Persona 4 the Animation

Persona 4 and the Inevitable Tolls of Adaptation

When it comes to all the mediums that could potentially be turn into an anime, such as a manga, light novel, visual novel or even a movie, few are trickier than a video game. While adaptations from other forms tend to turn one non-interactive media into another, video games rely far more on interaction and players getting as much time out of them as they put in, based on the speed they can get through its challenges or how much side content players go for, which won’t be the same for everyone.

This inherent difficulty is why so many video game based anime either are original stories that have game elements present, such as Kirby Right Back at Ya, Sonic X, and most notably the long running Pokémon anime, original stories that directly tie into the game canon like the Professor Layton/FFXV movies, anime that remove the game elements entirely like God Eater or Tales of Zestiria The Cross, or in general glorified advertisements to the game without closure to anything brought up, not wanting to flesh anything out more than the video game could.

Even those times you get full adaptations of games like Danganronpa: The Animation, BlazBlue Alter Memory, and the Ace Attorney anime, they tend to be seen as rushed, sterile retellings that ruin the plot experience for newcomers and offer almost nothing of new worth to established fans. But years before those deflating series, there was Persona 4 The Animation.

Attempting to adapt Persona 4, a nearly 80 hour RPG, into a 10 hour TV series would be a herculean task to any staff, but the great thing about Persona 4 The Animation is how it manages to think creatively and pull together, even if there are notable problems in dealing with the interactive to non-interactive pitfalls. This is less a “review” in the traditional sense and moreso an analysis on the creative choices involved in Persona 4 The Animation’s development to their effect on presenting the game to a wider audience.

1. The Storytelling

So in terms of basic storytelling, Persona 4 stars your player character, entering high school in the town of Inaba when suddenly, murders start happening, you find out you can enter a world inside of TVs, you link the two subjects together, and try to prevent any more from happening while slowly learning more through investigating. For JRPG standards, it’s an appreciably digestible, simple plot that focuses on the chemistry and characterization of its protagonists over convoluted plot beats, with a unique overarching theme of societal conformity and acceptance that echoes through all of the game’s major characters. The game alternates between fun bonding scenes between you and your friend group, serious scenes involving the murders and kidnappings, fantastical dungeon crawling, and heavy character exploration through these dungeons as well as “Social Links” which help you better connect to Inaba as a community.

The anime, to great credit, covers the entire main plot of the game, minus the hours spent dungeon crawling against enemies. It, plus the additional OVA for the True Ending, complete the entire story in a fairly cohesive way without adding any anime-exclusive plotholes. Additionally, it well retains the balance between the serious plot and bouncy character moments just like the game, letting each character be themselves yet still contribute in a meaningful way even after their character conflicts.

The character conflicts themselves are often the type that fly incredibly close to the sun. Topics such as repression via gender norms, excess overcompensation, and image in place of identity are represented by one or more characters and just like the game they’re bold topics for the YA audience. One could argue the intentionally over exaggerated presentation of these elements creates certain unfortunate implications but from my point of view, the nature of what these problems piled up as is presented in a deliberate incomplete, inhuman way to still properly supplement the conflicts. Greater expression of anime shows these off than they were before for better or worse, but it’s genuinely well meaning and what the characters learn from these experiences is reflected in future moments as well as the core theme. In general this aspect was a win for the anime, with certain conflicts like Yukiko’s and Naoto’s having some more anime original backing to them, perhaps to account for the missing Social Link info.

It’s also very nice how P4’s anime is able to maintain the sense that “filler-ish” scenes really ARE a great course of character building and camaraderie in conjunction with the main plot and characters. They help to structure the repeating pattern of the plot and add further to the characters even after their main conflicts conclude. Several of these, such as the camping scene, night party scene and school festival scene are genuinely fun moments that bring out a lot in the cast as a group, helped a lot by how much fun you can tell the voice actors are having. Regrettably though, the anime does nothing to fix the worst of these scenes: the infamous Amagi Inn incident (a scene where gender roles are divided to where it’s practically torture porn for the guys when it’s meant to be funny). It's even somewhat made it worse with an entire episode to further build each part of it, only mildly mitigated by a rather rushed Social Link integration that feels more out of place compared to the one there in the game.

