Persona 4 the Golden Animation

tl;dr: supplement, not a replacement

I don't understand half the hate this gets. From the intro you can tell this is meant to emulate a new game+ for the main character, with his stats maxed out, lending to the main character's more lively personality. If you actually played a new game+ run of P4G, this is how your save would look, easily skipping over character introductions and dungeons, while absorbing all the new content of the game. The important part of this version is the GOLDEN, but negative reviewers mostly lament the fact they didn't re-animate the events of the original Persona 4 animation. What did ... Atlus add to the Golden version of the game? Marie and Adachi s. link, Winter trip, and a new boss, and therefore new ending. What P4GA didn't cover was what the base game already had and what was already animated, but what it did animate was everything NEW to the series. This is a supplement to the main story and not a retelling, please watch it with that in mind.

How can I possibly start this review without saying how much of a loss of time this anime was like? Because it is.
But let's start with something more simple. This anime is the adaptation of the remasted version of Persona 4, Persona 4 Golden, so I was expecting the plot of Persona 4 (maybe without many details, since it's a lot to put in 12 episodes) plus the story added in the Golden. I was really wrong.
This anime is completely a filler season. It's literally the Social link story of Marie, the character added in Golden that is really important for the story. For those ... who don't know what a Social Link is, it's the Friendships with the other characters in the game, that you have to level up meeting and chatting with them while you play to know them better. And it's okay when you have the entire game, but when you have ONLY the Social Link of a character, it feels pretty useless to make an entire anime about it. Also this isn't exactly stated in the plot, so at first I wanted to watch only this series without the vanilla one (and I didn't play the game). Luckily I changed idea, though I still wanted to watch them together, so I was alternating episodes and I got really big spoilers from the second episode already even if I was already past half the vanilla season. Yes because this series doesn't even care in giving you prompt of the story, already in the second episode you have the full cast together, without any explanation, when you should actually know them one by one. It was pretty rushed too, since the episodes are mostly one shot, and aren't pretty much plot-related if not for few chatting about the major plot point of the story.
At the end of the story, how could I enjoyan anime that was almost like watching a series only of "beach episode"? Only the last episodes are really plot-related, but this doesn't justify or help that much since I was really bored when I got there.
Also, I have the opinion that every media should be watched by itself, but in this case you should play the game of watch the vanilla season (and this is not a sequel, let's be careful with that) or else you wouldn't understand anything about it.

Remember in my Psycho Pass Movie review about the movement of Michaelbayanism? Well, in a few words, Persona 4 the Golden Animation belongs in that movement. You could literally rename it to Persona 4 the Cashgrab Animation or Baysona 4 the Michael Bay Animation. In short, it is not good and a disgrace.

When I saw how Golden in comparison to the Original, its score was almost 1 mark lower than the former. I did not think it will be bad until I watched it and...yeah it was poorly done. Despite that fact, there were very few moments when I had fun one being the ... final episode, the second half. The rest is cliched disjointed and a clusterfuck of nonsense.

There was close to zero saving graces for this masterpiece of a series, and the only thing I found good was actually the sound. But that was also poorly used during the series. The op is ok but it grew on me. The ed is the only track I actually liked and the animation in the ending was good. Shoji Meguro is one of my favorite music composers and his passion is shown in the song. It just feels wasted on this Michaelbayan ingenuity of an adaptation.

Who knew that when you see the label A-1 Pictures in a show you should already know what to expect most oftenly: animation and art becomes gradually worse later on, the soundtrack is standard to good and story and characters are not given a shit.

My biggest complaint with this adaptation is that instead of making it a complete series, they just took the opening episode of the original and after that they just put the scenes from P4G. The end result is a mess of a story that has little to no continuity and A-1 shines again with its notorious use of timeskips *cough* SAO S1 *cough*. Characters are bland and a paper-thin imitation of the original. Marie who is the only new character is annoying and typical as hell and the fact that half the series is about her made me rage. She is your typical, annoying, tsundere, amnesiac girl who has a secret that will cause a plot-twist to occur. She is even more annoying than Teddie in this anime who is innately annoying.

This is exactly how not to do a game adaptation and how to do a Michaelbayan chef-d'oeuvre (more like poop-d'oeuvre). A-1 Pictures can do so much better if they handle the story and characters better like in Shinsekai Yori. But clearly, most of the time, their shows end up following the Cashgrab formula.