Look, old stuff! A fancy book! Blue stuff! A fancy sword! She is much more a vehicle than a character for many portions of the story, and we only have a vague feel for the motivations that drive the events. She mostly just goes from place to place introducing key concepts. Consider how they treated the story of Alisha, Princess of Somewhere ( Kayano Ai) and her merry entourage. Usually, an episode ends up like this when there’s a lack of exposition-which I don’t usually mind, because there’s no need to explain everything straight away-but in Tales of Zestiria‘s case I think it’s actually a matter of too much exposition, and not enough development of the drama. Things aren’t confusing, I suppose, just undeveloped, a whole heap of ideas without much linking them together. Lots of proper nouns are mentioned, but we of course do not know what they mean, and certain strange phenomena are displayed, but we don’t even know whether magic is supposed to be weird, let alone anything else. It’s even hard to tell what Tales of Zestiria the X is going to be about, because we can only guess at what is important and what is not. There are dragons, but also astronomy is this a fantasy world, and what kind? They’re waiting for some chump to pull some sword out of some rock, so is this fantasy Britain? Fantasy Britain with youkai? Or, are the elves awaiting the true king to reclaim the sword that was broken because the dwarves dug too greedily, too deep and awakened Smaug? I’m all for derivative fantasy, but at this point, it’s hard to tell from what. What’s the setting of this anime? Is it real world, or fictional. So, let’s assume that I am a viewer of the most ignorant sort, only having stumbled into Tales of Zestiria X while surfing TV channels or browsing around the internet. Outside of preview material (I hear there’s a site that does excellent ones), the only context I have for this episode is that which it provides itself. I haven’t played Tales of Zestiria the videogame, and I come into this anime mostly fresh. So, what is Tales of Zestiria the X doing with theirs? Unfortunately, I can’t really tell you, and I think most anime-only viewers will be similarly unsure. The 00 is most appropriate, I think, for an offbeat introductory episode, like Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu‘s brilliant pilot. If it’s the first episode chronologically, it’ll do plenty well as episode 01, thank you very much, prologue or not. They’re sometimes prologue episodes, sometimes omake episodes, and rarely justifying the weird numbering. I’m never all too sure what to make of an ‘Episode 00’.
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February 2023
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