The general premise of the game is turn-based strategy role-playing etc, and I sort of recall the game having a few somewhat innovative features in its battle system but I can’t remember what exactly.

I thought the game wasn’t that great despite all the hype and I didn’t think the anime adaptation would be anything special either. But Priecia is kind of cute so I gave episode one a try.

Basically the story of Prism Hearts/Ark revolves around this war fought between two religions. There are three neighbouring kingdoms in a land that looks suspiciously like Europe. Windland (where Germany should be) and Vietaly (where Italy should be) are allies and Sablum (symbolized by a red patch of evil) are the weird foreigners.

By calling upon the powers of fearsome biological weapons called “Angels”, Sablum created a vast and powerful army and invaded Windland, conquering a huge portion of it (dark red on the map) before finally coming to a stop. The king and queen of Windland were assassinated by Sablum before the war began, during their trip to visit their neighbouring ally Vietaly. After the war, a knight took over the running of the kingdom and set up the Rozenberg Knighthood Academy to train a new generation of knights to fight and defend Windland.

The main characters of Prism Ark, Hyaweh and Priecia, are students of this school.

In the game, the story starts with you, as Hyaweh, enrolling in the school and learning how to fight, while slowly getting entangled in a web of conspiracies that have their roots in Windland’s past and meeting new party members during the course of the adventure.

The anime, however, takes a different route by beginning with the full party so as to expose the audience to all the important characters first.

I didn’t actually play the game to the end because, despite the admittedly high production value, I was bored by the story. But it seems to me that the anime is really shuffling things around because I don’t recall seeing the flashback scenes in the first episode at all. In fact, I was a little confused by the whole sequence until I did some research.

The first episode basically alternates between two timelines. The first is Hyaweh and his merry gang fighting Sister Hell (what a name), a sister who gave up her faith and joined the Sablum army. Also she has a fricking huge cross-shaped claymore.

In fact, almost everyone has funky-looking weapons. I guess that’s why it’s a fantasy RPG.

The other timeline tells the story of Princea, who is actually Priecia’s mother… (Also, witness how much the graphics have evolved between the two games)

Basically, the flashback tells the story of how Priecia’s father and mother first met and fell in love…when they were like eight or something. These things never happen in real-life.

This part of the episode was quite confusing because I don’t think it was in the second game. I thought at first that the flashback was of Priecia’s childhood, but that wouldn’t make any sense at all due to reasons that you will find out later on in the series.

It also doesn’t help that the two of them look so much alike that for a good while my brain didn’t register that they were supposed to be different characters. I simply assumed that it’s the lack of consistency in animation quality that seems so common with UHF titles these days…

Priecia

Princea

The first episode actually has tons of information crammed into twenty odd minutes. That’s not to say that it’s good or interesting, but it does seem like the producers is trying very hard to grab the viewers’ attention. Maybe too hard. I think a person who has never played the games before might feel somewhat overwhelmed and disengaged by this barrage of disjointed information, but then again maybe not. At least they managed to give every girl some airtime…

I guess ultimately, this is what’s going to keep people coming back for more:

Oh well, perhaps I shall stick around for one more episode to see if the story gets interesting. Priecia does look kind of cute…