Persona 4: The Golden Animation 5
PersonaGAF, let me tell you a story. Once upon a time there was this video game called
Final Fantasy V and it was pretty good. The gameplay was well-thought out, the plot was light-hearted, and the cast was full of humorous characters. As a follow up to the rather brooding Final Fantasy IV and predecessor to the equally serious Final Fantasy VI, FFV was a wonderful contrast and a great change of pace.
But then Krile was introduced. She was the sort of character one didn't really expect to just fall into a game. More like the type now famous for populating a thousand and one fan fictions on fanfic.net, really. Krile had no specific trait of her own. She just borrowed and amplified the traits of others. Bartz, the hero, was a talented warrior in his own right, trained by and capable of besting warriors of legend. Krile was a better fighter. Lenna was a kind-hearted princess willing to sacrifice herself for the dragons with whom she had a significant history. Krile was a better dragon rider. Faris had a deep emotional bond with monsters, but Krile could speak to them psychically! Ex-Death was a demon wizard whose power was shattering the elemental anchors of reality, but Krile could off him with a single magic spell. The more you got to know her, the more she usurped from you, right up until she managed to plant herself as the centerpoint of the entire ending for no apparent reason.
Now let's skip ahead a bit to a more recent era. Say, 2006-7. Square Enix, hot off the heels of FFXII, announced FFXIII with a brightly colored heroine doing all manner of nifty tricks of her own. Boy were we wrong about that, huh? Square went nuts and got all revisionist with Lightning, calling her "the first female protagonist in the series" in blatant disregard for the several who had preceded her. They thought to strike that ol' FF7 magic again, not realizing you can't make magic in a lab, and began forcing her down everybody's throats. And she wasn't just forced, she was
everywhere. To the point of being the first Final Fantasy character to have a game named in their honor. Needless to say, it was painful to watch for everybody who wasn't all that stoked about her to begin with, or who had come to see her as the emblem of all that was wrong with the company in modern times.
So what happens when you combine these two? Apparently you get Marie in Persona 4: The Golden The Animation. In the interest of not making this simply a rant, let's consider what Marie was in Persona 4: The Golden, first. Disregard with me any complaints about her actual person or her poetry and consider just the minimum of her execution within the plot. Her Social Link was undeniably a poorly forced scenario in which players had to spend an abundance of time with her (including non-social link time!) in order to witness the full ending, during which Social Link Marie was attributed not one, but two classical faults of the genre: amnesia and an intimate connection with the game's true foe. While these things were passable in the bygone age of FF4, FF6 and FF7, they've been done to a wearying death by now. But that isn't really the point. The point is her Social Link felt forced and half-hearted, with the game at times wanting the player to view her as another member of the team (but her never being placed into the team) and yet her optional nature leaving weird gaps where her friendship and importance had to be questioned. After all, if Marie was so important to the gang, why doesn't she participate in numerous shared difficulties?
To that end, I had assumed that the point of Persona 4: The Golden The Animation was to address this sort of haphazard inclusion by making Marie a more intimate part of the story, to set her on par with the members of the IT. Oh, I told myself any number of lies about this show when it began. The haphazard story-telling being because it was meant to serve as a supplement to the other show, the lack of character to the entire cast for the same reason. The added weight to Marie simply because she was a part of The Golden and that was what was getting all the attention here.
But I think it's time we were all honest with ourselves about what, exactly, we have here: A poorly animated, woefully disjointed, abhorrently written piece of dreck attributed to a single character at the expense of literally every single other thing. Like a black hole swallowing light, Marie drains all quality from the rest of the production into herself, where it cannot truly be said to continue to exist. When was the last time in this you saw Yu interact with any of the other girls on the Investigation Team? Shit, his only non-Marie interactions are with Yosuke and Teddie, and both of those are terrifyingly limited. I went on at length about how bad cast interactions were last week, but I feel the need to punctuate this by stating that, for however off Yu Narukami's portrayal might be in Arena, at least he has a portrayal in that. The main character here is less an amalgamation of the quirks the player might ascribe to him and more a sock puppet on one of the myriad tentacles Marie is playing with in the fever-dream that is this production.
And as if Marie's bloated importance at the cost of every other cast member was not crime enough, they've now decided to lay bare all that which may have concealed her true nature and just flat out start giving her brazenly absurd powers. Marie can now play guitar. Now, I'm not going to defend the band scene like it's some paragon of writing or like it was even one of the truly amazing sequences of Persona 4. The writers seemed fully aware that it was a stupid idea and ran with it, but I'm not going to let that stand as an excuse for it anyway, but then, if that scene was already stupid, consider how much worse this is now: Marie doesn't even know what a fucking school is but somehow she knows how to play the guitar. And mind you, there's no arguing that that has anything to do with who she really is. If anything, it stands rather at odds with it. But to top it off, Marie hears Rise singing one time on a river bank and is suddenly quite capable of singing every bit as well and appeasing a crowd of angry hicks. That'd be bad enough on its own, but she's essentially overthrown Rise's entire role in this little scenario, and honestly she's kind of driven Rise out of her position in the group dynamic by becoming the new girl who shamelessly hangs all over Yu. And oh yeah, MARIE HAS THE MYSTIC POWER TO KNOW WHO DUNNIT MONTHS IN ADVANCE.
What I'm driving at here is that Marie was only ever a tolerable character executed poorly to begin with, and that this has taken things entirely too far. There's no point to any members of the Investigation Team being in any of these scenes because the nature of every single scene in the entire show is almost exactly the same: Narukami gonna fuck this girl and everybody is gonna be so happy for her when he does. In a way, it resembles less the antics of a group of sappy high-schoolers and more a free-love cult wherein the leader is grooming the newcomer to be his fifth bride. Except, in spite of that, Marie is clearly the one in charge.
Persona 4 is a game about how your bonds with the people around you help you to grow as a person and make you strong. Persona 4 The Golden The Animation eschews this idea entirely by making it clear that the only bond that matters is ATLUS' special baby Marie.
Before all this went down, I'd wondered if Margaret wasn't going to take the role of Igor in light of Igor's sort of being phased out, but now it's obvious who the only important person in the Velvet Room is ever going to be, and it's the girl in the dumb fucking hat.
Marie stands in such amazing contrast with Labrys that it's hard for me to really fault Labrys for being
yet another robot girl with
yet another tragic backstory having
yet another mental breakdown and somehow being included despite only possibly being able to forge bonds with one or two members of the cast because of Arena's horrible story-telling. It's ironic, too, that Labrys can magically steal the appearance and powers of others and yet Marie is the one whose theft of traits of others is the true offense. I suppose, really, it all comes down to execution, but that only highlights it all the more. It's insane that a game with a plot as terribly disjointed as Arena's can somehow manage to better sell it's 11th hour girl than Marie, who has the advantage of both The Golden and The Golden Animation, but there you have it.
If even the slightest bit of effort had ever been invested in making Marie gel with the series, maybe I wouldn't be sitting here, ranting like I am, but as it stands, I'm just left scratching my head how the girl who looks like a made up anime fanpage mascot has somehow taken so virile and cancerous a hold over everything.