Persona 5 the Animation
TVアニメ「ペルソナ５」
- Action
- School
- Super Power
- Episodes
- 26
- Duration
- 24 min per ep
- Aired
- Apr 8, 2018 to Sep 30, 2018
- Status
- Finished Airing
Synopsis
Ren Amamiya transfers to Shujin Academy in Tokyo and moves in with café owner Sojiro Sakura after being placed on probation for intervening in an assault. On his way to his first day, a mysterious app appears on his phone and pulls him into the Metaverse, a warped realm where people’s “Shadows” take shape as twisted reflections of their true selves. There, Ren awakens a Persona—power drawn from within—giving him the means to battle these Shadows.
Joined by other students carrying their own burdens, he helps form the Phantom Thieves of Hearts, a group that targets corrupt adults by “stealing” their hearts and forcing them to confront their wrongdoing. As their name spreads, public attention turns into a volatile mix of admiration and suspicion—until Ren is captured at the height of their notoriety and subjected to interrogation, where prosecutor Sae Niijima demands the full story behind the Phantom Thieves.
Otaku Consensus
Persona 5 the Animation is best treated as a stylish companion piece to ATLUS’ RPG rather than a definitive replacement: Masashi Ishihama’s direction, CloverWorks’ preservation of the game’s graphic identity, and the flash-forward interrogation structure give it a recognizable Persona 5 pulse. Its mixed MAL and AniList reception reflects the central complaint clearly: a 26-episode run compresses a dense social-JRPG into television pacing that often feels rushed, especially for viewers who have not played the source.
Why You Should Watch
Watch Persona 5 the Animation if you want the iconography of a modern JRPG translated into a brisk crime-action anime without committing to a 90-plus-hour playthrough. It scratches the same itch as urban conspiracy shows like Durarara!! and power-awakening team anime like My Hero Academia, but with a sharper emphasis on public opinion, juvenile records, school hierarchy, and symbolic alter egos. The appeal is not mystery-box plotting; it is seeing Shigenori Soejima’s sleek character language, ATLUS’ myth-heavy Persona concept, and a pop-art interface sensibility filtered through CloverWorks’ TV production. Game fans get animated versions of key confrontations and social dynamics, while newcomers get a compact, high-style route into one of the most recognizable Japanese RPG worlds of the 2010s.
Key Characters
- RRen Amamiya(VA: Jun Fukuyama)
Ren is compelling because the adaptation has to turn a mostly player-shaped RPG protagonist into a screen presence, leaning on cool restraint, timing, and visual framing more than long speeches.
- SSojiro Sakura(VA: Jouji Nakata)
Sojiro gives the series its grounded adult texture, functioning as a wary guardian figure whose café setting contrasts sharply with the show’s heightened supernatural vocabulary.
- SSae Niijima(VA: Yuko Kaida)
Sae stands out as the pressure point of the anime’s achronological structure, giving the story a legal-thriller edge rather than letting it play only as school action.
What Makes It Stand Out
- 1
The anime uses an achronological frame centered on Sae Niijima’s interrogation, a structural choice reflected in AniList’s Achronological Order tag and one of the adaptation’s clearest attempts to mimic the game’s suspense architecture.
- 2
CloverWorks handled the 26-episode TV run that aired from April to September 2018, giving the series a single-cour-plus length unusual for many game adaptations but still extremely compressed for a long ATLUS RPG.
- 3
The production directly inherits the Persona 5 design chain: ATLUS is credited as original creator, Katsura Hashino with the original story, Shigenori Soejima with original character design, and Tomomi Ishikawa with adapting those designs for animation.
- 4
Its genre identity is narrower on MAL than the source material’s reputation suggests: it is listed under Action, while AniList’s strongest tag is Crime at 92%, followed by Henshin, Mythology, Super Power, and School.
- 5
The series’ public-score profile is unusually polarized for such a famous property: it has over 108,000 MAL votes and a popularity rank around #1014, yet sits at a modest 6.45 MAL score and 62/100 on AniList.
Fun Facts & Trivia
- Fun fact 1
- Masashi Ishihama directed the series, with Shinichi Inozume handling series composition, placing the adaptation’s biggest challenge on structure: condensing a choice-driven RPG into fixed weekly television.
- Fun fact 2
- The title logo is separately credited to Masaki Sudou, while prop design is credited to Youko Kuhara, reflecting how closely Persona 5’s identity depends on graphic presentation, objects, and interface-like visual detail.
- Fun fact 3
- Tetsuya Usami served as art director and Yuuta Fujii handled art design, two credits that matter for a series split between recognizable school-life spaces and heavily stylized alternate-world imagery.
- Fun fact 4
- AniList lists 995 favourites for the anime, a sign that even with mixed aggregate scores, it retained a dedicated audience beyond casual franchise recognition.
- Fun fact 5
- The series finished airing on September 30, 2018, the same year CloverWorks emerged as a distinct studio brand, making it part of the studio’s early public identity.
Studios
- CloverWorks
