I stumbled across Cinderella Gray on the YouTube channel "It's Anime", which is evidently a legit licensee in the US (its main NA distribution seems to be on Amazon Prime). I've only watched the first couple of episodes thus far, but even that is enough to be obvious that it's very different in tone from the game and/or the original anime. I guess it's a prequel to same, because Oguri Cap is the MC, and she starts out at a C-tier uma school in some podunk town, not at Tracen Academy.

There are three things you should know about Oguri Cap going into Cinderella Gray:

1) You know the Norse myth where Loki gets into an eating contest with a giant and loses, only to discover afterward that the reason he lost was because the "giant" was actually all-consuming elemental fire in a cunning disguise (... somehow)? Oguri Cap would probably have won that contest. She can eat until she looks about 14 months pregnant, then be back to her normal shape by the time she's finished her afternoon run.

2) She's evidently dirt poor--literally. She owns precisely one set of clothes, a tracksuit, and appears never to have laundered it. The mean girls at her school call her "Dust Bunny". I assume this is a reference to the "Cinderella" part of the title, as are the aforementioned mean girls, who stand in for the wicked stepsisters.

3) She has no sort of sensory apparatus known to man. She has rivals without realizing she has rivals, enemies without realizing she has enemies, friends without realizing she has friends. Early in the first episode, one of the mean girls, who is supposed to be her roommate, slyly informs her that there's nowhere in "their" room for her to sleep because of all her own stuff, and she'll just have to sleep in the storeroom.

Oguri's only reaction is a bland "roger that, good luck with your stuff," and when she reports to the storeroom she's overwhelmed... by how incredible it is to have an actual room in which to sleep, with blankets and a window and everything. She genuinely believes the mean girl did her a favor. Similar interactions bounce off her like hail off a window. She simply has no idea what's going on around her, and moreover, she doesn't care.

The tone of this show is kind of wack. The opening theme is oughties Melancholy Rock, one step short of shoegaze, in sharp contrast to basically all the music in the game, and there's this eerie thread of melancholy underlying the essentially silliness of racehorses as humanoid track stars. Oguri's mom is evidently an ex-racer who never made it (I assume that's why they're so poor), her main rival is a damn psychopath (and not in the funny Agnes Tachyon way)... it's all weirdly dark. And this is from the franchise that brought us Rice Shower...

Don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying it, but dang, what internal whiplash.

Actually, now that I think about it, you know what it reminds me of? Arpeggio of Blue Steel. It has a very similar habit of whipsawing between extreme silliness and Incredibly Srs Bsns.

Also, by equine standards anime-Oguri is not a proper gray. I just felt like I should point that out.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.