So far, this adaptation has been a massive disappointment.
A-1 pictures are known for their generic character designs and cutting corners when it comes to animation, so when adapting a game as stylistically brilliant Persona 5 it was obvious they wouldn't live up to the game’s highs. I never expected it to surpass or even match the game’s quality, but with a director as talented as Masashi Ishihama (Shinsekai Yori) expectations were raised and this adaptation’s first six episodes have flown far below them.
Story: 5/10
A 100+ hour game stuffed into 24 episodes will inevitably have pacing issues, and this has its fair share. The story is rushed as hell, but so far it has given us the most important information to give us a surface level understanding of the world and plot. Any depth the game's story offered is for the most part missing. The themes of adults in positions of power abusing their roles have been boiled down to “grown-ups bad, kids good”. Like most of this adaptation, any half-hearted attempts at storytelling feel like a low effort recap to advertise the much better video game.
Character: 3/10
We have only met Ryuji, Ann, Morgana, Yusuke, and the quiet main character called Ren in this adaptation. They all feel like cardboard cutouts with a fraction of the personalities of the game's counterparts. Trying to stay as faithful as possible to the game has hamstrung the character arcs, story beats are trimmed down or skipped entirely so we can't get a sense of who the main cast are from this show. The game itself was not perfect with characterization either, which is expectedly not fixed in this adaptation due to the insistence on staying as faithful as possible rather than letting the anime stand on its own merits.
There’s plenty of inconsistencies in their arcs and annoying quirks that made some of them hard to like before they received development. These annoying quirks, like Ryuji’s obnoxious attitude and lack of self-awareness, become almost all there is to the characters. There just isn't enough time for each cast member to be developed beyond a surface level.
Even those inconsistencies in development are already appearing. In episode 4 Ann announces she’s finally free of the twisted pervert Kamoshida who was sexually objectifying her, but because this is a lovely A-1 Pictures anime, the camera is constantly shoved uncomfortably close to her butt. You could argue plenty of fanservice is necessary for the studio to secure a budget, but it is so opposite to the message the game was trying to convey. Effectively undoing any development that came from what should have been the most monumental battle in the first quarter of the show.
Art: 3/10
Action scenes are where the series looks the worst. It constantly uses this laughable shortcut of zooming in and out on unanimated shots to reuse them at a different resolution in a later scene. There’s somehow less animation than the game, and what we see tends to be worse. Look no further than the ‘epic’ boss battle in episode 5, what should have been amazing was stilted by hideous CGI that looked even worse than what was used in the game. The action is so boring to watch too because there are next to no stakes, usually, the Phantom Thieves are fighting random mobs but even the boss goes down so quickly.
The fight choreography is even worse, the whole battle scene where Ryuji awakens his persona is the worst case of it. There is next to no fight choreography at all, hits don't even feel like hits, it's more like colors flying around with sound effects added over it. And somehow the all all-out-attack is so much worse than the game’s even though it was practically ripped straight from it.
Character designs are the best part of the visuals because they’re lifted straight from the game, but they only look good when they’re totally motionless or on an animation loop (very often). When there's not much movement and/or character close-ups look really good but by that logic, you should just play the game.
There’s also plenty of ugly CGI random people walking in the background. In episode 2 Ren and his teacher are talking in a hallway, and there’s a giant CGI student trying desperately to walk without looking like a robot but its so obvious he was stuck on there last minute with zero quality control to fix him. He looks ridiculously unpolished and the perspective is all messed up, he goes past two girls standing near a door and he looks twice as large as them.
Sound: 6/10
Persona 5's OST is amazing, but here it's lifted straight out of the game and overused with not care for if it fits the scene or not (usually it doesn’t). You can easily tell when they use stock sound effects, deafening the punchy effects of the game’s combat for the sake of something easier on the ears but infinitely more forgettable. Yes, they fixed the OP and it is decent now, but the ED is still just a still image with limbs and hair being animated to look like the main cast is walking. It looks so uncanny, a completely still image would have at least not distracted from the pretty good song.
Overall: 4/10
I honestly can’t see this getting any better, but I love the game and respect the director enough to see if it can repair the story/character issues. I’m not expecting the art to get better because it seems as though they’re stretching the budget out to meet 24 episodes.
If they try to simplify the character designs to be more fitting to a TV anime budget rather than solely faithful to the game, it may become more manageable for A-1 to animate. Also, I've referred to CloverWorks as A-1 a few times, there's no difference. It's a subsidiary of A-1 so they're the same.