Memento Mori. Let's Play Persona 3!

Cullen · Sun Jul 07, 2024 5:51 am

I know what you're thinking... which version?

All of them, silly!

The Game(s)

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3, first released for the PS2 in 2006 and localized to the US in 2007, is functionally a full on reboot to the Persona sub-series of Shin Megami Tensei. While still retaining some of the urban fantasy elements of the Persona series to this point, Persona 3 introduces and heavily focuses on a social simulation aspect to the series core gameplay. This focus redefined how the Persona series compared to the mainline SMT series, with this particular sub-series going on to absolutely dominate public perception of the SMT franchise as a whole and influencing every game in the series overall going forward. It's not uncommon to see people jokingly and sincerely refer to Persona 3 as the "first game in the Persona series" despite the multiple levels of fallacy loaded into that statement. While there had been games that combined traditional RPG gameplay with social simulators before, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a game more influential on that blend than Persona 3. While Persona 4, the thematic sequel (and technical story follow-up) to this game, definitely blew down the doors and gave the sub-series its mainstream popularity, with the benefit of hindsight I think it's safe to say that games like Fire Emblem Three Houses and Trails of Cold Steel wouldn't exist as they are if Persona 3 wasn't the trailblazer that it was. That all being said, this game is going to be of minor focus in this LP. I'll be covering this game in a series of livestreams where I'll be getting stupidly drunk as a self-imposed challenge, but its actual presence in the videos I plan to make will be fairly minimal. The reason for that is,

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES, released in 2007 and localized in 2008 for the PS2, is the first in a long line of improved re-releases that Atlus would become famous for in the coming years. Persona 3 FES adds a number of new story elements to Persona 3, as well as retooling the social simulator aspect on the whole and making minor changes/additions to the traditional RPG gameplay. Most notable, it adds a second campaign to the game dubbed "The Answer", which is a follow up to the main story of Persona 3 which has since been dubbed "The Journey". Unusually compared to future updated re-releases, FES manages to be somewhat harder compared to vanilla Persona 3 with its core RPG gameplay due to the addition of a brutal hard mode, as well as The Answer being designed to match up with this new Hard mode. If you're curious what the hell "FES" means, it's not an acronym but rather a shortening of the English word "Festival". I'm sure it made sense at the time. Anyway, Persona 3 FES is the definitive version of Persona 3 on the PS2 and my personal favorite version of the game. While it still retains some of the jank that Persona 3 vanilla had in its efforts to be "immersive", the frictional elements of the game make it an RPG unlike any other I've ever played, and it's the version of the game that made me truly appreciate Persona 3. We'll be seeing a lot of the core RPG gameplay of this version of the game, though the social elements will take a slight backseat. Rest assured, I will be showing off how the social elements of this particular version of the game compare to its most modern version, though those will be relegated to their own side videos. The reason for that is,

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 Portable was released in 2009 and localized in 2010 (translation and localization take a lot of work people!) for the PSP, straddles the line between "Updated Re-Release" and "stripped down handheld port". While the story and social additions of FES were retained, The Answer was kicked to the curb. In its place, a new story line revolving around a female main character was added, bringing in new Social Links and reworked dialogue across the whole game to accommodate the feminine perspective. This is the first version of Persona 3 I had ever played, and my introduction to this SMT sub-series as a whole. Persona 3 Portable features its own retools to the mechanics of Persona 3, namely swapping most of them out with mechanics from Persona 4, while sanding off most of the player unfriendly mechanics from the PS2 versions of Persona 3. Additionally, many aspects presentation had to be removed to accommodate the limited amounts of available space on a PSP UMD. Persona 3 Portable plays much more like a Visual Novel or traditional point 'n click adventure for its social aspects, as well as completely lacking full motion cutscenes of any variety. I have a lot of negative things to say about this version of the game, as I think it's the worst version of Persona 3. though it's still very nostalgic for me and I want you to know that I still love it in spite of the criticisms I have. We will be seeing a lot of the social aspects of this game since we will be using the Female Main Character for it, which results in a massive number of changes to the social elements. We'll likely be seeing a lot of mechanical differences between this game and other versions early on, but less and less so as the games press on and we have more powerful options available to us. The differences at that point become kind of irrelevant, save for one critical problem moment. Now the bulk of this LP will take place in and focus on...

Persona 3 Reload (The SMT title has been dropped as Persona has long since become the cash cow franchise at this point) is the most modern version of Persona 3, released in all regions on 2/2/2024. Persona 3 Reload features heavily polished and retooled mechanics, largely basing itself on Persona 5 with its own unique bits of flair thrown in, and a fairly faithful recreation of the script from the Male story of Persona 3 et. all released up until this point. It is the most accessible and newbie friendly version of Persona 3, and I think it's a great way for new players to experience this story. Videos in this LP will likely begin and end in Persona 3 Reload. While I still prefer FES due to its unique elements compared to future Persona titles, I think this is a wonderful way to experience Persona 3 if you've ever had an interest in doing so. I'm not going to dwell too long on describing this game, since I feel like my thought and feelings on it will shine through in the videos. Speaking of!

The Let's Play

I will be doing complete playthroughs of all the above mentioned games, editing them together in a way that I feel is interesting. We'll be covering every social link and defeating all bonus challenges presented. I will also be covering The Answer in FES and its updated re-release as DLC for Persona 3 Reload, which at the time of this OP is launching in September of 2024.

Cullen · Sun Jul 07, 2024 5:54 am

Part 1, where we have our setup! The notes for these thread posts will become pretty extensive in due time, but for now there isn't much to say. The Persona series is pretty cutscene heavy, so the early game is mostly defined by exposition dumps. Still, we are able to compare and contrast the different versions of the game in pretty interesting ways, even this early on! About the only notable thing I left out of this video is that you do get to mess around in your room in Persona 3 Portable also, but it's not terribly interesting and I can show it all later.

Notable Differences

What's a comparison LP without actually going over some of the changes along the way? Even this early in the game, there are some interesting changes across all versions of the game.

1.) Most notable and present in the videos, Persona 3 Reload gives you more room to stretch your legs and roam around in situations you couldn't in the PS2 and PSP versions. This is kind of nice though it also draws more attention to the lack of agency you have in the early game. It does allow them to squeeze in a handful of extra cameos from characters who will become important later!

2.) I didn't show this in the video since it wasn't too interesting and I felt cutting back to P3P fully worked best at school, but you do also get a moment to mess around in your bedroom in P3P after Yukari escorts you there. Like Reload, there isn't anything you can do but sleep.

3.) Speaking of, P3P features a couple different NPCs in the school if you're playing as the FemC. Like the ones featured in the Male storyline, they will become important later!

4.) Something kind of funny that's notable about P3 Vanilla actually is that these early school days actually tick through each distinct time cycle that can happen in a day even though nothing does happen on them. All Persona games going forward realized what a colossal waste of time that is and just skips over displaying any time cycle where nothing happens and advances you to the one where something does.

5.) P3P introduces Persona 4 style fast travel and immediately informs you of it! Obviously this still exists in Reload but since we can't really do anything with it yet the game doesn't feel the need to draw attention to it.

6.) The elephant in the room with P3P that was mentioned in the OP, in order to get this game to work well on the PSP the traditional overworld of Persona 3 was retooled into a bird's eye view point 'n click game using low res renders of every screen of the PS2 game. This streamlines the school and town segments of the game and causes this game to play at a pretty snappy pace in comparison to FES, though obviously it's a lot less pretty.

7.) The script of Reload is highly reminiscent of the P3P Male script, with some touch ups and slight dialogue changes scattered around. Notably it retains some of the expository text added to that script that was necessary to convey things you couldn't gather visually anymore (Junpei stopping to remark about the track team is an example of this). It's not too clunky but it sticks out a lot when you're aware of it from playing the various versions of the game.

8.) Since the Sign in Sheet would be redundant in P3 Reload with the ability to save anywhere, it now just produces some flavor text when you examine it.

9.) The FemC's room is on the third floor of the dorm instead of the second. This would actually be pretty obnoxious in the PS2 versions, but the addition of fast travel relegates it to a flavor change.

Cullen · Sat Jul 13, 2024 5:28 am

Part 2 is out! It'll be awhile before we get any real degree of agency in how we spend our days, but we do get into some light action in this part. Things are starting to look up!

Notable differences

1.) We get our first pop quiz! Answer these right, and you get 2 points of Charm. Vanilla, Persona 3 FES/Portable, and Reload all have different questions that get asked on quiz days. Be sure you have the proper guide for whichever version you are playing when faced with a question you don't know the answer to!

2.) Reload gives us more opportunities to boost Courage early on by sleeping in class on Lecture days. In every prior version of Persona 3, doing this instead put you in the Great condition, regardless of what your condition was before hand. We'll get more into condition when it becomes relevant, it doesn't really matter now.

3.) In Vanilla, FES and Reload, the social stats provide no mechanical bonus to gameplay. They purely exist to satisfy event triggers that check your rank in a specific stat. In Persona 3 Portable, however, the Charm stat actually does something outside of event triggers once you max it out.

4.) Elizabeth is conspicuously absent from the Velvet Room during both visits in Persona 3 Portable. I wonder what the deal with that is...?

5.) The FemC gets Naginatas for her weapon type as opposed to the one handed sword the MC is provided. Things are a bit more complicated in this regard in Vanilla/FES, but we'll address that when we can get to it.

6.) The first mandatory battle can be lost on the harder difficulties if you don't use your skills, though obviously you have to be pretty dense to let that happen. Reload starts you with Agi, while all prior versions have Bash as your first skill with Agi learned from the EXP you get for the fight. Curiously, they just removed EXP altogether from the Reload battle, perhaps to avoid previews of future mechanics.

7.) For some reason, every version of the game gives you control back on a different day after the Full Moon. Reload let's you take control on the 17th, Vanilla/FES forces you to take the quiz on the 18th before getting a chance to save, and Portable gives us control on the 20th. Not sure what the deal is with the sliding timeline here, but we will inevitably see all the cutscenes in Reload that were seen in the other versions.

8.) I kind of neglected to mention this in the last update so better late than never, the main UI color for the FemC is pink as opposed to the blue used in all other versions of Persona 3's story. I kind of prefer the blue, though it's not like the pink is garish or anything.

Social Stat Progress

I'll be keeping a running total of the progress on social stats in this update. This is mostly for my benefit in regards to FES, since that game has a much looser structure to how you want to develop your social stats. Plus I just think it's kind of interesting to see how the schedules between the 3 games can diverge a bit.

Persona 3 FES/Portable

Academics: +2(Rank 1)
Charm: +4(Rank 1)
Courage: +0(Rank 1)

We'll eventually be tracking FES and Portable separately since the two schedules diverge heavily after the start, but for now the progression is identical. We'll be getting the Charm boost we got in these games in Reload come the next update.

Persona 3 Reload

Academics: +0(Rank 1)
Charm: +2(Rank 1)
Courage: +2(Rank 1)

As mentioned previously, Reload retools sleeping in class to be a Courage bonus since what it originally did no longer applies. Courage maxes out by far the quickest in terms of points required (+80), and not coincidentally we need to have it maxed the earliest for optimal scheduling. This retool actually doesn't matter as much as you'd think, as Reload removed a way to cheese free Courage boosts that existed in the previous versions. That said, it also retools the primary means to boost Courage, giving us more options for boosting it quickly once we get some freedom at night time. We're behind on Charm at this moment purely due to gaining control again earlier compared to prior versions of the game.

Cullen · Sat Jul 20, 2024 5:28 pm

Part 3 is out! Some exciting developments as we begin to establish the main conflict of the game as well as a team to tackle it. Once we're done with this part, we're officially out of tutorial land and will start having some agency over what we can do on a day to day basis! Granted, I'm going to be using some pre-made schedules to keep this as straightforward as possible for myself, so it'll be awhile before I technically have true freedom. But hey, that's the concession you have to make when going for a completionist run.

Notable Differences

This section will probably be retired in the coming updates since I'll have more pertinent mechanical information to discuss for each game, but since there's not much else to tack on at this stage, may as well keep going with this for things I might have blown past or ignored in the video.

1.) Because the schedule in P3P has moved up a couple days, you actually end up going to Tartarus the same night Junpei joins. Not sure why Reload walked this back, though admittedly I have very limited experience with the Male character story in P3P so maybe this is a FemC exclusive thing.

2.) This one's kind of funny, the detail of the main character sleeping all of Sunday away is newly added to Reload. In the other versions, you just randomly lose out on Sunday because I guess they didn't want you exploring the town yet.

