Persona series

I have several problems with the golden anime, but the Adachi episodes made the entire mess surrounding it feel worth it.

I'm actually fond of Marie, for the record. But the anime put her on the highest freaking pedestal, I swear...

Well shit. I guess a power binge is in order then.

I'll admit, that Adachi ep was pretty nifty.

As was the last bit of the first episode.

I never went past Golden Animation episode 2 or 3, I thought it was incredibly boring.

You can go ahead and skip to the Adachi episodes, those are what prevent me from hating it entirely,

I skimmed episodes 2-5 of the Golden Animation and landed on the Adachi-focused episodes 6 and 7. That was the best thing about this anime. Adachi's POV was interesting, Adachi vs. Yu was even better than it was in the original anime, and Yu one-shotting Ameno-Sagiri with Magatsu Izanagi was awesome.

Since everything after this is just Marie-focus, I'm gonna stop it here while my satisfaction with Persona 4: The Golden Animation is still high.

Everything after that goes above and beyond the Marie-focus from before. The finale especially. Just... Why.

I suspected it would, which is why it stopped. The Adachi episodes had a lot of effort put into them, so I wanted to leave the anime on a high note.

I, alas, decided "Eh, might as well finish it."

At least the Adachi episodes were great. I honestly still go back and watch the Yu vs. Adachi fight sometimes, it's really thought-provoking and a really interesting scene.

I really liked seeing Yu's confliction. You could feel how torn he is about Adachi all of episode 7.

As someone who haven't played Golden, I actually liked this adaptation. The first anime has very noticable pacing issues that led me to be bored of it quickly, so I liked that the second one just skipped all the already shown material and just went with what was new to me. Also, I endedup quite liking Marie.

I like the Golden Anime's Marie stuff as a supplement to the game, since Marie gets relatively less of a chance to interact with the cast there.

Then again, I actually like Marie a bit despite having played Golden, so I'm trash.

Yeah, the Golden anime at least made it look like Marie and the Scoobies were, y'know, actually friends.

i liked marie and i played golden :v

There are a few things I really liked about the anime:

• The Lotus-Eater Machine twists. AKA the fights with Izanami and Shadow Mitsuo. I thought those were incredibly well done.
• The lack of weapons. Sorry to say it but the characters (other than Kanji) randomly being experts at combat with obscure weapons made zero sense. So I liked that they didn't even bother.
• Yu's personality. I just liked him.
• As people said, Aika was great.
• I liked the Summer episodes/the Perspective Flip with Nanako. I wish there was more with Social Links, but it was nice.

Honestly I'd rate it a 7.5 or 8 out of 10.

Re: random weapon experts. Naoto's a professional detective and has a license to carry one, so her having had some firearm training isn't a massive leap in logic. Chie's a huge MA fan, so again her having done some isn't beyond the bounds of possibility. And I'm pretty sure Yosuke's meant to be a novice, given his idle animation is him fumbling with his knives.

Seeing someone doing martial arts and doing martial arts are very different things. Though I do think Chie was into physical excercises I don't think she was in any clubs or such. Or maybe I just don't remember, it's been years since I played 4.

Marie was fine in the game (though her rather annoying tsundere traits prevented me from fully liking her) but they played up the ship tease with Yu way too much in the anime (ye gods all the ship tease).

edited 7th Jul '16 7:36:47 AM by LordVatek

It is Japan, there is no way Naoto should have a hand gun license. I mean no way in hell.

To even have a hunting rifle you have to be over the age of 18, submit to a physical, have almost a year of training courses, have several police interrogations, interviews with family members, provide the police with a detailed layout of your house and a bunch of other things. That is just for a hunting rifle...

For a handgun its basically just not allowed outside of Cops, there are only like 5k exceptions in all of Japan going by the other wiki. Japan would rather pay a cop escort to follow her around than allow her to carry a gun.

edited 7th Jul '16 7:48:36 AM by Memers

Marie is fine, but I don't need to watch a whole anime about her. I do recognize the issue the anime was attempting to address because I know I was complaining about it before the anime even came out.

Chie is a martial arts fan. The Hollywood version of martial arts at that. She just does random kicks in combat, there's no indication that she's actually a trained fighter or anything.

edited 7th Jul '16 7:42:25 AM by Arha

I figured the weapons were essentially abstract, since the damage they actually do came more from the Strength of the persona, ie: mental strength of whatever. Yosuke just pretends to be a ninja and helplessly flails at the enemy, but the rules of the TV World translate that into spiritual damage based on his personality.

Heck, Yukiko's shooting people with a fan, somehow. That doesn't even make sense.

edited 7th Jul '16 7:54:24 AM by Clarste

This. You can't do physical damage to shadows, the weapon is just a means to channel the strength of your persona. Better weapons are more powerful because the people using them believe they are.

And yeah, Naoto having a handgun is horrifically unrealistic, but this is the same game where your party also includes an idol singer and a sapient animated bear costume. Plus, Naoto travelled to Inaba specifically because of the murders, so it's not like she just randomly happened to be in the right place in the right time. Her family, being famous ace detectives, presumably pulled strings to allow her to get a handgun license. It's an exceptional situation, sure, but Naoto is explicitly noted as being an exceptional person due to her family ties and fanatic devotion to detective-ness.

See, I don't like having to go through all those mental gymnastics (that Yosuke is inexplicably skilled at) to arrive at something that may sort of almost make a little bit of sense.

I liked how the Persona 3 movies had three separate handwaves to justify characters using weapons (they're weapons that they either train with or from a sport they do, they're explicitly built for anti-Shadow combat, and they physical abilities of Persona-users are enhanced). In P4 you have Yosuke doing flips with no explanation, Chie blocking stuff with her legs because she likes martial arts movie, Naoto having a g-d gun, Yukiko throwing a fan with more accuracy than I could throw a baseball, etc.

It's a jarring conceit based on the fact that we expect the ability to attack in our games, no matter how little sense it makes. Which is fine. The game would have been worse without weapons. But that doesn't change the fact I like the fact that the anime addressed it (admittedly by avoiding it).

edited 7th Jul '16 9:17:18 AM by Larkmarn

Judging by how well he dances, I'd say Yosuke is just a naturally agile person.

Yosuke being natiral is the point as it in his stats. Just like his luck is the worst. Especially in PQ.

And you can harm shadows with physical objects, it's just a lot harder to do without a persona. This is explained even for demons in some games like the harmonizer makes it so humans are tough as demons and hit hard as them. In fact shadows are just inferior demons and demons can be taken out with guns.