The Fall 2023 Anime Preview Guide

Protocol: Rain

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In the world of e-sports, Shun Tokinoya is a second-year high school student who started working at the e-sports café FOX ONE after his father's accidental death. However, it comes to light that FOX ONE is in a considerable amount of debt. In order to repay the debt, Shun and his friends enter the "Xaxxerion Championship" tournament to win the tournament's prize money.

Protocol: Rain is an original anime project. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

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Nicholas Dupree
Rating:

If I can start with a compliment, this show has a really nice OP—here played as the end credits. It's gorgeously animated, full of moody imagery, and has a number of moments that could sell you on the idea of an esports anime all on their own. It is a lie.

The actual show is about as boring and flat as a piece of television can get. The drama is at once overwrought and non-existent—built around our flavorless protagonist overcoming his gaming-related trauma in the course of A Single Match of Bad Fake Valorant. The animation is messier than episode 19 of a mid-tier Toei production from the mid-2000s. It is wholly incapable of approximating the excitement of actual esports—centering itself around a muddy, sluggishly paced FPS with seemingly only one map and 5 character classes. Yet it also expects us to believe that the game is such a hit it can carry tournaments with six-figure prize money pots and last for over three years at that level. It is wholly uninteresting if you don't pay attention to e-sports and mind-numbingly stupid if you do.

It's to the point where the fake in-game scenes are more charming than the actual 2D animation. Sure, the models look like something from the PS2 era, and the video files look like they were rendered at 480p, but the characters do move more or less like they would in an FPS engine. The opening scene takes place entirely in-game, with characters talking and emoting through their PCs—and for all its technical faults it really does capture the vibe of some teenagers messing around in a game lobby. That is the first and last thing that feels even a little authentic, and the rest of the show might as well have been written by somebody who had the concept of video games explained to them right after waking up from a nap.

There's absolutely room to make a cool, compelling, unique anime about esports. Lord knows there are plenty of VRMMO anime with similar enough concepts, and some of those have been pretty fun! This, however, is a limply produced pile of vague ideas stapled to a stock plot and boring characters. I would sooner watch a League of Legend tournament than sit through another episode.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

It is absolutely possible to make a good series about esports. Just look at the donghua series The King's Avatar. It's been a while since I watched it, so I'm not sure where Protocol: Rain goes wrong in comparison, but I suspect it might have something to do with the story's need to pad itself out with things that aren't esports. Does Nozomi's father's café need to be on the brink of financial disaster? How was Shun's sister Mio injured in a way related to esports that made him stop playing for three years? Is any of this really necessary in a show about people playing a fugly FPS for fame and fortune?

I could be being unnecessarily dismissive of these plot points, and I do like seeing the disability representation that Mio provides, as well as the fact that her using a wheelchair in no way changes the fact that Shun's friend Akito has a crush on her. There also may not be any real link between the game and her injury; we see that Shun's dad is dead—so it's very possible that he died in an accident that paralyzed Mio, who perhaps only went off with him because Shun wouldn't let her play the game with him. That could still provide the guilt he still obviously feels without it having been a freak console accident—which is all I could think of otherwise. And Shun does need to deal with his feelings of guilt. They seem to drive his life—from the way he works hard and barely eats to the limited amount of time he seems to spend at home. Mio doesn't remark that she wants him to use his time off to rest for no reason. And really, these human touches could end up elevating the story somewhere along the line.

But as of this episode, it is a very lackluster production. The plot doesn't make a ton of sense and it doesn't look particularly good either. Akito also comes across as creepy—although I do love the scene where Nozomi appeases his unpleasant friends by “drawing” on their omurice in kanji. I also suspect that if you're more invested in FPS games than I am there may be more to reel you in (although I must say that the gameplay we're shown isn't all that dynamic). This may be worth a second episode, but I don't say that with any great surety that it will, in fact, get better.

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James Beckett
Rating:

I had all of these jokes ready to go about how bad the in-game footage of "Xaxxerion" looks in Protocol: Rain, but that honestly turned out to be the least of the show's problems, so it doesn't feel fair to devote a whole paragraph to dunking on its made-up game's visuals. Still, I want to get at least one good dig in here, so if you'll allow me the indulgence: "Man, the game that these kids are playing looks like if Valorant were being played on a toaster at the barest minimum of settings. Wait a minute… I'm just describing Counter Strike!" Bazinga.

(And yes, I'm aware of the graphical refresh that CS2 just rolled out, but I just got done reviewing that godawful pig isekai show, so please let me have this.)

Anyways, for as lame as the game at the center of this supposed eSports anime is, it wouldn't matter all that much if the rest of the show happening around those brief cutaways made up for it. Unfortunately, while Protocol: Rain is working within the same formula that countless sports shows and movies have cribbed from before, it doesn't know how to execute on the same level as the greats. Shun, our protagonist, has the perquisite tragic backstory that drew him away from the sport that he loved, and we've got the gang of enthusiastic friends and at least one possible love interest who is set to rope him back into the world of competitive shooting games with a "Save the Café!" storyline. The issue is that Shun is fundamentally lacking in any charisma or likability whatsoever, and the rest of the plot was genuinely more interesting when we saw it done in Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo.

There's just no life to this story. Watching it is dreadfully dull, and anyone coming into the show because of their interest in eSports will likely turn the premiere off the minute they catch sight of the amateurish-looking game footage. If it can't excite on a narrative level, and it can't entice anyone looking for exciting eSports action, then I honestly don't know what else Protocol: Raini has to offer.