Alas, video games. This isn’t the first time I’ve picked on you and it won’t be the last. And let me make one thing perfectly clear: I love video games. I even like their stories; there are games I’ve played and replayed just for the story, like Planescape: Torment, and games where I think the story could gracefully make the transition to screen in some form, like Iji. Even when a game doesn’t reach the highest heights, it can have a good and memorable story with good and memorable characters. JRPGs like Skies of Arcadia are great at this – and, for all its stereotypical fantasy cheese, so is the Fire Emblem series.
For those who aren’t familiar, Fire Emblem is a series of tactical RPGs or Turn-based strategy games (depending on how you want to look at them) united by being set in fantasy worlds where a lot of familiar tropes tend to repeat themselves. Warring kingdoms, divine dragons, nobles, and retainers are the order of the day. Sometimes the setting can be a little tired, and sometimes the characters (who only have a few quotes to distinct themselves, unless you follow their support stories) can be a little basic, but by in large it tends to turn out moderately decent stuff.
Why do I bring that up? Because, at first, Shironeko Project Zero Chronicle feels like an off-brand Fire Emblem setup. It’s got noble pretense, clear fantasy tropes for everyone, sworn retainers with different character classes, and so on. They worship a shiny rock instead of a dragon, but that’s neither here nor there. What it turns into is an insult to storytelling and makes me feel kind of bad for ever thinking of this mess in terms of Fire Emblem. So let’s dive in.
We open in what seems like the most tired of fantasy settings, a world divided between the white good place where things are nice (in this case literally in the clouds) and the black bad place where things suck. I won’t automatically dismiss a setting like this, but it is an uphill battle.
And, in the Kingdom of Black ruled by the King of Darkness, we drop in on a young man who becomes the sole survivor of his village in the dull gray wastelands; everyone else is killed in a random monster attack. It is at least believable why and how he survives (requested to flee with a group of children, his charges suffer general attrition), but this leads to the boy senselessly digging some kind of mass grave when an old knight rolls up.
The knight feeds him, gives a fairly generic harsh mentor speech, and fights it out with the boy like harsh mentors do. Then, as an old mentor character, he promptly decides that he’s on his deathbed. I guess the excitement gave him a heart attack or something. As he dies, he tells the kid to take his sword to a manor in the capitol and present himself there as the Prince of Darkness if he really wants to change the world, since evidently the title of successor to the crown is perpetually up for grabs. Right as the old man passes, the boy (who I am still calling that because he declines to give a proper name) displays some unknown light-related special power he has, the significance of which will be left for later, or more like never. He proceeds to do the thing as instructed, meeting up with a retainer of his dead old mentor (of about ten minutes) and introducing himself as the Prince
Meanwhile, in the sky, a girl with angel wings (evidently the Queen of Light, Iris, and said wings only for battle form) fights off shadowy demonish forces of “the Darkness”. She and the trio of differently-character-classed retainers evidently blame the King of Darkness for their woes, despite the fact that our lead on the other side shows that the King of Darkness can’t even pave roads or maintain his own villages. The queen, Iris, is worried that the dark power is getting stronger, and that she might not be able to hold out as-is for much longer. She’s also keen to blame the current King of Darkness only, and hope that a regime change will restore balance to the world. Did I mention this show has, depending on what source you ask, a Romance subgenre? It’s not subtle about setting up the idea, but it’s also not good at setting up the characters.
In any case, a rather chatty big flying demon thing called Bahl attacks one of the White Kingdom’s cities, having a kind of meaningless and not particularly visually stunning fight with some elf elementalist until the young queen manages to show up.
Now is as good a time as any to talk about the action in this show. It’s… not good, in that boring conventional way where the action writing is alright but the animation can’t really show us anything thrilling or wonderful; it’s too cheap to execute any sort of vision in a way that’s particularly striking and doesn’t seem to care. It does the bare minimum of visual storytelling, but there are a lot of fights in the show and they needed to be better than that.
In any case, Bahl no-sells everything the queen can throw at him and then just sort of leaves when she refuses to channel extra power from the holy magic rock that is the “progenitor rune”, a feat that would be bad for some fairly non-specific reason. We hear that when a Queen of Light passes she gets forgotten, so would this make Iris go poof? But then she talks about straining the rune, so would it make the kingdom stop being airborne? Or would it just mean less magic for a while after? No idea. Nor are we given any clue as to why Bahl stops his rampage rather than continuing to blow stuff up or doing something bad to the little queen who can’t scratch him. Later on we get the idea that this is just sort of what Bahl does: appear, wreck stuff, and disappear when he gets bored.
