Arknights: Reimei Zensou

tl;dr rating if you play arknights: 8 or 9 /10. rating if you don't play arknights: 5/10 at best

Surely this show's ratings are inflated by the fans of the game. I mean let's be honest. I play the game and while yes, the game has great story and yes, the game has great voice lines, the anime was without a doubt very slow paced and at times boring. It is practically word-for-word from the source material though so points for staying true there.

Like I mentioned above, if you don't play the game you will fall asleep watching this. The gravity of the scenes, the explanation ... for the world of Terra, the way the characters interact with each other; all of it would not make sense to a non-fan and the anime does little to try to explain any of it to people who are unfamiliar with the source material already. The pacing is molasses. The character development is also molasses. Both of which are real shames because the Arknights main story is actually quite interesting and at times thought-provoking and challenging. All of that was latent in here in the show, sent to background in favor of what felt like character showcases. I should also mention that Yostar/HG make great PV's and music but we didn't get much of that here. Some cool action sequences, a smattering of music, but it didn't shine.

It really hurts me to say it but I do not recommend this to anyone who didn't play the game. I would recommend the game though. So I guess you could come back to watch this after playing the game some? It is a good game...

-- Who should watch this? --
People who really like Arknights will probably really enjoy this. If you really like ambient lighting/photography, poorly written pseudo-war melodrama, AND cute gacha girl designs, this might be a perfect combination for you too. Otherwise, really not much else to be had here from a technical or especially a narrative perspective. Skip it.

-- Review --
Damn, this show was boring.

I'm not against gacha game adaptations on principle: I watched Takt and Fate/Babylonia, among others. They weren't amazing but they weren't terrible either. They had good animation, looked pretty, and even if the writing was terrible from ... an adaptation standpoint, I had some amount of enjoyment that kept me in every week. But Prelude to Dawn had none of these benefits, and piled on a whole lot more of terrible dialogue and narrative.

"Show, not tell" is the crux of animation and visual media, and episode 1 of Prelude to Dawn failed this to such a degree, I almost gave in to the gacha advertisement, because I figured if I was just going to read a synopsis of the background and character profiles through subtitles, I could probably read it faster by actually downloading and playing the game prologue. From there, it doesn't get much better. Much of this show is dedicated to the emotional turmoil of the pacifist protagonists and how they fight against not-totally-evil antagonists and their acceptance of violence, etc., etc., ...which might be a really good plot, if not for the fact it just boils down to close-up shots of the bunny-girl and bear-girl crying, with the other characters providing not-very-comforting condolences to them. All Quiet on the Western Front this anime is not.

The photography is great, and probably what originally sold me to watch this show. Very good ambient lighting coupled with on-model animation and character design convince me that there was at least some production budget, but the animation fight scenes, while passable, are not really anything to write home about. Once again, more melodramatic talk-no-jutsu exists in this show then gunfire or magic. Even for sound, there was a startling lack of Arknights' wonderful soundtrack - which leads me to believe they deliberately chose silence to emphasize the brutality of warfare. Unfortunately, this just meant that the un-engaging dialogue and uninspiringly framed close-up shots of the characters had to be delivered solely by VA performances that were too strong for the writing they were given.

Previews gave me some hope for this show, but even worse than being disappointed, I had to continuously debate with myself whether I had the attention span for 8 weeks of this boring tripe. Guess I did.

This show is an uncomfortable combination of adult and child themes. The world/story, generally, is pretty dark, where people are oppressed and brutalized. But the characters of the show and the individual episode plots are incredibly childish, with a huge focus on never killing and the juvenile heroic attempts to "save everyone" that you usually see in shows for young children and which only work in situations where the heroes have MASSIVE amounts of plot armor which allow them to succeed despite their ludicrous and unrealistic approach to reality. Watching the protagonists make insane decisions due to a childish black-and-white-no-shades-of-grey outlook on ... life, and having the dumbest character be the nominal leader of the entire group, can be incredibly frustrating, not to mention utterly destroying any chance for a watcher to take the show seriously.

The rest of the show is...fine, I guess? The art is good, if you don't mind most of the characters in every faction being literal copy/pasted faceless goons. The voice acting is good. The fights are limited, but fine. The character development is bad, but I assume it's aimed at people who already know them.

This show is basically an advertisement for a game I didn't know existed. It's an eight 25 minute episodes worth advertisement. I couldn't spoil this anime even if I wanted to since there's nothing to spoil. There's literally no story, just number of facts and interesting tidbits, alluding to a story happening elsewhere, sprinkled around.

Characters are given some development even though most of them feel painfully simplistic in their behavior. Animation for the most part is competent. Sound as well. But up to point I watched number of things happened that feel like world building but then nothing is done with information you are given. ... Next episode something else happens and new character is revealed, but again nothing happens. Rinse and repeat for 8 episodes and then am guessing it's buy our game time.

There's far too much hype about it online and score is nowhere near indicative of its quality.

While being a fan of the game I need to say that this show sucks. And sucks hard.

As story presented in-game through a visual novel, so script in the anime is pretty poorly written and uninteresting for viewer. There is no character development, there is no engaging events. Main heroes teleports between abandoned locations and “entertain” you with self-explanatory dialogues. Action scenes are straight up badly put together. Not to mention there is nearly no action at all. OST is nearly non-existent though it must be written by Yuki Hayashi, maybe later in the series it would be better. OP is bangers, ED is ... not bad - Hypergryph is indeed a music company. Instead of the atmosphere, there are washed out colors here.

I see no way this anime would attract new players to the game and hope that exaggerated score would soon lower.

I am someone who has never played Arknights and never even heard of Arknights before this season. I've given this 3 episodes and to be honest I have found Arknights to be a very average anime.

The animation is ok, but the unsaturated palette and the fact that Reunion has a budget to give their grunts a uniform is very telling about how cheap it really is. But they do take the time to make most of the characters look unique so there is that.

The OST is very average too. Not terrible, but it doesn't grab your attention either. In a season of banger OPs this ... isn't good at all.
Character development is below average. We get introduced to a bunch of characters and I can understand that if you are an Arknights player you will know who these characters are and their backstories. You may even be excited about seeing your waifu animated. But if you don't know who they are then they are just a parade of faces you don't get to learn anything about before they get shuffled aside for the next one. I don't hold out much hope for anything more either since there are only 8 episodes in this short season.

Lastly, the most egregious fault is the "doktah" the self-insert cardboard cut-out is terrible, it just leaves a gaping hole in the story crying out for something of substance to fill it.

If you are a fan of Arknights you probably want to scream at me about how wrong I am and that this is the best thing since sliced bread. However, it is my opinion that if a story struggles to stand on its own, then it is not a very good story at all. But if you are curious about Arknights and thinking about playing the game then I suppose it might be a good starting point... maybe.

In a lot of ways, we've come pretty far from the kind of abominable video game adaptations that were common in past decades, and many newer attempts at least have bigger budgets, a smoother flow, or sometimes even have a loftier vision than b-movie schlock like Masami Oobari's endless string of adaptations or live action Street Fighter or whatever. Arknights is a gacha game adaptation with a slick cinematic appeal and an ostensibly more ambitious story due to the pretensions of its ambiance and overwrought dialogue, but, in reality, there's not a whole lot there beneath the surface.

The world essentially looks like a lazy ... merging of Final Fantasy 12 with Half-Life 2, meaning it's a dystopia with vague and slow trickle-down storytelling, and the main character, along with the viewers, is thrust into the immediate immersion of POV shots and amnesia. The mix of high-tech and low-tech is not always very convincing: you have aircraft and mobile cities, but almost everyone is using swords and crossbows? Obviously, magic arts shakeup the dynamic a bit, but the core of the combat feels off and, indeed, gamey. There doesn't appear to be any justification for its lopsidedness, other than it being "cool."

