Can't you predict these things based on who the director and head writer are?
https://myanimelist.net/people/51069/Daigo_Yamagishi
https://myanimelist.net/people/2701/Hiroshi_Oonogi

They seem middle of the road. Not amazing, but not terrible. Oonogi Hiroshi was the head write on FMA: Brotherhood, but that was probably carried by its source material.

>>37988
Certainly they do not have the best track record, such as with the JP adaptation of Girls' Frontline and then with Arknights.
However, given the bright colors and less grungy atmosphere of Blue Archive, I'm hoping this adaptation will at least be pretty to look at and carry a lighter feel with it. Cautiously optimistic, I'd say.

>adaptation
Yeah it will be bad

>>37990
Arknights is weird, it seemed about as well made as can be, yet still came across as boring and forgettable. ...Girls' Frontline on the other hand was such a massive train wreck, the early story material isn't that great in the game but that was no excuse for the dumpster fire they gave us.

It's a fun and light hearted franchise, I'm just concerned that things might not translate well here. A lot of the details of this world are drip fed to the player, with much of it still being a mystery, but one of the PV does a light info dump which left me mildly concerned that they might go too hard into exposition. I could just be over thinking it.
I'm also curious if this season is going to be entirely focused on the one school? hopefully they don't rush things and bring out the gamers like six ep in.

>>37988
My favourite mobile game is uma musume.

It's nice to finally put a real face on sensei. He's not exactly what I was expecting, but I think this can work.

https://nyaa.si/view/1800430
I guess these are the go to subs at the moment since the anime unfortunately ended up in license hell with no "official" subs.

I was cautiously excited about this anime. On the one hand I really like this franchise (a lot) but on the other hand I had a feeling it might not translate well to an adaptation. There's a little meta humor and jabs at itself in game which wouldn't really work in another format (like for example how sensei's ultimate trump card/ability is his "adult card" that in exchange for personal damage lets him summon whatever students he wants to any fight by using a plastic card kept in his wallet, which is a pretty blatant reference to using a credit card to buy characters you want)
I've only seen the first ep so far, but I can tell that much like with the arknights anime, this might have a problem with how to depict what the protagonist actually contributes. It 'shouldn't' really be much of a problem here as the gameplay is actually very hands off and 'mostly' consists of telling characters when to use their special abilities (and where in some cases). I'd go as far as to say the gameplay doesn't really mater most of the time, and I tend to picture sensei as keeping out of sight in cover or something during fights, not really doing much. He seems to me like more of a vehicle that takes us on a ride that is the story, and who's strengths actually fall more in line with motivating people and giving emotional support or guidance, which is one thing I think actually can translate perfectly fine to an anime. The way the battle at the end of the episode was directed seemed a tad sloppy regardless of how they handle sensei. They could have done a better job of showing who was where, doing what, and why. I dunno, maybe the point was to try and illustrate how chaotic a battle can be. It just felt clunky, and kinda weird that sensei would have to tell someone to fire their gun, I mean what else are they gonna do with it? What might have made more sense is if sensei stayed on that top floor watching over the battle field and gave directions over a radio. Sure that's not how the game works but it might have made more sense here.
I'm kinda just nitpicking there anyway. I feel like the bigger issue from what I saw was the info dumping towards the start of the ep simultaneously combined with lack of info. Like saying a lot of nothing. I know the game and context already but was trying to picture how this would be viewed by someone who has never played the game. I think it would be a lot to process and just confuse people, they also leave out details I think people should probably know first in the process. Sure it's good to not lay all your cards out on the table but you also don't want to leave people feeling frustrated. Instead of going over recent political events between factions viewers don't know a thing about, maybe just keep it focused on our main school and it's problems. Let the viewer assume it's a normal school, then show them what makes it different, and from there go into it's place in this world among the other schools.
I do feel like this ep does a lot of things right at least. Using sensei to indirectly explain things to the viewer is smart.
The animation quality isn't half bad, and it seems like they're going to be making good use of their sound track witch is one of the nicer things about the game.
Something else I feel like they did an "okay" job of establishing, but could have done a much better job with was showing how students don't actually get hurt with all the gun violence. Someone who doesn't know blue archive would see all these girls carrying guns and think that's dangerous and this is something really violent and possibly gory. The intro sure didn't help with this. You wouldn't think it's actually mostly bright clean wholesome fun. They could have for instance shown some kids shooting each other for fun or out of mild annoyance and being perfectly fine. The thing with the thugs kiiiinda works, but one might think there's just something special about those particular characters. People new to this won't know those characters are generic dime a dozen enemies. But I guess showing a character unload a mag point blank into someone else's face who then gets up and runs away, is certainly one way to demonstrate gun don't actually kill people in this world. It's like they were going for a shock, and then twist reveal.

