This Week in Anime

Can Newbies Enjoy the Arknights Anime?

Steve
Sorry, Nick, no time for jokes right now. A new Arknights event just dropped, and I'm trying to pull the new super-powerful 6-star unit named Ligma.

Look, we both know the upcoming limited operator Sugma is gonna clean both of their clocks. But we can talk turkey about Arknights and its totally sane codenames at any time. For now, let's wrap up this year of "This Week In Anime" by covering Arknights: Prelude to Dawn, the long awaiting anime adaptation of the hit gacha game! It's got some of the action and all of the depression!

It pays to have strong fundamentals. And in this case, those fundamentals are kemonomimi girls with cool techwear and rock cancer. Look no further than Amiya, the poster girl for the series, and her oversized coat, donkey rabbit ears, and crystal lesions. Like any gacha game, the character designs run the gamut, but I greatly enjoy the "core" Arknights aesthetic.

You're telling me! Look at these common anime W's.


I love a woman who'll stuff a grenade in my mouth and pull out the pin.

You neglected to mention my favorite, Asbestos, but otherwise, that's a pretty good list. The point is, Arknights is a distinct game with a strong sense of style and a ton of lore and personality. It also, quite notoriously, has a very weak opening act, which is precisely what this adaptation covers! Fun!

I held out a little longer, but I've also stopped keeping up with anything outside the main narrative. The storytelling in the game isn't the friendliest. It's very verbose and circumlocutory, and the events are also set up to incentivize skipping past the visual novel scenes. But with these weaknesses comes an opportunity. Where words fall short, an animated adaptation could be able to succeed.

Yeah, I'll give Prelude to Dawn this much at the very least: it looks damn good. The premiere impressed me right off the bat with how well it used the brutalist architecture of Chernobog to instill the right mood. The environment is vast and daunting when it needs to show how vulnerable our heroes are, and it's tight and claustrophobic when they're on the run.


As the cinematic framing implies, it's an adaptation that takes itself extremely seriously. And for the most part, that works in its favor.

Hard lol, and hard agree. The storyboards are excellent at blocking many characters and, even better, blocking those characters in a way that emphasizes their pointy headgear.

As you can see there, the anime can't avoid some moments of expository clumsiness, which stems from its source material. The player character is an amnesiac (tell me if you've heard that one before). That prompts many of their companions to stop every few minutes and deliver a quick tutorial, like how to install Arknights on your smartphone.

A neat thing Prelude to Dawn does is keep the Doctor's gender deliberately neutral. We're just a white-haired person in a weird hood who says "Amiya" a lot and sometimes gives sage tactical advice. You don't need gender to do any of that.

Yeah, Amiya's the actual protagonist. A young girl at the head of Rhodes Island, she drives the events of Prelude to Dawn, which eventually culminate in her reconciling her youth and naïveté with the realities of the battle Rhodes Island is embroiled in against Reunion. Who are the guys in these goofy masks?

Haha, which gets to my favorite part of early Arknights: the politics! Because in these early stages, you are essentially fighting rioters who have pretty good reasons to rebel against the system. Oripathy can be contagious under certain circumstances—namely, after death—so this has resulted in widespread discrimination against the Infected on all levels, from the personal to the federal. Rhodes Island, ostensibly a pharmaceutical company (it's a long story), wants to bridge the gap between both sides. Still, the people in Reunion are fueled by the violence they've experienced at the hands of their oppressors.

Mephisto is such a trip, lol. So is Talulah, for that matter, the stony queen leading Reunion with her building-flattening flame magic. Both of these characters, and more, are in the story for the long haul, so they only get a little to do here in the opening act. And in general, the longer arc of this Reunion conflict builds up a lot of apparent hypocrisies that the narrative takes a while to address with the proper nuance. There are shades of it here, but right now, we're left rooting for (or playing as) a PMC that is only making this conflict worse.

Ah, but let me present you with the toughest ethical quandary ever: what if the Dragon Cop is hot?

This is where illustrator Kuroblood's years-long gambit pays off, which should inspire us all. If you work hard enough and on the correct game, you too can live to see your furry OCs animated in an internationally distributed television program.

Also, Wei isn't even a recruitable operator. Arknights' character design just goes that hard unilaterally.

It's nice, isn't it? And Prelude to Dawn, to its credit, is pretty unobtrusive about the cameos, which are primarily relegated to the handful of scenes on Rhodes Island's base. Elsewhere, the show focuses on a much smaller and more manageable cast of playable ops, which includes an apple pie-loving angel and an Italian wolf with a penchant for Pocky.

And they're pretty normal by Rhodes Island standards.

And here's another injection of levity for you: the name of the antagonist for this arc:

Hugely authentic "13-year-old coming up with AOL Instant Messenger handle" energy, I cannot deny that.

Like, it's obvious to the audience that Skullshatterer is talking up checks that Reunion cannot cash, but at the same time, we understand why this is the path he had to choose and why Misha decides to throw her lot in with him as well. We can see the tragedy coming from a mile away, but that doesn't blunt its impact.

Alas, war never changes. Neither does the anime's visual potency. Look, I didn't notice this parallel until I started sorting my screencaps. They went above and beyond your average gacha advert.

It's better than nothing, but still, a tall order for most catgirl techwear laypersons to commit to. Only Arknights fans and people excited to watch the first ~25% of a long and plodding war tragedy will lap Prelude to Dawn up. But if you're in either of those crowds, it's a pleasant surprise of a show with more than enough artistry to sustain its ambitious tack.

I couldn't agree more. In fact, I think Hoshiguma herself put it best: