Name: A fun way to bring the mobile game to life but falls flat without the game's character depth and more-detailed story
Item: A3! Season Spring & Summer
Rating: 64
Author: Kalladry

Waifra

A fun way to bring the mobile game to life but falls flat without the game's character depth and more-detailed story · Waifora

[Special note: this review is for both seasons, A3! Spring & Summer, and Autumn & Winter]

Mankai Company is a far cry from its glory days as an all-male theater. With only one member left and debt collectors at the door, a young woman finds herself in over her head when she boldly confronts the Yakuza’s loan sharks, promising to bring her father’s theater back into the spotlight. She might be able to recruit enough talent, but can they bloom into the actors she needs?

Unlike Touken Ranbu, which I watched because it sounded fun and didn’t learn until later that it’s based on a mobile game, I’ve been playing the A3! (”Act! Addict! Actors!”) mobile game, and knew what to expect going in. And unlike Touken Ranbu: Hanamaru, whose anime seems to be a thing all its own (more separated from the fighting/training focus of the game), A3! just transposed its built-in storyline to animated form.

Which is, honestly, a good idea! The existing, base story is perfect for a series: Trying to locate her missing father, Izumi Tachibana ends up at the theater company he used to direct, just in time to try and stop it from being knocked down by yakuza coming to collect on debt. She makes a deal: they’ll put off claiming its large debt for now if she can gather enough members to form a troupe and put on a successful play. The problem: the theater currently has 1 member, with no prior experience. So she’s got to find 4 other guys, a script, and get them to put on a well-acted, sold-out performance in the span of 3 months.

When that’s successful, she goes on to put together the theater’s other seasonally-named sub-troupes in sequence, aiming to get the company back to its former glory and make enough money to pay off its debt and ensure its continued existence. And the anime makes this easy: both 12-episode seasons are split into two 6-episode arcs that follow each troupe from formation to closing night.

And through it all, members learn to work with others/open up/express feelings/all that good stuff, because of course they do.

The fun of A3–both games and anime–are the characters. The game has no romance function, rather its focus is training the actors and putting on shows, and the in-story struggles are usually because Character A and Character B keep butting heads, or Character T and Character Z had a falling-out years ago, or Character S just wants to fight.

The story doesn’t change from game to anime, and some things actually get cut, but animation does let it expand on other things, particularly what the stage plays actually look like.

I really enjoyed it, because they are all dorks, but they are all dorks I’ve been playing for months and I know what their deal is. They’re all designed to be likable! I like seeing Yuki and Tenma snark at each other all. the. time. I like sweet Misumi and his mysterious obsession with all things triangle. I like Citron’s cheerful language mistakes, and Homare’s bizarrely ethereal poetry recitations.

There are 20 actors in the main story (4 troupes x 5 actors each), so while it’s a lot of characters overall, the story focuses mainly on 5 at a time, so you don’t feel lost in a sea of people.

Verdict

English Dub? As of this writing, only the first 3 episodes were dubbed before the pandemic interrupted, and it doesn’t look like finishing it is a priority. The dub that exists is decent, though, and I particularly like Monica Rial as Izumi–I think she added a layer of humor that I don’t get from the original voices.

Visuals: Mediocre. I mean, the hair is nice and shiny, but the first season in particular often has faces that are slightly off, and characters stand straight or are seen in profile often, not moving much in group scenes. Camera shots aren’t creative.

It did improve in the second season, which got a new character designer, new art director, and new show director. But even so, A3! was cheated.

Worth Watching? Listen. I am an active player of the A3! mobile game, and each troupe’s anime arc mirrors their storyline from the game. So for me, this was really fun, a chance to see characters actually moving around, to see visual gags, a different way to watch a story I’ve seen play out on my phone. And sure, there’s a chance you’ll like it without that background.

But would I recommend it if you’re not playing the game? No. The story is better, the characters given more depth, in the mobile game, so without that background, the anime likely falls flat. The game’s strength is its story, so that adds to my disappointment here: there’s already a good existing story, the base material is great, why did so little effort get put into this? (The theme song is very fun, though, as are the openings–which change every 6 episodes to focus on the troupe that’s getting the spotlight.)