Persona 4 the Animation – Episode 09 and Gooney’s brief apology

I’m going to get this out of the way first so that I can talk about this episode of Persona 4 uninterrupted. I’ve barely had any time this week (I wanted to write this post a few nights ago, but I went to a Deadmau5 concert and was completely drained for the whole day yesterday) and as a result, I haven’t even been able to watch most anime (including this week’s episode of Haganai, so I’ll hopefully incorporate that into my next post) so that explains why this is later than usual. Last thing, I’m going on vacation this week, I should be back on the 9^th so with any luck both of my next episodic posts should be out on time next week, sorry for the schedule slips, I love blogging so I feel like crap when I don’t even manage to write the minimum I planned.

So about this week’s episode…

Persona 4 the Animation – Episode 7

Back when Persona 4 (the game) was released, Kanji Tatsumi was lauded for being one of the few characters in modern gaming who not only had an ambiguous sexuality, but whose sexuality was explored to such a degree, he’s one of the more interesting characters in a medium that often prefers to leave such issues taboo, and the anime pulls off his arc very well.

Persona 4 the Animation – Episode 06

This week, we’re introduced to everyone’s favourite sexually confused delinquent, Kanji Tatsumi!

Persona 4 the Animation – Episode 5

[For those who didn’t read my last post, the reason for the slight delay was a fault with my laptop fan and the lack of any viable replacement. It’s all been sorted out now, so I can get back on track with my posts, and I now have a bit of a backlog from last week to get through]

In a change from what’s happened in the show so far, this episode instead focuses on the slice of life aspects of the game during the character’s time off from the investigation and blasts through one of the game’s many optional social links. In this case, it’s Ai Ebihara’s link of the moon arcana.

Persona 4 the Animation – Episode 4

With this episode, we close out Yukiko’s plot in spectacular fashion. By emphasizing events that were alluded to, but never clearly shown in the game, the anime shows us slightly more about the characters whilst still remaining faithful to the source material, giving us its best episode yet.

Persona 4 The Animation – Episode 3

Things really get going this episode. We begin to delve into social links (a core part of the game) and the plot is properly starting, with more of our protagonists getting bigger roles, namely Chie and Yukiko.

Persona 4 The Animation – Episode 2

I don’t get most gamers despite being one myself. Here we have a very faithful, incredibly solid adaptation of a great game, and fans have been criticising it for that very reason, it’s faithful. I’m willing to bet that if it wasn’t faithful, fans would have criticised it for that too. Can’t change it, can’t keep it the same, apparently they’re impossible to please.

And honestly, isn’t the point of an adaptation to be able to experience a story told through a different manner? You can’t claim it’s bad because you know what’s going to happen with the plot (something I’ve honestly seen lots of people do), that’s just being plain unreasonable.

Anyway, back to actually talking about episode 2…

First Impressions – Persona 4 the Animation

As I’ve made very clear in the past, Persona 4 is easily my most anticipated anime of the year, let alone the season. The game is considered a modern classic and the plot seems perfect for adaptation. That said, it was never going to be an easy thing to adapt, as it’s compressing an 80+ hour long game into 24 episodes. There’s a lot to cover and if it was handled poorly, it could lead to the anime feeling very rushed, and if it deviated from the source material, there’d be a lot of angry fans.

Thank god then, that this so far not only proves to be a very faithful adaptation, but one that turns out to be as good as I could have hoped it to be.