Persona 3 Works as a Stage Play, But Less So as a Musical

This past week in Tokyo saw the end of the second Persona 3 musical's run. And while I had not seen the first, I decided with my vast knowledge of the series I owed it to myself to give Persona 3: The Weird Masquerade: The Ultramarine Labyrinth a watch.

But while I can now say that Persona 3 makes for a darn enjoyable stage play, it's unfortunately not quite up to being a musical.

Much like the BlazBlue stage play I saw earlier this year, the special effects and backgrounds were all provided by projection mapping onto the all-white stage set. This allowed for a wide variety of awesome looking locations. But where the projection mapping technology really paid off was in the fight scenes. While some actors played lesser shadows for the characters to fight against, the bosses were all animated projections. Personas were likewise projected on the set when summoned. And hats off to the SFX crew. Its timing of the special effects was perfectit always looked like the characters really were attacking the projected monsters.

But as good as the combat effects were, my favorite effect was Fuuka's persona which was projected on a semi-transparent screen with Fuuka standing on the far side. It gave the optical illusion that Fuuka was standing inside her Personajust like in the games.

Originally when Persona 3 was released, the player character was male. But when the game was re-released on the PlayStation Portable, they added a female version of the protagonist with her own Velvet Room companion and gender specific events and romances. Like Persona 3 Portable, The Ultramarine Labyrinth also has two versions of the protagonistsome performances had the male lead while others sported the female one. Thus, the play had minor changes depending on who the lead was. For the female route (which I saw) Kotone, the female protagonist, fell in love with Shinjiro. More than that, she also managed to find his missing watch and return it to him, thus changing his story in a major way. Also only in the Kotone version of the story was a comedic scene where all the girls were lost in an island jungle. The male version of the musical instead follows the boys as they hit on various girls at the beach.

All in all, staging the production with both protagonists adds rewatch value to the show as well as more than a little fanservice to anyone who played the PSP version of the game.

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Persona 3 Works as a Stage Play, But Less So as a Musical