Arknights: Prelude to Dawn : Episode 1

Current Episode Score: 6

This is a show I am kinda excited to see how it goes, and kinda hoping it goes well. It has some good potential, and the whole concept behind the show I love. I love some of these recent shows that are based on gacha mobile games that the studio just throws money at to really let them create something that looks good and is enjoyable to watch. But also because many of them have stories and characters I enjoy and want to experience, I just lose interest in gacha mobile games very quickly and stop playing in a couple hours without fail. So when I get the chance to experience the story and characters in a different medium that I do enjoy, I want to see them do well.

As for the first episode of Arknights, some interesting choices have been made. I was wondering how they would make the tower defense style mechanics work in an anime, and they just kinda didn’t bother to adapt them as expected. Instead you just have some normal combat between the various characters and units you get to use in game. I am also interested to see how they keep developing the Doctor character, I don’t remember really get much of any dialogue or great development for his character in game. They are just a self insert character. But I’ve seen similar things work really well in Princess Connect and GranBlue. Were they manage to make the self insert character have an actual personality and character growth, so I have some hope here.

And interesting choice they did make is with the visuals of the show. Doing the entire episode with black bars is a very unique decision, and something I can’t say I see very often in anime. I don’t know if this was a stylistic choice or a financial related decision, but I can’t say I hate it. And in general the show is looking pretty good, but I can’t say it is anything special yet. I feel like we pretty much only saw drab grey concrete buildings and hallways and very muted colors, so honestly not much of an impression to be made. I’m hoping we see a bit more colorful and stunning visuals soon, something to really make their art style pop and show off what they can do.