It doesn't really help that the infection plot line basically boils down to the bunny-eared Rhodes Island representative pointing to all governments as mean because they discriminate against the infected, while painting the Reunion baddies as the polar opposite, only meaner, and insisting anyone who sides with them is "buying into illusions and false hope," which just sounds like random people on Twitter complaining about the not-nice political party de jour. Whereas Rhodes Island is like "Can't we all just get along? The non-infected should lick the infected until we're all infected, while my team of cute fox and cat girl scientists pretend to be making a cure. Yay! Vote Rhodes Island!"

There's also ridiculous, cliched, and forced drama injected into the story because Rhodes Island is so goody two-shoes they—and their most adorable allies—pretty much don't take the lives of their Reunion foes—seemingly ever! You know those pivotal moments in fiction where a character has a mental breakdown from taking a life during a battle, even though it was the only way to stop that character from killing an ally? Meanwhile, another character sees this and will be upset and hold a grudge against said character, when they would have otherwise been allies? Yep, Arknights does this, and it's just as floppy and sloppy as the set of ears on a dog girl. Are we dealing with actual soldiers or kids who still eat Captain Crunch and Fruit Roll-Ups? Mommy Amiya: "We do battle to help the infected, and we must stop the meanie Reunion mask people! Oh, and make sure you don't hurt them too badly, even when they're coming at you with swords or hurling magic projectiles and grenades at you. If you seriously hurt anyone, you're going to get time out! And don't even get me started if you kill anyone, which better never ever happen!"

Almost all of the characters are cute high school girls with rotated-out animal ears—panda, bunny, cat, and whatever other ears, or horns, or tails, etc. It's a zootopian menagerie of copypasta cuteness, and there's a little fetish content here for even the most obscure of aesthetes! All presented with the utmost seriousness, of course, yet it's hard to take this seriously, so it instead becomes laughable. The characters are about as tropey and generic as you'd expect from looking at them, and their moebits are just about all that define them as characters. The writers attempt to intimate depth out of these bland personalities through oftentimes vague or occasionally pseudo-profound lines, when we're not bombarded by non-stop exposition, as that's almost all we have time for with only 8 episodes.

The only person who seems even close to a character is probably Amiya, who is like the overly empathetic "I have a big heart, and I'll be anyone's mommy" kind of character. I'm sure she's great at kissing boo boos (and much better at causing them), but would anyone ever believe she is the leader? It's like they intentionally made her an incompetent emotional wreck, because they were conflicted between having her be a leader and a simulation of a high school crush for your avatar.

Most of the men, in comparison, never take their masks off (actually, this was probably for the best, as I was laughing when I saw the generic men—panda men—with panda ears in Lungmen—why don't we just call the city Pandamen?), making them feel disposable. Aside from the ultra-generic Ace and a few psychopaths with exaggerated voice acting that would make even Re:Zero blush. It almost has this weird, grimy, POV harem feel or that of a hentai where a bunch of faceless men are garishly lit, and they circle around crying animal girls, and after wolf-whistling, they're like "What's a bunny girl like you doing around these parts? Heh heh heh..." It doesn't present itself in a way that feels like an organic world.

Doctor also remains masked and is meant to be one of those blank slate, near-wordless and obscure stand-ins for the viewer, which probably works fine for a GAME, but it's simply awkward in a series, and it just doesn't work out. As with many of these wish-fulfillment characters, the vibe meant to be given is "I just woke up, and the first thing I see is the face of my little angel looking down at me. I don't know anything about the world, but I'm a fast learner, and mom tells me I'm really smart, so, like, I've got this, and I'm coming up with all these good plans before my avatar does, and, you know, his plans are good enough, but mine are better. Imagine if I were the actual main character! Give me a chance, please... and these anime girls with these adorable animal ears keep telling me how amazing I am UwU." Yet we're passive observers, and it's easy to forget Doctor is around at all, avatar or not!

