Persona 4 the Golden Animation

Episode 12

Episode 12 acts as the conclusion to a very inconsistent series, plagued with serious narrative flaws throughout its run. Thankfully, “Welcome Home” provides us with an entertaining episode while wrapping up the overall plot in a satisfactory manner. While not as uniformly excellent as last week's installment, this final episode plays to the show's established strengths: comedy and character.

If Persona 4 the Golden Animation is anybody's story, it's Marie's, and the episode knows this, giving her a lot of dramatic and comedic material to work with. The dramatic scenes succeed in making her relationship with Yu seem more real and compelling than ever before. Similarly, the jokes involving Marie are quite funny, though, not as much as the ones from last episode. The other characters are also funny as ever, and even though they are relegated to the background for most scenes, they never feel ancillary to the overall story. Despite the fact that we've never seen the complete stories of Chie, Kanji, Teddie, etc, the series has succeeded in giving us a sense of them as people. While the unanswered questions about nearly every character besides Marie are never truly resolved, by the end the main cast feel more like old friends than strangers, and given the flawed structure of the show's narrative, that's nothing to sneeze at.

The first several episodes of the series made me feel that the cut-up nature of its story would be the series' greatest flaw, and having now seen all twelve episodes, I can say that is definitely the case. It seems that this show was never interested in telling a stand-alone story, instead crafting a narrative that would only be comprehensible for those who had seen the original Persona 4 anime. This, combined with its often sub-par animation, made the show an often frustratingly incomprehensible experience. Thankfully, these defects were overshadowed by the Golden Animation's positive qualities in the end: great humor, charming characters and outstanding voice acting. These elements were enough to make the show a genuinely entertaining half-hour of anime, despite its flaws. If you're looking for something simple and fun, with a lot of laughs and a lot of heart, you could do worse.

Rating: B-

Persona 4 the Golden Animation is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Miles Nelson has been watching anime since 1997, and writing about it since 2013. You can read some of his articles at My Geek Review