Shironeko Project: Zero Chronicle (Episode 12) - The Sin of the Beginning

The Prince of Darkness is reunited with an old acquaintance where he learns the true ambitions of the King of Darkness. Can he stop the King from destroying everything and save the Queen of Light?

What happened?

So, Adel was still alive and seemed pretty upset that the Prince of Darkness cut him in two. He also seemed to have received a power-up from the King of Darkness. Their fight was short and filled with more talking than should have been possible, not to mention the Prince’s armour (shoulder guards and knee guards) that was destroyed, reappeared and then disappeared. Of course, he’d also been holding back and rushed to stop the King of Darkness once he’d defeated Adel, complete with a new set of wings that he mysteriously acquired.

Meanwhile, the King of Darkness’ attack on the land of white continued, but Iris had run back to the Progenitor Stone to pray, leaving everyone else to fight. She’d come to the realisation that they were doomed to fail so she set the stone to self-destruct, much to the annoyance of Phious. The Prince of Darkness flew to her aid but was too late, so he took out his anger on the King of Darkness. Basically, everyone died apart from possibly Theo and Phious, or not. Who knows?

Shironeko Project ZERO Chronicle Episode 12 Adel versus the Prince of Darkness

What did you think?

I’m not sure why I’m even remotely surprised. This series has been awful from the very beginning when it rushed through so much character development and plot progress that none of it had any impact. Then, we had an entire episode about picking wild greens… Not to mention the episodes either side that basically were build up and come down from said wild greens episode. So, destroying the entire world and killing everyone in an episode without any reasoning or development is pretty much as should be expected. It’s hard to say exactly what killed this series because it’s a complete mess.

Shironeko Project ZERO Chronicle Episode 12 The Prince of Darkness flying to the Rescue

What have you learnt?

They say that everything that happens in a story should either develop the characters or move the story forward. Both, if you’re lucky. This series seemed to want to ignore that advice and just plod along doing its own thing. Seriously, see the wild greens episode for further proof. It failed to develop any of the characters beyond a title or role and that ultimately killed the ending. Personally, I’m a big fan of everything going wrong and everyone dying endings, because they’re usually packed full of emotional stakes and things feel like they’ve concluded. However, without the development of character and story, you end up with what happened here – just a bunch of stuff happening that leaves no impact on you.