A fan-made Persona 4 musical. You knew it was going to happen.
The popular role-playing game has already gotten a stage production, so it seemed only a matter of time before it also got a musical. Brother/sister writing team Jake and Gina Smith have recently unveiled their Persona 4 musical project, which they first undertook three years ago. Last month, the two began to share the fruits of their labor on Tumblr.
Jake talks about the project's origin over at the project's forums:
I've always been a musician, it's been my passion my entire life, and one day while playing Persona 4, during a loading screen, Gina (my sister) and I started singing random songs about "Adachi The Cabbage Man" and "Bufula being not as great as Mabufula." After joking for awhile, we started to actually talk about how cool a Persona 4 Musical would be, and VOILA!!! 3 Years later, you see what has become of our little joke :D
You can listen to a bunch of demos over at their Tumblr. I like the one nearest to the top, the emotional ballad "Big Bro."
The demos are rough, with Jake singing all of the parts. But they have a charm to them; the whole thing is a little bit like Rent, but with Persona characters. (So, you know: Your mileage may vary on that.) But I can imagine how this could be a fun, small theatrical production, given the right cast.
Gina discusses their plans for release over at another thread on their forum:
I realize that this is an odd remark, but understand that we were not expecting people to respond to the songs and our work with such enthusiasm. The original plan was to gather some local performers and put on a concert version of the show (Sort of like the Jekyl & Hyde experimentation concert in which they played over 40 songs and then got the audience to tell them what should be kept and what should be cut in the finished product) in order to verify which songs should be kept/cut ext, to finalize the staging and to make video recordings so that people could see what we were working on. Past that... well, we really had not planned that far.
Who knows whether the Persona 4 musical will ever see the light of the stage, but I can't say I'm not rooting for them. I'll be keeping an eye on the project.
Persona 4 Musical [Tumblr, thanks Colette]