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Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Can Newbies Enjoy the Arknights Anime?
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meiam
Posts: 3442 |
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I tried the first episode and will completely agree on the framing/blocking being really good, the whole visual aspect is top notch. But boy does it look like there's there nothing interesting story/character wise in this. Between how incredibly generic everything is and the awkwardness of the gacha adaptation it made watching it painful. Combine these two and its pretty depressing that such good visual craft is wasted on "amnesiac wet cardboard collect an harem token girl".
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timber
Posts: 134 |
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I Wonder why "Prelude", I watched all 8 episodes and got the impression to watch the a succession of action scenes from a game without even knowing what the game was about. Absolutely zero story telling or world building.
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Blazi
 Posts: 501 |
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Wonderful article! I was a bit disappointed that no one decided to review it, so this is quite a nice addition. To your question, yes, I believe first time viewers can get into this. In fact, the reception from New viewers was quite positive, which I'm glad about. Though to make one thing known, as that the argument of "only for the players" can go so far; I believe one part, which was showing all around the base and many cameos of other operators was definitely for the players, but everything else I'll explain. 0-4 were the only chapters on Arknights release, so the players themselves were thrown into a plot with no context or understanding whatsoever, just like new viewers. And even in the present times this story is fairly new, as it heavily differs from the game in many perspectives; since the game was quite rough and not that well written at the start, but when the developers knew the game would survive, they drastically improved the writing, which definitely shows in the latest event Lingering Echoes, and the Victoria Arc. So they also updated the story Chapters 0-3 in game a few days before the anime, which it now reflects the anime. Though except for ArknightsJP, it was pretty much a shadow update, so most players going into the anime realized all the changes and smoothing out that was done, and thank God it was. So yeah, some of it was pandered towards players, but for most of the audience, it would be stepping in to something new.
Yostar Pictures did quite a good job for the first season and I'm excited for the second, Perish in Frost, which is animating a very good arc. Hopefully someone will review it! Until then, have a good rest of your day 
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12Zwolf12
Posts: 36 |
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Suddenly ANN realized the show existed, after not mentioning it for the entire runtime anywhere.
Not sure if you watched the right show, the main complaint I saw from people new to the story was that there wasn't enough fighting and too much world building. In general, except the last fight, the fighting was minimally animated, only in the last fight did we see some art/magic used by anyone that isn't Amiya.
That feels like the opinion of someone that watched the first half of the first episode and decided "I know what is happening", the problem with that approach is that you would miss shows like Madoka Magica, because the point of subverting expectations can only happen after you showed something people expected. And while Prelude to Dawn isn't an exceptional anime, I think you sell it far under worth when taking it as a standard story, because you think you know what will happen. In general, the show has the expected slow start, given the dense world that needs to get build first, before we can dive into the more interesting parts, and they even did that with a very save story (the Skullshatterer arc is very milk toast, even with the hints and some subversion in the details), but that would have always been the case. It is impossible to throw viewers into a world, with a grand story, like the grand knight tournament, where context is so important, without having some introductory parts first. Could these parts be better? Sure, but they started the journey with no idea if the game would succeed and threw out a very safe and slow first story, and they really got better and better with each arc, with the end of the first overarching story being a grandiose finale that rivals some of the best written modern stories. From what I observed, it seems that some people got hooked, and I only hope that they can up their animation for the fights, episode 4 (I think) was probably one of the worst episodes this season in terms of direction and visuals, and it came right before the end part actually showed that there is more to the show than meets the eye. |
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meiam
Posts: 3442 |
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Show like Madoka go out of their way to make it very clear on the first episode that they understand the tropes and will subvert them. And even if they don't, you end up hearing about them from eventually because they manage to be interesting enough to stand out from the chaff .Case in point, you'd need to be living under an anime rock to have never heard of Madoka, but I haven't heard of much of arknight and this article really didn't do anything to make it stand out, at most it seems to conclude that it's pretty good for a gacha adaption. Arknight first episode played every tropes as straight as they could without any hint that they'll do something exceptional. The problem with watching every anime that seems like they're just playing the tropes straight is that almost all of them do and then you end up watching more boring stuff than anything else. |
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Daze3x
Posts: 20 |
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It's been a commonly agreed upon opinion that chapters 0-3 in Arknights sucks, and that's just not something I ever agreed with. These chapters make up the prologue, and it does what it needs to do well. That's introduce the world and characters, and set up the main conflict. And I think it does a fantastic job at drawing you in with its complex world and interesting conflict.
