Arknights: Prelude to Dawn TV Anime Unveils 1st Cast & Staff Members, Visual

The second anniversary live stream for the Arknights smartphone game on Sunday revealed a cast member, two staff members, and the visual for the game's upcoming Arknights: Prelude to Dawn television anime.

Takashi Matsuyama will play the character Ace in the anime. The character is unvoiced in the game.

Yuki Watanabe is directing the anime at Yostar Pictures, with Masataka Nishikawa as assistant director. Both have previously worked on the smartphone game's "Holy Knight Light" first anniversary anime short, and Watanabe has worked on the game's numerous animated promotional video shorts.

Yostar Pictures described the anime as a "season one" when it was announced in October 2021.

Chinese developers Studio Montagne and Hypergryph released the game in China in May 2019, and then Yostar launched the game worldwide in January 2020. The game already inspired animated net videos since 2019 and a nine-minute animated "Holy Knight Light" short in December 2021 to mark the game's first anniversary.

The game is set in a fantasy world called Terra with modern science-fiction motifs. Terra is plagued by rare but devastating Catastrophes which force most people to live in nomadic cities. Catastrophes also bring forth the rare mineral Originium, which yields high energy and is thus a valuable resource, but also consumes everything around it as it grows, and those with prolonged exposure to it easily develop a wasting disease known as Oripathy. The story centers around the lives of Oripathy-infected individuals. A roving medical company known as Rhodes Island offers a helping hand and a place to belong for the often-shunned Infected, but it has often had to conduct ad-hoc paramilitary actions against the Reunion Movement, a terrorist organization that conducts violent action aimed at governments that oppress the Infected.

Yostar founded the Yostar Pictures animation studio in 2020. Yostar CEO Hengda Lee is representative director of Yostar Pictures. Arch, a Tokyo-based company that assisted with the production of the Promare anime film, took part in establishing the studio, and is managing the studio.

Source: Arknights 2nd anniversary live stream (2:58:19 in stream), Arknights: Prelude to Dawn website