3.) If you're playing as the FemC in P3P, you can choose to have your Velvet Room attendant be the stoic Theo instead of Elizabeth if you so desire. This doesn't have any meaningful impact on the game. On a personal level, I don't really care for Theo that much in this game, he's just kind of like Margaret from Persona 4 except a dude. While most spin offs flanderize and water down the characters compared to how they appear in their base game, I'd actually say the changes Theo got in games like PQ were for the better.

4.) Each game has a different means of fully recovering your party in the Tartarus lobby. Contrary to what you'd expect, this process actually became more strict and costly with each new version of the game, with Reload being the most limited. P3P allows you to heal your party at the clock for a fairly minor amount of cash (far less than what the Fox would charge you in Persona 4), while Vanilla and FES just fully heal you free of charge when you return to the lobby. There is a caveat on that, but it's remarkably generous for a much less player friendly edition of the game. We'll be seeing how the healing system is retooled for Reload in the next video.

5.) The Tartarus tutorials largely play the same across all versions of the game up until the very end. The tutorials in Reload are more like glorified cutscenes, locking out certain mechanics until you hit the point where they are explained to you and proceeding with scripted actions from your party.

6.) In Reload, instead of getting skill cards from leveling up your Personae, you instead get cards from the Sword minor arcana in Shuffle Time. This is good and bad, as it's a quicker means of obtaining cards, but it's also a method you have less control over compared to Portable. Better than not having cards at all like in Vanilla/FES I guess. In the PS2 and PSP game, the Sword arcana gives you weapons instead. In FES the weapons are low value vendor trash that are always inferior to a Coin card of the same level, while the relationship is reversed in Portable. While the weapons are usually less good than what you'll be entering Tartarus with, the sell value of the weapons you get is 2 to 3 times higher what they are in the PS2 versions. This makes the Sword cards the best reliable source of money in the game, with the caveat you have to leave Tartarus to sell your haul instead of getting the money right away.

7.) Your party members on the field are just for show in Reload, they don't really have much interaction with the environment. In the PS2 and PSP versions, on the other hand, they can be ordered to split off to find items, stairs, access points, etc. They can also be caught out and forced to battle shadows, which can necessitate you stepping in to rescue them. There are a couple other things to keep in mind with this, but we'll go over those later.

8.) Reload introduces a variety of new chest types, diversifying the types of treasure you can find in Tartarus. FES and P3P just have normal chests and rare chests to find, with nothing like the locked chest we see at the end of the Reload tutorial.

Social Stat Progress

Persona 3 FES/Portable

Academics: +2(Rank 1)
Charm: +4(Rank 1)
Courage: +0(Rank 1)

No changes here.

Persona 3 Reload

Academics: +0(Rank 1)
Charm: +4(Rank 1)
Courage: +2(Rank 1)

We've gotten the next pop quiz in Reload and have caught up here. Next part will be seeing a lot more Tartarus action since we're broke right now and really need the money, but we'll be seeing rapid advancement to all these stats once we make it past that point.

Cullen · Wed Jul 24, 2024 11:50 am

Part 4 is out! A little and a lot happens here, we don't advance too many days on the calendar but many of the game's mechanics open up to us at this point. In particular, assuming there are no story events on a given day we can now roam Tatsumi Port Island at our leisure. Additionally, we are allowed to roam around at night, though not nearly as much is available to us during the later hours. Finally, we start initiating our first non-team social link! Social Links will form the back bone of our daily progression going forward, so we'll be hanging out with a lot more people going forward. Developing these will be key for creating powerful personae down the line, so be sure to get yourself out there! Since we now have agency over what we can do, this is also where the schedules between the various versions of the game start to diverge pretty heavily. While the general flow is similar, we won't be taking quite the same route to our desired end goal due to a variety of changes and retools between the various versions of the game. For right now though, in all versions we do need to go to Tartarus early on as we are flat broke and need a ton of cash to fuel our daily activities. I did consider making the Tartarus trip this video too, but I quickly realized mid recording it would have been a gargantuan video if I had did that. We'll be seeing our first real exploration of Tartarus next time.

Extra Notes

Now while the average person playing for the first time would have complete freedom to do what they want at this point (for the most part), in the interest of showing off everything guaranteed, I will be using pre-made schedules. Luckily, the original games were released during GameFaqs' hey-day, so the contributor penguin_knight has made excellent schedules for Persona 3 Vanilla, Persona 3 FES, AND Persona 3 Portable. There are a couple inefficiencies with these guides (particularly a handful of useless trips to Chagall Cafe when you can just use pop quiz questions to get those charm points in P3P), but they're very reliable for maxing every social link in the game, and there's only a slight bit of RNG you have to grapple with in Vanilla.

Now Reload is more recent and has come out at a time where traditional guides have unfortunately found themselves phased out for more specialized videos, reddit posts, and wiki entries. Thankfully, there are still people out there who carry the banner of their forebears, and I found an excellent schedule posted to Steam by the user Duplexium. This one follows a very similar flow to FES, so I'll feel right at home using this one. It's not at all necessary to use schedules if you just note when you can advance social links and at least have the correct answers ready, but for a hefty let's play project such as this, these are a God send for keeping things simple.

Going forward, I'm largely going to be giving each game its own subheading to remark on things we want to keep in mind for each particular version of the game. With that established,

Persona 3 FES

-With the Police Station and Be Blue V opened, we can now gear ourselves up. We don't have nearly the money for that right now though, so the only purchase I absolutely want to make is getting a Short Bow. This isn't strictly necessary, but it avoids having to deal with weapon loot RNG in Tartarus. By having the Protagonist equipped with a Bow alongside Yukari, it will make the first boss fight way easier.

-Going to the movies and then the Arcade on 4/21 allows us to collect a whopping +8 to our Courage. That's 10% of the points we need altogether on the very first free day of the game! With purchasing the Bow, this will drain all our funds, so we'll have to go Tartarus the following night no matter what. Not that it really matters, our starting capital is so low we'd be going there sooner rather than later regardless.

-The PS2 versions of Persona 3 have a unique time slate, Late Night. Any night where you do not go to Tartarus, you instead progress to Late Night. You have the option to Rest to put yourself in the Great condition the next day, or study for +2 Academics with the chance of becoming Tired. Despite sounding pretty broken for being a free +2 Academics almost every day on top of any other boosts you get, it's actually relatively balanced in both PS2 versions. Vanilla gives you less options for boosting Academics, while in FES the Tired proc happens fairly often. That being said, getting Tired from studying is arguably beneficial at this point for reasons we'll cover later.

-Kenji Kramers his way into our social life, kick starting our very first Social Link that isn't an auto-advance like the Fool link! Kenji is available for us to hang out with Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. He represents the Magician, which is the archetypical early game arcana. Despite that, it's also one of the best Arcana's long term due to having access to powerful fire elemental attacks, so in a casual run it pays to focus maxing out Kenji early on. He's pretty easy to read and it's not at all difficult to progress his link, even without a guide. Because we need to ration our time wisely to max every link, we won't be fast tracking him, but he'll still max out well before we can even hope to access the ultimate Persona of the Magician arcana.

Persona 3 Portable

-Pretty similar to FES really, though the stats we work on are different. The movie and arcade game boost academics instead. Outside of that, we make no purchases from Officer Kurosawa since the FemC can only use Naginatas. This will make the first boss fight much tougher on top of another mechanical change already making it harder, but we have ways and means for dealing with that.

-Junpei subs in for Kenji as the Magician, providing us a much more endearing link the process! The progression is pretty similar, Junpei is a straight shooter like Kenji so it isn't hard to figure out what to say to make him happy and his link develops pretty quickly. He's only available on Tuesdays and Thursdays though, so we have more limited opportunities to work on him.

Persona 3 Reload

-Once again we want nothing from Kurosawa since I don't care to waste my money on anything he has right now. The movie in this version boosts Charm, so we instead just head straight for the Arcade to boost our Courage. We're going to knock out Tartarus on 4/21 in this version because we want to build our funds ASAP.

-One major thing to take care of before advancing to night time is gathering Twilight Fragments. All around Tatsumi Port Island are Twilight Fragments, and we can collect all but two of them right now. Doing so is a good idea, as to use the healing clock in this version, you must pay 7 Twilight Fragments instead of Yen. Gathering almost every fragment now will give us two clock uses and some change, which will make taking care of Tartarus in a single evening vastly easier.

Miscellaneous

-Rather amusingly, for each console jump the type of movie that is played in the theater boosts a different stat. It's Courage on PS2, Academics on PSP, and Charm for the modern platforms running Reload. I think it's a funny thing to keep changing anyway.

Social Progress

Persona 3 FES

Academics: +6 (Rank 1)
Charm: +4 (Rank 1)
Courage +8 (Rank 1)

Magician Link: Rank 1

Massive step forward for the FES Protag, we've knocked out 1/10th of the necessary Courage points we need and are going to be more or less passively gaining Academics every night we don't go to Tartarus! We also have a slight augment in power from having the Link with Kenji, though it's not anything too special at this point.

Persona 3 Portable

Academic: +12 (Rank 1)
Charm: +4 (Rank 1)
Courage: +0 (Rank 1)

Magician Link: Rank 1

The FemC is a smart cookie right now, but hasn't had much of an opportunity to work on other stats. Late Night is no longer a thing, so we'll be seeing a more varied spread of gains as we follow along the schedule since we can't hyper focus one stat while passively boosting Academics. Not too much else to say here, social link progress is the same as FES.

Persona 3 Reload

Academics: +0 (Rank 1)
Charm: +4 (Rank 1)
Courage: +8 (Rank 1)

Sleeping in class has left us pretty stupid at this point, but it's also allowed us to keep our Courage even with FES. No social link in this game, since we're taking out Tartarus ASAP.

Cullen · Mon Jul 29, 2024 2:45 am

Part 5 is out! We return to Tartarus to do our first real exploration of it, reaching the first boss fight and seeing various tutorials and new features along the way. There's quite a lot to go over and my ability to focus on a single topic is abysmal, so let me know if anything was unclear from my explanations! Now the fatigue system (which we'll discuss in the notes below) in FES limits our ability to realistically explore all of Thebel at once, so to keep the playthroughs moving along consistently with each other we'll only be seeing up to the first boss of Tartarus plus a couple extra floors after. In Portable and Reload, I've already done almost everything there is to do with Tartarus until the next Full Moon, but we won't be seeing that until we return to Tartarus again in FES. For the sake of the LP, I think this actually works pretty well since it prevents strings of videos where we are doing nothing but climbing Tartarus.

Extra Notes

Persona 3 FES

-Now I had spent 3,000 yen on an arcade trip but it is far from necessary to do so. I'll likely max out Courage well ahead of schedule, and there's actually a surprisingly large number of useful things that yen can be spent on. Some notable choices include 3 Power Bands: this doesn't do much for your attack damage but +1 Strength on everyone can actually make your All-Out Attacks punch much harder. 2 Agility Bands for the MC and Yukari and a Power Band for Junpei is also a decent purchase, making the Venus Eagle fight a bit more consistent with the extra accuracy from the bands. Another valid choice is 3 Endurance bands to equip on everyone. You'd be surprised how much a single point of Endurance can reduce incoming damage by! Another option is to buy a Camo Shirt for the MC. Every point of Armor you have reduces incoming damage by about 2 points, so that's actually a pretty appreciable increase in survivability in the early game. The last one is probably the least useful though, as with enough patience you can find basically everything Officer Kurosawa sells in Tartarus for free.

-A good farming tactic for Tartarus is to remove your party members and just run past every shadow on the lower floors of Thebel, opening any chest you come across. You can get some pretty good hauls from the random treasure, from money to better equipment. It's easier to avoid conflict if you go solo.

-Fatigue kicks in on the basis of the number of battles you fight. While the amount of battles party members can fight in before getting Tired is quite low at this point in the game, you're usually allowed enough to make it to a boss floor without anyone getting tired. Generally, you should avoid fighting any battles on this first trip once everyone hits level 4, since you'll likely not have many battles left before the Tired status sets in at this point.

-It's far from necessary to fight the Venus Eagles tonight, you can just set the checkpoint and come defeat them on a return trip after getting better equipment with the funds from farming. Boss fights don't contribute to fatigue, if you're wondering.

-Related to the optimal farming method, you can rush the stairs of each floor after the Venus Eagles and secure the checkpoint for the next boss floor if you want. I didn't feel this was necessary, since I do want to do some fights and treasure hunting when we next return to Tartarus.

-If you're feeling up to gathering personas, it's a good idea to fuse Nekomata and Ara Mitama sooner rather than later. We'll be returning to Tartarus before we need those two, but it's one less thing to stress about if we take care of it now.