The later chapters in Arknights are freaking fantastic, and it may make the older chapters look bad in comparison. But the payoff wouldn't be as good if Arknights didn't do a really good job at setting the stage in the prologue. I definitely think the anime did a great job at adapting the game. The game can be very verbose, which can lead to zoning out (which you can't really do if you want to understand the complexities of the story). The anime is able to use its visuals to do part of the storytelling, which drastically reduces the need for lots of words. It's able to effectively communicate all the info you'd need (and even added bits of foreshadowing that didn't exist in the game), the make this a really good way to experience the story. At no point do I think you need to go back and read chapters 0-3 in order to "truly" understand it. (But if you wanna read it to catch up to the story, be my guess, its worth reading.) I definitely this anime is approachable to newcomers. The only thing really holding it back is that a lot of anime fans are pretty impatient. The prologue does very little when it comes to answering tons of questions. There is still a lot of lore, worldbuilding, and major twists to come. But if Arknights can continue this level of quality into it's next season, it will be more than worth. And considering its likely to cover chapters 4-6, we are in for some good content. Chapters 5 and 6 especially are fantastic. I do hope the sequel, Perish in Front will be well adapted. The prologue chapters are by far the shortest chapters in the game. From here on, the chapters just get longer and longer. Chapters 4 and 5 are already a decent bump up in word count, but chapter 6 is longer than the whole prologue combined. I'm worried they will try to adapt it in 12 episodes. Even cutting down on Arknights wordiness won't help much, I believe. Especially when the conflict gets really complex and has a lot of things going on in chapter 6. It's almost like Durarara, just to give an example. I hope it gets like 18 episodes or more, which I feel it like the minimum is needs to be a great adaptation. And considering it already got a weird number of episodes for the first season (8 eps), it's not impossible they just give it some random number. I hope more people either get into the game with this anime (because even if you are satisfied with the adaptation, the side stories are still great and worth reading). But if not, I hope people are able to enjoy this adaptation and any future seasons. I truly believe Arknights is a fantastic story that just keeps getting better and better. And if it can ever get to chapter 8 and give it a good adaptation, I can see this being one of my favorite anime of all time, as I truly feel chapter 8 embodies the phrase "peak fiction". |
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WANNFH
 Posts: 1708 |
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I can't really call the show itself bad, because it actually did well in terms of production and represented the game quite nicely — but god damn, if they wanted to bring the new audience in, they did literally everything wrong in terms of making it stand out and leaving at least strong impression even in the season that was filled with awesome shows, so people don't gonna bother with it anymore and probably not even try to give it a second chance to watch the sequel, where the story gets good. Common auditory just didn't watch a whole half of the season of the show where literally NOTHING is happening and it just honestly feels like a slog, with the writing not even trying to approach the "show, don't tell" style and just dropping heavy lore by characters talking between themselves and just... moving from one location to another, without any trying to condense it? Even the action kicks in outside of a few scenes of the last episodes, it just feels completely dull and boneless. As far as I hate Netflix's style approach to anime by dropping all episodes in batch release - Prelude to Dawn probably won more audience if it was released this way instead of a weekly release, maybe - but at this point, the direction of the series has a LOT of actual flaws that is better to be fixed up even on the guaranteed sequel that comes. |
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Izanagi009
 Posts: 464 Location: Pittsburgh, PA, USA |
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finished reading the article and have a few comments:
While i get the issue with RI joining up with the Lungman forces, i don't think that it's inherently a bad idea. If it can be shown that the infected can work with Lungman's authority and system and help maintain the order and peace of the society, the infected will have a decreased sigma over time I find Talluah interesting because her first showing made me go "why does this feel familiar" until i saw this on tvtropes: A female leader with dragon motifs using fire-based powers with a sword and voiced by Sakamoto Maaya... Where have we heard of that before? Yep, it's Jalter which i feel has to be an intended voice casting gag As for the central point, I find that it would be hard to get people invested with the anime due to it adapting a very slow and expository part of the game. I feel when Frostnova gets involved, the show's reception will pick up. That said, the strong visuals, animation and voice cast will help maintain some interest for now. |
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Vanadise
 Posts: 500 |
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Somehow I missed that it's only eight episodes long... kinda makes me want to just push through and finish it, I only watched the first four episodes before stalling out. I played through the first three chapters of the game or so before I just couldn't handle the absolutely terrible writing any more (which I'm not blaming on the original, I think it's purely the translation's fault), so I wanted to give the anime a try... but the first few episodes, at least, still feel like they're throwing a ton of characters with great character designs but paper-thin characterizations at you, and I don't feel any reason to be invested in anything that's going on.
I feel like Arknights is the kind of thing that I should love, but it just consistently fails to grab me. I feel like Utawarerumono: Mask of Truth was a much better source of kemonomimi death & drama this year, which is saying a lot since it's a rather rushed adaptation of the game and you need to be familiar with the second game or anime (and the second season of the anime was an even weaker adaptation of the game than this season). |
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Clarste
Posts: 430 |
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I guess I'm late to this article, but I just wanted to note that the codename Rockrock comes from the fact that her real name is Rochelle Rockwell. So, Roch-Rock -> Rockrock.
It's slightly endearing! |
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