Although, standalone, without prior knowledge of the game, I can see it maybe being a little hard to watch.
One complaint I read about was that the pacing of this anime is too quick, some scenes are long while others are very short.
The anime also tries to follow the calendar that is ingame, though it sometimes skips a lot of days forward.
I did notice that while watching it myself, but then I thought about it for only some minutes.
What the anime is skipping out on is the downtime between more major events, it won't spend time on showing the days where you do almost nothing, like grinding the current dungeon or walking around Inaba.
So I think the pacing is not really a problem, it is even less of a problem if you have already played the game.
Most of the scenes are faithful to the game, it even uses a lot of the music that is in the game, along with completely new tracks.
The fighting scenes that are spread out a bit are fine enough, it mostly depicts the game mechanics and combat well.
Other than some things, things you can't do in the game, like putting your Persona in front of a party member to shield them from an attack, two party members using their turn at the same time.. etc. Good to see it is taking advantage of the difference in medium.
Persona 4 is a long game with a lot of story beats, long social links and a bunch of other content, I think they managed to cram it all into 26 episodes well enough. It's not a completely perfect adaptation but still great.
This anime also has some completely new scenes or added something new to already existing scenes.
For example the scenes where we get backstory on the characters, and some of the social link events.
I won't spoil anything, cause it was pretty fun for me, a player who loves the game, to return and watch what they did with this.
To me it feels more like it was meant for people who played the game, so they could experience the story again but with new insight and some nods to things that the fanbase think about the game.
Because of that, I think going into this completely fresh, without having played the game, there probably is a lot you won't catch onto or understand. It is mostly smaller things that will be hard to appreciate.
That is why I made this review, I've judged this anime as an extension, or rather, a companion piece to the game, instead of it being its own thing.
So, I want to recommend this to anyone that likes the game and other Persona 4 media, to try it out.