anyways, I'm curious to see what people who haven't played the game think about it. I already heard from one person how it feels like being dumped off into the middle of an ongoing story, and how the gun damage stuff didn't make a lot of sense.

>>38005
Quality subs.

I can't wait for the problem solvers to show up.

Blink and you miss it.

https://nyaa.si/view/1804182
EP1 got a proper fansub. Maybe the scene isn't so dead after all?

I thought skipping the tutorial was a good idea, but it's a little weird to gloss over it for the intro to ep2.

Ayane is adorable. <3

Now that's more like the sensei we know and love.

Seems like a nice idea to me!

Post edited on 21st Apr 2024, 5:31pm

https://nyaa.si/view/1808390
EP2 subs are out.

what better way to deal with money problems?

>>38065
Robbing two banks!

The things people will do for limited edition merch...

EP4 was awesome. This show has easily become the highlight of my week.

I should've said this before, but there's a collaboration going on with Mahjong Soul involving Blue Archive. You can watch some vn-style scenes, and get a character or decoration if you're lucky. There's also a new mode. The event is almost over but you can still check it out. I don't know anything about Blue Archive, but I got lucky and scored a Shiroko.

>>38077
>and get a character or decoration if you're lucky
Is it even possible to get anything as a free player? I've played the game a bit and couldn't get any of those gem things you need for character rolling.

>>38077
It has it's own collaboration at the moment with Railgun.

>>38078
I got this character for free as a newbie 2 years ago during a new years campaign iirc. I only wanted to learn mahjong but got hooked for a while thanks to the daily gacha system.
>I've played the game a bit and couldn't get any of those gem things you need for character rolling.
I logged in after a year~, you can get 2 summon tickets doing event missions. They say gacha games let new players get lucky once so it's worth a try. I don't have much time to play right now, sadly.

>>38078
>Is it even possible to get anything as a free player?
Yes, I'm a free player and have not spent a single cent on this game. I have gotten 4 characters - not including the 2 initial ones, 2 of those 4 being collab characters - three riichi bets, one winning ron effect, three portrait frames, three tablecloths, 4 tile backs, 1 tile face and 1 background. All of those do not include the default ones. The total amount of summons I did is 50. I've played 277 east games and 110 hanchans. All these were on ranked 4 player rooms, except one 3 player south game. Additionally I've played 47 extra "others" east games (special event modes). Also some of those are obtained by events as opposed to summoning.

>I've played the game a bit and couldn't get any of those gem things you need for character rolling.
You mean the summon scrolls? Or the jade? Jade is only for paying players (unless you win the official championships or something). You get summoning scrolls when they give it to it during events or by donating gifts. You get gifts during normal events and also during accumulated log-in periods they have in-between events. In addition once you become an Adept(2nd rank after the initial rank) after every game, depending on your performance, a bar-meter will fill, once it reaches the end you get some random gifts.
To be honest the system is kinda complicated, but it gets very straightforward as you play more. The odds don't look actually very promising if you do the math, but personally, I have no complaints about it.

https://youtu.be/Sm7i4TEpxtU

I wonder if this couldn't possibly be foreshadowing for something...

