Here I go opening up on another Gacha adaptation. That… shouldn’t mean as much as it’s seemed to. Personally, I don’t like the sentiment of dismissing video games as a storytelling medium. Even outside Visual Novels, which are built a little different, games can have and convey powerful, moving stories. Obviously, not all of them actually do, but neither does every single book or movie. Even phone app gacha games, which seem to have a reputation of the lowest of the low, are capable of telling good stories.
But compared to other source material, those stories seem to take to the screen shockingly poorly, rarely rising above mediocre competence. I speculated on what some reasons might be when I tried to pick up the pieces of MWZ , but even aside from anything inherent, there’s the distinct possibility that it’s something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Since, with the partial exception of VNs, video game adaptations “aren’t good”, they get less time, effort, and money put into them, resulting in an inferior product.
If that’s the heart of the matter, then perhaps there’s hope for Arknights.
While I don’t know the game first hand, coming into this as a newcomer like I did for Girls’ Frontline rather than a veteran like I did for Azur Lane or Fate: Grand Order, I am somewhat familiar with one of the names involved: Yostar. After the Azur Lane anime, Yostar decided to open up their own animation studio, Yostar Pictures, in order to adapt the games they publish right. This reminds me of an anecdote from western media, but in reverse: lamenting that video game adaptations of his movies tended to be bad, Vin Diesel famously decided to kick off his own video game studio, and turned out licensed games that were considered among the best of their genres on their systems. There’s something to be said for a creator’s frustration as a driving force. Given that Yostar Pictures has been tapped to do more than just adapt their own games, perhaps they can be the ones to break the video game anime curse.
Arknights begins with the recovery of a person simply known as Doctor, during which we focus on a rabbit-eared girl named Amiya, the leader of a group known as Rhodes Island. They try to get by some masked goons from a faction called Reunion, but the Jenova’s Witnesses (FFVII joke, sorry) might be the least of their worries, since Doctor professes to having complete amnesia when offered command of the operation. However, it seems that while Doctor’s memory may be gone, skill is not, and taking charge soon results in making it through what would have been a deadly encounter.
Gradually, we begin to understand more of what this world is like. Not only do we get some legitimately pretty long shots of our dreary gray cityscape, which manages to be more thematic than generic, but we start to be introduced to the setting’s core ideas. The most important of these seems to be the mystical disease known as Oripathy, which causes the afflicted to turn to crystal and shatter into infectious dust. It’s incurable (currently. They hope that Doctor could fix that) and inevitably fatal, resulting in the infected being treated as lepers or worse. Both Reunion and Rhodes Island are made up of Infected, but have very different reactions to the world: Rhodes Island tries to help people and keep the peace, while Reunion is a rebel group that basically wants to burn down the orthodox power structures out of rage for their mistreatment. The flip side is that the kind of crystal involved is also where the setting’s industrialized magic comes from
Also of note are events known as Catastrophes, seemingly predictable massive disasters that are made out to be quite important.
Most of this is delivered moderately naturally, at least with the excuse of Doctor’s missing memory, but a couple of speeches do get ham-fisted. But, weird world, some exposition must fall upon us.
Rhodes Island continues to struggle to escape, only to be faced by the quirky miniboss squad including a weird masked girl called Crownslayer, an eccentric nutjob white-haired little boy called Mephisto, and the seemingly dragon-like woman Talulah, who can pretty much incinerate buildings with her magic. No prizes for guessing which of those is the immediate danger.
Rhodes Island gets out, in part due to one of those Catastrophes falling, but it’s not without incident nor losses.
As we rearrange ourselves for the next arc, the exposition dumps do continue being just a little more heavy-handed than you might like to see. I’m not sure we needed the tour of the Rhodes Island land ship base to be narrated, but that’s a small matter. It’s also clear that, despite giving us loads and loads of named characters (no doubt to act as fanservice for people who know the game), the story is intended to be tightly focused on Amiya, and most especially the gap between her excessively optimistic bleeding-heart sort of personality on one side and the grim reality of the world on the other. This is more or less explicitly called out, but it’s shown as well as told.
We then transition over from the Soviet-esque brutalism of the first city to a new destination: the vaguely Asian-inspired and more modern or cyberpunk-ish city of Lungmen. There, Rhodes Island makes a deal with the city’s boss for access, on the condition that they help take down the Reunion threat in the city before it fires.
