The Licensing of Persona 4: The Animation

Big news today,
Persona 4 fans! Despite not even
beginning is TV run in Japan yet (it begins on October 6th), Persona
4: The Animation has been licensed for North
America by Sentai Filmworks. For anyone who didn’t want to watch
the fansubs and wanted to wait for its eventual distribution in America (because
there was no chance this wasn’t coming over), you luckily might get your chance
to see it domestically on DVD and Blu-Ray earlier than most of us expected. But
for those of you that did, it would be best to support the digital distribution
run being maintained by Sentai, which should start soon.

But this
news also raises some concerns. Many fans of the superb English localization of
the game have been hoping to see the entire cast reprise their roles for the
anime when it was eventually brought over. The fact that it’s been licensed by
Sentai may not be encouraging news. Sentai Filmworks is basically ADV films
under a new name, and like them, they tend to use talent near their location in
Texas. Now, this doesn’t mean they can’t
use LA-based talent like Atlus USA (PCB
Productions, to be precise), but it would certainly be quite a bit more expensive
for them. It all depends on whether they think it will be worth the expense.

But don’t
lose hope! Their previous incarnation in ADV used LA-based company Bang Zoom!
Entertainment for a couple of their dubs; Wild
Arms: Twilight Venom and Arc the Lad,
to be exact. Coincidentally, both of them just happen to be based on video
games. They also went through the bother to get some old voice actors to
reprise their characters in Nurse Witch
Komugi — a spin-off of The
SoulTaker, which was dubbed by The Ocean Group (now Ocean Productions) in
Vancouver. It’s possible they may feel that getting the old voice actors back
for P4A may be worth the expense. And it would.

Hopefully we
find out their decision sooner rather than later. The series hits Blu-ray and DVD
in America sometime in 2012.

Meanwhile,
you’ve been keeping up with the dissemination of Persona 4: The Ultimate in Mayonaka Arena‘s media, right? No? Well,
you might have missed the
TGS trailer released not too long ago, and a new
gameplay movie showing some early combos. The sound is off in the Youtube
video, but you can also check them out on the
official website under the “Movie” section for each character in the “Character”
section. There’s also plenty of off-screen footage from the TGS demo station
floating around, which you can find via a search on Youtube .Also, I believe
this is the first time we’re seeing Yukiko in gameplay screens. This game is
coming out next year, and it’s probably a matter of “when” rather than “if” in
terms of its localization prospects.