Anime premieres on October 28
Crunchyroll revealed on Tuesday that it will stream Arknights: Prelude to Dawn, the television anime adaptation of Hypergryph‘s Arknights smartphone game, beginning on October 28. The anime will stream in North America, Central America, South America, Europe, Africa, Oceania, the Middle East, and the Commonwealth of Independent States.
The anime will premiere on TV Tokyo on October 28, and will also air on TV Osaka, BS11, and Animax. The anime will stream in Japan starting on October 29.
Yuki Watanabe is directing the anime at Yostar Pictures, with Masataka Nishikawa as assistant director. Both have previously worked on the smartphone game’s “Holy Knight Light” first anniversary anime short, and Watanabe has worked on the game’s numerous animated promotional video shorts. Aya Takafuji (key animator for Fate/Grand Order Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia, SSSS.Gridman) is adapting the character designs for animation.
Yostar Pictures described the anime as a “season one” when it announced the show in October 2021.
Chinese developers Studio Montagne and Hypergryph released the game in China in May 2019, and then Yostar launched the game worldwide in January 2020. The game already inspired several animated promotional videos since 2019 and a nine-minute animated “Holy Knight Light” short in December 2021 to mark the game’s first anniversary.
The game is set in a fantasy world called Terra with modern science-fiction motifs. Terra is plagued by rare but devastating Catastrophes that force most people to live in nomadic cities. Catastrophes also bring forth the rare mineral Originium, which yields high energy and is thus a valuable resource, but also consumes everything around it as it grows. Those with prolonged exposure to Originium easily develop a wasting disease known as Oripathy. The story centers around the lives of Oripathy-infected individuals. A roving medical company known as Rhodes Island offers a helping hand and a place to belong for the often-shunned Infected. However, Rhodes Island has often had to conduct ad-hoc paramilitary actions against the Reunion Movement, a terrorist organization that conducts violent action aimed at governments that oppress the Infected.
Source: Crunchyroll (Kyle Cardine)
