Prince of Stride: Alternative

Episode 7

Do you like cute boys acting cute? Have I got a Prince of Stride: Alternative episode for you. Nothing of note occurs during this half hour of loosely related montages, but if you can ignore the plummeting animation quality, there's plenty of man candy to go around.

Amidst a lot of bad apples, Honan has found some pretty easygoing rivals in the Saisei team. This other school is so nice in fact, they've invited Honan to train with them at their state-of-the-art indoor Stride gymnasium. And that's it, that's the entirety of your plot for the episode. The rest is a sequence of loosely related scenes consisting of your very average training camp episode. Everything's here, from training montages to a communal bath to a kebab dinner to fireworks on the beach. However, it feels very empty. There's no conflict, as everyone's personalities and goals mesh fairly well, and even if they didn't, we haven't been introduced to them for long enough to grasp their differences. This is not a story with a beginning, middle, and end. This is a group of characters and a setting and nothing else. The story should show how people have changed—by the end, some of the characters claim to feel like they've improved at Stride, but given that they were at a training camp, that's not some kind of surprise.

However, if you're the kind of person who watches a lot of sports anime, you can sort of fill in the gaps, and that's exactly what the show seems to hope you will do. There are plenty of one-on-one interactions that read like the beginnings of friendships or relationships, designed for the shippers to unpack later, line by line. Lines like “next time we run together, show me everything,” can be read at deeper levels than the bland episode they appear in, making them more like a prompt for your imagination to take off than any actual plot progression. The one place where a hint of plot appears is when Takeru, Nana, and Riku are burning sparklers on the beach, and Takeru seems to have memories of a much younger Nana and Riku. So the big twist is that the three of them are childhood friends? Wouldn't they remember that?

Mostly, the show features the ensemble cast acting goofy and having a good time in various outfits—from athletic wear to yukatas to plain old shirtless. I'm starting to notice that the quality of the animation and art is starting to drop. There's less shading, and sometimes the shapes of people's bodies shift too much during in-betweens. Even the Stride races, which are usually the most interesting and attractive part of the show, aren't at their usual best. Two half-seen training races water down the tension, and close-ups on just legs or arms seem to have been done simply to save time and effort.

With little plot to go on, this episode was extremely chill, perhaps as a calm before the storm that is End of Summer. The preview indicates that there's still plenty of sports action to hope for this season, there just wasn't much this week.

Rating: C

Prince of Stride: Alternative is currently streaming on Funimation.

Lauren writes about anime and journalism at Otaku Journalist.