Post edited on 12th May 2024, 9:21pm

This scene was painful to watch. They animated the whole thing like a no budget live action TV show would shoot it.

Okay so you've got some characters in a building that gets destroyed and they need to escape. This would be really expensive to film, even doing it in CG would still be pricy and hard to make look good anyway if you're on a tight budget. So what do you do? Fade to white, play an explosion sound effect, and transition to the characters on the street. Have them talk about the building that just blew up and maybe place a bit of easily made rubble or a burnt sign in the shot so you know they're near the destroyed building they're talking about.

I know it might be a pain to animate something like that too, but come on man that's just freaking lame.

>>38099
Someone must have pointed out what a load of BS that was during production, because in the very next ep we get a little glimpse of it.
Or maybe they couldn't finish it in time as they rushed the ep to air?
I'm honestly really curious what the heck happened there.

That makes two of us.

The anime sure makes sensei look kind of useless sometimes doesn't it? I guess that's hard to avoid since he rarely gets directly involved in fights and can't do much other than give directions, which doesn't translate well. In a lot of ways he's like a counselor that helps and supports students, but for that to work they'd need to animate some of the side stories too, which the adaptation doesn't seem to want to do.
Still, it's not exactly a good look when he's just standing there in the middle of the street doing nothing as a battle rages on around him.

That got a little chuckle out of me. Makes me wonder what "those" girls are up to this time.

>>38202
I question the placement of that bow. It makes me imagine her head as being very oddly shaped, almost like a pear.

So we finally got to "That scene"
I don't think it's a hyperbole to say not only is this scene a crucial turning point in the series, this scene also has immense significance to the franchise itself and may very well be what turned Blue archive from a largely over looked mobile game, to one with a player count going to the moon. Up until this point, The game's story while odd, stays fairly tame and dare I say boring. It's cute and charming don't get me wrong, and I love the themes of friendship at play.

The bank heist is crazy, It's fun watching high school girls rob a bank, but that alone wouldn't be enough of a spark to set off these fireworks. They needed to go one step further, they needed to do what fans always joke about and saying they'd do, the sort of stuff we rarely actually see.
I think from this point, our protagonist went from being a boring generic no personality moralfag type, to someone that's fun and relatable. Now the protag on top of those usual qualities, has this weird perverted side that he won't act on unless given the opportunity.
They then went on from there to give him more man-child like characteristics, such as suggesting he's a fan of sentai and robot toys. I think this along with along with leaning the dynamic (at least for side stories) into a more silly and over the top dynamic that became legitimately fun and exciting to read. This I would say helped a lot in giving the franchise a bit more of an identity, which let it stand out from the pack of generic looking PNG collecting mobile garbage. Assuming of course you give it a chance there's a lot to love here, and thanks to word of mouth this has now become a comiket dominating juggernaut. It's a bizarre but fun world full of mystery and likable characters. You do have to get past a decent amount of dull content, but I think if you can make your way to "That scene", you might start to see what makes this special.

Whelp, it's over now. Like >>37989 said, this really did end up being a very middle of the road adaptation, not amazing, but not terrible. It was a very safe and by the numbers adaptation.
I'm glad they didn't mess it up, but it also doesn't feel like they tried to do anything special which I think doomed this to being an unimpressive forgettable anime.
I will say though, The action scenes felt poorly directed while only having adequate enough animation to avoid "QUALITY" labels.

The world and characters came across as poorly flushed out. It might have been nice to better establish the bonds between these characters and why they're choosing to endure the situation they choose to be in father than devote so much time to mediocre action scenes. The game might not offer much more in terms of details, but that strong sense of friendship was the most endearing part of the material they adapted for this season. As >>37990 said, a lighter feel might have been nice. While the series does have it's share of fighting and action, I don't think that's supposed to be the focus. For me at least, it's about meeting all these interesting characters and seeing how they live and work together in this unique and bizarre world that makes absolutely no sense but somehow works.
Hopefully season 2 will be a bit better.