Arknights Prelude to Dawn Episode 1 finished airing recently, and as a fan of game, I watched episode 1 of the anime as it came out to see how they’d adapt the first story chapter of the game, Evil Time into an anime.
After watching the first episode, I was curious about how faithful the anime’s story and the script were to the game, and what liberties they took to make it more watchable. After all, Arknights is known for having one of the highest word counts when it comes to reading material for a gacha game, so for an anime to compress 20,000+ words down to 20+ minutes, they must have taken a few liberties.
So let’s take a look at some scenes from the Arknights anime, what part of the games it is from, and what changes the Arknights anime made to the story.
▍Arknights Story Comparisons – Amiya
Episode 1 of the Arknights anime covers basically the first level of the game, Evil Eye Part 1’s prologue, and 0-1 Collapse, both before and after the operation.
Most of the events happening in these sections are pretty word for word though there are a few interesting omissions and changes made to fit a 20-minute episode
Interestingly enough the anime’s prologue omits the cryptic voice speaking to you in the early part of the game where you see Amiya looking out of a window at an ominous cloud shaped like a gigantic snake. Oddly enough looking back at this, it’s almost like Amiya was peering out into the Deathless Black Snake, foreshadowing what’s to come in the Reunion arc.
Next is one of the key CGs in the game and moments in the anime, when the Doctor is awoken from the Sarcophagus.
The tone of the scene is pretty similar in both but it’s presented far more grimly in the game. You don’t get to see Amiya’s expression shift but in the game you can see Amiya pulling the Doctor out of the sarcophagus with incredibly pale hands, the color in their hands only getting warmer as it gets closer to Amiya’s.
Her expression and tone are also grimmer in the game, appearing more worried while in the anime you see Amiya being overjoyed at seeing Doctor alive, but for her tone to change when she slowly realizes the Doctor’s unable to respond and becomes worried.
Both of these ways of showing concern work, as for most Doctors seeing our favorite donkey be so happy is heartwarming, only for us to realize this is a version of the Doctor from a long time ago, and we’ve forgotten what it’s like to have been in those shoes again.
It makes sense in this way why they portray Doctor as having incredibly sickly white hair, we don’t see their appearance in-game at all so in the anime they opted for a fairly non-gendered appearance with incredibly sick skin, showing the effects of the Sarcophagus had on them.
▍Arknights Story Comparisons – Doctor and Ace
Naturally, since we play as the Doctor, Arknights doesn’t spend a lot of time on us, rather focusing more on the other characters that make up Arknight’s world. Though there are a few things that have been changed for the Doctor in the transition to the anime.
In Arknights the doctor’s speech seems to recover fairly quickly, they’re just rather stoic about it. Of course, since you can pick whatever line you want for them to say there isn’t really a canon version, but in the anime, the Doctor is appropriately, extremely weak, compared to lines like “A simple matter, I’ll handle this”.
One thing the Arknights anime also changes is when the Doctor shows off their analytical skills.
In the game, you’re given control over a few operators to play out the tutorial, but in the anime the Doctor doesn’t take command of the PRTS until Rhodes island decides to fight back against a reunion, which conveniently stages 0-1 of the game, letting you sort of recreate that moment yourself.
And that happens after the Doctor is saved by Dobermann and her team. This is a pretty neat change of pace because this way it shows the Doctor’s abilities both to Dobermann and the rest of Rhodes island at once. This is pretty interesting because in this way, we see an extremely competent member of the party Dobermann still being taken off guard, and only this pale, barely vocal character without a name is able to see it coming.
It gives us a small glimpse of what the Doctor is capable of in a very short amount of time while letting us come to that realization along with the characters, which is always fun.
One other cool change is the introduction of Rhodes Island’s senior operator Ace.
In the game Ace only shows up a few stages into the game, once the Doctor has proven to everyone that they can still operate. Here Ace shows up sooner before the first battle and already knows that the Doctor has amnesia, whereas in the game Amiya is the one to break it to him.
The dialogue between both the Arknights game and anime isn’t the same at all, but the whole vibes you get from it are still the same. It still shows an Ace as a caring senior operator. In the game he says “What’s lost can be found again”, showing that even with Amnesia he can trust the doctor. Meanwhile, in the anime, he’s just happy to see the Doctor is fine and seems to have no doubt that they can recover.
Both scenes still get across that Ace cares about the Doctor, and are great ways to further express how important the Doctor is that 10s of people are risking their lives for them.
▍Arknights Story Comparisons – Battle and Aftermath
The last eight minutes of this Arknights Episode 1 were easily the best and gave me some real goosebumps watching it. Of course the most obvious difference being the anime buffs 0-1 with more soldiers instead of Originium slugs, but there’s more than that.
The battle section in the anime is loosely based on stage 0-1. with the goal being to protect a mother and her child from members of Reunion. The buildup to this scene is fantastic. In the game, the decision to rescue the mother and child comes immediately, as soon as Amiya sees them in danger she decides right away that she has to stop them, with Dobermann following suit.
In the anime, Amiya catches a brief glimpse of them before second-guessing her own decisions as a leader, only for the Doctor to finally log in to the PRTS system and show how it actually works. This is an amazing scene because since we’re not the ones taking control, we can instantly see how the Doctor, despite being an amnesiac and despite being physically weak, can take control with just that simple device and that mind of theirs.
Rhodes Island’s creed… has always been the same!
The aftermath of the conflict is also pretty interesting. In the game, the mother is incredibly scared of Amiya because she notices Amiya’s originium infection, while in the anime she comes as still scared, but more scornful.
Either way, it makes you feel for Amiya and the infected, letting you know that the discrimination that the public has for Reunion also goes for the members of Rhodes Islands, and helps paint a picture that people do have a real reason to fear the infected, even if they aren’t blatantly out on the streets destroying property.
I do feel like in the anime they made the mother a bit more unlikeable to help drive this point home. Not to make you hate non-infected people, but to further empathize with Reunion, a group of people that has been ridiculed for so long that this is how they choose to react, even if it’s not the “right” choice.
What do you think of the Arknightsanime so far? Have you seen Episode 2, and are you excited to see more of Ace, Reunion, and the various other operators that have yet to show up?
