in my opinion it is there only because it would be awkward to listen to the boys' gasps for a few minutes.

When it comes to characters, there's absolutely nothing original in them. There's the female protagonist, who is there only to be a narrator and has no personality whatsoever, then there's the overly enthusiastic guy, the manly guy, Haru from "Free!" and even Sephiroth from FF7 - pretty much the characters we've all already seen elsewhere. Each character is pretty much one dimensonial and is involved in some backstory which is absolutely forgettable and is meant to add depth to the characters but unfortunately fails to do so. On the other hand, some of them are sometimes funny.

Having completed the whole series, I can say I generally enjoyed it despite its flaws. There definitely are better sports series, but also there are definitely worse sports series. "Prince of Stride: Alternative" is by no means a masterpiece, but it's not a bad show either. This anime just doesn't shine in any way. If you have some free time, give it a go. Don't expect too much, though.

(This is my first review and I'm not native English speaker so there probably are lots of mistakes, so sorry for that.)

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Mar 22, 2016

MozillaFennekin

Not Recommended

There's no real explanation to it, so let's just assume that "alternative" in the title of Prince of Stride implies that you should watch an alternative show.

So, anyone willing to tolerate sports anime thought this would be pretty cool. Running with some parkour elements? Shit, parkour’s awesome, this oughta be good. But instead, we’ve been given a thoughtless, soulless, utterly boring show with no point in watching to completion unless you really, really like sports or writing yaoi fanfics.

Fortunately, Stride conveniently makes all of its fuck-ups clear within the first episode, so this doesn’t require a lot of work. Every major character (with the exception ... of a couple that won’t be introduced until later because reasons) gets introduced within the first ten minutes. It’s too much too quickly, like going to your parents’ favorite hangout and having to suffer through all the introductions to their stupid friends who only talk to you to ask about how school is going. But, don’t think about it too hard, look alive because the plot’s coming through!

A school with a famous stride club (whatever that is) is now close to disbanding because they don’t have enough members for official matches because no one likes stride. Wait, what? I thought this was famous? Where did everyone go? That doesn’t matter now, because Riku (whose name I only remember thanks to my fifteen years of playing Kingdom Hearts) joins the club and fills the deficit, and now the almighty Honan Stride Club is ready to go. The whole school sets up a course for the club because they’re all so excited to see stride return that they didn’t even remember the club existed five minutes ago, because no sports anime would be accurate without a bunch of bandwagoners! Go Royals!

Wait, aren’t we forgetting something…………? Oh yeah! WHAT THE FUCK IS STRIDE?

Stride, the sport, is introduced to us after giving an incredibly vague explanation of just a few things about it. You know, it’s not really the audience’s job to put more thought into your own work. We’re expected to figure the rules of the sport out for ourselves because the authors were too lazy to do it themselves. But after a couple episodes, you can see that stride is just some relay racing with parkour with a coordinator from the sidelines, with some specific details that won’t be necessary. See how easy that was?

But some questions still remain. Why do we need the gimmicks? What’s the point in the end? One guy did a run while completely skipping the obstacles and nothing really happened, he still had a great run. If they’re there just to make the runs look flashy, it’d be good if you could actually implement flair into the rules of the sport, even making it part of some score. It’d be even better if the parkour was naturally part of the course and not just some shit they threw in the middle of the road. People racing over rooftops and over fences would be pretty badass. They could at least put more shit in the road. But my point is that I’d like it if the parkour had a bigger focus and speed wouldn’t be the only thing necessary.

Then you have the relationers, who coordinate the runners from the sidelines via headset. One team told their relationer to fuck off and one of the runners did all the work while the actual relationer was there as a formality. If the runners can control things themselves, what’s the point of the relationer in the first place? Shouldn’t this be illegal, at least? Why isn’t anyone even watching this race, like a referee? Does ANYONE care about what’s going on??? WHY AM I ASKING SO MANY QUESTIONS?

Ignoring the dumb sloppiness of the sport itself, we have the actual story. Yes, I care about a story in a sports anime, at least to an extent. It’s a sports anime so you can only expect so much, but as long as you write better than a 10-year-old then I can accept it. But when Stride tries to incorporate some human drama, it just gets idiotic.