Thankfully though, once the plot does get on track in the final fifth of the TV series, it really stays on track. The mystery’s conclusion makes sense and the last handful of battles, while not amazingly animated, are well put together for animation and there’s clear spirit to it, despite how much it wanted to rush the falling action to hold off on the true ending. And the way the separate true ending OVA was handled was........................................not very elegant.

Regardless, the storytelling itself is properly maintained, with the mystery, character moments and message for the sense of community still coming across.

2. Spacing and Flow

Despite the proven competence of the story, this is, unsurprisingly, where the series has the most problems, having to do with of the amount of content it feels like it has to show in an attempt to downplay the “gameplay for gameplay’s sake” aspects of the game. That being said, the handling is very much a mixed bag.

I mentioned above how it felt like the anime maintained that character building comedy in between conflict, but for a good dramatic example, at one point in the plot, a major character is kidnapped, forcing you to enter a dungeon filled with high leveled enemies and a boss if you want to rescue them. It’s an incredibly desperate situation, but in the game you can massively reduce that by holding off the rescue for days of grinding, or progressing Social Links within that timeframe. In the anime, the rescue and confrontation happen immediately after so the sense of urgency is fully maintained, with the battle following being one of the best moments adaptation wise for how it adds onto the drama of the battle.

Similarly, there are a number of Social Links in the game relating to side characters that do not impact the plot in any way, and a couple of them were presented in ways that make sense for being non-interactive. Some of them, while not as delved into as the game ones, are shown in a really fun comedy episode that practically mocks the game player‘s daily activities. Four more Links (in pairs of two) get their own episodes to help break up the plot (Episode 5) and in Episode 18's case, neatly combine two stories together rather than force them to be separate like the game. This helps create a stronger emotional punch with the anime’s expressiveness.

That’s not to say all of them are well adapted though and you can really tell sometimes. Naoki Konishi has his entire character spat out in less than five minutes only for the anime to consider it a done deal. Margaret’s Link doesn’t exist in any capacity. One Link, for a little girl named Ayane, gets the worst of this. Rather than feeling like an actual struggle to work through like in the game, it just comes off as a short bit of emotional manipulation, before said character disappears completely.

Other moments as well greatly suffer from a lack of clarifying these in-between parts, especially for viewers who haven’t experienced the game. For instance, every episode begins with a brief segment in the “Velvet Room”, which game players would know is the place where you can fuse Personas together and gain ones for your party by using the Compendium. The anime, however, makes no attempt to explain the Velvet Room despite having scenes featuring it at the beginning of every episode. In the anime, Yu fuses Personas inside of dungeons several times instead of using the room, and neither does it clarify where he actually gets his Personas, which seems to downplay its purpose even further despite how much they show it, and the pleasantness of Margaret’s voice.

Individual episode pacing wise, Episode 10 is definitely the low point. It attempts to cover entering a dungeon, a character’s confrontation, and two boss fights in the space of a measly 21 minutes, which was just not enough to cover so many events, let alone events that even in the game itself were explained poorly. On top of that, the boss fights themselves aren’t conveyed in nearly as fun or interesting a way as the boss fights before and after this, likely because of how much they had to cram in.

However, that’s just a matter of time constraints. What’s truly jarring is a brief bit of editing in Episode 12. Most of the time the show’s editing is perfectly functional, aside from little things like not showing a double punch or a sliding fall animated, but this episode had an odd segment. There’s a scene in which the team confronts the dungeon boss, and then mid-villain monologue, it hard cuts to Teddie doing a silly comedy bit with the team outside, completely taking you out of the scene with no transition to showing the battle as a foregone conclusion. They later bring you back into the scene, mid-fight, about 9 minutes later, in what’s conceptually a pretty epic scene. This could’ve been one of the best moments in the series, but with no proper transition, or attempt to show what happened in the meantime, it felt jarring and disconnected. Almost as if the director had a good idea for a scene, but didn’t know how to properly implement it, so he just hard cut and thought people wouldn’t notice because of what it leads to. But people will. Thankfully the rest of the series avoids this incredibly jarring editing..................until the True Ending episode which continuously cuts between three plots at once in half an hour, which is disappointing but not irredeemable.

These issues aside though, the editing never precludes the game experience and despite this rushed pacing, the bulk of what the game aimed for is still there and does come across despite occasional rushing, condensing or slotting in events elsewhere.