It’s around here, at what’s the halfway point of an unusually short series, that you really start to notice the biggest problem with Arknights: it tells its story more like chess notation than not, being very concerned with who goes where and, fair enough, their fates… but less about the emotions and reasoning involved.
Compared to some media that has this problem, Arknights is fairly forgivable. They make the various active setups, whether battles or other situations like a “find the sassy street kid” scenario, engaging enough with animation that at least makes the characters look and feel invested. But we don’t get a lot of how these scenarios actually impact Amiya, or how they inspire her to grow or change… and even less for Doctor.
On one side, the element coming in for Doctor is a shame – Doctor is, essentially, starting as a blank slate, and seeing how the character develops from the experiences in the show would be a pretty big deal if it was done well. Amnesia plots may be something of a dead horse, but when they’re done well they can be done really well. Perhaps ironically, one of the best examples I can think of is a video game – Planescape: Torment. In Torment, your player character begins the game with literally no memory (much like Doctor here) and he in fact never does get a name, being referred to as The Nameless One in a meaningful way. A big part of the fun of the game is in how you play TNO, and a lot of the best scenes give the player the opportunity to take a path in dialogue or the story in general based on what kind of person said player has shaped TNO into. Looked at from a story perspective, TNO fundamentally must grow. The blank slate needs to have values written on it bit by bit. That’s what makes it worth watching.
But… Doctor is a somewhat different kind of Player Character. TNO is a blank canvass meant to invite creativity. Doctor, at least based on the depiction in the anime, is a blank screen that’s meant to be projected upon. Canny readers may have noticed that I’ve been avoiding using pronouns for Doctor, and that’s not an accident. The show does it too, carefully skirting around Doctor being a “he”, “she”, or even “they”. They even go so far as to have Doctor defined by a face-concealing black hood, through which we only see Doctor’s eyes and a hint of hair, erasing the most distinctive part of a person from this character, presumably so that can be you. Androgynous build, androgynous voice, no name… and no personality to get in the way.
And as much as I defend video games in general, this is a pretty “native” issue to games. In the old days you might hear of the AFGNCAAP – Ageless, Faceless, Gender-Neutral, Culturally-Ambiguous Adventure Person – a term that comes from the classic adventure game Zork: Grand Inquisitor more or less lampooning the tendency of the Adventure Game genre to have such protagonists. After years of character creators and arguably a steady rise in the acceptance of playable characters with actual defining character traits as well as names, identities, and so on (part of legitimizing games as storytelling media), the style of protagonist got something of a resurgence from the gacha scene. Doctor is one of many such protagonists, kept absolutely vague because you don’t want to offend anybody or keep them from self-inserting.
This makes such properties extra challenging to adapt. Theoretically, this is your main character. But not only does this character lack any defining traits or identity, usually they’re not an actual fighter who gets involved in the action (as befits the role of “player” being above the role of “unit”) so it’s hard to have said lead do things. Azur Lane’s anime outing went one possible way, completely writing out the AFGNCAAP “Commander” character in favor of focusing on the characters who actually are defined, for better or worse. Arknights resolves this tension by… not resolving it at all, and just presenting Doctor as the formless void we get here.
I know what some of you are probably thinking: “Bland self-insert characters aren’t that rare.” And it’s true. Bland self-inserts, to an extent, have been a staple of many genres, especially the ones high on wish fulfillment. But even the lamest Isekai Generic Nice Guy will typically be written to have his own opinions, likes, and dislikes even if none of them are very strong, and at least as a face and a name to set him apart from the other inheritors of the role. Doctor is… something different.
The last route, of course, would be to write an actual character for your main character, whether there was one in the game or not; a more pragmatic rather than faithful form of adaptation keeping in mind the needs of a different media. This is, to an extent, what Fate: Grand Order did, but FGO had the advantage of the fact that, while the player is able to select (and even switch at will) between a male and female avatar as well as set a name, there was always at least a little canon for “Ritsuka Fujimaru” rather than a total blank.
Going the faithful-to-a-fault route where Doctor is always there but completely undefined and not particularly talkative absolutely hurts Arknights, but I can see why they did it. The last thing you want is your player base rioting at their anime outing because they felt inappropriately or improperly represented.
And this digression has gone on quite long enough. Point being, just assume until we’re given evidence otherwise that there’s a Time Lord on scene. Moving along.
