If you haven’t guessed, video game related media is kinda my thing. I love to see movies, read books, and the like based on video games I enjoy. So after enjoying the heck out of Persona 4 Golden on the PS Vita, I heard about Persona 4 The Animation.
Simply put, it’s an animated form of Persona 4, where they do their best to make the game into a show while still being faithful to the source material. In this, AIC A.S.T.A., the studio behind it, did a magnificent job. The show perfectly captures the feeling of the game, builds Inaba very well, and portrayed each of the characters very well.
The show follows Yu Narukami, who you normally name in the game, who has just moved to Inaba since his parents are working overseas. Moving in with his uncle and cousin, he arrives just in time for a bizarre series of murders, where people are found dead from undeterminable causes and hanging from television antennas, power lines, and the like.
On his first days at school, he meets Chie Satonaka, Yukiko Amagi, and Yosuke Hanamura, students who sit around him in class. Chie tells him about the midnight channel, where if you stare into a turned off TV at exactly midnight, you will see your soul mate. Bored, he checks it out, where it shows a girl. He then experiences a strange dizzy spell and trips, his arm and head touching the TV, which opens a portal. After telling Chie and Yosuke about it, they all figure out they all saw the same girl and, taking Yu to Junes to tease him about the portal thing, Yu manages to open another portal, where he and his friends fall into the TV world.
This world, however, is dangerous. Beings called Shadows live here and will kill anyone who wanders inside for too long. The group is attacked, alongside a strange bear named Teddie, before Yu awakens to a power called Persona and fights the Shadows off. Soon, they figure out that the girl on TV was Saki Konishi, Yosuke’s co-worker, and she is soon killed as well. Yosuke talks Yu into entering the TV world again to figure out if the Shadows had killed her, only to be confronted with a Shadow version of Yosuke, revealing all the feelings and thoughts he kept buried. Before long, he awakens to his power too, where Yu and Yosuke resolve to save as many people as they can.
Coming in at 26 episodes long, Persona 4 The Animation does a fantastic job with much of the game’s content. While much of it had to be rushed, every character shows up and they do an amazing job showing what’s essentially Yu interacting with them to the fullest extent. In the game, they were called Social Links and, as you advanced them, more and more events happened. The anime does a great job capturing numerous events from these Social Links, showing Yu’s growth as a person.
The best part is that unlike the game, Yu isn’t perfect. He can be a bit of a pervert at times and has his own weaknesses, like being terrified of being alone and losing his friends, to the point where he nearly surrenders to the final foe when his friends’ lives are at stake. In fact, if it wasn’t for timely interference from Margaret, the woman who guides him in how to use his powers, he would have lost completely. He even starts going crazy as he keeps experiencing the same day over and over again.
The hardest part about talking about this series is that there’s a great many events and I don’t want to spoil too much. Yu’s search for the truth makes for a great show and I cannot recommend it enough.
Highly Recommended
The Professional Protagonist 