Prince of Stride: Alternative

Episodes 1-3

Prince of Stride: Alternative has some big shoes to fill.

You can't name a sports anime something that begins with "prince" without harkening back to the most famous trailblazer of its genre, The Prince of Tennis. Consistently ranking among Japan's favorite anime of all time, this is a show that captured viewers' attention by merging a real life sport with fantastically impossible showmanship, such as rallying ten tennis balls or hitting a ball so hard it made the dinosaurs go extinct. (No, really.)

Prince of Stride is already halfway there before it begins, because it documents the story of a sport that doesn't actually exist. Stride is most similar to the real life sport of parkour, in that players perform inconceivable acrobatics to overcome obstacles. But the heart and soul of Stride is the relay exchange. Two athletes high-five at top speed to transition from one runner's leg of the race to the next runner's, an exchange that we're told requires extreme trust. In order to make things go smoothly, runners wear headsets and take cues from a third person, a Relationer who monitors them via GPS and tells them when to increase their speed.

Prince of Stride is ostensibly the story of one Relationer, Nana Sakurai, who happens to be the only woman so far on any of the Stride teams. Every other athlete is an interchangeable bishounen, and the fanservice is already coming in fast and loose. At various times these athletes are fashion models, music idols, animal-paw-wearing cuties, or inexplicably in drag—these are all-purpose pretty boys ready to please. They're flashy and insubstantial—just like the fictional sport of Stride itself. With an effervescent mood and plenty of jokes that hit their targets, who cares who's doing the bantering? These characters are still archetypes and quite blurry around the edges, but like Stride itself, they're still fun to watch.

The main characters that have emerged from this primordial prettyboy sludge are Fujiwara, a quiet, difficult, socially awkward runner who looks and acts a lot like Haru from Free! and Yagami, an effortlessly talented but airheaded athlete. With Sakurai's help, these two will surely improve their ability to high-five during a relay. (I can't say the stakes here are set very high.) They're surrounded by goofy (but also sexy and talented) teammates and rivals who are also teamed up into relay pairs, so this plot is trying hard to appeal to the fujoshi set as well as the typical shounen sports crowd. It is not lost on me that the viewer avatar character is a woman whose title is Relationer, and whose job it is to help the athletes grow closer.

The plot is pure wish fulfillment and escapism. The boys' personalities remind me more of dating sim archetypes than three-dimensional characters. They're defined by a single gimmick, like an interest in shogi or Japanese four-character idioms. There's plenty of time to mess around and mug for the camera and put on an idol performance in between practices! Heck, we're only at episode three and the preview indicates a hot springs trip coming up. The plot is as formless and upbeat as the graphic color palette and glossy line drawings that characterize the show. Events simply occur for plot purposes—even though the Stride club is on the verge of closing down, the team is still able to get the entire student body to pitch in and convert the school into a Stride course by sundown, with the student newspaper even publishing a special edition about it. The anime seems to know that it's already about an impossible sport, so why not tell its story through increasingly unlikely events?

Bright and pop-art-like, this show is nice to look at with no substance underneath. It doesn't matter who wins or loses, and with no marker set in real life, it's hard to be impressed by the Stride athletes' moves the way we can instantly tell when The Prince of Tennis passes the benchmark of reality. You should stick around for the cute characters and occasional wit. But so far, the sport itself is the least compelling part of this sports show.

Rating: B-

Prince of Stride: Alternative is currently streaming on Funimation.

Lauren writes about anime and journalism at Otaku Journalist.