-Absolutely, under no circumstances, should you fuse away Orpheus at this point. We cannot use Cadenza without him, and it is impossible to get him back at this point if you fuse him away. This is not necessary for the other versions of the game due to how fusion spells have been retooled.

Persona 3 Portable

-This is one of the few sections of the game where I'd say Maniac in Portable is a little bit harder than Hard in FES. While we do get a lot more EXP, we're going into Tartarus under prepared with no chance to upgrade ourselves with anything outside of Tartarus. Don't be afraid to stop and treasure hunt for good gear and items if bosses are giving you trouble.

-Persona 3 Portable has a larger number of random events that can happen when revisiting floors, key among them being an event where you get more EXP for every battle you fight until you leave your current floor. If you're looking to grind, don't be afraid to fish for these events.

-If you get any attack items, save for them for the boss fights. These items deal fixed damage, and they are some of our best attacking options at this stage of the game.

-Orpheus and Apsaras give out the Agi and Bufu skill cards respectively, allowing you to customize a persona to check the weakness of nearly every enemy you can encounter in Thebel. Pixie is a decent choice for this due to the fact she lacks a weakness, but Angel comes in with Garu by default allowing her to check every enemy by herself if she gets the cards.

Persona 3 Reload

-Not too much to say here actually. As long as you go in with all the Twilight Fragments that you can collect at this point, you should be able to spread your SP out to clear all of Thebel in a single night. This goes for Portable but don't be afraid to use your Snuff Souls! 50 SP is a good amount of restoration in the early game that quickly becomes irrelevant, so it really is the best use for them to extend your magical offense when exploring Tartarus.

-With sword cards giving skill cards now, it's easier than ever to customize a perfect counter Persona. Once Arcana Burst happens, you can pick up cards for every tier 1 elemental spell. I elected to give near perfect coverage to Orpheus with the cards I got (which we'll see in due time), but that was more for fun than anything. There's a number of good magic based Personae we'll eventually be able to fuse, so don't be afraid to pick up as many skill cards as you can to fine tune them once they're available!

-If you really want to, you can make upcoming battles incredibly easy if you grind Yukari to level 11. She learns Media at this level, which is unbelievably good for this stage of the game. I don't plan on doing this but it is an option.

Miscellaneous

-Probably an unpopular opinion, but I actually kind of like how the fatigue system works in FES. Having the Tired status loom over your head creates a certain kind of tension in deciding whether or not to engage in battles beyond the normal consideration of how tough the enemies are. Plus just having an organic mechanic within the game that encourages you to take breaks with Tartarus actually goes a surprisingly long way in keeping the dungeon crawling from being too repetitive. I usually optimize my trips around the fatigue system and seek to get the most out of a night in Tartarus before my team inevitably starts bailing on me.

Social Progress

No changes here since we were in Tartarus all night. This will be changing rapidly come next video though.

Cullen · Thu Aug 01, 2024 2:21 am

Supplemental: Protagonist FES/Portable/Reload

"Persona!"

As I am wont to do for my RPG LPs, I'll be writing out supplemental posts regarding mechanics, characters, and strategies. I do this to give a better idea of why I approach things the way I do, as well as get a more organized thought dump out there since I know I can stumble over my words and lose my train of thought frequently. What better place to start with discussing characters and mechanics than with our protagonists?

Now it's important to note, there's quite a wealth of changes and additions when it comes to mechanics in Persona 3 Reload, and some characters function almost completely differently in the remake compared to how they used to be. Even disregarding that, many of the characters have been overhauled to the point that even if they serve the same role in the party, the ways you can use them at various stages of the game are often vastly different. I'll eventually write up dedicated Reload posts for each character in the game, but I'll be saving that for once we gain access to every unique mechanic related to characters in that game. Up until then, I'll just write brief blurbs regarding the characters in Reload in their FES/Portable bios.

Of course the main character kind of falls outside of this consideration due to their central mechanic. They are not bound to a single Persona, and will indeed be obtaining and creating many new ones throughout the game. No doubt, the average player will have their protagonist run through every possible specialization they could have through the course of the game, and a well equipped protagonist with meticulously fused Personae will likely be able to swap between specializations on the fly come the end of the game. There are some things to consider beyond that though, especially in comparison to Reload.

In FES

The Main character has several unique considerations in the PS2 versions of Persona 3 compared to later revisions. First and foremost, as demonstrated in Part 5 the Vanilla/FES Protagonist is not bound to a single weapon type, and can equip almost any weapon that is wielded by the members of his party. Since weapons aren't dogshit in Persona 3 PS2 and there's 3 physical types to consider with every one having an opportunity to strike weaknesses, this is a pretty good attribute to have. Even beyond that, if you don't care about the weapon type specifically, the main character still gets full control over what bonus abilities he's getting from his equipped weapons. Another thing to consider is fusion spells, which I will list below and update this post as we encounter new ones. By having two specific Personae in his stock and equipping one of them, the protagonist can bust out unique powerful spells that have a high SP cost of a fixed percentage, but often have incredible or at least interesting effects. Some of these are garbo, but there's quite a few that are unbelievably powerful if you can think to work them into your load out. Finally, the protagonist on PS2 is the only character who can tap into your item supply in battle. Items can be critical to surviving battle, and many of them can replicate powerful spells or do things that spells cannot accomplish, making this a nice feather in his cap. Other minor considerations are that you can only modify team tactics on the MC's turn and that at the end of the day due to AI control governing your team, the MC is the only one you can truly rely on to accomplish a specific task for a given turn. If something absolutely needs to happen in a turn, make sure your protagonist is the one doing it.

Not specific to FES, but always keep in mind that it's game over if your protagonist is knocked out in battle. Something that does need to be kept in mind is that the protagonist's HP cannot be boosted independent of equipment and level ups, making these things much more valuable in FES and Portable.

In Portable

Several retools to the mechanics on the account of them being air dropped in from Persona 4 means that the MC/FemC are a mix of weaker and stronger here. Gone is the ability to use multiple weapons, but weapons are in that awkward phase of being nerfed into uselessness outside of their abilities, so that's not a huge deal most of the time. You enjoy the general QoL bonuses such as not being the sole item caddy with direct control for party members and having a guard command, but the use of Persona 4 mechanics make critical hits from the enemy anathema to the protagonist now, especially on Maniac mode with multi-target physicals from the enemy. We'll see that in due time, trust me. Fusion spells still exist, but are now items that can only be replenished after a certain point in the story and require other unique items to trade for. On the bright side again, this means you don't need to cart around outdated or useless Personae to use them. The FemC herself has a few fringe perks, mainly regarding equipment selection. Her ultimate weapon becomes available much earlier than the MC's, and she has access to some powerful female exclusive armors at various points in the game (though she has the same ultimate armor as anyone else.) Overall, the changes to the Portable protagonist are most prominent early on and are largely superficial later in the game. In the beginning it's a good idea to keep a lot of this in mind though as it tends to be relevant to the early game bosses which were not rebalanced for the Persona 4 mechanics. One major boon the Portable protagonist has are skill cards. These items allow them to just simply teach Personae new skills independent of having to fuse them with the skills, making it much easier to customize up a stock of ass kickers. This is especially prominent in the late game and can literally save dozens of hours if you plan to take on the ultimate bonus boss.

Fusion Spells

Cadenza: Requires Fool Oprheus and Priestess Apsaras. In Persona 3 Portable, this can be obtained at the Antique Store for the cost of 2 Malachite and 1 Amethyst. Costs 20% of your Max SP in FES, and restores the party's HP by 50% while also giving a unique evasion buff status. This status gives the same evasion bonus as Sukukaja, though without the accuracy bonus to go with it. It also only lasts two turns, but uniquely can be reapplied before it expires, extending the duration. It is the only buff or debuff that works like this in FES and Portable, as it wasn't until Persona 4 Golden that they changed it so that you could recast buffs/debuffs before they expire to extend the duration. Needless to say, this spell is crazy good and is absolutely critical for surviving on Hard mode in FES. 50% HP multi target is the best healing possible you can have at this stage of the game, and it pretty much always outclasses Mediarama once we get that. The evasion buff can also go a long way to minimizing damage, even if it isn't reliable. This is the main thing that makes Orpheus worth hanging onto, and it's a serious consideration to buff him up with EN boosting items when you have the chance just so this spell can stay relevant. Definitely keep Orpheus and Apsaras around so you can make regular use of this spell, and do not fuse off Orpheus early on since it will be awhile before you get him back and the absence of Cadenza can make several battles beyond infuriating. Once you can trade for these in Portable, it's a great investment there as well though slightly less helpful because your party is a bit more reliable with direct control. At least you don't have to haul around beginner tier Personae to use it in Portable.

Justice: Requires Justice Angel and Justice Archangel. In Portable, this can be obtained for the cost of 1 Malachite and 1 Diamond. Costs 30% of your Max SP in FES and will reduce all enemies current HP by 50%. Although it is technically a Light element attack, it cannot trigger weaknesses. Naturally, bosses are immune to this spell. If it cost a bit less and triggered Light weaknesses, this spell might have been worth something in spite of the really weak Personae it's locked to. As it is though, it's too situational and far too expensive to rely on. Might be worth something against Strong Shadows, but those also have more reliable counters. Just grab this to complete Elizabeth's request and call it a day. It's a little more worthwhile in Portable due to not costing SP, though your mileage will definitely vary on if it's worth the resources it takes to get it.

Jack Brothers: Requires Magician Jack Frost and Magician Pyro Jack. In Portable, this can be obtained for 1 Malachite and 1 Emerald. Costs 15% of your Max SP in FES. This one is really weird, it's classified by the game as an almighty skill but it does not deal damage. Instead, it has about a 50% chance of putting an enemy into the Down status. It's multi-targeting, so it has lowish odds of downing multiple enemies without needing to strike their weakness. Far to unreliable to ever be put to good use, the required Personae for it a generally better off attacking. I believe this one can work on bosses, but again it's just too unreliable to shoot for and the fact it deals no damage directly makes it a less than ideal use of your SP. Again, it's less of an SP drain in Portable, but I'd be hard pressed to say it's worth the resources it takes to get access to it.

Frolic: Requires Lovers Narcissus and Lovers Pixie. In Portable, it requires 1 Malachite and 2 Amethyst. It costs 10% of your Max SP in FES. This is an interesting one, something of a sideways upgrade to Cadenza. Frolic effectively casts Mediarahan on your party (full healing to everyone!), and it's available to use about 35 levels sooner than any Persona that allows you to cast that spell. This sounds pretty good, but there is a catch. Anyone healed by Frolic has a flat 30% chance of being Charmed, meaning that using this to heal your party has a not inconsiderable chance of turning at least half your party into hostiles, with your Protag being among those who can be affected! Here in lies a trick though: Charm resistance does block out the Charm aspect of Frolic, meaning that if you're immune to Charm it's essentially Mediarahan but available close to the mid-game as opposed to late game. It's something you have to build around, but it is possible to make practical use of this skill for a decent while, and Narcissus has pretty good resistances making it an interesting way for the Protag to function as some kind of off-tank healer in FES. It's one of the cheaper fusion items to get in Portable as well, so if you find yourself in situations where this kind of healing might be critical, it's worth keeping in mind.

In Reload

"Alright."

Reload brings in a number of mechanical updates and changes that don't directly affect the Protagonist but do affect the tools at his disposal. The most obvious boon the Protag gets coming into this version is that he is now able to manually select the inherited skills when fusing new Personae. On top of skill types being less restrictive, it is much easier to have a Protagonist who can cover every situation in this game. Jumping off from Portable, the Inari shrine has also been retooled to be much more helpful. Not only can you now directly select skill cards to duplicate, the card is duplicated immediately and the service can be used once per day. The only annoying RNG point involved with skill card duping now is that you no longer get cards from leveling up Personae and instead have to rely on Shuffle Time for a good number of them. One last mechanical change that is something of a nerf to the Protag but a buff to everyone else is that the old stat raising cards have been removed, replaced with Incenses. Incenses can be used on your party members and also have a higher cost to trade for in comparison to the old stat cards, meaning it's a bigger investment to max out any one Persona for the Protag. Finally, the Persona Compendium is much cheaper in this version of the game, and you get further discounts as you raise your registration percentage. This allows you to play around with fusion a lot more without losing tried and true Personae in the process.

