The Persona 5 Anime is Here!

Persona 5 is the role-playing game that made me buy a PS4 (no regrets!). It entertained me for most of 2017, and even got me into the vast world of different coffees.

The game Persona 5 is available on both PS3 and PS4, and tells the story of a group of mostly wronged or misunderstood high school students that moonlight as vigilante thieves and become known as "the Phantom Thieves of Hearts." Thanks to a mysterious smartphone app, they gain the power to enter twisted worlds inside corrupt people's minds, where they steal the "treasures" that represent the corruption in those people's hearts. Once the corruption is stolen/removed, the targets open their eyes to their wrongdoings and confess their crimes out of guilt.

If you didn't know about the game and got curious, you'll probably like this bit of news!

Persona 5 the Animation

Persona 5 has just gotten an anime adaptation! This means people can be introduced to the series even without one of the aforementioned consoles to play the game (although, like most movie adaptations of other mediums such as books, the anime adaptation will likely be very rushed compared to the 100+ hour game... still, it should serve as a good entry point to the Persona series).

"And when will the anime air?" Actually, the day has already arrived!

Own image, created from the output of the "cal" (calendar) command in Linux, formatted into an HTML table, styled with CSS and rendered to an image with help of the DOM to Image JavaScript library.

The Persona 5 anime began airing in Japan on April 7th, 2018! (or in other words, yesterday at the time of publishing this post :D ) And another good news. Even us outside Japan will be able to watch it, with subtitles, legally, and for free!

This is thanks to Crunchyroll, a streaming website that shares the money from subscribers with the anime creators, and has the rights to stream anime legally. Most of their anime has Japanese audio and subtitles in English and other languages too (including Spanish and Portuguese). Many anime in there are free to watch and don't even require creating an account at the website. Just open the page and watch... though the free option has a lot of ads, both on the website and as commercials interrupting the video, and it's limited to 480p resolution. But hey, it's free :P . And they'll be streaming Persona 5 the Animation, too, so it's an opportunity to take a peek at something Persona 5-related if you haven't yet. You may check their announcement to see more details about the P5 anime, and the regions where it will be available through Crunchyroll. And of course, last but not least, here's the page to watch the anime!

Crunchyroll also does simulcasts (streams the anime just a few hours after it airs in Japan), and this also goes for the Persona 5 anime. It'll begin streaming on April 7, right on the same day it is released in Japan, already with subtitles and all! ... However, usually, only premium members have the privilege of watching the episodes as soon as they come out, and the episodes become available for free after one week. If you don't mind the ads and the waiting (like me), you'll have to wait an extra week before the episodes become available for free-watching.

I'll simply wait, and watch it from the Crunchyroll app on my PS4 (even after having beaten the game three times, it looks like the Phantom Thieves will continue holding my PS4 hostage for a while longer :P ).

Note: after I wrote all this, I was surprised to find out that the first episode is available for free already! (the page is saying that the episode was made available for free users on April 7) I've already watched it, and it's really the full video. Not sure if the next episodes will be available for free right away too, but if I have to wait, then I will.

PS: I've read that the P5 anime will also be streamed on Hulu.com, though as far as I understand, Hulu is restricted to only the US and Japan. Hulu isn't free, but I'm mentioning it here in case someone reading this happens to have a Hulu subscription already and decides to check the anime out.