Review of Persona 3 the Movie: #1 Spring of Birth

For someone who's already played the source material and knows all the story beats, this movie is an absolute joy to watch. Its gorgeous art direction and animation is a breath of fresh air from the animated adaptations of the game's sequels, and it's genuinely fun to watch these PS2-era cutscenes transformed into such beautiful and compelling animated scenes. The pacing sucks though. It really is one event jumbled after another. Put in more exact terms, it feels more like two separate narrative arcs mushed together into a full-length runtime than anything particularly cohesive--(It's the sort of thing that makes you go, "Wait, that wasn't theclimax? This flick's still going?")--not to mention how the film's time constraints butchered the setting exposition beyond recognition. It seems to me that this movie would be almost painfully incomprehensible to anyone who was not already intimately familiar with the plot of Persona 3.

TL;DR: Great eye candy if you already like Persona 3. Best avoided otherwise. Maybe look at some GIFs from the film on Tumblr or something?