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.
