With the first episode under the belt, the Pricone (Priconne?) anime is turning out to be very charming. It’s also faithful in the meta, which is always how I want my anime.
Coming from the POV of a day-1 JP player, I can say that everything I like about Princess Connect: Redive! can be summed up as QoL. The mode of play, the actual interface, the way content is delivered, the kind of content present, the considerations put into place for their target audience, and so much more, is about you, the player, having a good time. And I don’t mean it in the way where you pay or not pay money to play this game, or whatever, but it is in how much the experience you have with Pricone can charm you. The game happens to be one aspect of it.
In so much that there is so much content that can make Pricone anime a simple matter to adopt, or that Pricone game has a ton of anime already in it, the ground-level truth is that all those things merely set the tone and tune the players’ expectation. It’s in how the game invokes that Sakura Taisen vibe, for example. It’s the skeuomorphism but without the menu hell, just so it invokes that early-era RPG vibe. It’s not about what the characters do in its world-breaking story, but how charming they really are.
In the first episode we the game players are invited to witness the translation of the charm of Pricone into the anime medium. Of course this will invariably involve its huge cast of playable characters. It will have a truck ton of details and references, enough to make me moved just from watching how Landosol becomes a proper anime versus just being the background of commu that I skip because there is no way I got time for all of it. It’s like seeing Nozomi singing At That Place in the end of the first episode, or Yui’s silhouette, or the music they used in town.
Most importantly, they even brought over Yuuki. The protagonist stand-in crossed with main plot device has those two roles, and the fact that he is both is also part of his charm. It is pretty amusing to see it play out through quiet action, rather than having that gap in the commu you read.
That’s not even to mention the reused animation and background, plus other assets that we saw already in the game in the past 3 years, nor the lines, nor the character quips (“Isn’t that crazy?”), the reused music, and a lot of other things. It’s like the other meta (that I don’t like)–it’s what greases the wheel of the various mechanisms (like Arena and how powerful gacha characters are). I get it, we need them, and that is the nuts and bolts of what makes the execution good.
But those things all mainly serve the greater good. It is that greater good, the thing about Pricone that attracts me as a player and a fan, and hopefully, attracts newcomers to the world of Princess Connect as well.
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