Arknights: Touin Kiro

The first season was somewhat okay for me, but ever since the second season started, I have had issues with this anime.

The explanations provided for things were present in the first season, so a good deal of stuff did not make sense to me.
The characters were introduced in a hurry and the show barely gave time for the audience to feel any sort of connection with the characters. The anime is full of female characters, strangely (mostly on the good side). The fodder and the bad guys have got male characters.

Everything was super forgettable and did not ignite any interest for me. ...

Story (4/10)
Honestly, if it were done properly, I think it'd be lots better than what we got. The story has an interesting concept, but the way it was portrayed in the anime was really subpar.

Soundtrack/music (7)
Background music was fine, but I mostly liked the ending song more. It was the only part of the show that I was actually looking forward to every week.

Characters (2)

Like I said before, good ones are mostly female, and the bad ones are mostly male, except for a few.
I don't think anyone got any sort of proper character development except for Amiya.

Animation (5)

Lots of panning animations and scenes where we don't see characters talking. Sometimes it'd be focused on their upper half of the face to avoid animating their mouth movements.

Art (9)

Easily the best thing about this show apart from the ending song.

Arknights is a good animation that meets a horrible story. It is such a boring show because of the no-brainer story that any 5-year-old could write. You don't get any real action, nothing. Most episodes feel so boring and when it comes to action scenes they are the most boring ones I have ever seen. They would be even more enjoyable if they straight-up inserted a tower defence scene from the mobile game. The enemies have such boring personalities with no real character, fights make no sense and on top of it, most of the time you will be more like let's play the actual ... game then watch this.
The only plus about this show is a good-looking animation.
If you enjoyed the previous Arknights series and still can remember anything from them, you will enjoy this one too because it's exactly the same copy-paste boring anime as the previous iterations.

Horrible adaptation of another gacha game. But beware of a long-read. If you not sure whether to read or not, check my profile for highest and lowest rated things to know how differently we perceive the media.

First thing I want to mention is my background, to help you understand my thoughts. I am a big fan of huge detailed worlds, with or without magic, of logic, of drama, and of course of quality. By being open minded, I value things no matter it's genre and medium, whether it is a game, mobile one, series, books or anything else. And while in my gacha-world-exploration time I ... tried lots of games. The most notable of them were few months of Azur Lane, Girls Frontline, few weeks of PGR and almost 3 years of FGO (yeah, I ate some shiet). But in the end I dropped all of them, and chose to become a true fan of Arknights for many, many reasons. And the first and foremost reason was the strategic gameplay, where the skills of the player are valued much more than the grind, core thing of the game. It also has great visuals, optimization and if you will follow lore long enough (through boring exposition of Misha's ark and few things beyond) it will show you a magnificent world. It is vast and pure, detailed and diverse, with truly different nations, governments, problems and in the end people, who react not heroically, comically or cool, but realistically, by being sometimes afraid, angry, foolish or naïve. And in such a world a tens and tens of different stories happen, without anime persistent boobs, magic of friendship or this powerful dude from highschool. And by being lore-great, in addition to great gameplay and visuals it has lots of amazing music in a huge variety of genres, fair monetization and a fair gacha rates. As a person who loves long stories, strategizing and music, this game was a real gift from above.

But the anime was announced.

After the ONA, with just demonstration of well-known characters in a decent combat, everyone was hyped, me included. I thought: "Can't be, the ones who show the amazing quality in almost everything title-related, will show us more animation?" And yes, as you may guess, it could not become a reality. The first season was extremely mediocre. The animations of characters, and whole first episode were kinda good, but everything ended here. Action scenes were bland, all meaningful scenes were going without any logical pauses between them one after another, leaving exposition, tempo and simple deomstration of said things out of equation. By dumping information that was already too vast even inside of a visual novel, they turned series into fast-paced mindless paraphrase, which was a horrible mistake. But overall both those variants were kinda equally boring, that's why I put a 6(Fine) mark on the first season. Perfect for ones who don't want to read, but want to play. Sadly, as an advertisement it failed.

But the second season... It is a literal crime against the lore and fans. While already finished with exposition, in-game tempo normalized itself, and from now on focused the readers' attention on the events and characters. Touching things from afar, walking their line of life and choices, it showed an amazing, yet dramatic story about Reunion, leaving unnecessary things like descriptions of places or exact actions out of picture.

