Within the last couple of years, I've started to appreciate adaptations that make alterations to
the source material more. Not ones that change into the realm of unrecognisability, of course,
but ones that make small changes that make their retelling of the tale a different experience,
while still being the same story. I think it was reading the Persona 5 manga that
got me to this point, especially when comparing it to the anime adaptation.
So, I'm planning a few episodes of Adaptive Difficulty where I'll be discussing each manga
adaptation of the three major Persona games - Persona 3, 4 and 5 (shut up,
they are the major ones - and then discussing some general recurring details of note at the end.
First, Persona 3. The manga has a... unique way of telling its story.
After a chapter and a half set during the late game, shortly before the school trip, the manga
jumps back to the day the protagonist, Minato, arrives at the dorm. The story then continues on
chronologically until the end of Volume 3, where Fuuka joins the team. From here, the series jumps
all over the place. After Fuuka joins, it skips to the days leading up to the school trip again,
then jumps back to the beach trip where the group learned about the experiments from ten years ago,
completely skipping the Arcana Lovers section with a two page flashback,
then jumping forward again to the night Ikutsuki betrays the team and Mitsuru's father is killed.
Then, Mitsuru and Yukari's personas evolve thanks to their character development.
Volume 5 then jumps back to Ken's introduction and then forward to Shinjiro's death and
Ken and Akihiko's personas evolving, and this is where the method to the madness becomes apparent.
Rather than adapting the story chronologically, the manga is grouping events by sets of
characters to tell their arcs in solid chunks. First is Mitsuru and Yukari,
whose developments are heavily tied together. Then, we have Akihiko and his friend Shinji,
plus Ken, whose arc revolves around Shinji. Then, while she was introduced in Volume 5,
Chidori's story with Junpei gets the focus for Volume 6. Then, Volume 7 finally gives
Aigis some focus and confirms that she is a robot, which had only been hinted at prior.
The issues with adapting the story this way are:
1. The manga doesn't explain that it's doing this, and only makes note of the fact that the
manga is written on the assumption the reader is familiar with the game's narrative in Volume 4.
It would be easier to accept this if that had been made clear up front.
2. By doing this, some characters' stories are severely hampered by the shift in structure.
Aigis comes to mind immediately. Aigis pops up every so often in the flashforward sections,
where her only clear character traits are that she's highly protective of Minato and despises
Ryoji. Then, we get the moment where she's being controlled by Ikutsuki and Minato is able to get
through to her. What is supposed to be a scene where the anti-shadow weapon defies her purpose
as a weapon by snapping out of Ikutsuki's control through the bond she shares with her friends, is
instead a very weak moment where some guy speaks to her for a few seconds and she snaps out of it.
Maybe it would have worked out better if Aigis got the focus before the other two girls and the scene
ended prematurely as Aigis lost consciousness, to be revisited in the next volume. She certainly
couldn't be combined with the other two since her arc and theirs only really intersect in that
one scene. The manga's publication history is difficult to track, but I'm fairly certain P3 FES
was out by the time Volume 3 wrapped up, so the mangaka should have been aware of the importance
of Aigis' relationship with the protagonist for both the game's ending and The Answer.
And Koromaru arguably gets it worse, seeing how his introduction is cut entirely, as is
the point where the group learns he has a Persona. He just shows up, already using it at some point.
I wonder if this bizarre structure relates to the unfortunate reorganisation of the manga's
production. In Volume 6, author Shūji Sogabe discusses how the series was being published
in Dengeki Maoh, a monthly magazine, while the P4 manga by the same author began in
the magazine's quarterly counterpart. At a certain point, though, the two were switched,
seeing how P4 was the new hotness, so P3 was moved to the quarterly release format. This
lasted a short time until the quarterly magazine was folded into the monthly one,
leaving P3 to go on a two and a half year hiatus after Volume 5, until a Persona-centric
magazine started up thanks to the surge of P4 spin-off material being announced all at once.
I wonder if it was the shift to the quarterly format that led to Volume 4 being structured
the way it was, perhaps to pack certain arcs together into one go to maintain the image
of some forward momentum, despite only getting four chapters a year. And then,
since this structure had already been started, there was no way it could possibly return to a
simple chronological format after putting all of Yukari and Mitsuru's story into one volume.
I sympathise with Sogabe for the way the series got tossed around beyond his control and taking
a full decade to conclude. But, even then, it's impossible to ignore that the adaptation feels
inferior to the source thanks to certain notable events being cut or skimmed over,
and that the structure makes this work impossible for someone not already familiar with the game's
narrative to adequately follow without taking note of every date provided and cross-referencing each
volume's dates to piece it together themselves. Fortunately, Sogabe's second Persona manga didn't
have that problem. No, it had its own unique set of problems, which we'll discuss next time.
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Today's recommended playlist is Myths and Visual Storytelling in Persona by Calluna
Reviews, which analyses the base Personas of the P3 cast.