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.