Back in the Black Kingdom, it appears that not everyone is content with the war, as a demon-ish lord demands the king give an answer as to why his people are being sacrificed in fruitless battles. The king, manifesting as a swirling pillar of evil smoke with a vague robed humanoid form inside, kills the dissenter and then monologues in his extremely stereotypical deep echoy voice some senseless evil prattle about darkness swallowing everything before saying about half of the substance that needs to be said: Dark doesn’t like Bahl either, and would-be princes are tasked with dealing with the situation.
Before dealing with that, Prince (as I will refer to the otherwise nameless character) gets a training montage and a new outfit, courtesy of the earlier mentioned retainer he met up with, Vallus, and we check in with a green-haired demon girl with a bad attitude named Groza. She beats up some monsters but doesn’t do as well as she thought she did and has to be saved at the last minute by Prince’s arrival. She immediately takes a much different attitude with her rescuer than with her retainers, blushing and stammering and very obvious. Still, she eventually manages to get her composure together enough to give Prince the plot hook that he’ll be competing with the other hopefuls for the Greatsword of Black that would make its holder the true prince.
Switching to White, we get an extended flashback of Iris and her mage retainer when they were candidates to become the next Queen of Light. As long as it is, there’s little meat to it: the former Queen (As much a supernatural throne sitter as the King of Darkness) passes the mantle to Iris after she gets bushwhacked by some random darkness and manages to dispel it with magic. Yeah, we also get that her knight retainer had a crush on her and she’s sisterly close with her mage retainer, but we also understood that in the present so really there’s not much to advance the character of Iris in this.
We then see Groza’s challenge for the hopeful successors: fighting a bunch of monsters in an arena, where the top two will then duel. The action is still lame and Prince, of course, manages to come out on top, with the feather in his cap of saving his rivals from imminent death and sparing his duel opponent, Adel. The next plot hook is then delivered, with Prince and Adel being asked to deliver a message to White.
Said message turns out to be an offer of temporary alliance against Bahl. Adel acts as the main envoy while Prince plays bodyguard (since Prince still doesn’t talk like a noble). When they meet Iris, Prince is quite obviously immediately stricken by something about her, which quickly develops into both a strong interest and a belief in her basic goodness, despite everyone else (especially her knight retainer) giving the Black envoys a hard time. Iris seems to also particularly notice Prince, but it’s not as focused on. She does, after hearing his take on the matter, agree to work with them to kill Bahl.
This leads to almost an entire episode fighting Bahl down in Black. First up are Groza, Vallus, and the army, who predictably get little done. The King of Darkness himself comes out to play and does a good deal better (even better than Iris alone) but Bahl gets the upper hand and threatens to off the King. That’s the cue for Iris to arrive and chain up Bahl so that the King can finish him off by burying him in a volcano, though Bahl recognizes that, since the King isn’t annihilating him, the king must have plans for him. These never come to fruition.
The effort leaves Iris in a bad way, however, and she collapses as she returns home, causing Prince (who catches her) to worry for her and the White natives to be on edge. She recovers well enough to be holding court by the time Groza arrives with another letter from the King of Darkness (asking for more ceasefire while Black repairs Bahl-related damages), and she ends up showing Prince, Adel, and Groza around her kingdom, which involves much puttering and several moments of Groza being jealous as Iris and Prince make eyes at each other despite still having not had an actual conversation. We get overly long scenes of tending to injured critters, trying on clothes, or having dinner that could be good character building with the right execution but are mostly just wasted.
This leads to an entire episode picking herbs and greens. You know, if the general concept of this came off as a Fire Emblem game, this bit is more like the really boring times in World of Warcraft where you have to run around for hours gathering resources to brew that next stack of health potions. I didn’t need to see the sanity-draining herb farming make it to screen, but here we are.
The jealous knight and jealous Groza get paired together for the plant gathering. Iris and Prince don’t, but she ends up hanging out with him anyway. Again, we could use this to actually have the characters interact in a way that tells us more about them and shows who they are as people, but we largely rely on silent looks of inexplicably budding affection between Iris and Prince or jealousy at that from Groza or the Knight. When the characters do talk about something other than herbs, it’s to rehash what we already know. I guess we learn that the Kingdom of White doesn’t salt their food as much as would be recommended from a culinary perspective? I guess the idea with that is that while White has the sunlight for good growing things, it doesn’t exactly have the land to mine salt. That’s great, but how about our main characters? Prince and Iris have several moments with each other, but we don’t see a whole lot out of any of them. Even when the two end up falling into a river we only get a little homeopathic romantic comedy and not much about how they really relate to each other.
There was an attempt – at that point, Prince was looking for the missing-but-not-really tagalong kid and tripped into Iris. She was touched, supposedly, by his concern for another person, but she basically says as much and we don’t get a clear idea of how this makes her feel or why she’s already been interested in or friendly with Prince (who, recall, is pretending to be a basic bodyguard for Adel) aside from him having some sort of unwritten main character magnetism. The other way around is more comprehensible – Iris is the queen, after all – but it’s still nothing resembling a developing relationship. Which makes me realize that Groza also fell for Prince in a matter of seconds with no development, so I’m just going to say the show’s writers aren’t great.
