Persona 5: The Animation

Persona 4 anime was hilarious, full of wink-wink anime gags, and interesting side characters. Persona 5 is heavier on suspense and serious, realistic crime story tone, and it took a while to introduce all the characters, so I didn't feel the group as tight knit as the group in Persona 4.

But the drawings won't disappoint the series fans, and Persona 5 world is bigger, supported by PS4 system.

*Warning* the anime follows the game plot closely, so if you haven't played the game yet, the anime episodes would spoil the plot twists in the game. In my case though, because I enjoyed the anime (episodes 1-26 so far), I don't mind the spoilers. In fact, the spoilers helped me to skip dialogues ahead in the game.

I figured I would go ahead and help to pad out the reviews for the P5 animation. Given the popularity of the game, I'm surprised it does not have more reviews/ratings as is.

For anyone who is not familiar with Persona 5, or the Persona series as a whole, It would take an entire essay to bring you completely up to speed. Just to cover the basics, Persona is a game series that mixes action JRPG elements with Life and Dating sim social systems. You often role play as a high school student, who is blessed with the ability "Wild Card", which allows him to wield multiple Personas in battle. Personas are essentially pokemon, though they operate on a much more complex elemental system. When you aren't battling the bad guys, called "Shadows", you are tasked with leading the life of an average student. You take tests, gets part time jobs for more income, and develop your relationships with your teammates and other supporting characters. The more you develop these bonds, the stronger you become in battle.

Persona 5, the latest entry in the series, was released for western audiences in the spring of last year by, and has quickly risen to the top of many fan's rankings for best Persona game yet due to its deep plot and engaging characters. Now, just about a year later, the anime adaptation has been released by company Aniplex, and is putting out episodes on a weekly basis, presumably until the entire main plot has concluded.

The reception to this project has been mixed, as opposed to the near universal praise that Persona 4's animation received. The reason why is immediately apparent after you watch the first episode. The pacing is.. not great. In fact, I could easily imagine someone who has not already played the game and knows the story getting entirely lost as to what is going on. With a property like this, that prides itself on giving sufficient context on the plot over multiple hours of gameplay and worldbuilding, it seems that a bit of that care was lost when they attempted to cram roughly the first two hours of the game into a 24 minute block.

At the same time, you can understand the approach from an objective perspective. If Aniplex were only able to cover an hour of in-game content per episode, they would be well over 150 episodes before they were done, and I simply don't believe they are able to invest the time to go into the triple digits.

From the second episode onward, the pace was fixed in a few places and we start to get invested in the characters. This is achieved well enough for how much screen time each one is given, but there's something.... missing. Some element of the social interactions that gets lost when you aren't driving the dialogue as you do in the game. This I fear will end up being the main issue with the series as a whole; the plot and its emotional impact will suffer for those who have only watched the adaptation, due to the fact they have not been given enough time with each character to fully appreciate their backstories and their bond with the main character.

As of the time of this review, there are 7 episodes released, covering roughly the first 30 or so hours of the game. So far, I can say that it is worth your time whether or not you have played the source materiel, but only time will tell if the entire package will come together as the story progresses, or whether things start to fall apart as more characters and plot elements are introduced.

The show is a little lack-luster, but has a lot of lovable characters, an amazing story and is just overall a fun anime

This is a solid series despite setting itself up to fail in a couple of ways.

The first is the flash-back intro. It begins with a character who, without context, appears as a cocky punk you couldn't care less about who gets caught doing crimes. Then, as he is questioned, you get obnoxiously vague exposition that finally leads to the flashback where the actual story is.

I personally benched the show for months because of this intro. I only finally finished the first episode because it is my personal rule to give any show one full episode to prove itself. This being my introduction to the game, which I later played, it also made for a very slow, weak un-engaging start to the game. Clearly, the developers were banking on the built up good will from previous iterations.

Flashbacks/forwards are only ever a cheap, detrimental story device or essential enhancing element with no middle ground. It's obvious which category this falls into and very unfortunate that it continues to punctuate the series.

The second way the anime shoots itself in the foot is content packaging/episode release. The packaged 26 episode anime doesn't actually finish the story. Without the final episodes, which you must know about and then hunt down separately, the putative ending from the first 26 is just a pointless slap in the face.

I never quite know who anime adaptations of games are for.

For those who played the game they are usually judged against game negatively as an update of the olde timey complaint wherein the book was better than the movie instead of judging each according to the genre of which it is actually a part.

If one is taking this apples/oranges approach wouldn't the anime, unsurprisingly and necessarily, be lesser since you are passively watching a truncated version of the game with no new story elements?

Yet, conversely, for anyone who hasn't played the game such adaptations are usually unwatchable exactly because they 1. Are set up such that they depend on you already being familiar with the game and 2. Are too much like a game, making for awkward and clumsy anime.

This adaptation also occasionally trips up from being too much like a game, e.g. Distracting bits of dead-end plot that only exist because they are translations of game elements, the main protagonist being unnaturally mute and un-reactive because that is the de facto for first-person RPGs, etc. But these are comparatively minor and might go unnoticed by many viewers.

So I am marking this pretty high because it actually stands up pretty well on its own with serious and relevant plot elements, flushed out characters, good world building and intriguing neo-noir type mystery.

Persona 5 the animation try's to do what the game does, but horribly, the anime has horrible artwork, and the amazing soundtrack is used horribly, not to say the pacing is just absolutely horrible. I know you can't fit a 100 hour game in a anime, but to be honest it is acceptable, to anime standards I guess it's alright, so you might enjoy it, but I definitely do see some fun to be had, I enjoy all the Easter eggs, all the xtra details, just I hope if they make a persona 5 R the animation anime, I hope they fix all the mistakes.