Prince of Stride: Alternative – 12 [END]
Running so intense, it affected the background animation budget.
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This ended a while ago, but the new anime season (and end of term OTL) is always so busy. But let’s see how the last competition went. |
Out of all of the things the last episode could have done, for some reason they decided to spend time on everything except the race itself. I guess this is fine since they already showed a dramatic race with Saisei for a climax, but I was kind of expecting more of a close race than just showing Honan beat out the other team over and over while Riku monologued. I suppose that he is the main character as far as the anime is concerned though. And the rest of the team overcame all of their problems already, so all that was left for them was to win the tournament. It’s just kind of a shame that they built up Kakyoin to be such a (seemingly) devastating force of a team, only to give next to no attention on how most of the team overcame people they had such troubles dealing with before.
I suppose Takeru and Riku definitely had their struggles shown though (more so Takeru than Riku). Though some kind of conclusion that showed how all three of the childhood friends reacted after keeping their promise would have been nice, since that seems to have been Takeru, Riku and Nana’s inspiration going into this final race. Though the rest of the team was kind of left behind (Nana was too, essentially) in favour for Riku and Takeru to take all of the attention. Poor Ayumu, who already suffered from kind of being replaced with Kyosuke, didn’t stand a chance.
Though I suppose the team were all cheering on the last racers, so yay for team work. It was interesting that trading positions worked so well considering that they’ve never tried that before. Maybe that’s what they were missing against Kakyoin in the first place. Though I’m betting it more being due to the team work and “hearts moving as one” thing.
Tomoe and Riku finally got some conclusion to their relationship as well. Riku isn’t running away from Tomoe anymore, he has new motivation to do his best, and now they can enjoy running together. …Or at least we can assume they can do that, since the only kind of conclusion the anime gave was that the Honan people still hang out together, and who even knows what the other teams are doing but at least they showed up to cheer on Honan. But who knows what Nana’s father thinks of all of this. Or if Nana ever found her perfect relation in Honan’s Stride in this last race. Or what anyone plans to do now, since Heath and Kyosuke are graduating. But yay for winning the race and Riku enjoying running now.
Also, yay for this team sticking together despite their issues. If only there was more time to make all of the side characters more endearing.
Overall, this was okay, but I wouldn’t say that it’s the best sports anime ever. It had interesting characters, visuals and concept, but I wasn’t as into it as other sports anime. The ending was pretty anticlimactic, since it seems like they spent all that time trying to win and now… nothing else really seems to be happening. But it wasn’t a terrible show overall, just kind of average. Madhouse made things look good, and the characters were interesting to watch for a season (even if they maybe weren’t that memorable). But yay for team work and guys having skinship though high fives.
About Karakuri
University student and the one at Metanorn who's known for wearing glasses. Likes blood, insanity and plot twists, but also plays otome games and adores cute romance anime. It balances out... somehow.
POWUH: and Yaoi Fangirl~ with 2320 comments
A boring episode for an ending, episode 11 was more interesting than episode 12. They should have switched the episode to make a BAM ending instead of a Romus Remulus play with one of the brothers doing the monologue.
POWUH: Meta Team and Megane-chan with 3214 comments
Yeah, I don’t know what they were thinking when deciding to have the last race be a backdrop for a monologue…