Onto direct changes to the Protag himself, like Portable multiple weapon types have been removed. Not a big a loss though since weapons kind of blow for the purpose of dealing damage in this game, though you have less ability options at your disposal. As we go further into the game, the Protagonist will also pick up upgrades to his capabilities out of battle in Tartarus. There are a couple of computer programs we can use that upgrade our Preemptive strikes, improving our standing vis-a-vis the enemy at a battle's offset. Next up is the Protag's Characteristic, his unique passive that will always be in effect when unlocked. While Characteristics are typically unlocked via hanging out with a SEES member 3 times for a specific event, the Protagonist can't very well hang out with himself (Well I mean I guess he can but it's against the spirit of the game). The Protag's Characteristic is instead unlocked via Compendium completion percentage. At 30% completion, you gain Weakness Boost, which is an additional 1.1X Multiplier (10% bonus if it's the only damage boost being considered) to damage dealt when striking an enemy's weakness. At 60% completion, this upgrades to Weakness Amp, which is a 1.2X Multiplier! Given the Protagonist can easily have every single potential weakness covered, this is a fantastic passive to have for him and helps a ton with closing out fights within a single turn once you have it. The Protag's Characteristic is obviously not the only feather he has in his cap, it's time to talk about Theurgy!

Theurgy

Theurgy is the functional replacement for Fusion Spells in Reload as far the Protag is concerned. Theurgy is much easier to work with than Fusion Spells are though, as you merely need to have fused the constituent Personae at some point and have their compendium data. Once the requisite Personae have been fused/obtained, their Fusion Spell will be added to the Protag's Theurgy menu and can be used whenever he pleases, provided he has a fully charged Theurgy gauge of course. All Theurgies in the Protag's arsenal are buffed or retooled versions of fusion spells from the older games, though a number of fusion spells were cut in the transition to Reload (Likely because a good chunk of them were overly gimmicky trash). Like everyone else, the Protagonist has a special condition for gaining extra Theurgy charge. His condition is "After summoning a Persona, power within gradually enhances." What the fuck does that mean? Basically anytime the Protag switches his Persona and uses a skill with the freshly swapped Persona, he gains a little extra on his gauge. It's definitely one of the weaker conditions for a couple reasons. One is that is just doesn't yield very much extra gauge. The other is that in prolonged fights, you're likely going to have a dedicated counter Persona for the boss or tough enemy you're fighting, and aren't liable to switch too much. Because of this, the Protag will likely proc most of his gauge charge from hitting weaknesses, landing crits, and being Shifted to. This does mean his Theurgy charges somewhat slow, but thankfully in compensation the Fusion Spells available are very potent!

Cadenza: The first Fusion Spell you're liable to see in FES returns, and it's actually mostly the same as it was in FES and Portable. Cadenza is your default Theurgy, technically requiring Orpheus and Apsaras to be registered in order to use, but Reload does not ever give you the option to have that not be the case. Like the FES/Portable Fusion spell, it restores 50% HP to the entire party. Unlike the older games though, the buffing effect is slightly different. Cadenza in Reload simply applies Masukukaja, rather than the unique Evasion Buff status that it does in FES/Portable. This is for the better though, as Masukukaja not only increases our accuracy in addition to our evasion, it also lasts 3 turns to the Evasion Buff status' 2! All buffs can be refreshed by reapplying them now, so it's not like that unique aspect of Evasion Buff even matters anymore either. That all said, this Theurgy is actually a fair deal less useful than it is in FES and Portable. The healing was always the big draw of this skill, and Reload introduces a bevvy of new options on that front. Not only do stronger healing options become available to the Protagonist and the dedicated healers in the party far earlier, Aohige Pharmacy also now sells Mult-target healing items that are more than adequate for your purposes in most fights. As a result, I don't typically use Cadenza too much in this game, though that doesn't mean it's bad at all.

Jack Brothers: Unlocked once you have fused/obtained Jack Frost and Jack O' Lantern. In FES/Portable, this is a useless joke skill that has about a 40% chance of knocking over enemies for way too much SP spent. Reload salvages this skill by not only massively buffing the Knock Down chance to something around 70% or so, it now deals Almighty damage to all enemies to sweeten the pot! Now all Theurgies pierce elemental resistances, so being Almighty in element is actually kind of unhelpful since the Almighty Boost passives aren't available until the end game. There are some boosts that can power this up a bit though, such as Multi-Target Boost. Jack Brothers' damage value is somewhere between Megidola and Megidolaon, which is quite good for the stage of the game where we get access to it. It'll be flatly outclassed by later Theurgies we unlock, but for right now it's a good heavy hitter skill to throw out when you have your gauge charged. The Knock Down effect also works on bosses, meaning this can sometimes create an opportunity to really unload on the enemy if you're lucky. Knock 'em down with this, and have everyone else pop off their Theurgies, and you'll see some beautiful numbers flood your screen.

King and I: Now this is what I'm talking about! Once you have fused King Frost and Black Frost (due to the former requiring an item to fuse and the latter being a Special Fusion, they MUST be fused), you gain access to this excellent spell. Functionally, King and I is almost identical to Mitsuru's Blizzard Edge, same base power and same status as a resistance piercing Ice attack. Where it differs is that it is an AOE skill instead of a Single Target skill and that its base Freeze chance is 50% instead of 80%. The former trait makes it quite a bit more useful in a greater variety of situations, while the latter trait seldom matters. What really puts this skill over the top compared to Blizzard Edge is the fact that the Protag is the one who uses it. Mitsuru has to wait until end game to stack damage boosts onto Blizzard Edge to maximize its power. The Protag can do this on obtainment, and due to the overwhelming power of Theurgies to begin with, stacking Ice Boost and Mult-Target Boost pushes this skill to extreme heights that only a Junpei crit can really reach. King and I is where the Protag really starts to come into his own with the art of violence, and seldom will you ever be wheeling out Cadenza or Jack Brothers once you get it. Keep an Ice specialist on hand at all times once you get this skill, it will tear chunks out of any enemy it's thrown against with the proper passives. Do keep in mind how I said Mult-Target Boost earlier: The Single Target and Multi-Target Boost passives apply their bonus based on if a skill hits single or multiple enemies in general, rather than the actual number of enemies they hit when used.

Cullen · Thu Aug 01, 2024 3:26 am

Supplemental: Stats, or why should I care about any of these numbers?

With our exploration, we've leveled up a fair few times and have begun to raise our statistics. The question emerges then: What do these numbers do and why should I care about them? Now I'll fully admit I'm ignorant to the under-the-hood mechanics of these games, so if anyone wants to illuminate me on that they are more than welcome. This is just going to be a quick and dirty rundown of the numbers relating to your character's combat performance and a rough description of why or maybe I should say when you should focus on increasing them. It's worth noting that the post PS1 Persona games have pretty heavily de-emphasized stats compared to mainline SMT, and power jumps almost always come from the skills you can use rather than the numbers fueling them. Still, once you have the best stuff at your disposal, the relative effect of stats is a bit more appreciable, so it can pay to know what to expect when you say, cap your MA stat.

Level: The first stat to mention. Normally in RPG's level has no effect in and of itself and it's just the number you increase to see the actually important statistics go up, but in the SMT series and especially the PS2 and PSP versions of Persona 3, your level relative to the enemy has massive scaling effects. If you are ever getting your ass kicked up and down the stairs of Tartarus, it is not a bad idea to just spend some time leveling up and see how much that mitigates incoming damage while increasing your own with no relation to the actual stat increases you get. One thing to consider regarding the protagonist specifically, all level related damage calculations are tied strictly to their own level and not the level of the Persona they have equipped. This is a major thing that allows outdated Personae to stay relevant in any version of the game. Level is less of a consideration in Reload, but it does still affect things.

HP/SP: You know damn well what the former is, and SP is just the alternative nomenclature for Magic Points this game uses. Obviously, HP determines how many hits your characters can take before keeling over, while SP is the fuel for your skills. Not too much to say about this in FES/Portable aside from the fact that these values vary wildly between party members and some are fundamentally bad in them which hurts them quite a bit. Reload adds ways to accrue permanent boosts for these stats independent of levels which is really nice. One other thing to note is that when you hit level 99, your HP and SP automatically increase to 999, which is quite a jump to say the least.

Strength(ST): Determines the power of your physical skills, as well as providing bonus to your weapon attack damage alongside the attack stat of your equipped weapon. Actually a very important stat in FES/Portable since aside from one ability that only affects weapons, there are no passives that boost the damage of physical skills. All that damage will come from your ST and your Level, so this stat is critical to have at a high value if you want to do good physical damage. There are a lot of good AOE physical skills in all versions of the game, so it's not a bad thing to focus on pumping up when you have the free time to do so. Reload has phys boosting passives, so it's less critical there but obviously a little bit of power gaming will never hurt. Assuming you're evenly matched with what you are fighting, 99 ST can roll about 200-400 damage on your enemies with the best skills depending on a variety of factors. This is surprisingly similar scaling in Reload, though the introduction of phys boosting passives makes the maximum potential much higher.

Magic (MA): Incredibly nerfed from the other PS2 MegaTen entries, this purely affects the magic damage you deal and nothing else. No bonus MP and Magic Defense here. MA is surprisingly unimportant to focus on, getting to newer tiers of Spells and having the corresponding passives to boost them is far more critical than having a good MA stat. Once you do have that though, getting this up to 99 can see some pretty good returns. Depending on the defensive prowess of what you are fighting, you can expect the strongest elemental magics to deal between 400-700 damage. This is quite good, but requires a lot more dedicated skill slots to get, so pure magic striking requires more fusion set up and investment. And obviously this only applies to the MC. A good example of how underwhelming MA is is Yukari. Despite having the highest MA stat in the game by quite a bit, by the end game she's one of the weaker casters in FES/Portable due to having no innate Boost/Amp passive. Other characters have considerably lower MA, but having a passive 50% boost allows them to outstrike her by a ton (Thankfully this is not the case by the end game of Reload due to a retool with Yukari.) Reload adds even more passives that can boost magic damage, so you can find yourself making some real hyperspecialize single element Personae, which does add a bit more value to MA.

One random thing to note, while MA affects most elemental damage, there is one case where ST is the stat used instead. There are a number of weapons that turn your normal attack into an elemental one instead of its usual physical type. This kind of attack uses ST and the weapons attack stat to determine damage, making it the only way to deal ST based elemental damage.

Endurance (EN): Determines resistance to all damage, magical or physical. Actually an extremely prominent stat, and the most notable one you get value out of increasing in the early game. A few points of EN can shave off a ton of damage. Boosting EN is a great way to keep fusion spells on weaker Personae relevant in FES, and in general you can get away with using outdated Personae for quite awhile if they have good EN. Low EN characters are some of the less desirable to use ones in the game due to the ease of which they can be knocked out of combat. The relative benefits of EN are extremely pronounced in the early game, where a mere 5 point difference can come close to halving incoming damage. If you're looking for any stat to augment via equipment, EN is a good one to keep in mind.

Agility (AG): Determines accuracy and evasion for/against physical attacks and magic attacks. Also determines turn order in random battles and some mini boss fights. In Reload, the protagonist's AG is considered when determining turn order and when he acts, which is not the case in older versions of the game where they are usually first in the turn order no matter what. Not a super prominent stat all truth told, and it can be completely invalidated as a need with buffs and debuffs. Definitely the worst stat to be focused in, I've never noticed any serious benefit from increasing this stat. One of the best accessories in the game outright disables evasion, to give you an idea of how little you should care about this stat.

Luck (LU): Luck affects a lot of things by a little. It gives bonuses to your crit rate, determines your resistance to and success rate with using ailments, ditto for insta-death spells. Funnily enough, this stat seems to have gotten weaker over the various remakes, it does barely anything in Portable while in FES it actually does quite well at making insta-death spells useful. In Reload, the main reason to care for this is crit rate since critical hits are a much more fleshed out and reliable mechanic. In FES/Portable, capping this will be a matter of course for any ultimate Persona you make while it takes a little more care in Reload. Like I said though, Reload mainly cares about this stat for crit rate, and there are more crit boosting passives at your disposal in Reload so it's not a super big deal to cap this. It's a little better than AG, but again I don't really see much benefit from focusing on things that increase it.

