Anime based from videogames is not an uncommon thing. It stands to reason that if a videogame franchise is super popular, then every last angle of merchandising is going to be pursued. Persona is, I’m told, a series of games that everyone has either played and loved greatly or not played at all. That said, Trinity Soul is likely an anime that will hold true to this theory. The show takes place approximately ten years after the events of the third videogame’s story arch and focuses mainly on Shin Kanzato and his two brothers, Ryo and Jun. Shin and Jun have lived together with an aunt since the death of their parents and Jun’s twin sister, Yuki. But that aunt is getting married, so the youngest Kanzato brothers return to the family home in their hometown of Ayanagi to live with their elder brother Ryo, who is the town’s chief officer in the police station. Ryo is investigating mysterious cases of “Reversal,” in which people have been turned completely and perfectly inside-out.
As it turns out, one of the culprits is a young man using the manifestation of his Persona—the semi-physical state and appearance of a person’s soul. Ryo’s pursuit and fight with his own Persona creates a series of events that pulls Shin into the intriguing web of mystery surrounding such happenings all over the town, and his older brother’s coldness does nothing to settle Shin’s concern. Soon, Jun and the boys’ friends from school become wrapped up in something far too big for teenagers to handle and Ryo knows more than he initially lets on. (Isn’t that usually the recurring theme of most anime?)
What this all amounts to is an intriguing story that catches your attention not just with the interwoven plot and characters, but the simplistic and, yet, elegant art style and animation as well. This is key in giving Trinity Soul a level of depth that is the making of a good anime. NIS America knows how to do a DVD set justice, as well, because they’ve included an official art book for the show that has two aspects. The first being the jam-pack of episode synopses, character profiles, brief poems regarding each episode (still scratching my head on that one), screen captures, and official artwork. It also has a few pages worth of four-panel comic strips as a light-hearted omake, though the humor of them is hit and miss.
The other fun aspect is that if you flip the book over, you find that the other half of it is actually the same illustrated storybook that Shin’s parents created and gets referenced in the show. This is especially nifty because it’s a nice story and I’ve never seen this sort of extra content packaged with an anime set before.
Trinity Soul combines just the right amounts of mystery and action with just a splash of interpersonal family drama, making it a series that’s easy to be grabbed by. The one hitch I did run into, however, was that I felt lost at the beginning of the series because I’ve never played the Persona videogames, so this might be a bit of a snag for people new to the franchise. This does give a little more weight to the art book, but not much until events such as the Apathy Syndrome are further explored in the story. Or, you could just be lazy and hit up Wikipedia about that. Regardless of how much you may or may not already know about Persona, Trinity Soul does get involving fairly quickly and is very much worth the watching.