Melancholy Sunday
Look, i’m actually excited for this. So my feelings on it are kinda all over the place. Whilst the game is pretty epic, the idea of giving main character a name and a personality was a worrying one, considering that he’s neither dark nor light, and the amount that they tried to fit into the episode was equally worrying.
Nicaea, or the “Dead Face” site, sends you video clips of your friends and people close to you dying almost right before it actually happpens, and whilst that’s creepy and weird at the same time, it was used pretty nicely here, with my only issues being personal ones with how the characters acted and so forth, and it’s not long before the Demon Summoning Program also comes into play.
The adaptation is incredibly rigid in the game’s favour, with timeskips and location skips taking place exactly where the game used them, which is all part of that whole “this is a game” feeling that you’re meant to get through it, and it does this relatively well with the way that it takes the events from the game almost word for word. They didn’t get the characters across very well, but considering that I have a serious issue with the main character, the only weird one was Daichi, and I figured that…well, that it was just rushed during that one moment where he gets a truck out of nowhere.
All in all, a lot happened this episode, and that just left me having very conflicted feelings about what I expect from future episodes. The first episode was chaotic, there’s no hiding that, but it’s very enjoyable once you get over the infodump that it delivers. The deciding factor for this one clearly lies in the second episode, and that’s simply to see how it handles things in the calm after the storm.
I guess generally what I could say was that this introduction was decent. Pretty inoffensive in all regards. Alex says up there that the episode was chaotic, but I wasn’t feelin’ that as much. At least, comparing to the rush job that was Persona 4′s first episode, this seemed to handle itself a good deal better. Though with as much content we were presented with, the trio of characters kinda suffered. Hibiki is a nice guy, Daichi is… also nice, and Nitta… worries about her family?? I guess Hibiki and Daichi do get some moments together, but it’s fairly generic stuff like “hey, we’re totally best friends, we play rock paper scissors and shit. We tight like that”.
The entire Death Face angle is something that feels intrinsically meant for a video game, but I guess they did a sound job translating that to an anime. Once again, nothing spectacular, but it’s there and serves it’s purpose. Not that I’m trying to be a downer here, since I’m pretty excited to see how this proceeds once it gets past the introductory phase and dives right into the thick of the plot. Could be good, could be less so. I don’t swing either way at this point.
