Arknights Season Three is the primary example of an adaptation where the quality is limited by its length and pacing.

Arknights as a story has every potential to resonate with newcomers and veteran players alike. It's a tale of oppression and discrimination in a contemporary dystopian world not unlike ours (well, except for the rock cancer part). It has a compelling idealist lead and a mystery-box amnesiac secondary lead, a great cast of supporting characters all with their own stories, and memorable and morally ambiguous villains. The story structure is contained within specific location(s) rather than jumping all over the place, and Act 1, which these three seasons adapted, tells a coherent, cohesive, conclusive story.

So why did this adaptation, especially this season, not work?

It's not the problem with production.

The audiovisual aspect of this season is phenomenal, as the production staff level up their game, bringing a breathtaking level of quality to the production. The soundtrack finally remembers the game developers are memed as "music company" and also tries to be more noticeable, and the fight scenes are awe-inspiring and tense. Just like in Season Two, there's some genuinely amazing character animation involved, the voice acting is still great, and unlike Season Two, there's not a single episode that looks as cheap as the rooftop fight did back then.

If anything, the strength of this adaptation is that it pinpoints and nails down the very specific high points in the story real well. Every single moment the players awaited to see gets the bluster and the shine one would expect.

The issue, just like in previous seasons of this, is in between those moments.

Whenever the show slows down and dedicates itself fully to the material, it feels and looks phenomenal, but what happens the rest of the time? Fast-forward mode. If one were to condense every issue with the Arknights adaptation as a whole into a single word, that word would be pacing.

And it's a problem that viewers should have seen coming since the start.

Whether it's with telling the backstories of characters and their motivations, having them interact and engage in tense dialogue standoffs, or having a moment to themselves and their thoughts—the show has no time for that. With a limited number of episodes and the ever-expanding SIZE of what it is adapting, the production has to pick and choose their fights.

If we were to go back in time a few years and look at the first season, Arknights Season One covered material whose length is around 26,747 words. That's four chapters' worth of material that is around the size of 2/3rds of your average light novel volume, done in eight episodes. As a result, the pacing already was creaking at the seams back then, resulting in compromises like the removal of entire scenes that set up confrontations or characterize people involved, or simply let the atmosphere of its setting breathe. There's not even time for a thought of expanding the adaptation or providing it with additional elements necessary for its transition between different mediums. If anything, the adaptation has to give less rather than expanding and adapting the material to its full potential.

That was the smallest amount of material this show had covered in a season.

In comparison, Arknights Season Three covers material a whopping 113,398 words in length. That's an ENTIRE proper (non-light) novel done in ten episodes, and it shows.

Arknights Season Three exists in this weird situation where the production itself has improved, yet the narrative quality and pacing of the adaptation have been steadily deteriorating. There's no time to build towards those grand moments of verbal confrontations between characters, no time to set up, expand, or emphasize the politics behind the scenes and the scope of the world the characters live and act in. There's no time to focus on relationships between various characters and the meaning behind their actions, nor is there time to dwell on the impact everything that had happened had on the protagonists' mental states.

There's one specific moment within this season that highlights that issue, and that is the Babel flashback, where the show rushes through 18,704 words' worth of material in a single episode. This results in something that is utterly incomprehensible to new viewers and fails to fulfill its primary purpose of characterizing the characters involved, despite this story being the backbone of the motivations of the entire protagonist team and their relationships with each other.

So when the finale rolls out and the big confrontation happens and the villain starts delivering a monologue (way shorter, of course, as we are running out of episodes already) about these concepts of nationalism and their quasi-fascist ideology and how it relates to the backstory of this massive movement we have been observing since the start of the show, as well as the protagonists' own organization and ideals, the audience can only shrug because none of those concepts really had time to breathe or be properly shown. How can we understand these clashing points of view and political implications between them when the show hadn't really built up toward them like it should have? How can we see the weight of the lives lost if those characters are but blips of light passing by as we rush to the finish line?

The anime-onlies are experiencing a detailed, grand, and tense moment of story, the context of which is only apparent to the game veterans and otherwise has been fast-forwarded through by the adaptation. There's no way to comprehend Amiya's mindset and what she had gone through in those three seasons and the burden she carries; there's no build-up towards how Kal'tsit sees the world and her opinions about the protagonists' actions, nor is there time for our favorite agent of chaos, W, to be properly introduced and carry herself with the presence she would have in the source. We watch Ch'en play a crucial part in this finale, yet the emotional crux of her actions is unclear and underdeveloped—a fact already apparent at the start of the season with Hoshiguma—because the show had simply not had the time to develop the character who is one of the three core leading people of Act 1.

The grand moments and confrontations between these characters feel weightless, their motives and ideals confusing and unclear as the audience gets carried away through fluctuating storytelling speed. Honestly, it's likely how it would feel to watch a movie with someone who just fast-forwards everything in it "to get to the good bits".

With better pacing and twice the episode count, this could have easily been one of the best shows of the year. Season 3 is a firmly for-the-players adaptation that uses its VERY limited runtime to nail down the moments whose context people already know. As such, it ends up being a pretty-yet-forgettable experience that is unlikely to expand the franchise to new audiences or convey the value and intricacy of its depth to its viewers.