AnimeZone

I ain't going to lie, after the mess that was season 2 of this show, my hopes for this new season were quite low. Which, in a sense, ended up playing in this show's favor, as I feel like the plot finally started to move forward in a way that made sense.

If you want to read about my thoughts on the previous two seasons of this show, you can read about them here and here.

My main complaint about season 2 was that it had very few important things happening in its story and everything felt like it was progressing at a exceedingly slow pace.

Generally, I like it when TV shows do that, since it allows for proper world building and it gives the audience time to build an attachment towards the characters. However, Arknights took this to a whole new extreme and really tested my patience, always making me question why I was watching the show in the first place, since everything felt like it was of such little importance in the grand scheme of things.

There were no side quests or anything of the like. Every event had a place in paving the way towards progressing the story, it was just happening at a very slow rate.

In the context of a video game, this might not be that much of a bad thing since, the whole point of a game is to have fun. If the gameplay is engaging enough and there are enough addictive mechanics to keep you playing, then story just becomes a commodity that rarely plays a good role in the overall enjoyment.

In anime, however, this doesn't work anymore. You need an engaging story to keep the focus of the audience, since there is no gameplay loop to keep them interested anymore.

This is where the drawbacks of this adaptation start to rear their ugly heads. The show, for better or for worse, takes its time in developing the plot of the game, very slowly unraveling the intricacies of the story and the background of the characters by drip feeding you with minute details every once in a long while.

After the horrible slow paced crash that was season 2, my expectations for season 3 were at a new low, but I chose to keep watching it simply because I felt like there might still be something worth salvaging here.

And, while new details did pop up that almost went into the backstory of the doctor character, which I am very curious about, it was still not enough for me to justify the 27 long episodes that you'd have to watch to get up to speed.

Like I had said previously, this show isn't for people who aren't fans of the game. If you come into this hoping to discover an incredible story with amazing characters and gut wrenching plot twists, I'm sad to say that this simply isn't it.

There are plot twists in this, don't get me wrong, they just aren't anything to write home about. The characters aren't particularly interesting and the few ones that have an intriguing background are kept in the shadows and seldom talked about, which really left a bad taste in my mouth.

But I digress.

I will continue to follow this show, simply because I am curious to see how the plot will evolve but, as I have said before, this show is not worth watching unless you're a fan of the game. If you aren't, there's very little to be enjoyed on this one.