But it’s not enough, especially with a story with this much elaborate worldbuilding and rules.
PERSONA 5 THE ANIMATION SERIES
Persona 5: The Animation is trying to put an even larger story into a format that is only moderately more accommodating, as the series has 28 episodes, along with two OVAs that don’t add to the main plot. Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, which will run you anywhere between 20-30 hours depending on how you play, was adapted into a 13-episode anime, which translates into about four hours, thus around a fifth of the game’s runtime, meaning it’s an incredibly rushed, fleeting, and shallow presentation of the same story.
This isn’t really a commentary on Persona 5, so much as it is an acknowledgement that, as games grow in size, they don’t lend themselves to 1:1 adaptations in media that is traditionally much shorter. The “dollar-per-hour” value judgement is, unfortunately, still very prevalent, and means we’re still dealing with games that are deemed unworthy of the asking price if they don’t meet some arbitrary number of hours invested. In fact, it’s positioned as an addition to value if a game takes large swaths of your time. The frequent trouble animated video game adaptations run into is that they’re working in a significantly smaller runtime with stories crafted for a medium that is, by and large, allowed to get away with taking up more time than pretty much anything else. This doesn’t apply to Persona 5: The Animation, and now that I’m marathoning the series, I’m realizing that I don’t really know who the anime is for. I’ve had several friends over the years borrow my blu-ray set of the series rather than a copy of Persona 4 Golden and walk away pretty happy with it. It manages to present its story in a holistic enough way that, should someone want to experience the story of Persona 4 without playing a several-dozen-hours-long JRPG, it’s a pretty decent substitute. When it comes to direct adaptations of video games into anime, Persona 4: The Animation is usually the benchmark I hold these things to. Most people don’t have the time to dedicate to a 100-hour RPG, but now that I’m rewatching Persona 5: The Animation with the newly-released English dub streaming on Funimation, I’m finding myself digging my heels into the ground: Persona 5 is a story that doesn’t lend itself to compression people are asking for.
And it’s also in response to (admittedly understandable) criticism that Atlus’ RPG is too long. This has mostly been a joke about the ongoing “games are too long” discourse, but it’s also genuine, in that I feel like both times I’ve completed these games I was left wanting more game to spend a few extra days with characters I didn’t get the chance to. I often joke that Persona 5, a game that took me nearly 100 hours to complete, and its “definitive edition” Persona 5 Royal, which took me well over 100 hours to complete, are too short.