Persona 4 the Golden Animation

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.

This is my first review, and will make sure that it doesn't contain any spoiler so read it calmly. Perhaps it will help you appreciate this work more.
---o---
The reason this anime has such a low score is because a lot of people misunderstood what this anime is. In the videogame franchise, Persona 4 Golden makes Persona 4 vanilla (the first version for PS2) not worth playing, since P4G is an enhanced version, with much more content (characters, story, levels, etc). Same happens with Persona 3 FES and Persona 5 Royal. I'm pretty sure a lot of people tought that, since the P4G makes the ... original P4 obsolete, the anime could be the same thing. I mean, the idea that "Persona 4 The Golden Animation" would have much more content and would make obsolete "Persona 4 The Animation". And they couldn't be more wrong.
If you want to enjoy the principal story of Persona 4, you should watch "Persona 4 The Animation". There you will see how Yu gets to know every character, and how with his squad they go forward toward discovering the truth. That's why that anime has more than 12 episodes. If you try to watch this anime first, without knowing the principal story, you would get more lost than a compass in a washing machine . So yeah, I would say that's the reason it has such low score. People see this anime has a standalone anime, when actually they should be seeing it has an OVA, or has a complement to see after watching the first anime.

Now that I have made that clarification, let's see; what does Persona 4 The Golden Animation has to offer?
Story: 8
Instead of re-telling the entire story of Persona 4, which could have been tiresome to someone that has already played the game, and/or just watched the first anime, this anime tells us the story of a character unique to the P4G videogame, Marie. Also, it lets us know more about the villain past, wich was my favorite add to the series. You'll know who Marie is if you haven't played the P4G game, or if that isn't the case, you could enjoy the new scenes of this character in the story. Personally, I'm not a fan of this character, but I truly enjoyed seeing how her relationship with the group develops. And well, Iguess she has some fans that would surely love this.
It also adds a bad ending, listed in this page, and the true ending for P4G.
Art: 8
It has great animation, and some good drawings, but sometimes the characters have badly drawn faces. Normally when they are afar from the viewer's sight. But I guess this is kinda normal in anime.
Sound: 10
Not much to say, the voice acting is great, and the music is top-notch.
Character: 9
In this version, we could say Yu has every social stat to the max. The real Yu NaruCHADmi. Every other character is just like what we've seen in the previous anime. I would take 2 points of it because I don't like the new character (sorry tsundere fans, just not my cup of tea), but I added one because I love how they animated more of the antagonist past.
Enjoyment: 7
I mean, the story goes around a character I don't really like, but I could still enjoy how this relationship develops, and revisit a lot of funny moments from the P4 story, like the beach scene. If you have played the Persona 4 Golden videogame, then I would say this will fill a hole that you probably felt after completing the first anime (which is an obligatory watch btw).
Overall: 8
This anime isn't as enjoyable as the first anime, but that's okay since that wasn't its objective. The objective of this anime isn't replacing the first anime making it obsolete. The objective of this anime is letting you know about all the content added in Persona 4 Golden that you could have missed, if you didn't play the game and/or only watched the first animation. I would recommend it to a friend that can't play the game, but only after watching "Person 4 The Animation" first.

I hope this review makes people understand what this anime is, and how they should watch it. I'm beary sad because a lot of people failed to understand this, and really expected a re-telling of the complete story (for that they have the first anime), whic would have made this boring to watch to someone that already watched the first animation. Anyways, I don't have anything else to add. If you already enjoyed the first animation, watch this. If you haven't seen the first anime, GO WATCH IT, and then watch this one. Have an enjoyable time doing so, buh-bye

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?

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.

Really, I'm not sure why Golden Animation has such a low score. Probably people came into it expecting to enjoy it standalone... but then again, objectively, it works just fine as a standalone, OR as a continuation of the first Persona 4 anime. My only real issue with it is the animation could be very nice in spots, and very lackluster in others. Everything else was fine; not the greatest anime I've ever seen but it had a sweet story, focused on Marie (mostly because she was absent from the original P4a so it makes sense she would be the focus of this one). Perhaps ... more viewers were expecting a total revamp of P4a? Who knows? Either way, I enjoyed it equally, viewing it as a piece of the whole.

Persona 4 The Golden Animation is an anime made for Persona 4 fans. If you haven't played the games or at least watched the previous anime you most probably won't enjoy this anime and I'll explain why.

Story 8/10
It's all about Marie. Marie's story is a subplot in the Golden version of the game. However, as the original game was already animated in Persona 4 The Animation, this one is almost completely focused on Marie, and the main plot of the game becomes the subplot. If you don't like Marie or don't know her and have no interest in her character, this anime isn't for you. ... If you haven't played the game nor watched the 2011 anime you will be very confused with P4GA, since characters seem to pop up out of nowhere, without any explanation about them, and their backstory is never discussed. This anime also animates events that weren't animated in the previous series, and if you're a fan of the series and its characters you'll certainly have fun watching their shenanigans.

Characters 8/10
Marie, together with Yu, is the star of the show. You get a lot of her, since the whole point of this series is learning about her past. Some say Yu is too different from the games, but I definitely love his personality in the anime adaptations. After seeing Makoto in the Persona 3 movies being a walking corpse devoid of personality, Yu is certainly a breath of fresh air. The other characters are there too, the whole bunch, Yosuke, Kanji, Naoto, Yukiko and Chie, being themselves, it's fun to see them. And we also get to see and learn much more about Adachi, which is one of the highest points of this series imo.

Sound 6/10
Typical Persona 4 OST. It definitely fits the atmosphere and I don't really have any complaints, it's just not one of my favorite OSTs, but that's just personal preference. The OST isn't bad.

Art and Animation 9/10
The animation is definitely much better than it was in the previous anime. The colors are brighter and feel closer to the original game. The art is the same, which means it's great.

Enjoyment 8/10
It's fun. Seeing characters we already know and love in different situations can be very entertaining, and getting to know one more interesting character adds up to fun. I'm fairly certain if you like Persona 4 not only for its plot, but for its characters and atmosphere, you'll be able to enjoy this series.