And here it is, the train of pain, Arknights: Perish in Frost. List of each carriage:
THE GRAPHICS. Nothing changed from the first season. Faces are really good, movement of hair and clothes were really detailed. Also liked the extreme angle shots from time to time. But backgrounds, rare 3D models and fights were comparatively unreasonably plain, for the difference was obvious and annoying.
THE ACTION. Bad, as bad can be with such a budget. All of the scenes were basically static. One movement of hand, one run, one object flying. That’s why zero cooperation (which by the way was the core of the original game), zero interaction with freaking environment (in a story about war conflicts and life’s fragility! Yes, really). "Instead lets alter characters’ abilities, so it will nicely blend with the rest of junk in the anime industry’s trash bin".
THE SOUND. Can’t say it was good. By being a bad child from a literal record label it showed us good 3D sounds, but… mediocre music, while still making bangers outside just as operator themes or boss fight backgrounds.
THE STORY. Oh, how wrong I was, when thought that adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire was an easy task, thinking Benioff and Weiss just had a good source material. In terms of story adaptation, it is a… violent sexual assault:
-Characters. Dead dolls, who have no time. “They must say, act or teleport from scene to scene, saying things we have no budget and time to show.”
-Tempo. “More episodes must be pretty expensive, let’s make 3 long, rich and difficult for comprehension chapters into 8 episodes.”
-Scale. “Oh, I don't know what it is, really. We are trying to show everything, but because of a few story limitations from above we will just slideshow the unconnected places, blend events, making them undetailed and simple as much as we practically can. If it adds mystery to the books, why shouldn't it add mystery to anime too?”
-Development. Previously I wanted to divide it into plot development, characters’ and something more but I’ll just say this: “We showed the main checkpoints, so it will not deviate from the game. Whether you want to believe in such development or not, it’s just your problem for it's just an advertisement, go play the game itself.”

It’s bad, so freaking bad. I have a few friends who are afraid of the mobile gaming world, and I will definitely not show them my favorite game in such a horrible state. The original thing, made by dozens of designers (try to google new events' trailers, just the video sequence alone is stylish as puck), ended up turned into this — pitiful money abuse victim, made by the hands of those, who couldn't care any less. On the bright side the franchise will not branch with such an advertisement, so the skillful hands will not be distributed god-knows-how among potential Arknights projects, yet staying as it is will just push potential new fans away.

Shame. Really.

Rewriting this now as I've finished the anime. I assume if you already like Arknights, you'll have a bias that'll help you enjoy this show but otherwise it's perfectly said as subpar in my opinion. There are a lot of flaws from characters, pacing, and the story which irritated me. I don't expect an anime to be realistic, however I also don't expect it to be comparable to a middle school theatre class. I don't mean to say that insultingly, I just feel like that's a good representation of the quality.

Pacing is incredibly slow or decently fast, there's no consistency however except in the final ... episode where the pacing is done rather ideally. I found it odd at some points the characters that should be fighting would just stop to or stall to monologue to each other. Moments that carried stakes or momentum would suddenly lose it or scenes that didn't would rapidly gain it and it was hard to follow without losing my attention.

Animation wasn't the worst, however it for sure was somewhat disappointing as well. It was subpar animation quality in most areas except for some stellar background and setting designs, they really did know how to set the atmosphere. However the character animation itself was stiff, some characters would move awkwardly or with overly exaggerated movements that looked odd. CGI was abundant in some of the episodes and it was terrible quality, copy and pasting of the same animations which weren't even entertaining.

Characters themselves were horrid, most characters were at best two dimensional with the lot being rather predictable and agitating. There were some interesting characters such as Faust and Kal'tist, though most of them didn't get a lot of screen time. Those who did were incredibly one dimensional that had everything you need to know about them explained in one scene same from the previous season such as Amiya or Mephisto. Decision making by the characters is god awful, considering the enemy is pretty much a terrorist organization hellbent on genocide I don't know why they show so much sympathy to them. Not to mention they just let enemies monologue openly without doing anything, I hate that so much.

Story doesn't seem bad, just poorly executed. First event in the anime the antagonist just had super poor decision making and could have easily ended the anime there and then. One of the antagonist in the second event is super overly emotional and whiny, yet is supposed to be a leader of the bad guys in the event. It's really annoying how they just feel like throw away bad guys put up against already stiff and one dimensional main characters.

This review isn't really written the best but overall the anime is pretty poor. Want something dark and gritty which also has a fair share of action? 86 is a good alternative to this I'd recommend and has a better cast of characters, handling topics such as racism and hopelessness. Unless you are an INCREDIBLY patient person, I'd advise you watch something else.