Prince of Stride: Alternative

Episode 11

What a happy-go-lucky episode of Prince of Stride: Alternative we've received this week! Here be smiles, laughter, amiable sportsmanship, and the setting is even a clear knock-off of Disneyland. It's all the most upbeat parts of a sports anime narrative. As a result, there isn't much conflict to be found from the characters, but this Stride race will blow you away, keeping the week's lack of character drama mostly at bay with a tumultuous main event.

I didn't have high hopes for this episode when it began. With Riku's brother issues out of the way, he and Takeru and Nana are happy together—but they're also sort of boring. The team is working together in perfect synchronicity, the opponents are jovial and here to “have fun,” everything is going well but not in the “wait for the other shoe to drop” sort of way. There's no sign of Honan's previous weaknesses. It's almost like continuing to watch an anime after it has wrapped up.

That is, until the race begins. Everyone has brought their A game today, and the animation team is actually up to the challenge. The race has all the action, drama, and tension that the character development was lacking, and then some. From Kohinata's crazy gimmicks to Kyousuke's impressive consistency to Riku's comeback to Takeru's masterful speed, each leg of the race has its own flavor. Seriously, you learn more about these characters and about their opponents through their Stride performances than their dialogue.

A word about Saisei for a moment: it's good to be a good sport, but aren't they taking the amiable attitude too far? They have single-handedly molded Honan into a team that could beat them. Asuma gave kind words to Riku when Riku was struggling, and that's something any decent human would do. But the training camp? Hosting them at their state of the art Stride facility? Maybe they didn't realize the kind of rapid growth it would spur, but here we are. It was a lucky break for Honan and a not-so-intelligent decision for Saisei.

Either way, all of the budget of this episode went to making the Stride race look great. Before and after that, there are a lot of fairly still scenes of Riku, Takeru, and Nana as children. They seem to have suddenly remembered that they were childhood friends, and I don't know what triggered it, or how believable it is that they wound up at the same high school because of a latent embedded memory or even random chance. But certainly even worse than this is the Saisei musical performance, where the performers' mouths don't even move with the music. The Stride competition was great, fantastic even, but this week it came at the price of pretty much every other element of the episode.

Rating: B

Prince of Stride: Alternative is currently streaming on Funimation.

Lauren writes about anime and journalism at Otaku Journalist.