Attack: This is a stat purely influenced by your equipment, specifically your weapon. Attack pairs with ST to determine your damage when using a normal attack. Attack also influences the damage of All-Out Attacks, which is varying degrees of significant depending on your version (Highly significant in Vanilla and FES, considerably less so in Portable and almost not worth considering at the 20 hour mark of Reload). For the most part, any increase to this less than 50 doesn't really do much and weapons have become continually less important for their Attack stat as the series has gone on. In FES though this can be quite good to consider. Each 100 points of Attack you have roughly equates to your normal attack being as good as a given tier of physical skills: 100+ will match or beat a Weak skill, 200+ will match or beat a Moderate skill, and so on. Admittedly, this scaling mostly still applies in Portable, but All Out Attacks have been heavily toned down, your party members can be directly controlled, and you have far more skill options so weapons are just way less worth paying attention to. This stat is dogwater in Reload and you should only care about what abilities weapons provide you with. Maybe if you want more consistent All Out Attacks to proc shuffle time, you'll keep some better weapons on hand, but for the most part this stat is shit in Reload and can summarily be ignored.

Hit Rate: Weapon accuracy. Only affects your normal attack and is an arbitrary way to make certain weapons weaker. Naturally if this is lower, you're more likely to miss. May as well not exist in Reload.

Defense: The value of your armor, pairing with your EN to reduce all damage. The scaling on this seems to be quite linear, with every point of Defense you have lowering incoming damage by 1 or 2 points. Very significant in the early game, but falls off hard once you hit the point where tier 2 skills get thrown your way. This seems to be an intentional design decision in the earlier versions of the game, where different costumes were actually equippable armor pieces, so having the Defense stat be relatively unimportant meant you could focus on style instead. This is no longer the case as of Reload, and correspondingly armor values have gone up a bit, though it's still not a huge consideration to make. Upgrade your armor when it's cheap to do so, EN and Level play a far bigger role in your defensive ability.

Evasion: Pairs with AG or LU depending on the attack being thrown your way, plus any dodge related passives you have to determine if you dodge incoming attacks. Not really sure how this stat works in practice and it's fairly unimportant. Shoes kind of fill the role of weapons in FES where you can mostly just focus on the abilities they have rather than the stats they give. Any piece of footwear that gives an ability that boosts evasion against a character's weak element arguably does more than the actual evasion the shoe provides.

And that's the quick and dirty rundown. As of Reload, you do actually get more noticeable impact out of making stats go up, and you do have means to boost them independent of equipment for your party as well, so this can be a bit more handy to know there. In the older games, you'll mostly only care about the stats of your MC's best Personae, and even then only when you have the requisite skills to get the most out of them. Mostly you just want to focus on EN boosting equipment otherwise. Persona has always had a bigger emphasis on defensive play compared to mainline SMT due to far less ability to stack damage multipliers on multiple characters.

Cullen · Sun Aug 04, 2024 4:24 am

Supplemental: Yukari Takeba FES/Portable

"Please hit!!!"

Level 99 Stats

St: 50
MA: 91
EN: 55
AG: 55
LU: 53

Yukari resists Wind and is weak to Elec attacks.

Skills

Dia: Starts with
Patra: Level 4
Garu: Level 5
Charmdi: Level 16
Magaru: Level 21
Media: Level 22
Diarama: Level 25
Recarm: Level 28
Garula: Level 32
Me Patra: Level 36
Mediarama: Level 43
Magarula: Level 46
Diarahan: Level 52*
Garudyne: Level 57*
Wind Break: Level 60*
Magarudyne: Level 65*
Samarecarm: Level 68*
Mediarahan: Level 74*

Skills denoted with an asterisk are ones that can only be learned after a plot related upgrade in the story (This is only a thing in non-Reload versions, the same event does something different in Reload). Yukari's skill list is identical between FES and Portable. It is worth noting that the learn levels for a lot of skills were actually pretty different in P3 Vanilla and some characters got a couple new skills in the transition to FES, but this only occasionally matters and Yukari is outside of these moments.

As you can see from her ending stats and skill list, Yukari is a focused mage type character with an emphasis on healing. One notable deficiency in her kit is that she never learns a Boost or Amp passive to increase her damage with Wind skills, which matters a lot more than you'd expect. Yukari's a good damage dealer in the very early game when most other magic focused characters don't have boosts either but she finds herself pretty quickly outpaced once they start picking them up. There are accessories that replicate the effects of having said passives.... but those can be stacked on top of those passives for an even bigger damage yield, putting Yukari on the back foot for damage dealing again. Her main stock and trade for most of the game is healing, being one of two characters in SEES that has access to multi-target healing (aside from the protagonist of course) and picking up revival spells, but the rate she learns these at is awful in these versions of the game. Seriously, Media at level 22? By the time you get there it heals almost nothing. Yukari tends to be run by a lot of people due to her simple game plan and the seemingly intuitive idea of having a dedicated healer, but for my money she's one of the worst characters in the game. In the bottom 3 for sure. The reason for this is the aforementioned terrible rate she learns her skills at, her also aforementioned surprisingly low damage potential, and above all else her terrible defense. Yukari has the worst EN in the game on top of the lowest HP, meaning she's actually a fairly poor healer since she's much more at risk to get taken out before she can help the party. Several early major fights in the game expressly get their difficulty from Yukari's paper defenses, and she just consistently fails to impress at most stages of the game. There is one point in the mid game where it's a good idea to use her, but for most of the rest of it I usually have her on bench warming duty. The alternative healer is a better character by an absurd degree, which is something I hope to properly demonstrate why later in the LP.

In FES

Fitting she learns Wind Break because Yukari in this game is *fart noise*. Okay maybe I'm being harsh, but Yukari can be a serious liability. If she gets knocked on her ass by a Zio type spell, she either gets robbed of her ability to heal the team that turn (You know, her main use) or she gets hit with a follow up strike that will almost assuredly kill her. Another thing she has to grapple with, of course, is the infamous AI control. Getting Yukari to heal the party as a focus is easy, getting her to use the best spell for the situation on the other hand.... The AI in FES is very particular about using multi-target healing, generally only doing it if the entire party's average HP falls under 50% or so. Naturally this means either two characters need to be near death or the entire party needs to be in a precarious situation. There is nothing you can do about this, and it's always a good idea to bring along healing on your Protagonist for times when the AI can't be trusted to make a smart move. Her status cures seldom see use due to ailments completely breaking the AI when they come in play. For some reason, when an ailment is in effect and the AI is set to Heal/Support, if there is any damage to the afflicted character the AI will almost always prioritize restoring their HP over actually curing the stupid ailment, regardless of how much damage is actually done. This affects Yukari pretty badly since it essentially just makes Me Patra and Charmdi slot filler in her skill list. Like I said, there is a point around October where it's actually a really good idea to have he fighting ready, but beyond that point I really couldn't recommend using her.

In Portable

Yukari fares a bit better with the mechanics change, her weakness getting struck no longer means a potential turn loss. On the other hand, Critical Hits are much more dangerous to her in this version, often absolutely flooring her and if she survives she will be dead when the follow up happens. The addition of Guarding allows her a means to cover her weakness in fights where she was intended to be a liability. This does mean she does spend some turns doing literally nothing, but it at least means you can avoid giving the opponent free 1 More's. Like every character, Direct Control benefits her immensely, her ailment cures no longer being useless for instance. Things take a turn for the worse for her though when the alternate healer joins, because they got buffed massively in this version and essentially invalidated some of Yukari's scant advantages over them. My rating for Yukari is about the same as FES, get her ready when October is about to roll around but beyond that she's not that helpful.

In Reload

Yukari got several immense buffs here. Some related to Reload's unique mechanics, but in general she just learns her skills at a more reasonable rate. Her damage is still surprisingly bad for most of the game's run time, but she does actually have some theoretical end game potential since her last skill to learn is Wind Amp. I usually finish literally every fight except the final boss by the time this would come into play, but it is there I guess. Mostly Yukari is just a much better supporter, learning her better healing at a time where it's actually helpful and getting some really nice attributes when Reload's unique character mechanics come into play.

Cullen · Sun Aug 04, 2024 1:47 pm

Part 6 is out! Back to the doldrums of high school life as we continue to develop our friendships and become involved in extracurricular activities. Beyond the offbook dungeon crawling we've been doing at night, I mean. We also cover a waterfront of new mechanics during the day, and get drugs from the school nurse to help our confidence. Thrilling!

Extra Notes

Persona 3 FES

-The Chariot social link has 3 different versions but it is painfully clear they only truly considered one of them on account of a character we encounter later. Which of course, is the Track team which was the only sports club that was retained for Reload. Between the 3 clubs, the dialogue and central conflict is the same every time, the set piece is the only thing that is different.

-If planned for properly, Mr. Edogawa's medicine can be taken up to 5 times in a week, and possibly 6 depending on how long sickness can last for you. Even just the former, that knocks out an eighth of the required courage points needed to cap the stat, with absolutely no time investment! Obviously you don't need to always shoot for that, but I'd recommend at least shooting for 3 visits off of Tartarus related fatigue unless you really need to go back to Tartarus for some reason. Obviously we can also pick up the Tired status from Studying, which is somewhat annoying but it also means a free courage boost the next day if you're still on a weekday.

-For nights to go to Tartarus, you generally just want to avoid going on nights where the arcade game that boosts your current focus for social stats is available. For courage, Horror House is available Tuesday and Friday, so those days are no go's. Once we transition to Charm, that'll be Monday and Thursday, and then Wednesday and Saturday for Academics.

-It's slightly suboptimal to go to Tartarus on Sunday since we can do Karaoke that night for a 2 point courage boost, but it's easier to carry Tired into the school week this way, offsetting the initial courage loss and allowing us to pick up more courage throughout the week.

-After a point, I'll probably do a couple Quiz game nights since we do need to have Academics at level 2 by 5/29. Fortunately the required points for Academics 2 is fairly low compared to the overall cap, so it shouldn't detract from Courage boosting too much if I do that. If you're able to study on a night you do quiz game, that gets you +6 points which is a quarter of what you need for Rank 2!

-For most of the game, the only service we'll be using at the Naganaki Shrine is the relationship fortune. The offertory box was actually extremely helpful in Vanilla for reasons I'll cover in the next video, but it was retooled in FES and is pretty useless now. The Inari shrine has its uses, but taking up time during the day really gimps it so it'll be a long time before we really want to use it, and its main use is actually on New Game +.

-If you want to, you can burn some of your funds on equipment from Officer Kurosawa and Be Blue V at this point to help with the next Tartarus trip. The only thing I'd say is majorly helpful is buying an Agility band for the protagonist to help with the upcoming boss fight. I ~~forgot~~ decided this wasn't necessary, but we'll definitely want to buy gear for the third Thebel boss once we reach that.

Persona 3 Portable

-Very little to say here but there's a couple things to note. Since we'll be going to Tartarus less often and we'll no longer be studying at night since that got retooled, we won't be able to use Mr. Edogawa's medicine nearly as much in this version. That said, it's still a good idea to extend Tired for as long as you can to get those free boosts, and we'll be getting a few opportunities to do so throughout the game. The Tired/Sick cycle seems to be capped at 4 days in Portable, so it doesn't have quite as much potential here.

-Like FES, Tennis and Volleyball purely changes the aesthetics of the social link, you otherwise get the same character and story. And in this version, aesthetics means the background picture you see.

-The retooled Inari shrine is much weaker than the Reload version, but it's still a good idea to dupe a ton of cards. There's one in particular that we'll get early on that we want to make tons of dupes for when making our Personae for the final boss. I don't typically use this shrine too much since getting most cards in this version involves a ton of grinding, but if you do level out a Persona and get a really valuable card, don't hesitate to dupe it at the shrine!

-As mentioned in the video, most of the original effects of the Inari shrine are now random floor events in Tartarus when re-exploring cleared floors. You'll be more likely to see these bonuses throughout a standard playthrough, but it's trickier to make effective use of them in this version of the game. Aside from the obvious problem that they are floor specific instead of applying to your whole trip, you have no control over what event you get while they're also in a pool of unrelated events specific to floor layouts. There is a new mechanic involving Tartarus that makes it easier to encounter these events, but the lack of control in what you get is still a problem.

-One thing I forgot to do in the video was visit the school store on Saturday. They sell a very special item on Saturdays in this version. Fortunately, it'll be awhile before I need that item so I can just pick up some the next Saturday.

Persona 3 Reload

-Edogawa's medicine is still a thing in this game, but it's a lot harder to make use of and is much less helpful. In this version, Edogawa will only offer you the medicine the day after you explore Tartarus. Since we were forced to hang out with Kenji on 4/22, we lost the opportunity to use this mechanic.

-Being able to go to Iwatodai at night basically invalidates the old means of boosting your stats, and there's never any reason to use them anymore. Being able to score +4 points on a stat almost every night makes it easy to stay ahead of the timeline for when we need to cap these, and also allows us to more easily mix in other +4 boosts besides our focus stat.

