Prince of Stride: Alternative

Title:Prince of Stride: Alternative
プリンス・オブ・ストライド オルタナティブ (Japanese)
Overall:Unevaluated
Keywords: , , , , , , , ,
Notables: Animation - Madhouse
HANAZAWA Kana
KIMURA Ryohei
OKAMOTO Nobuhiko
"Stride," is an extreme sport that involves six people on one team who run relay races through towns. Honan Academy and other schools compete to win eastern Japan's top Stride competition, "End of Summer." However, Honan's team has shut down. First-year high school students Takeru Fujiwara and Nana Sakurai attempt to restart the club, but they must recruit six members for the team. They ask Riku Yagami to join, but he turns them down by saying that Stride is the one thing he doesn't want to do.
(Synopsis courtesy of ANN)

12 episodes
OverallArtAnimationCharacter Design MusicSeries StoryEpisode StoryReviewer
Unevaluated Stretch [series:3133#628]
(Four episodes watched):

Another sports anime--an extreme sport this time. While I am for the most part not very interested in sports (and almost quit this show early on), I did notice during episode one that Stride put together a likeable cast before turning to the game. As I have said countless times before, I need to care about the characters in order to care about the plot of an anime, and in this case perhaps I could. The jokes were okay, too. However, the sport of Stride (a sort of acrobatic relay racing, apparently) itself doesn't strike me as all that exciting. Why did everyone at the school turn out to enthusiastically watch a hastily organized Striding event when the sport had apparently been in decline there and the club had barely been hanging on? A person standing in one place can only watch a tiny portion of the race. I could think of more than a few better uses of my time. And why do anime characters feel they have to accept every challenge that is put to them? So, I left episode one of Stride with mixed feelings. I decided to watch some more to see just how interesting it would manage to be.

Episode two explained a bit more about just what Stride is; the fact that timing needs to be extremely precise, and computers are routinely used to monitor it, was sort of interesting. Again, the cast seems fairly interesting, there's a little humor, and in general I was pleased. If the sport itself isn't fascinating, the characters will need to be the main objects of attention, and indeed that seems to be the case here. The question isn't 'what sort of spills will there be during the next race?', it's 'will the characters you care about achieve their goals?', which is the way it should be. After watching episode three the thought occurred to me that there are still several characters on the good guys team that I have a hard time telling apart; that is, I forget what their stories were, and what, if anything, made them distinctive. This episode seemed to be all about their first Stride competition instead of further expanding the characters. Like I said, Stride itself isn't tremendously interesting and as a result this show will need intriguing stories about how the characters grow. If it can deliver that, I'll continue to watch, but if episode three is typical of the remainder of the series, I probably won't.

Episode four left me thinking that I still have little idea how the sport of Striding works. Apparently it's a relay race between a set of points where new runners join the contest, but you can take any route you wish between them, and vault over obstacles, though why doing anything but taking the shortest, most unencumbered route would make sense is beyond me. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and as a result I am confused at times. Maybe if the races were held in places that are unfamiliar to all the contestants, so that they must make quick educated guesses about what routes to take--sort of like finding your way through a maze--it would make more sense. Ultimately, the problem which I noticed back in episode one was what convinced me to abandon Stride: the sport itself isn't very exciting or interesting. I can't care about the plot of a show if it doesn't have interesting characters, but perhaps I also can't care about interesting characters if they aren't doing something interesting as well. The characters were okay, but not good enough to be worth watching the show just for the sake of the interplay between them inbetween Stride races.

Last updated Wednesday, August 29 2018. Created Thursday, January 07 2016.

Community Anime Reviews

anime mikomi org