As the Black cast finally makes ready to go, Adel starts acting a little mind controlled. Then he turns into a monster and attacks Iris. Prince slices him in half for that, when no one else was even close to being able to save Iris, and for that he gets the tar beaten out of him by the knight, who also arrests him since Iris can only manage to say “wait” in the smallest voice ever. It’s not like she’s queen or anything, or that the guy just saved her life. Might as well let her top knight get to the torture and interrogation.
The Progenitor Rune gives Iris some kind of vision while at the same time a mysterious white cat appears to Prince and seemingly sets him free from the prison cell he’s brooding in. The cat leads him to his weapons (out on a spit of land in the countryside for some reason) and then turns into the Progenitor Rune (or something that looks like it) with Iris inside. It shatters, releasing her to fall into Prince’s arms. They hold hands, look into each other’s eyes so much the scene goes weird for a bit, Prince introduces himself as the prince, and they promise to help make the world a better place from their opposite sides. This is literally the only time in the main story they talk to each other as each other, and they spend it talking big things rather than forging or affirming any kind of human bond.
After this, in White the knight goes looking for a cure for Iris’s lingering weakness, much against her wishes. In Black, the King of Darkness seems to get that not everyone is on his team, and sends Groza and Prince on a monster-elimination mission while he launches the full-scale assault against White, either to get them killed or just distract them. If the idea was just having them out of the way, it works pretty well, as the pair are busy fighting junky (and not-so-junky) monsters while the sky armada takes off to attack Iris and her kingdom.
Our knight friend gets the magic water for Iris, which is good because she drains herself hard putting up a shield for her kingdom. Meanwhile, Groza gets let down hard and has a good cry, despite being still loyal to Prince even if her affection won’t be returned. Remember, while her love is predicated on more than Iris, that’s not saying a lot.
The King of Darkness kicks off the final battle, leaving Prince and Groza behind. Only Prince is arrested, though, which seems like a tactical blunder. The King is in battle above anyway, facing down Iris one on one. It gets us the chance to see the King of Darkness clearly aside from his smoke and… while his design isn’t the worst, it is really a generic meanacing cloaky wizard dude like you’d see in an old video game, with very little distinctive about it. They have a beam battle while, in the war around them, Light forces get mind controlled left and right and Iris’s knight ends up in a duel with Vallus.
The King of Darkness lets Iris get away several times, even though is win condition seems to be killing her. She fails her first few attempts to fix the problem, including pulling out a “rewrite time” spell that does absolutely nothing but save the animators some money showing ups clips from earlier in the show, but ultimately ends up before the Progenitor Rune again.
Meanwhile, Prince seems faced with a darkness monster rampage in Black, and more importantly a returned demonic Adel because logic and continuity are for suckers. Prince obliterates said distraction with BS sword magic powers that appear for no reason. That doesn’t kill off the annoyance, though, and Prince gets run through before stabbing him, which takes better for some reason. The two talk while stabbed like they don’t have mortal wounds, revealing at the last minute that the King of Darkness taking the Progenitor Rune will destroy all time and space rather than ruling it. I’m not sure how that’s supposed to make sense as a motivation, but at this stage who cares? Adel finally dies (again) and Prince moves on ignoring being run through because, hey, he’s still got hit points left, right? He runs across the land, leaves Groza to fight the army of darkness for him, and is then enveloped by a mystic power that lets him sprout feathery wings like Iris does (black instead of white) and reach the sky.
Prince charges towards the top tower while Iris prays to the Progenitor Rune to do something. The King of Darkness is probably monologuing somewhere, but after failing to mind control the mage retainer of Iris, isn’t seen. Iris wishes for the Progenitor Rune to use everything it has to seal the Darkness and Black, even knowing that will destroy White as well. Her kingdom literally crumbles away under everyone’s feet, which of course causes rocks to fall and everyone to die down on the surface, except maybe Vallus who teleports away from the mess. Prince dives for Iris as she falls, but while he gets close enough for her to say goodbye, it’s not enough to catch her. We do get one last cut to the King of Darkness as it all falls apart, just enough for him to give a “How could this be?!” and Prince to come out of nowhere and stab him, ensuring the two of them die with Iris.
Game over.
Yeah, they just go ahead and destroy the world in this one. I guess when your heroes suck as much as Prince and Iris and their nonsensical random love do, it’s kind of inevitable.
I am not kidding, that’s how the show ends. We get two post credits scenes, but they make no sense. In one, a redhead kid washes up on the shore of a small, sunlit island and sees a white cat. I guess this is supposed to indicate the world was somehow reborn, but really it’s more like they cut in five seconds of test footage for Link’s Awakening. In the other, the absolute final note of the anime, we cut to Iris’s knight retainer. He’s drifting in the empty void of space and going a little crazy, lamenting how she didn’t wait for him and then his voice distorts and he gives a really good psychotic maniacal laugh. The absolute final end.