-Once you start building up a good spread of skill cards, you should frequently visit the Inari shrine for duping them. One per day that you get back immediately? Yes please! Additionally it's much easier to get a good stock of cards in this game, making this buff the shrine got even more prominent. If you're looking to make generalist Personae or Personae that are hyper specialized in a single element/attack type, you want to keep this service in mind.

Social Progress

Persona 3 FES

Academics: +6 (Rank 1)
Courage: +24 (Rank 2)
Charm: +6 (Rank 1)

Magician Social Link: Rank 2
Chariot Social Link: Rank 1
Hierophant Social Link: Rank 1

In the span of 5 days, we got our Courage over a quarter of the way to its maximum! We won't be able to keep up this momentum consistently, as there are a number of days we'll lose through no choice of our own, but if we keep this up we can have this maxed well ahead of schedule. As mentioned previously, I will probably want to take a couple quiz game nights just to be sure I get my Academics where I need it to be on schedule, but we're so far ahead with Courage right now that it should hardly be an issue to dedicate a couple Wednesdays or Saturdays to it. The Bookstore is closed on Sundays instead of Mondays in Vanilla and FES, so we couldn't get Hierophant to Rank 2. This doesn't matter much though, the movies were still available for Courage boost on 4/26 and there's plenty of spare time in the schedule for non-school social links anyway.

Persona 3 Portable

Academics: +16 (Rank 1)
Courage: +8 (Rank 1)
Charm: +6 (Rank 1)

Chariot Social Link: Rank 1
Hierophant Social Link: Rank 2

No stat rank ups at this point, but they'll come in due time. Due to the shifted schedule of the FemC story, we're still a little incongruent between all versions of the game with social link progress. These differences will become more pronounced in terms of what links we're working on at any given time, but the general volume of rank ups should start to become pretty similar going forward with the game.

Persona 3 Reload

Academics: +0 (Rank 1)
Courage: +20 (Rank 2)
Charm: +8 (Rank 1)

Magician Social Link: Rank 2
Chariot Social Link: Rank 1
Hierophant Social Link: Rank 2

Night time Iwatodai kind of breaks the original social stat progression. As you can see, despite not being able to grind courage as nearly as much as we can in FES, being able to get +4 boosts on a regular basis has already close to caught it up, and will let it catch up next time we return to the Bay Area. Once you know what you're doing, it's trivial to get each stat to where it needs to be on time, and a retool to Academics related events makes it much easier to qualify for those as well.

Cullen · Mon Aug 05, 2024 12:02 am

It's a double update kind of day with a bonus video! Now I've mentioned a couple times that the writing of the social links between Reload and FES is incredibly similar most of the time so it's not really worth showing both versions of the links in the same video. It'd be a waste not showcase the evolution of how the links are presented though, so I figured I could compile the FES links into their own separate little videos so people can play spot the difference if they want. Additionally, I'll also bundle in the Portable versions of links that the FemC shares with the MC, since there are some minor differences in how these links are portrayed here and there to account for the female perspective.

Cullen · Tue Aug 06, 2024 5:25 pm

Supplemental: Social Stats and Scheduling, or How I Gorged and Gamed My Way to Popularity

So we've been going through our breezy school days without really dwelling too much on the options we take, or at least I haven't been commenting on them too much, but obviously there's a method to this if you want to maximize your social stats and fully complete every social link before the game ends. This post will mostly focus on the routing choices we want to make in order to max out our social stats so they're ready for when we need them, but I do briefly want to touch on Social Links and when to start them.

If you don't want to stick to rigid schedule with your social links, then it's important to keep two major things in mind for Portable and Reload. Number one is that you always want to open up new social links the moment you can, especially if they take place in school. There are a couple of Link initiates outside of school that can conflict with progressing ones in school, but thankfully exam weeks and holidays tend to give us free opportunities to activate these. (There is one quirky link that functions like an out of school link in the PS2 games, but functions like an in school one in Reload until you actually activate it, which we'll touch on later) The other major thing to note is ties into that last part of the previous point: you should always focus in school links over out of school ones when you have the option to do. Holidays, Exam lead up and vacation periods all give you ample time to work on out of school links, so working on them while you have an in school link you can work on is a waste of days and is probably the biggest trip up that keeps people from maxing social links on their own in Reload.

Now when it comes to Vanilla and FES, the latter major point is true while the previous one you need to be a bit more selective on. Vanilla and FES have two unique social link related mechanics: Neglect and Jealousy. Neglect is exactly what it says on the tin, if you neglect a Social Link for a given period of time the friend the link is tied to will feel neglected and the link will Reverse. When a link reverses, you no longer gain EXP bonuses from Persona fusion for it until you fix it (which is done with a Relationship Fortune rather than talking it out lol). In Vanilla, both Male and Female Social Links would reverse after 60 days of no interaction, but FES retooled it so that Male social links take 90 days instead. I'm not sure if out of school links have this mechanic actually, but with how holidays, vacations and exams are scheduled it should genuinely never be an issue regardless. Now the other mechanic, Jealousy, is by far the most infamous and hated mechanic of Persona 3's social simulator aspect. Female social links in Vanilla and FES automatically become romantic regardless of player choice (Yes you're forced into being a philanderer). The rank this happens at varies depending on the Social Link, but when it does happen the girl in question will now become Jealous if you hang out with another Female social link that can become romantic. When a Jealousy penalty is incurred, 15 days are taken off the Neglect counter for the Jealous party, rapidly accelerating the rate at which the link can reverse. This means that it is a terrible idea to activate too many in school social links with female classmates at once, as you have to work too hard to juggle Jealousy and Neglect. For the most part, Neglect isn't something you need to worry about with Male classmates because the timer is so generous, but you still want to take care with how long it has been since you've hung out with one of your bros. With that taken care of, let's go over the various social stats, when you want them maxed by, and how you can go about maxing them out.

In Persona 3 FES

For Courage, we need to be at Rank 2 for the Tower social Link, Rank 4 for the Star Social Link, and Rank 6 for the Priestess social link. The dates for when we need those ranks for the previous 2 genuinely don't matter (especially in Tower's case) because the Priestess link is available to start on 6/19, months before the Star link becomes available. All deadlines for when you need a maxed out social stat are the same between Vanilla, FES and Reload.

For Charm, we need to be at Rank 2 for the Moon Social Link, Rank 4 for the Devil Social Link, and Rank 6 for the Lovers Social Link. Now the former 2 are actually available much earlier than the deadline for when you need to max this for maximum efficiency, but it's also not that big of a deal for similar reasons to Courage. We need to max out Charm by 7/25 for the Lovers link, which can be a slightly tight time limit but we get more incidental boosts to that than Courage in all versions of the game, so it's pretty easy to manage once you max Courage.

For Academics, we need Rank 2 for the Temperance Social Link, Rank 4 for the Sun Social Link, and Rank 6 for the Empress Social Link. Now we actually have two deadlines we need to worry about in this case. We want to get to Rank 2 Academics by 5/29 in order to start the Temperance Social Link on that day since it's optimal to do so then. This one has a nasty trick to it that if you don't activate it before a certain point, it becomes permanently unavailable. I think Reload removed this aspect, but I haven't looked into that so let me know if I'm wrong. We have plenty of time for the Sun social link since we'll have long since maxed are other stats by the time it becomes available, so that one's not worth worrying too much about. Now the Empress link technically isn't available until 11/21. but there is a quirk to it that requires us to potentially (and most likely) need Academics maxed by 10/12. To access this Link, you must also place top of your class in at least one exam, and that exam is the last chance to do so before the link first becomes available. In order to top that exam, you need to have maxed out Academics. (The other exams require Rank 3 and Rank 5 for the record, which is doable in Vanilla but requires too much time investment in FES to be feasible.)

The points required to max out each stat is 80 for Courage, 100 for Charm and a whopping 230 for Academics. Since the average boost gives +2 points, assuming we only did 1 boost per day we'd need 40 days for Courage, 50 days for Charm and 115 days for Academics. That sounds daunting, but fortunately we have many tools at our disposal to tackle this more effectively than that.

For Courage, our options are:

-See a Courage boosting movie during the Day: +4, Advances Time
-Eat at Wild Duck Burger if it's open during the Day: +3, Advances Time
-Visit Mr. Edogawa while Tired or Sick and accept his medicine: +2, Does Not Advance Time
-Perform Karaoke at night (Unavailable Saturday): +2 Courage, Advance to Late Night
-Play Horror House on Tuesday and Friday: +4, Advance to Late Night

Now we have 39 potential nights for developing Courage with Karaoke until we need to max it. That's not enough to max Courage in time, but luckily FES gives us some good extra boosts to work with! The obvious one is Horror House. The arcade is a new addition to FES, giving us nights where we can get double boosts for our social stats, essentially giving us two days of growth in one. Each time we use it essentially gives us an extra day to work on another stat down the line, which is the main reason why we can potentially max Charm despite the short time between the Courage deadline and the Charm deadline. Additionally, by exploiting Edogawa's medicine, we can shave even more days off and give us time to fit in some Academics and Charm boosts if we want to.

For Vanilla it's a little bit tighter, as the Arcade does not actually exist as a visitable location in that game (I plan to mention this in the videos). Additionally, Karaoke is also closed on Fridays, which docks us a whopping 9 days to work on it! 30 days with no Arcade is quite a bit under what we need to max it, but thankfully the theater still exists with the same days where we are free to use it at no loss to our social links. Assuming you can make every day to perform Karaoke, you only need one Edogawa boost to max Courage in time, though obviously you want as many as you can to get more days to work on Charm. Speaking of,

For Charm, our options are,

-Answer pop quizzes correctly in class: +2. Technically advances time, but since it's its own context sensitive time slot, this doesn't affect scheduling.
-Place high in exams: +1 to +4 depending on the score you got, higher is better. Obviously this only happens on exam result days, and there's no time loss for it.
-See a Charm boosting movie: +4, Advances Time
-Eat at Hagakure Ramen if it's open: +3, Advances Time
-Have coffee at Chagall Cafe during the night: +2, Advance to Late Night
-Play Photo Sticker in the Arcade on Monday and Thursday: +4, Advance to Late Night

Because of Pop Quizzes and exam results, Charm actually doesn't take that much more time to boost than Courage really. It'd be faster in fact if Edogawa didn't exist. Additionally the Cafe is always open, so the only days we'll lose on it are when we need to go to Tartarus. Now in Vanilla, you couldn't realistically max this by the time you'd first be able to use it, so the scheduling is different there. With Photo Sticker though, we can easily max it in time for Lovers once Courage is done, and each Edogawa boost and Horror House visit we get makes the scheduling for this more manageable.

For Academics, our options are:

-Listen to Lectures in Class: +2, context sensitive time slot on specific days
-Study in the Library During the Day: +2 if you're in Good condition, +4 if you're Great. Advances Time
-Study in your Room on Holidays during the Day: Same as Library, +2 for Good and +4 for Great. Advances Time
-Eat at Wakatsu if it's open during the day: +3, Advances Time
-Make an Offering at Naganaki Shrine (100 Yen): +2 if you're Good, +5 if you're Great. Advances Time.
-Study at Late Night: +2 if you're Good or Great, with a chance to become Tired if your condition is Good. +0 if you're Tired or Sick, with a chance for your condition to worsen or persist. Advance to Next Day regardless.
-Play the Quiz Game at the Arcade on Wednesday and Saturday: +4, Advance to Late Night.

Academics takes the longest to max out, but luckily due to how Studying works in FES, we can work on it alongside our other stats. Funnily enough, once you max the others the rate at which this goes up is basically unaffected aside from the Arcade games. There is no other option to boost Academics except studying at Night in both the PS2 games and Portable, so the only real change as far as FES is concerned is that you can now play stat boosting games for your Personae while working on this.

Now aside from the Arcade games being unavailable in Vanilla, the Offertory works completely different. In Vanilla, you can instead choose to offer 5, 100 or 1,000 Yen to the box. When you donate, you have a random chance of getting +2 Academics from it, with better odds for higher donations. The critical thing about this is that it Does not take any time to do this. This means that you only need a decent amount of luck to boost your Academics at a much faster rate in Vanilla, and it is actually possible to Ace every exam in the game while working on other stats due to how this works. This was considered to be too good with how the other mechanics of the game were reworked come FES, so this got slapped with the nerf bat.

So what does this all mean? Generally in FES, we want to progress all our stats in the order of Least points to max to Most, and we do that by focusing them almost exclusively. In the case of Courage, this would mean the most effective thing to do is go to Tartarus on Saturdays only, but that's far from necessary and can actually be sub-optimal scheduling. Sunday is another good day to go since you go to school right after and can use the Edogawa boost to offset the lost night. Since Social Links and Stat development can occupy completely separate time slots in this game, we should have no conflicts between stat building and social links if we're efficient. Once we max Courage, we won't have to grapple with random elements anymore either and the game gets much smoother at that point.

