Persona 4 The Golden is a sort of alternate timeline version of the original series, adapted from the remake of the PS2 title released exclusively on the PS Vita. It involves a new character Marie who has lost all of her memories, and starts out mainly with silliness and some fanservice episodes, though it then becomes hugely serious as the anime goes into harsh detail explaining the backstory behind Adachi and the original murder that started the entire game. After watching this, I have to say that I didn’t feel bad for Adachi. You see, the actress in question was cheating on him. She also looked down on him. Many women had looked down on Adachi, but Adachi himself wasn’t always such a bitter person. I can understand why he might have pushed her into the TV and anyone who has ever been deeply in love with a person but was then betrayed, might have done the same. That is just my opinion though. In any case, this deeply mature segment was completely left out of the original game and I guess I can understand why. Later on, we find that the amnesiac Marie is a big-bad and they have to battle her in order to change her mind and all that good stuff. If I recall, Yu still jumps aboard the train and goes back to the city as if all of that never happened, but I do believe that he comes back to visit again, which they show towards the end and is rather nice. It felt like a real tying up of most of the events in Persona 4, except for the TV Realm and Teddie’s past, which are both never really explained. I feel that there’s a bit of a pacing problem in the series though, as all of the fun stuff happens right before everything goes into the darkest corner imaginable for the series. You never see it coming and once it does, you kind of wish that the more light-hearted episodes would return. (Reiterate: I loved these episodes, especially the music related one where Marie plays a few notes of the velvet room theme on guitar.) I’ll also admit that I love the anime’s ending theme, especially where Marie has been synched with the song so that it seems as if she’s singing during the end credits. This is an amazingly cool effect. I definitely don’t like the opening theme very much though, I felt it was much weaker compared to the other two in the previous series and have no idea what in the hell the frontwoman of Lotus Juice was singing about this time. It felt like a B-Side from the band. All in all though, if you consider yourself a diehard fan of Persona 4, you owe it to yourself to pick this one up. Especially right before Persona 5: The Animation airs, which will be very soon. Which reminds me, I still need to finish the game!
