Haven't posted in a while so going to knock a few topics out. Nothing following has anything to do with P5 so you know, skip this post if that's all you care about.
P4 Manga
Recently Udon Entertainment released the first two volumes of the P4 manga. I'm sure a lot of people have simply read the fantranslations on the internet so I'm not going to go too in-depth with discussing the manga itself. Sogabe's artwork is very visually appealing and he captures the feel of the game pretty well. You can look up images of later volumes to see that he only gets better at recreating the feel of P4 so that's something to look forward to. The actual plot of the manga in the first two volumes is more or less what you'd expect from playing the game up to the first time Nanako calls you 'big bro'. There are some things the manga probably executes better due to the nature of the medium while there are others that kinda fall flat... a simple consequence of the differing mediums. The manga really shines during emotional scenes and exploring the day-to-day life of the Investigation Team but inside the TV world battles lose some of their lustre due to not being able to reproduce the same level of energy that is created in the game. Much like the anime I hate how the characters are one again represented without the use of their weapons. However, Sogabe is a terrific artist and is still able to provide some great eye-candy such as one of the most amazing things you'll ever see:
I feel that's all I really want to say about the manga itself so I'm going to move on to talking about the translation. To be blunt, as much as I think Udon does a good job with their products I'm not too happy with how they're handling the manga thus far. The next few sentences may be extreme nitpicking as a huge fan of P4 but I feel they're rather valid points. The main thing is that the manga translation disregards a lot of the game's localization. This can be pretty jarring to long time P4 fans when Chie laments about her broken "Fists of Fire" DVD or when Nanako sings along to the Junes jingle: "A Youthful Life Everday! Junes!" Again, many people might not think twice about this but if you've played P4 for even just 30 minutes you'd probably wonder why they didn't just stick to the game. I imagine that most, if not all, people interested in picking up the manga will be coming in with at least a basic knowledge of P4 so I really don't get this inconsistency... and this leads into my next complaint: the manga drops honourifics. Those familiar with the dub of the P4 anime aren't strangers to having the honourifics dropped but I feel the manga translation drops them far more carelessly. The one that rubs me the wrong way the most is how Chie always refers to Yosuke as 'Hanamura' (thus far). I fully understand that this is a thing in Japan but if you're dropping honourifics it's most likely to make the dialogue more natural/accessible to the audience so it stands out to me. I also simply feel it undermines their relationship in general by bringing in a formality you wouldn't expect in English. For the record the anime dub has Chie and Yosuke on the first name basis people familiar with the game would expect but the anime is more in-tune with the game's localization in general. I guess the last thing I want to point out is a good amount of simple errors littered throughout. In one panel Chie says "you mean the woman who was married to that guy who died recently..." which should have been an obvious catch and on the
back cover of Volume 2, Inaba is misspelled as 'Inabi'. These are rather insignificant things to discuss but I'd like to see a bit more care put into the following volumes.
P4D Figure
It's a really
nice fig. Happy to add it to my collection of Persona merch.
Nice. I got mine yesterday and I'm really happy with it as well. Here it is next to Wave's Rise figure:
The details on the glove and outfit in general are really nice as you'd expect from a figure of this price. I don't really have anything else to say about it though.
Art
Not sure if anyone really remembers but I used to post some art here. I also provide the drawings for a joint effort with PK_Gaming to create (super infrequent) persona web comics. Anyways, I'm constantly working to improve and haven't shared any of my progress here in a while so going to take a moment to do so.
My most recent artwork is something a bit more ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) than I usually do so maybe I'll play it safe and link the one I did before it:
I'd appreciate it if you checked out my other stuff and constructive criticism is of course always valued. So if you're interested please pick your poison: Tumblr:
http://84xl.tumblr.com/ Pixiv:
http://pixiv.me/x84 Twitter:
https://twitter.com/EightyFourX
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TL;DR: What's Persona 5?
