in his expression." He further noted that the character managed to have a "hidden coolness." In retrospect, he found that the character was not ambiguous enough and thus when creating the Persona 4 protagonist, Soejima made Yu Narukami with the idea that his entire personality be decided and portrayed by the player's in-game actions and decisions. Director Noriaki Akitaya had faced a similar dilemma for his animated film version. He explained that one of his biggest challenges was, "...getting the protagonist, who is the player in the game, and making him into a character named Makoto Yuki for the film, then figuring out how to integrate him [the protagonist] into the story." This led Akitaya to be extremely careful about how he went about constructing the character in terms of his speech, gestures and behavior all the while staying true to what was already established in the game. Akitaya admitted that he would not have been able to meet the expectations of the individual fans of the game since they were able to choose their own unique name and personality for the protagonist. Instead Akitaya took the route of incorporating the most general traits of fan reactions to the protagonist to form Yuki's character. Akitaya stated that his favorite scene in the film occurred when the protagonist summoned his Persona for the first time. He elaborated that the protagonist's maniacal laugh and heavy breathing helped bring depth to the scene and establish animation director Keisuke Watabe's character designs as being one of the main attractions of the film. Akitaya had joked that during initial pre-production the protagonist's name was still not determined and instead proposed the placeholder until the first draft was developed. However, even as Jun Kumagai began working on the screenplay, the placeholder went unchanged for the next four to five months and Akitaya found himself growing attached to it despite eventually changing it. Akira Ishida voiced the protagonist in this Japanese adaptation. He noted that since he was presented with the roles of both Pharos and the protagonist, recording the scene of the protagonist's initial meeting with Pharos was something he enjoyed. In the English version of Persona 3 the role of both the protagonist and Ryoji is taken by Yuri Lowenthal. As with his previous role as protagonist of the Digital Devil Saga games, Lowenthal did not have extensive dialogue lines. His main task was shouting