Hello everyone,
This morning we'll talk about the fifth episode of the action anime series of this fall season 2011 named Shin Megami Tensei Persona 4.
The focus of this episode switch away from the character introductions we had in the previous episodes to explore the social links that will make our protagonist gain additional Persona for the future battles.
This is by far one of the most interesting feature of the original game and I think it was adapted quite nicely in this slow paced episode revolving into a typical love romantic polygon with our protagonist ending up to be the center of the story.
Another important note is that I'm not noticing a big fall in animation quality in this fifth episode even if (as we said in previous posts) part of the animation team left the job right after a couple of episodes.
The episode center around the basketball team in which the manager (Ebihara Ai) is in love with the leader of the basketball team (Kou Ichijou) that in turn is in love with our lovely Chie Satonaka. In order to "survive" after being "rejected" by Ichijou, Ebihara decide to go out with our protagonist.
Is it only to me that this whole setting looks like a soap opera? While clichè, the execution was nicely done and I liked the whole ordeal of Yuu trying to get out of this polygon relationship without hurting anyone.
The most funny part of the episode were definitely all the different facial expressions made by Yuu. He is slowly gaining more personality as the series goes on even if he is still a bit of a "nameless protagonist #01". :P
Ichijou has great tastes and this is an undeniable truth, but I wonder why I hope he will get abducted to the tv realm sooner or later never to be found again...
Its nice to see some focus on minor characters in the story (even if I want to see Naoto personality as soon as possible!) and I really wonder how many Persona will our protagonist gain by the end of the series.
I heard there is quite a big number of them in the game, but how many will fit in an anime context?!
By the way, I did not like Ebihara's character at all. She is not beautiful (the other girls shown till now are definitely better) and she doesn't even have a nice personality. She even had the courage to call my Chie "lame"!
Only the last thing is worth a thousands of death penalties in my book (and I'm being quite lenient this time around). :P
With this said, next episode will continue to explore the massive cast of this story, but I'm really wondering on who can be the culprit of these happenings...
I'm also curious on why we did not get the "other self" of our protagonist, is this something with a relationship with all the deaths?!
Concluding, this series is continuing to be very slow paced (that is bad thing), but being the overall production values are still pretty high giving me more reasons to watch and blog the future episodes!
See you soon,
feal87