Persona 4 – 14

There is no age limit for Yu’s “Harem Magnet” secret technique

Ahhh, it’s not fair…Yu gets a summer vacation while we just had our first, real snowfall a few days ago. It really makes commuting to my campus so much more troublesom. Hmm, maybe I should just stay inside with a warm cup of tea and watch anime? The perfect plan!

Ahaha I looked up the lyrics to the new OP. “I will strip search if I have to.”…? Oh, Persona. You and your Engrish. Anyways, this episode looks like it will be pretty crammed full of plot.

Velvet room. So on to Yu’s side of the story. While Yu reads a book called “Men are Forever”, Nanako comes home without her umbrella (since she gave it to the fox). However, Yu finds that he doesn’t have enough money to buy Nanako a replacement umbrella. His solution? Pimp himself out.  Around then, he meets the fox that Nanako saw and the fox gives him an ema (a wooden plaque in shrines that people write wishes on) asking that someone look at them. Yu is totally okay with wild animals approaching him at random and following the fox’s directions, Yu finds a job as the ema writer’s tutor.

That awkward moment when you spend more time with feral animals than your friends.

However, after Yu meets the kid, he’s quickly roped into working at a day care centre by one of his friends. There, he meets a kid who’s parents probably hated him based on what he wears and another shota named Yuuta. In trying to stop the two from fighting, a toy breaks and Yu offers to pay for it (he also meet’s Yuuta’s mother in the process). Yu works hard over the next few days, but he’s still broke after buying the toy. Yu runs into trouble again at the daycare since the kids can’t stop fighting, so he busts out the Kuma costume. Where the hell did he pull it from? Who knows. It works though and the kids are too busy abusing Yu to fight anymore. Of course, after, he runs into his friends, acts suspicious and then runs away.

You know the rules! Bears and old people at the back of the bus!

Later, he runs into an old woman who was mugged/knocked unconcious and he takes her to the hospital. There, he meets a nurse who immediately begins hitting on him. He runs into her again some time later and she drags him to go drinking. There, she complains that she hates her job and everyone leaves her as soon as they get better. After that, he runs into Yuuta’ mother, where he learns that she’s not actually his mother, but his step mother instead. …And then when that’s finished, he finally meets up with the old woman. She tells him her life story about how she’s going to be moving because her husband died, she didn’t love him towards the end and blah, blah, Yu looks like her dead husband. She also throws a comb into the river and after she leaves, a HUGE ASS fish jumps out of the water. Of course, it has the comb.

Suddenly, TANAKA APPEARS ON TV selling an extreme fishing kit. Yu buys it and his EXPLOSIVE FISHING ADVENTURE begins. At the festival, Yu has massive bags under his eyes. However, he quickly ditches his friends to go talk to the old woman. After flashing back to catching the bigass fish (wearing his glasses for whatever reason), Yu gives the woman back her comb saying that it’s important. She then flashes back to her husband giving her the comb during another festival and cries realising that she DID love her husband.

Conveniently, Yu sees Shu (the kid he tutors) running around with explosive materials in his arms, so he runs after him. The kid explains that he doesn’t want fireworks because nobody asked if he wanted to see them and so he was the only one left out. Shu then says that everyone is just jealous of him, but before he can go on much of a rant, Yu pulls out a game (that he can’t play alone) and wishes Shu happy birthday. Shu agrees to return the fireworks and everything is awwwright.

Here, take this box of matches to go with the bomb. Have fun, kid!

Around that time, Yuuta is with his mother and it turns out that the bowl cut kid’s mother doesn’t just hate him, but hates everyone and starts bitching that Yuuta is bad because his father remarried. Yuuta then bodychecks the woman, but then his mother is seriously injured due to the woman’s retaliation. Yu calls up the nurse, the tasks Nanako helped everyone with conveniently falls into place and Yu saves Yuuta’s mother. So skip to Yu returning the fireworks and watching them with Nanako. Everyone’s problems are solved, Nanako gets a yukata from Yukiko and Yu has fun with his friends. Also, Yu buys Nanako a new umbrella, but the fox gets all of the credit for returning it. Yu doesn’t mind though.

Bonus Screncaps:

Awww, everyone’s yukata is so cute! …Except for Chie’s. It looks like algae floating on a scummy pond.

