Ah, that's a fair point. I'd even point to something like Sword Art Online as an example of A-1 doing good work over the course of multiple series. Say what you will about where the story went, the production value of that show stayed pretty impressive, at least from what I can remember.
I agree with you that lamenting A-1 is kinda pointless at this stage. What's more important is who is actually directing and writing it. I'm worried about this adaptation for a ton of reasons, A-1 isn't really one of them.
Sword Art Online's kind of a weird case too, where the production team got stuck between a rock and a hard place. The original novel was written way before everything else, and is more of a standalone piece that has a very specific (note: not saying it's
good) flow to it. Adapting that to anime format basically gave them two choices: Destroy that flow and go in chronological order, or keep the flow and confuse the hell out of non-novel viewer. They obviously chose the one that would benefit their expanded audience.
Worse, even with all the side material that exists now, they had no way of making the Aincrad arc fit a full 26 episode series. But at the same time many of the stories were simply too big to fit in a single episode. Episodes 2 and 3 are particularly bad about this, having entire chunks of them being cut out of the anime adaptation. So they had a second dilemma trying to figure all that out too. I don't envy the team that worked on Sword Art Online for those reasons, because they had their work cut out for them. They did, however, manage to make it
very popular, in spite of any critical reception.
As for the Persona 5 anime itself, we really need to know a lot more about the format and details of it before we can judge. The announcement just says it's a TV series, so we can safely assume it's a 26 episode/two cour series. But who's directing it? Who's writing the scripts? Those key details will be important. The teaser trailer is pretty promising IMO, due to emulating the style of that one particular image.
And for what it's worth, I felt the Persona 4 anime was pretty faithful
despite having an incompetent director. It told the entire story, ultimately, and didn't leave anything out. It had it's flaws with pacing and stuff, and the animation was garbage at times, but it have it's moments where it was superior to the games. Particularly the music, and several key scenes near the end. The P3 movies didn't have Kishi onboard as director anymore, and they ended up in many ways telling a superior version of Persona 3's own story. So I think as long as they've got a good director and scriptwriter, it'll be good.
I'd love to see Noriaki Akitaya and Jun Kumagai return myself. They did good work.
