Now for the actual review. I'll just write this at the start. Unless you've played the game, this movie is not worth it. My reasons are below.
To be honest, I'm probably a big persona fan. Persona 3 was the first game i played in the series and i liked it so much i played it and then directly after that I played it again just because I liked it so much. You can thus imagine my excitement and glee when i found out that Persona 3 had a movie as well. I decided to watch this movie with a friend in hopes of getting him to play the game as well. Boy was I wrong. I'll go through the good bits first.
Art (8). The animation and character design was very well done. The fight scenes were fluid and the characters movement didn't jar with the background at all or feel unnatural. The backgrounds were just as good as it helped create the ambiance that the world wanted to created very well. Apart from that, there's not much else to be said apart from that everything looks very pretty.
Music (8). I've always been a fan of pop and the way Persona 3 mixed jazz and pop was interesting and it's one of the things i find most unique about Persona. The music gave a very cool and chilled feeling that I've come to know and love while the battle music was very upbeat and suave. I'm sure my decision on this was clouded by the fact that I enjoyed the game music as well and given that the music used in the game and the movie was about the same, I would naturally not have a problem with the music here.
Characters (5). Right off the bat, the main character (MC) was very emotionless. I know that it's never easy when there's a transition between a playable game character and any animation they're in but Persona 4 the Animation did a much better job at this by making the MC then much more relate-able from his sense of humour to his weaknesses. It wouldn't be an exaggeration here to say that the MC in the movie feels like a dead fish or more like a puppet with a very bad puppeteer.He barely says anything giving him a very blank persona (pun intended) and even the decisions he makes remind me more of what a machine would say than an actual person.
Enjoyment (3). If I had watched this alone going into the movie as a persona fan, I would have enjoyed it much more. However I went into this movie with a clean slate and my friend and i sat there for what felt like a 3 hour movie when it was only an hour forty. My friend kept yawning and I struggled to keep my eyes open. At the end of it, both my friend and I felt a sense of relief when the credits started rolling.
Overall (4). I'm normally a person that would be more unwilling to give a high score but would think twice before rating an anime below (5). This movie is no way to get introduced into the world of Persona 3. The most you'll get out of it is that this game is boring and the guys that like are just avid fan-boys of the franchise. If you do want to watch the movie, I cannot recommend enough that you play the game on psp (it has an english release) before you watch the movie.
If I were to rate this from a person that has played the game though, I'd probably give it a solid 8 but from a new persons point of view, it would have to be 4. There were many other ways that this movie could have been improved giving the MC more personality to maybe focusing a bit more on the social links and how they actually come into play. Overall, not a good way to enter the Persona 3 universe and since i can't add it in anywhere (MITSURU-SENPAI FTW!!!)
