An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

How Much Lore Does It Take to Justify Cute Ship Girls? A Prelude to Azur Lane

The upcoming Azur Lane anime is… something that is weirdly in my interest. I was never really a gacha game or phone game sort of person, but I’ve been playing around on Azur Lane for most of a year now; it has some decent character writing and is overall very friendly to casual players. When I heard they were going to make an anime based on the game, though, I was… less than thrilled. It would be cool to see some of my favorite characters moving around and doing things in a more fully realized world, but adapting video games, at least ones that aren’t visual novels, into other media has historically been very thorny. True, anime does this a little better than Western media; Granblue Fantasy the Animation was… not exactly what I’d call good, but it does look a little like Citizen Kane when you put it next to the filmography of Uwe Boll (probably the West’s most famous or perhaps infamous adapter of video games). But in any case there would have to be care taken and effort output in order to make an Azur Lane anime good.

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