The Overwhelming Style of Persona 5's All-Out Attacks

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]