Excuse me, what?
Okay, so this show is based on a game. Specifically, it’s attempting to tell the backstory of a game, rather than the main story. I guess in a way that makes sense – I love delving into myth and history in gaming – but in other ways… why this story? Why in this form? This is like doing a full story on the Fall of Netheril as a tie-in with Baldur’s Gate. Except Karsus would actually be an interesting character. I’ll generously assume that it probably makes more sense if you’ve played the game, like Mr. Knight being a villain or something and redhead probably being important, but isn’t an anime a way to advertise and reach a wider audience? A chance to win over new fans? How does telling a story that seems remarkably pointless due to ending in the world going kaput further such a goal? Unlike, say, Takt op. Destiny, which also theoretically sets up the plot of a game, I have absolutely no interest in following up with Shironeko Project and don’t really see how anyone would, since in the unlikely event you were invested in anything in this show, it’s all gone.
But I’ll be honest, while the ending is bad it’s not the main problem here. The main problem here is how this show has no personality or interesting notes. It doesn’t feel like a real story, it feels like the outline you give of a generic fantasy epic when you don’t have the time to think anything up, the sort of thing that would be a show within a show like Gunvarrel in Robotics;Notes. It invokes every lame trope and has no intelligence in its writing to actually use them. It makes me think of Western fantasy titles that have a lot of the same ideas, and how even the weakest of them is infinitely more memorable and unique than anything that Shironeko Project Zero Chronicle has to offer up. Even most fantasy epic video games have significantly better stories and characters. Say what you want about Heroes of Might and Magic V (which also has the dude from the evil place falling for the lady from the shiny kingdom that’s good), it at least did a couple things worth remembering in the story department.
The setting is a joke, a basic example of duality that would have to work hard to have less nuance. If you ask a middle schooler to create a fantasy setting for you, I almost guarantee they will invent something that looks and feels less like reprocessed crud than this.
The conflict is worthless, messing around with the irrelevant Bahl only to have an embarrassingly brief final battle for the fate of the world. For all the struggles in this show – Prince becoming the first prince, taking on Bahl, getting a cure for Iris – none of them really contribute to how the finale goes down.
The characters are awful, stereotypes of stereotypes that seldom say a word of value. The only one who does anything that’s not totally paint-by-numbers is Groza, and really she’s just a third wheel slapped onto a romance where the first two wheels weren’t even doing any good. Iris is pure sweet positivity, and that’s it. Her knight retainer is loyal to her with a crush, and that’s it. Her mage retainer is like a sister, and that’s it. Prince is a tight-lipped nice guy from the bad place, and that’s it. The old dark knight who dies in episode 1 with less than ten minutes of screen time and leaves everything to Prince got about as much personality as literally anyone in this show does, and when he’s an embarrassment of a character that’s just sad.
The characters are so flat that calling them two-dimensional seems to be an overstatement. They spout exposition as needed and never interact like ordinary humans. The only time they show anything is during the peaceful stay in White, and even then the dialogue between them is even more bland than the native cuisine. It’s pure NPC chatter, the sort of stuff nameless characters in a game will talk about on loop in order to fill dead air for the player.
This is particularly damning because the entire story, in theory, hinges on the connection between Prince and Iris, and we never feel it. We don’t get a lot of time for it, really just a few episodes in the middle, and more critically that time isn’t used in an effective manner. They just sort of fall in fascination at first sight, and when the show needs that fascination to have evolved into love, it’s treated fully as love. The two have conversations before becoming each other’s most important person, but in some ways I’d prefer a real “love at first sight” that admits the craziness of the scenario to this half-hearted attempt to build chemistry without building chemistry.
If this was going to work, and that’s a big if, it needed to be a melodrama. It needed to be operatic. You can get away with “the kingdom of white ruled by the queen of light and the kingdom of black ruled by the king of darkness” in an opera, because that’s not supposed to be realistic, it’s supposed to be powerfully archetypical. But that would require going heavy into overwrought emotions. The main pair would need to live big, love big, and suffer big. The animation would have to convey some degree of epic scale. When White falls, it would have to be something dark and inevitable, that was a long time coming, vast and dramatic. That’s what Shironeko Project Zero Chronicle thinks it is, but that’s not what it actually achieves.
Shrioneko Project Zero Chronicle was an easy F. It’s one of the rare shows that gets everything wrong, with the possible exception of the voice casting. It feels less like a powerful fantasy anime and more like some sort of money laundering scheme in the vein of The Producers. I’d rather spend the same amount of time watching an actual cat. At least then I could dangle a piece of string in front of it and be entertained.