In Portable

The rank requirements have been shuffled around for a bit in Portable.

Academics is the same, so I'll mention it first this time.

Courage is required to be at Rank 2 for Priestess, Rank 4 for Tower, and Rank 6 for Justice. As you can see, Priestess is now the least demanding to get into while still being available on 6/19. Tower's rank straight up doesn't matter for the same reasons it doesn't in any other version of the game, it could require Rank 6 for all we care. Justice has a different character tied to the link in Portable, and they are not available until 9/1. Because the point requirements are the same between all versions, we have a much more generous amount of time to get this maxed out and can focus almost exclusively on boosting it through Arcade games and Edogawa's medicine.

Charm is required to be Rank 2 for the Devil Social Link, and Rank 4 for the Star Social Link. Rank 6 is actually not needed to open anything, surprisingly. However, there's a mechanical benefit to maxing out Charm in Portable, so you want to get it capped out asap once Courage is done regardless. Charm 4 is needed by 5/25 to start the Star Social Link.

For boosting these stats, we have all the same options in FES plus a couple extras and considerations.

-Several places offer part time jobs that give +1 boosts to two stats. We can work at Chagall Cafe at nights to get +1 to Charm and Courage. The movie theater also offers work for +1 to Courage and Academics, while there's a health food shop that offers +1 to Academics and Charm. These jobs also give a small amount of money when doing them.
-Late Night is no longer a thing, so we need to put more care into maxing out Academics.

This version of the game places emphasis on using the arcade games more, and The FemC generally gets a more relaxed timeline for maxing stats. We'll make use of Edogawa when we can to fast track Courage, just because it'll allow us to use the days we'd spend at the Arcade for it on Chagall Cafe instead. The FemC also has several new night time social links, but you can honestly very easily go off schedule with all but one of these because of how much more free time you have to work on them.

In Reload

Persona 3 Reload uses the same rank thresholds as FES/Portable's MC. One notable change though is that the first two exams have reduced their required Rank to 2 and 4 respectively in order to Ace them. This makes it much easier to Ace them alongside developing other stats.

Persona 3 Reload has all the options Portable had, plus the following,

-Sleeping in class has been retooled to be a +2 Courage boost instead.
-Iwatodai strip mall is now available at Night and you can use the restaurants there for greater stat boosts. The standard meals still give +3, but new secret menu items can be unlocked with the relevant stat high enough that give you +4 when you eat them. These new items are available on different nights than the standard menu items.
-New study session scenes in the lead up to exams have been added, giving +4 to +6 to Academics if you attend them.
-There are a variety of new night time scenes you can get with your fellow SEES members that offer a +2 boost to a particular stat, though that's not the reason you'd attend them and they don't factor into a max out schedule much.

Iwatodai Strip Mall at Night makes it trivial to max out your stats on time, and you can actually play pretty inefficiently with this and not have it affect the social link schedule at all. I was tempted to play it like I did FES, but I'm sticking to a premade schedule to keep the videos more controlled.

It's worth noting that all versions of the game have some incidental or miscellaneous boosts you can get that fall outside of these aforementioned methods, but they are fairly inconsequential to scheduling and often come to late. The last big one I can think is that there is a week of Summer school in all versions of the game that gets you +18 points to Academics altogether in exchange for completely robbing you of those days.

Phew, that covers everything to consider for the social simulator! I won't have much to say on Social Links really, just always pick the right answers (guide lol) and always have a relevant Persona to the Link once you hit Rank 2 for it. There are sometimes we'll need to get some Relationship Fortune boosts to avoid wasting days, but it doesn't really impede other links too much since the days we use for those can only develop out of school links anyway which we have plenty of spare time for.

Cullen · Thu Aug 08, 2024 1:23 pm

Part 7 is out! We find ourselves back in Tartarus, but with how much we've powered up and the better gear at our disposal, the going is much smoother now. A relatively easy boss at the end of this excursion is just icing. Don't expect that for our next trip though.

Extra Notes

In FES

-My execution was a little sloppy on the boss, I should not have double upped with Bash on one of the Hands and just let them all lose their turn. Another round of Bash and an All Out Attack after would have taken them out no problem. Obviously there's always the risk of missing at this stage of the game, but with Ara Mitama and an Agility Band (if you buy one) can mostly eliminate the threat of that.

-Juzumaru is an excellent weapon for the protagonist at this stage of the game if you get it. While it's merely a minor offense upgrade compared to every other weapon available, the +20 HP it provides is tremendous for this stage of the game. Almost double what the equivalent accessory we can get does, and it beefs up our all out attacks! Definitely slap it on for boss fights when they happen.

-Related to the last point, according to a GameFaqs guide I read, Juzumaru will appear in rare chests on specific floors, namely floor 4 and floor 11. This seems consistent with my own videos, getting the weapon on Floor 4 in Portable and 11 in FES. Juzumaru is the first in a set of Katana type weapons that follow this formula, and they're usually at least one cut above the best weapons you can purchase for their section of the game, if you're only paying attention to Attack value.

-This video is a good demonstration of why I rarely buy anything from Officer Kurosawa. Just through exploring, I've managed to find a better weapon and the exact kind of armor Kurosawa sells to outfit everyone with. That's not to say Kurosawa is useless, and late game it is definitely easier to just buy his fenced goods instead of trawling about Tartarus, but right now this kind of thing is a wonderful money saver.

-I do want to make a slight amendment to something I said in the previous Tartarus videos. I stated that EXP does not seem to be divided by having more party members in this version of the game. Looking closer at it, this doesn't seem to be true though the reduction in EXP gains is far less noticeable in this version than it is in Portable.

In Portable

-This is where we see the buffed Wand cards and general increase in earned EXP start to put us over compared to FES. Now this will remain pretty consistent for Reload, but funnily enough in Portable this isn't really the case. We'll be ahead on levels up until the first full moon, but you ram into the downward scaling applied to EXP much sooner in Portable. Our levels between FES and Portable will be much more consistent with each other as early as the next game month, and there might actually be some times where my levels in FES pull ahead of Portable due to taking less Tartarus trips in this version.

-If you don't mind doing some grinding, something you can do to aid yourself right now is catch and release Personae like Apsaras and Angel. These two award their skill card after a single level up, allowing you to customized a dedicated problem solver Persona very easily if you build up your stock of those cards. Orpheus is actually not a bad choice for this in this version of the game due to being one of your earliest access to the Tarunda debuff.

In Reload

-We hit Arcana Burst in this video, upgrading every shuffle time we get for the remainder of the night. When we would draw from Level 1 cards, we now get Level 2, and Level 3 in the case of Level 2 and so on and so forth. This can be abused by prowling around the lower floors of Thebel right now, each Coin card now being worth over 1000 yen a draw. Shuffle Time isn't a guarantee though since you'll be so strong at this point you'll almost assuredly kill enemies on Floor 2 without All Out Attacks.

-Relatedly, Level 2 sword cards make it very easy to amass a huge stock of tier 1 spells. Keep it in mind if you want to customize something later.

-The bosses are much easier and much less chaotic in Reload, which is starting to become apparent. It'll be a bit before we see something with some bite to it in Reload, but some bosses have been retooled in ways that make them genuinely tricky to approach.

-If you play frugal enough and collect the same number of Fragments I did, you can pop all the locked chests on boss floors open tonight. One thing to keep in mind related to this is that while floor layouts stay consistent in this version of the game and treasure doesn't respawn, breakable objects do refresh when returning to floors. This includes randomly placing Twilight Fragment crystals. This gives you a slow bust existent way to farm fragments if you want to.

Social Progress

No changes here due to it being a Tartarus video. Technically we lost progress in Portable and Reload because the footage is from a couple weeks ago.

Cullen · Sun Aug 11, 2024 4:07 am

Supplemental: Junpei Iori FES/Portable

"Who's da man!?!

Level 99 Stats

ST: 82
MA: 44
EN: 69(nice)
AG: 56
LU: 53

Junpei resists Fire and is weak to Wind attacks.

Skills

Cleave: Starts with
Agi: Level 5
Re Patra: Level 7
Rakukaja: Level 9
Assault Dive: Level 18
Double Fangs: Level 20
Kill Rush: Level 25
Agilao: Level 32
Counter: Level 35
Torrent Shot: Level 40
Marakukaja: Level 44
Counterstrike: Level 45
Blade of Fury: Level 50
Gigantic Fist: Level 55
Spring of Life: Story Event*
High Counter: Level 58*
Fire Break: Level 60*
Agidyne: Level 64*
Brave Blade: Level 65*
Vorpal Balde: Level 75*

*Skills marked with an asterisk are ones only obtainable after an in-story upgrade. Additionally, Spring of Life is a Junpei exclusive skill that is gained by him alongside said upgrade.

Junpei is being rhetorical, because he is indeed the man. Junpei isn't super impressive at any specific point of the game, he's just a very consistent and reliable member of the team. His excellent ST, good EN and high HP make him a steady damage dealer and a very survivable anchor for the team, with Spring of Life just being icing. He also picks up some decent support skills in Marakukaja and Fire Break in the late game, making him a good cover for those skills so the protagonist doesn't have to worry about them (More so for Marakukaja, Breaks are a little situational). Junpei's biggest drawback is an unimpressive mid-game due a lull in physical skill upgrades and being one of the last characters to get an AOE option. That latter bit doesn't matter too much in FES but it does hurt quite a bit in Portable. Junpei's other stats are simply modest, with a noticeably weak MA stat. This means Junpei's fire damage will never be spectacular and just exists for coverage. All that said though, you can never really go wrong with brining Junpei along. At his worst, he's just whacking the enemy with his Katana for somewhere between 100-200 damage which is at least something you can count on. He's one of my preferred end game party members due to his general goodness, and in the versions of the game we'll be looking at he has several boons that help him along that didn't exist in Vanilla.

In FES

Probably the most linear character in the game. It's like how physical damage worked in Nocturne, though it doesn't reach quite the same highs. Junpei possesses good coverage of the physical types for most of the game, and late game he is a pretty consistent 300 damage against anything you come across. I'm huge fan of his access to Marakukaja, as it takes a load of stress off the MC and makes it easier to apply all the buffs I care about in a single turn. Funnily enough, in that regard Junpei has actually been nerfed since Vanilla, since he learned that skill about 10 levels earlier in that game. FES, however, adds a couple of boons that make him a better fighter. For one thing, across the board physical skills have had their HP costs to use heavily reduced, meaning Junpei is at less risk from using them in this game. Additionally, the yet to be seen Weapon Fusion mechanic gives Junpei access to better weapons that will actually allow him to pull ahead of his skills when it comes to raw damage. Even end game, if Junpei has his best Katana his typical ultimate physical skill only deals about 30 more damage than his normal attack, with a large HP cost making it somewhat impractical in comparison. This is actually worth thinking about, as Junpei's ultimate weapon can easily be obtained without any grinding on the way to the final boss. That does feed into one of Junpei's problems though, as he does not get the relevant weapon boost skill for his Katanas. This does mean he has a smaller advantage in raw strength than you'd expect compared to other characters, though he's still far ahead of the other main physical specialist of this game. There's never really any point where you can go wrong with bringing Junpei along, though other characters are situationally better. He's never failed to make my final line up. (Not that it matters much, I've used the same end game team every single time I've played this game outside of Reload.)

In Portable

Not too much to say here, he enjoys the usual benefits of direct control and guarding to cover his weakness. One thing that does hurt him that's more due to how I play this version than anything else, is that I typically do much less Weapon Fusion in this version of the game. Weapons are also just ever so slightly less impressive in this game, so Junpei shines a little less even when you get him something good. Still, he retains his reliability, and the character who received genuine buffs is one I used alongside him anyway, so it hardly affects my ranking of him. Lack of AOE does impact him a bit more here, as we no longer have to grapple with AIs questionable decisions on when to use those type of skills, but the other physical specialist is so damn bad past when they first join that it's another thing that only minorly impacts him.

In Reload

Hoo boy do I have things to say about Junpei when we get to the Reload bios. Just to keep it simple, Junpei gets AOE much earlier (as in, at the start of the game) in Reload and picks up a very strong specialization that he didn't have in FES and Portable. This has propelled Junpei from Good Party Member to almost indisputably the best damage dealing party member, and possibly just the best party member in general. He's a force to be reckoned with in Reload, and I cannot wait until he fully comes online. It'll be hype for sure.

