Persona 4:The Animation
To list out my complaints first, I feel the series starts way
slower than it needs to. The pace of those first few episodes can be
agonizingly slow. They don't seem to grant Yu any sort of personality until you get 8 or so episodes in. He's a blank slate, like in the game, but since you aren't the player projecting on to him, he just feels empty. The animation ranges from pretty good to
awful. Battles feel
truncated. It's amazing that I feel some of the turn based battles from the game feel more dynamic and interesting than their animated counterparts.
One thing I really want to give the show credit for is how it handled the last 1/3 or so. I think it's BS to restrict the "true" ending to a home media release, but from a story and pacing perspective the back part of the series is top notch. The manage to get in all the important bits and give them time to land. They even added optional stuff I did not expect, like the battle with
. They didn't need to do that, but it was a really neat touch. The way they handle the story of the true end in general was very well done. Also, the way they gave the main cast their Ultimate Personas was good, seeing as they didn't have time to deliver them the way the game did.
Overall, it's a fantastic show. Sure, most of that is due to the amazing cast, which remains the greatest video game cast of all time in my opinion. Even if it loses some intangible things in translation, the core is still there and still super poignant and amazing. If the rumor of the P3 adaptation being a film is true, I'm really worried about that. P3 is even denser than P4 and I feel they barely held on with P4A as a full show. I see no way P3 gets a satisfying adaptation as a single film, but we'll see.
