Plot: The basic story of Persona 4 is that Yu Narukami moves to the rural town of Inaba for a year with his uncle and cousin due to his parents working overseas. When Yu moves to the town people start to die in odd ways and it is concluded that there is a murder on the loose in Inaba. So like all teenagers must you and his new friends start to explore a mysterious T.V. world which is linked to the murders and the murderer and in this world Yu and company awaken the power of persona. Yu and friends make a vow to solve the murders and bring peace back to Inaba. That is the basic story and is very much the same story of the game; this however leads to Persona 4 major flaw the pacing. The pacing is all over the place in persona 4. It starts off steady but as the story moves on the story begins to jump all over the place and this can be a major turn off to many viewers. This is especially evident during the middle arc of persona 4. Also it should be noted that due to pacing issues many things that were important in the game were skimmed over rather quickly. However the pacing issue is understandable as the P4 anime is basically the game in an animated form. The game was roughly a seventy five hour game (on an average play through) and a large portion of those seventy five hours was the actual plot and the social link side stories and it is very difficult to put all of that content into a twelve and a half hour show. They could have changed the story greatly and cut out all the social links and this could have helped the pacing but it would have made a lot of people angry. They tried their best to make a very faithful adaptation and they succeeded but this resulted in pacing issues.
Characters: The characters in Persona 4 the game were all very well developed characters and were all pretty great and you could relate to at least one of them by the end of the story. However in the anime a lot of the characters don’t get the development they got in the game. The best example of this is Yosuke. In the game Yosuke was a fantastically developed character who was very comical but had a deeper side to him than just the comedy, however in the anime Yosuke just comes off as your basic comic relief character which is a shame, also it should be noted that Yosuke was also a very important asset in battle in the game one of the best in fact but in the anime he and his persona come across as weaklings (not till episode 25 does Yosuke seem to be of use in a battle situation). Now while other characters suffer a development loss from the game one character gets more development here than in the game, and that character is the protagonist Yu Narukami. In the game Yu had the personality of a rock and had no real kind of development however in the anime Yu has excellent development. Yu when he arrived in town had as much personality as a rock; he only ever spoke when spoken to, had little to no facial expression and had no real emotion in his voice but as the series went on and as Yu’s stats improved we went from having a terrible unlikeable protagonist to a pretty likeable guy.
Animation: Now this is an extremely mixed bag. Some in some shots there is some really great animation of facial expressions and some superb battle animations and effects but at other time the animation is just so terrible that you want to smack your head against the table. Some for the far away shots of the characters just look so terrible kind of like someone just scribbled on a head. This results in extreme derp faces. Also another knock against the animation is that the lower portion of character faces seemed to be a different more tanned colour than the rest of the face (however in latter episodes this problem seemed to be fixed or I just stopped noticing it). So over all the animation is not all that great.
Sound: Now this is a category I can’t find any real fault in. All of the voice actors due a superb job here all the performances are very good however standout performances are Daisuke Namikawa as Yu and Mitsuaki Madono as Adachi. These two gave great performances especially Mitsuaki (mostly in episode 25). Now the soundtrack is just great. They took all the music from the Persona 4 and put it in the anime and the persona 4 sound track was great to begin with. Hearing reach out to the truth, I’ll face myself, Heartbreak Heartbreak was all great. They even added some music form the Persona 4 Reincarnation sound track it was really great to hear the reincarnation version of I’ll face myself. They even included (for one episode only though) the persona 3 soundtrack, having burn my dread as the opening for episode 15 was a great decision. Even the new original music was pretty great, the standouts for me was Sky’s the limit and Beautiful Destiny. If I were to find fault in the soundtrack it would have to be with opening 2 song Key words plus it was just not as good as the other opening.
In closing: Now Persona 4 had major problems with it but by no long shot was it ever a terrible show, in fact it may just be one of the best adaptations of a video game to an anime. Persona 4 in no way was ment to be some award winning anime no it was made for the fans to see all of their favourite characters run around on screen and to see all of their favourite scenes animated. This anime was made by fans for the fans, and I loved watching every second of it warts and all.