3. Comedy and Characterization

This is where the series shines. While the game had notable moments of comedy, they often had to rely exclusively on line delivery and the small portraits since the models were not very expressive or animated. Completely the opposite here, where models move to the beat of every joke to add to the punchlines. Many of the comedic scenes from the game are retained or added to, sometimes with more expressiveness and other times thanks to cute new character Aika Nakamura and her tendency to always be around for food deliveries. The fact that there’s more jokes may result in some of them not landing (some may find Teddie’s jokes to be unBEARable), but the only parts of the anime to me that weren’t funny were scenes that weren’t funny in the game.

A new element that adds to the comedy is the anime’s portrayal of the game’s silent protagonist, now named Yu Narukami, into non-interactive animation. As a character he works for the most part. He’s reactionless enough to still project some, but also witty and funny enough to feel distinctive character wise as the collective straight man, combining aspects of every choice path the player could make into an engaging character. It’s his comedy moments, many of which were original to the anime, that got a lot of the laughs out of me from the series. Some of his louder emotional moments do feel a bit “on cue” because of this, but Daisuke Namikawa and Johnny Young Bosch still put in the effort all the way to sell it.

I’ve already brought up the side characters in terms of spacing, but as for the rest of the main cast, thankfully Yosuke, Chie, Yukiko, Kanji, Rise, Teddie and Naoto all maintain their strong personalities from the game and in the chemistry from their voice actors old and new continues to shine just as well in the more expressive medium. Everyone gets their due, and something I really appreciate about Persona 4’s characters is that even with their initial arcs, they maintain a sense of relevancy to the core theme, add further to the team investigation, and each play off of each other in a way that goes beyond being token party members into genuine friends. The anime adds some strengths and weaknesses to adapting them. On the plus side, the anime adds more scenes to foreshadow their conflicts prior to their climaxes, which help to make them seem like built up, real problems seen in the present, rather than simply having sad backstories expositioned out for quick feels with no buildup. The downside is that, with the inability to get all of their Social Links, the most you get for aftermath is one scene from each character’s link placed at random points in the narrative. These don’t have the same depth, but most of them do help to an extent that is better than nothing. Teddie’s the only one majorly hurt from this, because his Link is story mandatory but several pertinent scenes are cut short or cut out.

The real-world supporting community aspect of Persona games is something that’s present, particularly in Episodes 13 and 14, even if the whole thing couldn’t be fleshed to nearly the same extent in this TV series. It’s at least better than the Persona 3 movies which don’t have any time for it at all, but there is that sense that many conflicts have further places they could go, and the anime just didn’t have time. But for the sake of preventing disjointedness, I get some of it. The player making the decision each day to pursue Social Links or dungeon crawling works because it’s an interactive medium. In an anime though, hopping continuously between over 20 different characters would not only stall plot momentum but be bland to watch on its own from a passive point of view. So while not the most substantive, it’s a choice I can buy.

__4. Presentation/Animation
__

While faaaaaar from the best-looking show around, especially in a season where Fate/Zero and Guilty Crown aired alongside it, Persona 4 The Animation nonetheless properly uses the perks of an anime in comparison to the videogame presentation wise, in at least consistently getting the job done. Shigenori Soejima’s character designs still maintain their distinctiveness and as of the latest release there aren’t any “off” looking scenes, but conversation scenes themselves are mostly average. The one odd differing detail is Adachi’s hair. I have no idea why they decide to make it more of an auburn compared to the blackish grey from the game, but it’s the type of odd choice that newcomers won’t really care about.

The Persona themselves were all rendered cleanly and distinctly in 2D animation to capture their unique designs and abilities, in a way that thankfully did not use CGI as a shortcut. At worst CGI was on a few objects and certain places in the one area where computerized designs fit. On the downside, few of the action scenes themselves leave much of an impression or engaging choreography. They are certainly commendable when it comes to how the directing creates an increased sense of space and scale for say, the first two major battles, and the penultimate boss battle of the TV series, but the fight choreography itself isn’t particularly standout, often using fast cuts that reduce visceral impact. To their credit though, they are at least animated loosely rather than stiffly, which fit for the nature of Personas themselves.

