Quarantine Control #159: Blaze the Lucky Fire Up in the Night

DC Staff | April 20, 2023 | Animation, Features, Television | No Comments

There isn’t a better juxtaposition that sums up the current faux post-COVID-19 time than the number of people and overall media apparatus desperate to move on and news that another variant is circulating. The former shows how even those who took the virus seriously during its prior heights have simply tired of covering it, despite how necessary it continues to be. But the latter news shows how the newest mutation will pose big dangers to parts of the world that have supposedly moved on from the virus, as if there’s any such thing. The times and news can be so bizarre that you can feel as if you’re blazing it 24/7.

Happy 4/20, by the way. Light it up, if you’re into that.

Geoffrey Barnes

Persona 5: The Animation (2018)
Source: Crunchyroll
Episodes: 26 + 2 specials

A Persona 5 anime adaptation had been a case of “when” and not “if” since the original game released in 2016. Persona 4 received two TV anime adaptations (one for the original game and a second one adapting Golden) while Persona 3 received a movie series, and here Persona 5 significantly outsold both of them worldwide. The Day Breakers prologue OVA released alongside the game was a way to prepare for an inevitability that took only a couple of years to come to fruition.

That’s all worth acknowledging. But after watching the entire series and concluding OVAs, I’m now asking whether it should have happened. It was bound to be tougher it was to adapt Persona 5 to a standard-length series considering how much longer it is compared to its predecessors, and the result is an unfortunate mess.

The key aspect that helped the Persona 3 and Persona 4 adaptations involved how they only needed to focus on the main story, as the Social Links and extra content lines in both games provided mere supplemental-but-enjoyable content. That was not the case with Persona 5, in which a significant amount of character development occurs in the Confidant lines, perhaps part of the reason why they were renamed from “Social Links” for this installment. The Persona 5: The Animation includes the game’s basic plotline, which involves a group of teenagers and a transforming cat who take on the mantle of the Phantom Thieves of Hearts, and venture into palaces in the Metaverse to steal the hearts of corrupt targets to make them repent in the real world. The game’s main twists and contrivances are all here.

The issue is how P5A rushes through the story at a breakneck pace with only 26 episodes and two special episodes at its disposal. It’s the same length as the Persona 4 anime despite the Persona 5 game being longer than Persona 4. It makes this feel like even more than an abridged adaptation than its predecessor, affording the story too little time to breathe in the rush from one plot development to another. Similarly unfortunate is how the Confidant lines are treated as unimportant, resulting in a lack of character development for nearly everyone, major and minor. This would have been more palatable as a multi-season adaptation that devoted several episodes to covering all the plot events.

Even protagonist Ren Amamiya gets shafted, thanks to the writers not giving him much character. He talks in this adaptation, but isn’t given much personality to ensure that his interpretation isn’t too large a departure from the silent video game counterpart for whom the players made the decisions. The result is a worse transition compared to Yu Narukami and Makoto Yuki from Persona 4 and Persona 3, respectively. The best decision would have been to fully commit to giving him a personality rather than only going halfway.

Not everyone is robbed of their character development: There is one whose development is slightly better off compared to the original game (though not Royal): Goro Akechi, of all people. He’s difficult to discuss without going into spoilers, but he receives more scenes as his detective self here compared to the original game. I have a soft spot for him, but I imagine this royally (ha) pissed off his detractors. I don’t have the energy to read any comments from them.

The animation quality is also a crying shame. My expectations were low considering the quality of the Day Breakers from 2016, but it’s nonetheless very distracting. This results in fights that lack any kind of direction and choreography, frequently off-model characters with sometimes bizarre and dissonant facial reactions, and ill-fitting (though sometimes unintentionally hilarious) CG usage. It comes off poorly here compared to the Persona 4 anime, thanks to how stylish the Persona 5 game looked.

For as (justifiably) negative as my thoughts are here, a few positives helped to make it more palatable. It works as a quick refresher for a story, should anyone need that without spending more than 100 hours plaything through the game itself. But the superlative English dubbing work is the biggest help, with most voice actors returning from the game and putting in their best efforts. This was, thus far, the best opportunity outside unused lines from the original game to hear Xander Mobus fully act as Ren, and he does a great job with the limited work he’s given. Most of the music is reused from the game, but the few newly tracks are solid, especially those with lyrics performed by Lyn Inaizumi.

Those positives are nowhere near enough to save it. Persona 5: The Animation is worth watching as a curiosity, and to hear the protagonist talk further. But that’s all. There are far more shows out there worth your limited free time.

Joseph Daniels

Have you ever had one of those weeks where no matter what you try to do, real life gets in the way? Due to stuff with family, I have had to give two 24 hour days in a row (sleep in between, thankfully, but still) and didn’t really have much choice in the matter, and the only thing I really could do outside of that was catch up on sleep that was robbed of me. I’ve already been having to chop up my plans for last week’s Quarantine Control column and spread it out over several weeks, but this week I don’t even have time for that. All I do have time for is:

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (2022)
Source: Disney+
Rabbits?: Read the title!

Yeah, there’s a new Oswald short. Over the years, Disney has acknowledged this character in a number of ways, although they haven’t really committed to much beyond reminding people that he existed at one point in the company’s history. The character is in the public domain now, so Disney could do more with him if they wanted to, but unfortunately for Oswald, Disney is called “the mouse house”, “the house that Mickey built”, and so on. Plus, apparently Oswald is a character who is “too difficult” to use, as they told Tetsuya Nomura while Kingdom Hearts III was in production, but they refused to elaborate. The history of this character is interesting, but will take too long to get into at this point. It’s not that it takes forever to explain, it’s just that I don’t have the time. When I’m expected to drop everything at any moment, it makes it hard to work on something or to get invested in anything I’m doing.

So that’s this week’s Quarantine Control contribution. A one minute animated short. I’m tempted to make that this week’s short film as well. No, I think I have time to offer something legitimate here.

This Week’s Short Film:
After The Rain (2022)

For as bad as the news is, it’s more unnerving to hear reports about the very sites devoted to reporting truthful and well-researched content being shut down. This fate was announced for Buzzfeed News just this morning. The traffic boost that several sites received during the pandemic has sadly faded, and there’s every chance that the media landscape will further erode. This could ideally lead to more independent ventures like Defector, but the chances of that are low. Until next week, everyone.

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