Yu ending up with Rise, Yukiko, or Chie? Pffft, naw. Adult nurse ending all the way!

LIEK OMGGGGG I TOTES LUV UR SCARF!!!! IS IT CASHMERE? IT FEELS SOO SOFFTTTT!!

“if my courage isn’t maxed out after this, I give up.”

End Thoughts:

Somehow, they did it. Five social links were covered in one episode without much trouble. The social links don’t overlap in the games very much if at all, so the fusion of all these into one coherent narrative was pretty clever. Even social links where you need one to unlock the other like the nurse and the old lady (which are the Devil and Death arcana respectively) were tackled from an entirely new angle. I appreciate the creativity here, and it all paid off. Even the fox’s social link was well-done, although vastly simplified (his social link is a biiiittttch to complete). It was also interesting to see how Yu’s various part time jobs and such overlapped with Nanako’s “investigation.”

The only caveat here is that the social links have no emotional impact, because most of the development and information about the characters has been completely cut out. They’re all great fun to watch, but good luck actually making me feel empathy for a characters who get maybe a couple of minutes of screentime each. Players of the game may feel a bit more melancholy because they actually have gotten to know these characters and have learned to relate to them, but anyone who hasn’t played the game was probably just sitting there poker-faced. At least, that’s my take on it…it will be interesting to see what the comment section has to say about that. For me, this was just an episode to show off what an amazing guy Yu is with some humour sprinkled in. The other characters were just tools used to show how much Yu has flourished and become the ultimate human being. He’s practically a saint at this point.

My favourite social link this time around has to be the kid Yu tutored…ironically, it’s the only one I never even touched in the game. It may sound like I’m being hypocritical since I just said you’re more likely to feel something for a character you’re more accustomed to, but this is because I felt more of a personal link to him. As a kid, I was the same. I refused to make friends because I thought everyone was stupid, and not worth my time or the effort. Old Lady Death comes a close second, although the lead-up was pretty lacking. The other social links were kind of dumb in the anime, but eh, they filled the time and weren’t bad to watch. I’ll always prefer those deep, in-game conversations getting to the route of their problems and talking them through it though. Err, well, talking them through it when I’m not having kinky, hospital room sex. I…I accidentally chose the wrong dialogue option, okay?!

I absolutely love things like this. Arguably, one of my favourite things about Drrr! and Baccano was how there were like, 10 different stories to every event and those anime actually took the time to explain every side to form one larger picture. While what Persona did wasn’t nearly as complex, it was pretty much the same idea. I LOVE how Yu and Nanako’s stories overlapped constantly and despite everything conveniently falling into place in the end, it was pretty well executed. Well done, Persona. Well done. I absolutely did not cry during this episode! Don’t give me that look!

That being said, Yu was hilarious this episode. Just watching the kids beat him up while wearing the Kuma suit (what is with children and having the urge to beat up people in mascot costumes?) and then seeing him on the bus made me lol extremely hard. Same goes for some of his comments this episode “…I’m looking at you.” or “Damn you Featherman R!” were hilarious as well. Plus there was the EXTREME FISHING and the zombie eyes. There’s just too many things to mention. Was he always this funny, or is my lack of sleep finally kicking in? Either way, I really enjoyed this episode.

I wasn’t sure if pushing 5 Social Links into one episode would be successful or not, but I’d say it was. They explained the important parts to each of them, and then resolved them in a way that made sense for the anime. Sure, in the process, they made Yu look like some sort of selfless saint, but the same goes for pretty much every Persona protagonist out there when it comes to Social Links. There wasn’t really any need for further details or an explanation as to why everyone is perfectly okay with telling Yu their life story after only just meeting him. So yeah, if I haven’t said it enough, I really liked this episode. Props to the writers for making this work.

Preview: It’s the school trip and you know what that means? PERSONA 3 CROSSOVER TIME, BABY! I hope they go farther with this than they did the game… If they really wanted to earn points with me, they’d add in a certain character with a hat.

We’re going on a field trip! DID YOU SEE THAT SHINJI?!

About Tag Team

We live, laugh, enjoy and strictly believe on "more the merrier". When together, we usually come up with very chatty, conversation-based episodics and interesting posts.