Hello there!
Welcome to New Frame Plus,
a series about video game animation.
Persona 5 is one of the most eye-catching games of 2017 AND 2019.
And the Persona team keeps doing this
on considerably smaller budgets and team sizes
than most of their competition in the AAA RPG space,
making up for any shortcomings in fidelity with
strong art direction and overwhelming style.
But how are they doing that?
Animation is slow work, which means it’s expensive,
so how does this team manage such an eye-popping anime aesthetic
for 80+ hours straight without spending Final Fantasy money?
To find out, let’s break down the animation
of one of the most intensely stylish sequences in the game,
the All-Out Attack.
All Out Attacks are basically a high-damage dog-pile maneuver
which requires some strategizing to set up.
When you hit enemies with something that they are weak to,
it will knock them down and leave them vulnerable until their next turn.
If you can manage to knock down every enemy on the field, this will trigger a Hold Up,
where your entire team moves in on the vulnerable enemy line.
From here, you've got a lot of options:
you can try to convince the enemy to join you as a summon-able persona,
you can extort them for money or items,
OR you can take advantage of your position and perform an All Out Attack.
If you choose that option, this will initiate a short,
flashy cut-scene in which your entire team attacks the enemy at once in a
glorious swarm.
Now, in the event that your opponent survives this, battle will simply resume.
But in the much-more-likely event that your enemies are completely wiped out,
you are rewarded with a special victory screen
featuring the character who initiated the attack.
These are unique for every party member, and they are all great.
Now, there are a LOT of moving parts in this All-Out Attack sequence,
and they all come and go in the blink of an eye so,
let’s try to break this down into chunks.
From the Hold Up screen, as soon as you select All-Out Attack,
your entire party first stows their firearms
and switches back to melee weapons.
These are just the default animations your characters do
whenever you swap back to melee weapons during battle.
And the instant everybody returns to their idle pose, they immediately leap backward.
Your main character, Joker, has the most eye-catching jump of the bunch,
which is good, because he’s always in your party
and he’s always going to be front and center on this screen.
And then, just as your characters land,
the battlefield is obscured by a big 2D animated dust cloud,
which serves to hide a scenery change.
When the cloud clears, your party is now clustered together
and facing camera, against a flat red background.
The camera pulls back, the background cracks
and the lighting on your 3D characters dims until they’re nothing but silhouettes,
visually flattening them into a 2D shape.
And then everybody springs into action.
And I really like how they’re not all jumping at the exact same time!
There is a nice staggered rhythm to this.
Morgana even does a smaller hop before leaping out of frame.
And in real time, obviously, this is all happening super fast.
The time between the 2D dust cloud wipe
and everybody leaving frame is like 1 second, tops,
but that variation in their exit timing adds some really nice texture.
It’s the little touches like that,
that make this whole sequence feel so viscerally satisfying in motion.
So once everybody is off screen, there’s another screen shake,
the fractured background shatters and your party members’
portraits appear in the foreground shards.
Then all the fragments fly past camera, setting us up for another scene change.
We pull back to see the darkened silhouette of our opponent.
And this is still a 3D model that we're looking at, but again,
because of the absence of lighting, it appears like a flat 2D shape,
which helps them to fit right in to this barrage of 2D effects animation
they are being pummeled with.
The screen shakes.
Darkened 2D blurs representing your characters streak across the screen.
The enemy plays their hit react animation on loop.
Onomatopoeic katakana and impact flashes are everywhere… it’s awesome.
And then one final bright flash fills the screen,
clearing the board and setting up the final scene change.
Whichever character initiated the All-Out Attack
drops down onto a flat red and black field
with the enemy silhouetted behind, does a little flourish.
And then, with a snappy zoom, your 3D character is swapped
for a gorgeous hand drawn rendition and the background is filled
with an animated splash screen
as the enemy bursts in a silhouetted blood spray effect.
When you frame through this, you can actually see the the one-frame cross-fade
from the 3D model to the pose-matched 2D art!
Again, every member of the party has a different version of this screen
and they all look amazing.
And even here there's a lot of subtle animation happening.
There’s that shake on the 2D assets emphasizing
the impact of the zoom transition,
and the slight drifting rotation of the 2D layers?
Mmm. It's very good.
All of the action I just described happens within the span of like 8 seconds,
but that action is so well-composed that it not only reads clearly throughout,
but you don’t even get a chance to notice when any individual element is
maybe a little lackluster.
Which is good, because that element is usually the character animation.
Like, if I really wanted to get in there and nitpick things a bit,
I can see plenty of places where the animation on the 3D characters is a little
rough around the edges.
Like, here: Ryuji’s transition from Hold Up stance to his weapon swapping animation
results in this quick, slide-y 180 degree turn,
because the two animations don’t start with the same foot forward.
You usually don’t want that.
And his little weapon twirl right after -
while a cool touch - isn’t animated in a way that makes much physical sense.
Or Joker’s back handspring here: it looks pretty nice,
but it could use a more pronounced anticipating crouch
to sell the physicality of the jump better.
It’s little polishy stuff like that.
And there’s a number of tiny imperfections in the screen transitions too,
like, how your party members often pop into place a few frames
after the dust cloud already passed,
and sometimes the characters are even partially clipping
through the red backdrop for a couple of frames.
But good luck spotting ANY of those rough edges when you play this back at speed.
All those tiny little flaws just get completely lost
in the larger whirling tapestry of movement here.
If anything, framing through this and seeing those tiny little seams
really only serves to highlight how intricately-choreographed this whole sequence is.
This right here is a microcosm
of everything that makes the animation in Persona work:
in the places where the polish and fidelity of the character animation
kind of underwhelms, a bombardment of gorgeous 2D art,
and effects and UI animation picks up the slack.
Because, to be a little blunt about it,
there is not much especially remarkable
about the 3D character animation in Persona games.
And I’m not meaning that as an insult!
For a franchise that has historically had to make modest budgets
and small dev teams go a very very long way,
I think they’ve done a fantastic job.
But if you actually look at most of the game’s 3D character animation in isolation,
very little of it stands out.
Like, if you’re just looking at the 3D characters in these story scenes,
just their gestures and their physical acting,
nothing about these performances is all that striking or impressive.
BUT, reinforce those animations with some gorgeous character portraits
so that every line of dialog has some more nuanced expressiveness attached,
and suddenly it pops!
And layered on top of that, you’ve got a dialog box wobbling with chaotic energy,
plus some extreme close-up splashes to punctuate spikes in emotion…
put all of that together and now you’ve got a yourself a pretty dynamic scene.
It’s the same with the battle interface too!
A lot of these battle animations are actually pretty darned solid to begin with,
but even so, none of this would be nearly so visually striking
without all those 2D hit effects,
and those really stylish screen wipes between turns,
and also that INCREDIBLE animated menu interface layered behind your character.
The 3D character animation in Persona is like a foundation layer,
with all of the 2D art that actually makes things pop built on top of it.
The streamlined efficiency of this animation
approach is what makes it possible
for the Persona team to produce an absurd quantity of story scenes.
And because this game’s art direction is so incredibly cohesive,
this 2D/3D hybrid anime-infused aesthetic far exceeds the sum of its parts.
The character animation in Persona
may not have nearly the animation fidelity of a Final Fantasy,
nor stay as true to the anime aesthetic as a Guilty Gear.
And yet, these games still transcend their budget limitations with overwhelming style.
And I think that is very cool.
A special thanks to Hank Kleinberg for suggesting this topic,
and for giving me an excuse to listen to a LOT of Persona music.
If you enjoyed this animation breakdown,
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Thank you for watching, and I’ll see you next time.
[music]