Backgrounds look great when trying to replicate the game’s dungeon and at least average anywhere else. The one place the art faltered was inside the Junes supermarket. While the backgrounds had generally been believable enough otherwise, in the market, it looks as though the background was taken directly from a REAL store, so the 2D characters create an unintentional Roger Rabbit effect that makes the market look extremely off in every scene that takes place there. It’s just odd compared to everything else. It has a look that could be better, but it could look FAR worse.

5. Audio

The great thing about being adapted from a game with such a large number of music tracks is that the anime doesn’t need to change many of them or make a whole new soundtrack from scratch And the game has a GREAT set of fitting tracks. But even still there are a number of anime exclusive tracks, whether for tense scenes or for comedy moments. Along with these include the first OP, which sounds great, the first ED which has a great melody change in conjunction with the visuals, the second OP which isn’t as good as the first but still has some slick visuals, and the second ED, which is a decent track, but pales compared to the three preceding. The only real negative I could say score wise is that certain tracks could occasionally be either cut too short or misplayed. The song that precedes boss fights being used around comedy moments doesn’t work nearly as well, a brief playing of Your Affection in Episode 20 felt similarly out of place, and some of the unique boss music near the end of the game would often get cut short for a mixing of tracks to varied effect. As for the dub, nearly every voice actor from the game returns, and those who don’t get replacements who are either better or just as good as the original voices. They do their best to bring out all the fun they can in the script, even if one may find Teddie’s bearly contained pun catalog a bit grating. Adachi’s voice was the only partial sacrifice, because Johnny Young Bosch uses the tone he used in the game for Adachi for the now talkative Yu, so Adachi now has a slight helium to his voice. It still works well enough when it needs to but to some it could make the voice more grating; I got used to it enough.

6. The Little Touches

Ultimately this section is what led me to want to write this review, because it feels like that even with the series’ pacing issues and average animation, the team at AIC ASTA made sure to add a load of great, appreciated small elements that while not much on their own, add up to show that it’s clear those involved cared about its game origins. Though anyone who doesn’t want to know about some of these can just skip to the last part.

•The eyecatches, often used in most shows to simply say the title, only occasionally showing cool pictures, feature a stats screen for Yu's progress at the moment.

•Yu pulls out Pyro Jack, a Persona can learn the ability to absorb Fire, to counter a boss that primarily uses Fire attacks as a distraction

•The first ED not only is a great song that changes song styles exactly when the animation does, but it displays the current Arcana Yu gained in the episode, as well as falling cards that show every previously obtained one. It’s a great example of an evolving ED because of it.

•The show is more than willing to change the OP song every once in a while. While the original songs are great, they’re able to change up the songs for episode-specific events just enough for the changing to not become a dull trend by itself

•One episode ups the Persona 3 fanservice even FURTHER than the game did, as if they had the entire soundtrack on speed dial. It’s really nice appreciation for those fans over a year and a half before it got its own anime

•The clop clop clop of Teddie’s footsteps is maintained while walking through the dungeons.

•Analysis screens not only display Persona weaknesses like the game did, but also some additional comments without actually needing to say them.

•Ayane on her trumpet is playing a version of I’ll Face Myself, the game’s boss battle theme used in the game and remixed in the anime.

•The main villain uses the Reaper as a potent distraction, which Persona 3 fans will understand given the sheer wrath it has in the game without cheesing.

7. Conclusion

In a world where Disney can get away with re-releasing their animated classics such as Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King as soulless, shot for shot remakes that bloat with nothing necessary, there’s a great deal to appreciate about the genuine effort of this series to do the opposite. In becoming a series, Persona 4 adds much more expressive characters, expressive comedy, expressive direction choices (even if some don’t work) and expressive new scenes to allow the whole thing to function as a good series, if not a great one. However, it is still inferior to the game, as the anime can’t compete with the density, playability, measured endgame and more intimate connection with events that the game provides. Despite these downgraded elements in the transfer, I believe the anime understands the game’s core and has enough heart put into it to be on its own, a solid anime series either way with action, laughs, intrigue, character and a relevant overarching message. True Ending aside, it’s cohesive enough for newcomers while providing enough differences to keep interest for longtime fans. While watching this as a game player, I wasn’t thinking “man, I really wish I was playing the game, but rather “I can’t wait to see what they present next” and when it comes to video game adaptations, that’s something really admirable.