Persona 4 the Golden Animation

What began as a triumphant success, both critically and commercially, in the gaming culture, even outside the JRPG community, has now devolved into whoring itself out. That is not a negative connotation, as the spin-off games and the Vita port are excellent in their own right. However, the event that started the whole milking process began with announcing an entire adaptation of Persona 4 in anime form back in 2011. It would be of no surprise to anyone that it was a thing that, in the end, would be looked at as a project that could not be called anything but unnecessary.

Speaking as someone whose ... favorite game is Persona 4 and will cherish it till the day I die, I’ve also adored its Vita port, Persona 4 Golden. Its different mechanics and new fantastic scenes also brought a new character, which breathed all new life into it. After much popular demand by absolutely no one, Aniplex thought to themselves, “Remember that Persona 4 anime we made a couple of years ago? Why don’t we make another one for the port to cash in on the hype for Persona?” Atlus probably had a hand in the decision too. Still, Persona 4 the Golden Animation is nothing more than just decent fan service for fans to see, even with the inevitable cringe-worthy attempts to adapt it fully.

For those who aren’t aware of the concept of Persona 4 Golden, it is another version of the original game with a different side character that we get to know throughout her own story. The anime wants to solely focus on the new one, named Marie, and find out the mystery of who she is and why she is there. These do not bode well in how they handle the pacing and development. At one point, there are several parts where they skip over significant growth to fit 13 episodes in with Marie’s and animate the extra scenes; this includes the beach fanservice, the band practice, motorcycle licenses, etc.

Ironically, this problem of fitting too much content into one season was the same problem with the 1st season. The creators wanted to include as much content as possible to make it feel like an authentic Persona game in full anime spectacle. While it is admirable of them to at least try to accomplish this, it fails considerably. There are many instances where the pacing felt too quick for us to understand and feel for our characters. If they were to make this into a bonafide hit, a more prolonged episode count would’ve sufficed a bit more for one. But in this day and age where shows more extended than 24 episodes all come and go, I don’t think Aniplex has that kind of budget to have had that accomplished.

Art and animation have their moments of eerie distinctiveness, where the characters are drawn quite an on point to how Atlus usually draws their Shin Megami Tensei characters. However, there are moments where the art quickly goes down south at a draw distance where the characters look very deformed. The animation can be guilty of this, too, with rigid motions at specific frames and cutting corners here and there. When the battle scenes occur, the art and animation are pretty stellar to see, so you can tell where Aniplex put most of their budget towards.

Despite this not being an excellent adaptation, should this be outright slandered by Persona fans? Not entirely. What is still intact from the source is the humor, which can still serve to be a delight on multiple occasions. Seeing them in the animated form helps make it more memorable in this light. Not only that, but there are a few exciting bonuses they added to the story, despite its flawed presentation. Adachi’s past is given a lot of in-depth analysis, which has him seen in a more sympathetic light in how he became a police officer.

Many will ask the obvious question: Should I play the games or watch the anime? Or should I watch/play Persona 3 first before 4? Depending on your preference, they will prove to be more fruitful in experiencing a truly brilliant story. Golden only proves to have more of the same systematic problems from the previous iteration. Even without mentioning it in regards to how it compares to the game, it isn’t anything that noticeably special. Fanservice shows are of no small quantity these days, so your best bet is to leave the fanservice for the fanatics to dive into.

Grade: C-

This is a insult to the original history of Persona 4, this thing doesn't have a history, it's directly the content added on Persona 4 Golden, this insn't a group of friends trying to solve a serie of murders like they say in the sypnosis, this is just a comedy from extracts from the history, the animation quality is mediocre, the OST is exelent, characters are only cartoons of any stereotyped character in this thing, the energetic one, the thinking one, the dumb one, etc. The anime isn't funny, dones't have a real plot, have a basic humor and if you fuse those with the ... bad characters, we got some really bad quality anime. If you want to watch Persona 4, i recommend you to play the PS2 or PSVita Game, but if you don't have any of them, watch Persona 4 the Animation, don't watch this trash.

Marie ruins everything.

There were some enjoyable moments in the anime for hardcore Persona fans. And maybe for some casual fans as well as the fans in-between. However, none of these enjoyable moments involved Marie and moments that did not involve Marie were very rare when watching. I expected Marie to be a heavy focal point walking into this as she was one of the more significant additions to the Golden game but I did not expect to walk away from it with a new hatred for the character.

Golden is also littered with moments of shoddy animation throughout. It was kind of like the double Chie ... situation from the original animation. In addition to these instances of questionable quality featuring twice the Chie, there are a thousand Maries this time around.

The first animation was by no means the pinnacle of video game adaptations but I remember it for being a fun, fanservice-y run through that endeared me even more to the characters I spent those hours of game time with as well as giving a likable personality to the hero. The overall experience is what made me look over some of the technical/quality issues it had. Most importantly, it was enjoyable to me as a Persona fan. I will remember the Golden animation for Marie. And not fondly.

This is the worst thing I've ever watched.

I'm not gonna lie I never played P4G, so I never got the hate surrounding Marie. For the first three episodes, I actually kind of liked her. This did not continue.

For reasons that I can understand, P4GA only adds the added stuff from the updated rerelease. As such, it is best watched after playing both P4/G and watching the original anime series.

One of the things that the original Persona 4 Animation failed to deliver on was animation and action scenes. The writing was fine, but the series still suffered greatly. One thing that I thought that the Golden ... Animation would at least impimprove upon was the art, but there is even more QUALITY than there was in the original.

The Adachi fanservice was fun, but it was interrupted with copious amounts of Marie. By the way, Marie has more spoken lines in P4GA than any of the other characters (besides maybe Yu) do in both Persona 4: The Animation and Persona 4: The Golden Animation combined.

So, to summarize:
Bad art
Bad animation
Bad writing
Bad everything.

Music was right out of the original soundtrack so that doesn't really count, does 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.