For some reason, everyone seems to be interested in a street kid infected, Misha. Lungmen wants her and has Amiya attempt to recover, but when the Reunion uprising starts, one of their leaders, a mysterious figure in a gas mask, also seems to be devoting a great deal to find Misha in specific.
For all the lack of specific character work in this show, we do get some good talks as Reunion’s uprising begins, about how they gain their force and why they seem to be so much better at recruitment than Rhodes Island: they sell (false) hope, but it doesn’t matter if their promises are fiction as long as they let people believe they’ll have their wishes granted, while Rhodes Island doesn’t lie and claim to be able to do what they can’t.
I’m no fan of message fiction, but when fiction happens to be applicable, it can be a good moment, and a quick take on how cults and destructive ideologies proliferate that’s more nuanced than just “all these people are jerks” is both something resonant and something that’s 100% germane to the fiction in front of us, so I thought it was worth highlighting.
It turns out that Lungmen wants Misha because her father was an important person in another city, meaning she may be party to sensitive information. Gas Mask wants her, because it turns out that this individual, who now goes by Skullshatterer, is Misha’s long-lost brother Alex (who we only hear about now), and he manages to snag her out of the city. He makes a pretty good recruitment pitch to Misha as well, though the barely constrained rage and the heap of senseless violence and assorted war crimes that can be laid at Reunion’s feet sort of put a damper on things.
The following rescue attempt becomes a pitched battle in which Skullshatterer is goaded by a rogue agent called W into attempting to suicide bomb Doctor. This pushes Amiya to respond with actually lethal force (since supposedly she’d not fought to kill before), saving the day but horrifying Misha (watching from afar) and Amiya herself.
Given the gritty nature of the show, I’d kind of assumed that the bloodless carnage up to this point was more of a stylistic choice than all the Rhodes Island crew, with weapons including edged weapons and guns as well as magic and bashing shields, were somehow doing nonlethal damage only, but no, they explicitly hadn’t killed up until this point. I guess Doctors Without Borders With Weapons still has standards.
In any case, this causes Misha to rather reasonably lose it. Ultimately, she takes up the mantle of Skullshatterer, donning the all-concealing gas mask and hoodie combo and leading the Reunion troops into battle into what sounds like pretty much her suicide by cop. I think what she actually keels over from is her illness flaring up due to using magic a lot, but that’s neither here nor there. Reunion is dropped for now, Amiya angsts, and the show lets us know it has another season coming.
But, for this review, it’s over. Arknights does continue with another eight episodes subtitled Perish in Frost, and a third season (Rise from Ember) has been announced, but with regards to the first season, it’s time to render judgment.
I’ve already talked at length about Arknights’ biggest problem, so I’ll avoid retreading it too much. In the end, it only does so much damage. Amiya gets some respectable notes in the last couple of episodes when her worldview is challenged, even if with the run time of the first season it amounts to an extremely basic “try to break the cutie” sort of affair. The degree to which Misha’s arc serves to humanize Reunion is also quite welcome. They’re absolutely a gang of murdering terrorists, but being able to understand who the boots on the ground are and why they’d sign up with this order is really nice, compared to just leaving the members with faces as a pack of eccentric big-eyed villains.
Also on the plus side, the art is gorgeous. Yes, its vistas are mostly of very dusty, desolate places: brutalist Chernobog, the Lungmen slums, and the wasteland where the last battle of the season is had. But the attention to detail, the color, and especially the lighting makes it feel extremely cinematic. There’s some very skilled direction here, and it’s backed up with a vision that doesn’t want to just look standard.
So, does Arknights “break the curse” of the Gacha adaptation? Well, not really. I think the failing with regards to implementing Doctor is going to disqualify it from fully escaping. But it puts up a quite fair effort even as its origins try more aggressively than usual to hold it back. By the end, I got the sense that Amiya and any other character who was going to have staying power (perhaps the police lady from Lungmen? She was in a lot of scenes after entering the show.) would be more of a slow-burn character. In that sense, going for sixteen or more episodes rather than eight might really benefit Arknights as a whole.
And, if Amiya has a couple good scenes across the duration of an average movie, like she does here, then the human element isn’t completely failed.
On the whole, I’ll give Arknights a B-. It certainly showed that there’s strength in the studio, and that they’re capable of producing something that’s really nice to look at, but it also showed that it takes more than that to create a good show, and that there are still X-factors that make adapting video games a challenge. It’s not all that long, though, so go ahead and give it a watch if you’re curious.