天下制覇

I’m having trouble thinking up witty titles lately…

Given the game’s popularity, I’m just going to assume people reading this have played it and not particularly care about spoilers. …Not that the Scooby Doo plot is exactly the game’s selling point over the engine and characters anyway.

Impressions:

And here we have something whose source begins with a mute spending nearly two hours walking around before getting to fight his first tutorial battle against an enemy that is 50% spider, 25% glove, and 25% scarf. But making an adaptation means more than just transcribing the material between the two mediums (is this horse dead yet?) and thankfully, ASTA does trim a significant amount of the fat from Persona’s bloated introduction, particularly relating to people talking about the Midnight Chanel as well as futzing around at the initial murder scene. Regardless, it’s still a fairly boring episode. There’s enough things carried over from the game to roll your eyes at or furious touch yourself to, depending on which part of the spectrum you lie on. They kept the a lot of the music, as well as the day transitions, and the entire not-really-the-OP sequence too for that matter. The production overall is fairly good with a very firm focus on expressive animation over the artwork, but I really hope they do a lot more with the battles from here out because trying to pass slow-mo of Izanagi throwing the licker shadows around as ‘action’ is not going to cut it.

I was hoping that they’d do a little more with Yuu in general too. He has only barely more of a personality and emotional range in here so far than he does in the game and most of his lines are simply narrating what he’s looking at. Pick something and commit. Giving him a voice and the random urge to explain to the audience what he’s looking at is just being wishy-washy, which never turns out well. I also confess that I’m a little disappointed that they’re apparently keeping in Izanami’s stuff, although they certainly could change things to make her more than just some random last boss tossed in at the last second after everything else that has driven the plot through the entire game was resolved. I really hope they do, because "the guy working at the gas station is secretly a bored god of creation… let’s go fight it" is really kind of horrible as far as general story is concerned.

So… eh. I think they did a good job cutting out a lot of the needless crap from the game’s introduction, but it’s still not an exciting or particularly interesting episode unless you plan to rub your crotch against the screen every time that something from the game happens. I can’t say that it’s unexpected, but I sure as hell am not going to praise them for not working harder to spice up the exceedingly dull beginning either.