天下制覇

  

Even Yuu showed marginally more personality than this.

Technically, this isn’t out for a week or two yet, but who am I to pass up something leaked with Chinese subtitles? I’ve got to keep up my speedy rep somehow. Okay, now, I’m all OVA/movied out for a day or two.

Impressions:

I had some hopes for this since whoever is in charge of Atlus anime adaptations decided to not have Seiji Kishi direct this one. No, he was just the supervisor, although you really couldn’t tell the difference since it’s just as boringly by the books and token as ever. Even the animation is really no better than Persona 4’s. Maybe the art/background squishyfaces are a little less squishy, but it certainly doesn’t look theatrical and is definitely not animated as such.

It also very quickly set down its intentions to go very slowly. I think the initial evoker scene was even more drawn out here than in the game itself, which is kind of a feat since they could have just copy-pasted the already animated cutscene. It also somehow took 20 minutes to get to what probably should have been the bloody opening scene, but we got time to fill! It’s almost a surprise that they didn’t go through the entire tutorial.

It doesn’t even try to do anything but lifelessly transfer game scenes to animation. This is not how you adapt. I actually wouldn’t be surprised if this was meant to be a TV series (or eventually split into a TV broadcast) at some point since there are pretty solid barricades placed every twenty minutes without any consistent driving element between them. Which isn’t to say that there was even a driving element within the twenty minutes either. The second segment was literally just exposition and “Let’s go wander around Tartarus. No reason, just for something to do.” Game world and movie world do not go by the same rules. Nobody is going to complain if you add a little purpose to replace “gain levels.” Even when they had one, like the last segment’s “go save Fuuka,” they still spent an ungodly amount of time just pissing around doing nothing.

If it’s made for fans, then it should be skipping the most bloody boring parts like “Hey, new student… let’s spend a quarter on not-the-premise and then another 10 minutes explaining the premise,” and if it’s not, then stop it with all the game transition screens, game exposition, game music, game quotes, and montages/half-assing of the combat and social link portions. And give the protagonist a goddamned personality instead of a constant blank stare because he’s not a player avatar anymore. Or hell, don’t, but then don’t make the climax of the damn thing him learning a valuable lesson about friendship. Christ. The entire Fuuka twenty minutes was just painful in nearly every way.

So I guess the word is that if you were expecting it to be any different from or better than the Persona 4 adaptation, don’t. It’s the exact same but with even less purpose, less direction, less humor, and the characters boiled down to little more than their insecurity and angst.