Prince of Stride being about some high school sporting event just won’t cut it, so we need some DEEP and COMPLICATED backgrounds or something. The reason why Honan’s stride club was low on members in the beginning is because of an incident that caused most of the team to quit. This incident is one of the most bafflingly brain-dead events ever conceived. To not spoil it specifically, the old relationer got rekt by the other team’s, and that caused the runners to crash and lose the race. The relationer and another member then act like complete fucking idiots and escalate the situation way beyond reason, and the knight in shining armor, the only person with a brain, the one who breaks it up, is then blamed for it without anyone trying to communicate like human beings. I am laughing so hard while writing these very words right now.

The other sort of incident involves the main character not knowing how to get gud and then quitting stride for a while. That’s it, that’s his backstory.

Having some human drama is nice, definitely. I’ll admit that at least the last few episodes had some sort of weight and tension, but all of this is just so stupid, man. But I could at least respect the nerdy guy, he had some actual problems and characterization that wasn’t dumb. Maybe as a token of my appreciation I’ll go look up his name on the database when I’m done.

Beyond that small number of characters and their dumb stories, the rest of the cast is incredibly flat, boring, uninteresting, generic, and other synonyms, no matter how many memes they try to force. Their only chances of being likable come with how many of their stupid, annoying LOLSORANDOMXD jabs they throw at you. Nice try, Dr. Meme. Oh, whoops, that’s a SIGNATURE PHRASE!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111!!1/1?11/1

Shoving away that nonsense, the characters include Leg-lover, who’s the only yaoi bait you’re gonna get, unless you got a kick out of that one guy who had to dress up like a girl. I felt like kicking myself in the nuts just for putting up with this. No one else has anything worth mentioning (except nerdy guy who eventually drops out of relevance anyway) except the girl because she’s a girl and she’s voiced by Hanakanamanahawamawallama, which really isn’t a compliment because she doesn’t have a personality either. The only thing she’s good at is being really worked up over what the other relationer is doing. DO YOUR JOB, IDIOT.

The woman who directed No Game No Life was told she couldn’t make everything purple in this, so instead she used normal colors and brightened them up about a thousand times. Okay, it’s not unbearably bright, but it really isn’t pleasant to look at, even deep into the anime where you’re expected to be used to it by now. The animation itself isn’t that big of a deal, either. In fact, it’s pretty lackluster, especially given that Madhouse used the same budget as One Punch Man. Maybe they spent it all on memes to try and recreate the magic. I dunno. Anyway, doing cool parkour shit is okay. I guess. But the running is often poorly framed--I don’t give a shit about people moving their arms around really really quickly, you run with your L E G S. LEGS, MAN! Some clever angles would’ve made this pretty interesting to watch, but I guess no one cared as usual.

Hey, remember Overlord? That one anime about Mr. Skeltal trying to take over the world? That opening song was incredible, right? Well, the same guys came back to do Stride’s, except not nearly as loud, exciting, cinematic, catchy, or even enjoyable. Which still makes it a decent song because Clattonia was just pure awesome, but the song doesn’t have a lot of punchiness or flair, and it’s marred by some pretty goofy lyrics. The art accompanying it has some style, at least, even if the runs presented look confusing. The rest of the soundtrack has a number of insert songs, which are pretty intelligible when used amongst the action, but I thought the non-inserts were surprisingly good. Not crazy good, but they have a smooth style and presence and are just exciting enough to make you keep your ear out for them without distracting you from what’s on screen. Not a bad ED either. I only listened to it like twice, though, because I wanted to move on as quickly as possible.

The last thing I wanna talk about are the guys, because this show is supposed to be yaoi-bait and I need to make this clear. These fuckboys don’t even look that good. Thanks for reading, everybody, have a great day!

Story - 2/10
Art - 4/10
Sound - 7/10
Characters - 3/10
Enjoyment - 3/10
Yaoi - tryharder/10
Overall - 3/10
Favorite character - Ayumu
Favorite episode - 11
Recommendation level - Very Low

Reviewer’s Rating: 3

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