Watching Persona – Trinity Soul is like walking through a desert, complete with mirages and all, only to end up at an oasis. It’s a supernatural mystery-series, based on the persona-games, and its favourite habit was teasing the heck out of its viewers.
And I’m not kidding when I say that. Despite the fact that this series is full of mecha-like personas, the pacing is sloooooooow. It takes ages for something to actually happen, and when something interesting does happen, a cliff-hanger follows and the next episode acts like nothing happens and starts building up again.
Even after the first half ends, there’s still no sign of a speed-up in the plot, and the pacing even becomes even slower than it already was, as it reveals more and more of the mysteries that lie behind this series. And I must say that the overall plot is definitely interesting; you can see that a lot of imagination went into it. If only the pacing wasn’t so god damn slow.
Another flaw that pops up after the second half is the obligatory background for the main characters. A major problem with them is that these play around with coincidences a bit too much. Seriously, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a character that grew up normally, and didn’t lose his/her parents in some sort of gruesome way.
In other words, as the series went on, my interest in it became pretty low, and I had almost given up hope on it, and then those final five episodes arrived. And it’s exactly here where the quality of this series increases dramatically: the pacing finally kicks in, and everything that the entire series had been building up for finally comes together and delivers a very enjoyable finale that changed my entire opinion of this series.
Overall, I’m not going to recommend this series, but if you’ve started it, then you might as well finish it because of the excellent finale. I think that this series suffered from two major problems: it’s too long and it could have fleshed out its characters a bit more. If this series was just one season long, it would be a total roller-coaster ride, and even if there were only 22 episodes, this series would already have been much more enjoyable due to the lack of quiet parts. The characters can be blamed for these lacklustre quiet parts as well. I don’t mind a slow pacing at all, but if that’s the case, then the creators do need to keep the viewer interested during these quiet parts. I just didn’t feel like I could care about these characters. Persona is a good anime, but it could have been so much better if it weren’t for these small annoying flaws.
| Storytelling: | 7/10 |
| Characters: | 7/10 |
| Production-Values: | 8/10 |
| Setting: | 9/10 |
Thanks for filling me in, I was totally going to marathon this. I might just delegate it to “lazy sunday” viewing sections now.
When I first heard about the show I thought it was something COMPLETELY different like some sort of harem bawfest.
Is there any benefit in watching the final episodes without having seen the other episodes? I watched episode 1 and remember being very unimpressed, but I know the characters and concept I guess.
They really should have just based this on one of the games, really. It has been one of the biggest dissapointments of 2007/08.
Heh. I remember getting to ep 22 or so and thinking “wait, when did this make sense”?
You got the point pretty well with your review. That’s exactly how i felt when i watched the show.
“It takes ages for something to actually happen, and when something interesting does happen, a cliff-hanger follows and the next episode acts like nothing happens and starts building up again.”
I’d likt to add the first few episodes were a blast. for me. The well done animation & superb Ost got me hooked pretty quickly. BUT if i hadn’t all the episodes lying around and corrently no way to finish my actual persona 4 game on ps2, i would have never gone thorugh the dry middle part.
I found the characters to be quite interesting and certainly they got a good share of developement during the middle part. But something just felt wrong, as you said the pacing was totally off.
Ah well, too bad it got kinda screwed up but the ending was certainly rewarding.
I loved this anime to bits and pieces. I’m actually rather glad it wasn’t based entirely off a game and wasn’t all action-y. Would have been too much like one of those typical OMIGOSH WE’RE ALL SO MANY WE DO STUFF ALL THE TIME AND HAVE AWESOME shounens if they tried to make it an action series.
I agree with recommending this series as it is rather enjoyable, despite the lulls between action.
A mysterious message coming from nowhere…