Persona 5 was not only one of the best games of 2017, but also had an amazing story. As such, you'd imagine that this would translate into an equally high-quality anime, right?
Wrong.
The main area in which the anime falls short is the pacing.The game will probably take several dozen hours to complete on a first playthrough, and by cutting out the random battles and Level Grinding, you'll probably reduce it to half that total. When you consider that the anime has only 26 episodes, and thus less than 10 hours, you can see that it's a bit like fitting a whale into a goldfish bowl. Even the last two dungeons being excluded from the televised portion of the adaptation doesn't help much.
The effects of the highly rushed pace are fairly apparent. Many dungeons are reduced to a few shots of the Phantom Thieves running through, before leading in to the battles against the bosses. Most of the non-Phantom Thief Confidants only appear a handful of times here and there, and their stories are cut down to the minimum, with only a handful of exceptions (e.g. Sojiro). Important bits of exposition get cut out, and sometimes, characters behave in ways that are at odds with their canon characterization.
The animation is also highly sub-par, with numerous Off-Model shots, particularly in scenes in which the characters are standing out, and lazily animated All-Out Attacks. This is bad enough as-is, but when you consider that Persona 5 had an impressive aesthetic style, this comes off as insulting. As a result, while most of the major battles are somewhat decent, they don't look nearly as good as they should be.
The soundtrack is quite good, but considering that most of the tracks are from the game itself, this isn't really a point in the game's favor. In fact, the same applies to most of the things the anime does well- the game did them just as well, if not even better, and first.
Perhaps Persona 5: The Animation was doomed from the start, but the fact is that it doesn't do Persona 5 justice. My recommendation is that you skip the anime and play the game instead.
Postscript: I watched the Dark Sun OVA. It was fairly good at providing exposition, even if a few significant details that tie up loose ends are omitted, and the dungeon was handled reasonably well, considering its length in the game. That said, the fights with the two main antagonists were disappointing even for the anime, and the animation was fairly shoddy (compare the escape sequence to its in-game counterpart), so it isn't really an improvement.
A terrible adaptation
Persona 5 was not only one of the best games of 2017, but also had an amazing story. As such, you'd imagine that this would translate into an equally high-quality anime, right?
Wrong.
The main area in which the anime falls short is the pacing.The game will probably take several dozen hours to complete on a first playthrough, and by cutting out the random battles and Level Grinding, you'll probably reduce it to half that total. When you consider that the anime has only 26 episodes, and thus less than 10 hours, you can see that it's a bit like fitting a whale into a goldfish bowl. Even the last two dungeons being excluded from the televised portion of the adaptation doesn't help much.
The effects of the highly rushed pace are fairly apparent. Many dungeons are reduced to a few shots of the Phantom Thieves running through, before leading in to the battles against the bosses. Most of the non-Phantom Thief Confidants only appear a handful of times here and there, and their stories are cut down to the minimum, with only a handful of exceptions (e.g. Sojiro). Important bits of exposition get cut out, and sometimes, characters behave in ways that are at odds with their canon characterization.
The animation is also highly sub-par, with numerous Off-Model shots, particularly in scenes in which the characters are standing out, and lazily animated All-Out Attacks. This is bad enough as-is, but when you consider that Persona 5 had an impressive aesthetic style, this comes off as insulting. As a result, while most of the major battles are somewhat decent, they don't look nearly as good as they should be.
The soundtrack is quite good, but considering that most of the tracks are from the game itself, this isn't really a point in the game's favor. In fact, the same applies to most of the things the anime does well- the game did them just as well, if not even better, and first.
Perhaps Persona 5: The Animation was doomed from the start, but the fact is that it doesn't do Persona 5 justice. My recommendation is that you skip the anime and play the game instead.
Postscript: I watched the Dark Sun OVA. It was fairly good at providing exposition, even if a few significant details that tie up loose ends are omitted, and the dungeon was handled reasonably well, considering its length in the game. That said, the fights with the two main antagonists were disappointing even for the anime, and the animation was fairly shoddy (compare the escape sequence to its in-game counterpart), so it isn't really an improvement.