I think you could do a whole course on this series alone for understanding wish-fulfillment protagonist and anime girl body language and psychology, as many of these anime studios have worked this stuff down to a scummy science. It feels as if all of the stinkiest pandering is on full display here. I really hate certain moments in the OP especially. Like, the girls will do this kind of moebait schtick where they'll be looking directly into your eyes via a POV shot, and they'll do this cutesy thing where they squeeze their eyes shut and smile like they're so happy to see you, and it just screams: "Ungh! You're so handsome and smart, anon. Buy my new PVC figurine for $19.99. The clothes are removable, and you can switch my ears out so I'll look more like your pet dog ;)." Speaking of this, there's also an enormous amount of plot armor because this show is about your favorite flavor of waifu, and killing any of them off might hurt figurine sales.

While the series manages to be visually striking at times, especially with some of the urban backdrops and flashy effects, you can definitely see a pattern where they're using a lot of editing and directorial trickery to stretch out a relatively thin animation budget. Cute girls will flash their moebits while delivering exposition dumps in drawn-out scenes with either no movement, stiff movement, or flapping mouths. The action scenes are often simply not there or truncated, often to confusing effect. Characters randomly appear to do battle with each other and kind of just disappear from the fray, with the viewer only really seeing the aftermath. Most of what happened with Ace, for example, made almost no sense. To be fair, it does get a little better in the second half.

It's pretty wallpaper when the staff puts the time into it, but Arknights seems to function as little more than an exposition-heavy example of the game's world: and what I've taken from that realization is a handful of vapid characters wandering around a grid-based map on fetch quests to dystopic cities that are all more or less the same, just mimicking the visuals of different real-world cultures, and the "people" of those cities consist of different races of girls, the only difference being which animal ears we swap out from one of your pets or more exotic moebits from the zoo for them to flaunt.

Here's the thing: some series and genres rely on cuteness more than others. If you're watching a high school drama/romance/coming of age, then they will focus on attractive characters, a cute crush, etc. High school is not far removed from the word cute, as it's filled with young people goofing around. But this is war. What does cuteness have to do with war? Is war cute? Could you imagine anyone liking this if they replaced all the cute girls with far fewer cute girls or not-very-cute girls or men? No, you couldn't, because Arknights has very little to offer other than its cuteness. Take the cuteness away, and you realize it's nothing but a hollowed-out stump in the ground.

It's shocking that there is a positive reception to this. The extent of content that can be drained from this bloated corpse of an animation is seeing your favorite cute girl be animated poorly.

There's an obvious shoestring budget. It's been a while since there's been an anime this clearly underfunded. It's hard to say the animation is bad, when it's barely even existent.

Voice acting is noticeably poor, especially for previously unvoiced characters. Mephisto especially misses the mark. I'm unaware as to if the casting was bad or the direction was. It would not be surprising were it ... both.

They're absolutely butchering chunks of the story out, yet leaving in scenarios the game used to tie in game mechanics to the story. What they've left in is lacking in emotional punch and it's absurd an animation wouldn't expand visually on scenarios from a visual novel type story. I am still in awe that they somehow ended up with even less of Ace's fight.

The more vibrant colors were a downgrade. More than likely this is biased, but pastel really doesn't work with Arknights setting and tone.

Finally, for all things an Arknights anime to be lacking in, it certainly shouldn't be the music. It's a long running community meme that Hypergryph is a music company, there is barely any noticeable music. Not barely any noteworthy tracks mind you, the music is nigh nonexistent.

The only thing positive so far is they showed the scale of Rhode's Island really well. Considering everything up until that, I was pleasantly surprised they bothered using the medium of animation to visually display something that might be more difficult to show in a different medium.

This should be an utter disappointment to any Arknights fan. Especially considering the 3d animations they attached to some previews blow anything done in this anime out of the water.