Cullen · Tue Aug 13, 2024 11:24 am

Part 8 is out! A whole slew of new social links open up to us over the course of this video, some at school and some closer to home. Going forward our day-to-day activities will be much more packed, that's for sure. And that's not even getting into the extra power afforded to us in the Dark Hour by our new connections. Because so much has been unlocking for us recently, and we have to make more trips than usual to Tartarus this month, things haven't exactly been moving at a rapid fire pace. Once we get past this initial month, things should start to move by a bit more quickly. Especially once I max out courage and don't have to deal with the randomness of the fatigue system anymore.

Extra Notes

In FES

-I actually bought some gear for once, so this is a good time for a reminder: You can only purchase equipment during the day in Vanilla and FES! Always make sure to commit it to memory when you want to do some gear shopping, as it is completely unavailable at night.

-As shown in the video, the Hermit link completely eats up your day, Evening and Late Night included. Now on the bright side, it's usually available on a day where there actually isn't much else to do (Sunday), but always keep this aspect of it in mind when advancing it. Definitely one you also want to know the answers for ahead of time, since getting the wrong answers causes this link to eat up even more time in the schedule. (Though admittedly that isn't as big of a deal later in the game)

-Be mindful of Junpei and Yukari's experience points for the next Tartarus trip. Every level makes a huge difference at this stage of the game, so if you can get them a level up before the next boss without running into the Tired status, you should absolutely do so.

-We have access to Requests now, and you absolutely should seek to complete as many as possible. Some of the rewards given are quite good for this stage of the game, particularly the enemy item requests. The Muscle Drink request also allows you to trade a Muscle drink for 3 Revival Beads, which is a pretty good deal.

-Be extra mindful of requests that specify a date you can expect to get the desired item. Those days are the ONLY days you can get those items, for no real reason other than to be annoying.

-Quite a few requests were added in FES with a handful taken out from Vanilla. FES brings the request total up to 99, compared to the 55 Vanilla has.

-Fusion Spell requests do not require that you actually cast the relevant spell, just that you discover the combo for it. The requests themselves mostly function as clues on how to find each of these spells.

In Portable

-Not only do some links get new reps for the FemC, certain links have their initiation times shuffled around! Lovers is available way sooner than it is in the MC's story, with no special requirements to boot! A byproduct of this is that certain Arcanas are much stronger in the hands of the FemC early on, while others don't take off nearly as quickly as they do for the MC. This does unfortunately result in some otherwise effective strategies being unavailable for the FemC at various points, though it's not too a big a deal most of the time.

-The FemC gets a different Hermit link, with no equivalent to Maya in her story. This thankfully means we don't have to deal with any links that eat an entire day.

-Requests are also available now in this version. The number has been dropped a bit, from 99 to 80. As far as I can tell, all fusion spell related requests have been removed since those are now relegated to items that you don't have to do anything special to discover when they become available.

In Reload

-A new mechanic in this version becomes available alongside Innocent Sin Online, the shared computer! We can now buy software that has a variety of wonderful effects that we can dedicate an evening to using. Early on this is mostly going to be social stat boosting software that gives us an on-demand +4 to a given stat, but later we'll be able to get software that gives permanent upgrades to our abilities in Tartarus. The computer is also required for a number of sidequests.

-The Hermit link no longer eats a whole day, so it's much less of a hassle on routing.

-This goes true for Portable as well, but Reload really encourages starting links as soon as they become available. There is no Neglect mechanic to grapple with in this version, so may as well make sure we're never short of something to do on a given day.

-Requests are not available at this point in Reload, and will instead come up shortly after the next full moon.

Social Progress

In FES

Academics: +8 (Rank 1)
Courage: +34 (Rank 3)
Charm: +8 (Rank 1)

Magician Social Link: Rank 3
Chariot Social Link: Rank 3
Hermit Social Link: Rank 1
Strength Social Link: Rank 1

Not quite the jump since last time, though that's largely due to losing Wednesday entirely which at into some Courage boosts. I plan to start hitting the Quiz game on a couple nights just to fast track Academics to Rank 2. Far from necessary, but I do get a little paranoid about the 5/29 deadline for that. We're well ahead on Courage at this point, so it's no big loss if I sacrifice a couple Saturdays for that.

In Portable

Academics: +20 (Rank 2)
Courage: +14 (Rank 1)
Charm +14 (Rank 1)

Magician Social Link: Rank 2
Hierophant Social Link: Rank 3
Emperor Social Link: Rank 1
Lovers Social Link: Rank 1

More of the same for Portable, the FemC is looking a lot more well rounded. Lovers effectively takes the place of Hermit as the next social link unlock for this stage of the game, though the Hermit link for the FemC becomes available much sooner than the Lovers link does for the MC.

In Reload

Academics: +0 (Rank 1)
Courage: +31 (Rank 3)
Charm: +14 (Rank 1)

Hierophant Social Link: Rank 2
Chariot Social Link: Rank 3
Emperor Social Link: Rank 1
Hermit Social Link: Rank 1

Note that I was incorrect previously about the stat boosts from Wild Duck Burger, it only gives +3 in Reload instead of +4. This is pretty minor though, it still puts you well ahead of FES and especially portable, and we eventually unlock an upgraded menu item that is +4. The progression is pretty similar to FES so far, save for some minor neglect to Kenji. As I've been saying, opening new links as soon as possible is a better idea since we don't have a formal neglect mechanic to deal with.

Cullen · Wed Aug 14, 2024 11:05 pm

Supplemental video 2 compiling the FES and Portable versions of the equivalent Reload links is out! Note that going forward, Yukari's social link in Portable will also be rolled into these videos, as the general content of the link is identical to the MC's version of the link and we'll be seeing a voice acted version of it in Reload anyway. As I mentioned in the main video, this carries all the Sapphic undertones that you'd expect of a link that was written to be inherently romantic. Especially for its final scene.

Fun fact, I quietly read these scenes aloud while recording them to make sure I don't advance to text too quickly for anyone to read. This means that underneath the video is a muted audio track where I'm doing a muffled ridiculous fake French accent for Bebe's appearance in the Hierophant link.

Cullen · Sat Aug 17, 2024 2:14 pm

Part 9 is out! This will be the last "real" Tartarus exploration until the next Full Moon. FES and Portable will see a couple incidental trips that will be relegated to offscreen grinding as I try to proc the Tired status, but otherwise we are done with it for the time being. Next video will be focused on a week of daily grind in the Bay Area, and then the following will see our next major story event! There will be a very brief pause in uploads for this series as I am taking a vacation starting tomorrow and won't be back at my computer until the following weekend, but we'll have another video up as soon as possible once I get back.

Extra Notes

In FES

-Definitely get all the Tartarus related quests done tonight. The rewards are quite handy at this point, and it requires minimal effort to complete most of them.

-If you don't luck into a Muscle Drink from Tartarus treasure, you can simply buy one from the Pharmacy for Elizabeth's request. It costs 1,000 yen and the reward is 3 Revival Beads, saving you 2,600 yen over buying that many beads instead. Pretty good trade, though free is naturally better.

-For any requests that require an item drop from a specific enemy, YOU MUST TAKE THE REQUEST IF YOU WANT TO ACTUALLY GET THE DROP. The relevant enemies will not drop the item until you have the request in your quest log.

-You can review accepted quests at any time in the config menu. Remember, you can only take up to 3 requests at a time, and there's a cancellation fee if you want to add a different request to your actives. Be mindful of which requests that can be completed independent of accepting them and which can't, and plan accordingly.

-The Rampage Drive can be a little hazardous to deal with, so don't be afraid to train in order to match him if you need to. Another level over what I had in the video can make the fight way more consistent, on top of getting access to a Persona who can do huge damage to the boss if you fuse him. It's not strictly required to beat the Rampage Drive this month, and it's much easier later, but we do need to beat him if we want to complete the Old Document request.

-Speaking of Rampage Drive, I got pretty lucky with my dodges in this fight, especially when Tarukaja was in play. This fight can definitely go a lot messier, so don't be surprised if you have to do it a couple of times if you take it on as early as possible.

In Portable

-Rampage Drive is brutal here because we aren't able to gear up like we can in FES. Definitely do some armor hunting in Tartarus before taking this guy on, I was struggling with my low defense in this fight. The enemies do hit a decent amount harder in Maniac mode compared to FES Hard, which can cause some problems in the early game. Rampage Drive also gives us an early preview of how hazardous critical hits can be in this version of the game, so beware.

-It's much easier in this version to grind out Orpheus to get Tarunda to debuff bosses with, so don't be afraid to do that if you're struggling.

-We didn't have access to requests when I entered Tartarus in Portable, so we'll have to dedicate a day later on to completing them.

In Reload

-Not too much to say here. Swift Axle is by far the easiest version of this boss since he has a weakness to exploit, and in general just doesn't hit nearly as hard. We also are much more likely to have access to a debuff against his offense, making this fight close to a complete non-issue even on Merciless.

-I was decently frugal with my SP usage and used my restoratives at key moments, so I was able to open all the boss floor locked chests in this run. Don't feel like you have to do this, definitely dedicate your Twilight Fragments to healing if you need it.

-Once you hit Arcana Burst, you can essentially auto battle ad-infinitum on the lowest floors of Thebel to get all the money you need relatively quickly. I didn't feel like wasting too much time on that, but it is an option if you want to take it.

-In exchange for delaying requests, Reload gives us access to the Persona compendium much earlier than FES and Portable do. It is also vastly cheaper to use in this version of the game, making it a great thing to have all around. We'll definitely be making extensive use of it in Reload.

Social Progress

Tartarus night, so nothing to report here.

Cullen · Sat Aug 31, 2024 4:40 pm

After a brief respite to recharge my batteries, Part 10 is out! All the major Tartarus exploration for the first month long period of the game is done and dusted, so now we're more able to get into the groove of the main gameplay loop within the Bay Area. We do have a major story event coming up for the next video, which will be its own thing, but generally speaking we should be able to cram a week's worth of activities into a single video going forward and ideally the pace will pick up a little bit. Once we've maxed out Courage in FES also, the flow of the Bay Area day-to-day becomes a lot more standardized, so I'll likely be interjecting less on what I'm specifically doing on a given day.

Extra Notes

In FES

-One nice thing about actively tracking my stat gains is that I can more easily gauge when I can pump the breaks on hyper focusing Courage and pick up boosts in other social stats. It'll be a bit before I go out of my way to pump up Academics since we only really absolutely need Rank 2, but I'll probably work in some photo booth sessions now to help Charm come in ahead of schedule. We're almost at the point where we can ignore picking up +2 boosts to Courage that aren't the medicine and just use the Arcade to pick up the remaining points. I haven't actively scheduled this out, but the night time scheduling for Persona 3 is loose enough that I can just play it by ear as to when I can start ignoring Karaoke altogether.

-We're coming up on the deadline for Elizabeth's requests rapidly, so don't neglect them! Many of them offer highly valuable rewards that make the going so much easier, especially in Portable where a lot of them give powerful equipment. Definitely don't forget to accept and complete the Pine Resin request on 5/2, that's the only day you can complete it in spite of the stated deadline it has.

-Absolutely do the Elizabeth/Theodore dates when you can. They take up no time and unlock some very good Personae that were newly added to FES. More importantly, failing to do one date ends the chain of date requests entirely, which robs you of a number of good Personae.

-Tanaka's Amazing Commodities starts airing on 5/3 in all versions of the game. Tanaka sells an interesting selection of items every week, and what he sells is different between each version of the game. It's always worth checking what he's hawking, because some of the stuff is actually really good. It'll be a bit before we can use him in Reload due to more limited funds, but I will definitely peep his wares when I can across every version of the game.

-We plan our first hang out via phone call in this video. Now in Persona 3 Vanilla, scheduling dates via phone calls was pretty important for social linking, since the Relationship Fortune didn't exist and in general a lot of the school links took way more points to advance. It's less so in FES, but still has its uses. Losing your Sunday to the dates does kind of stink, but we need to do at least a few to keep our links going at a good pace and it's not like we have too much that is Sunday exclusive at this point anyway. You get a generous amount of link points for agreeing to the hangout, which in and of itself can help with advancing social links and is why we accepted the invite from Kaz in the video. When attending the date, you get a huge amount of points by giving the right answer (even moreso if you have a gift when going on a date with a girl), but in this case that doesn't really matter because we get enough points from the Rank 4 link scene to advance to Rank 5 anyway.

-When accepting phone invitations, the date will be scheduled for the next available free day. Usually this is a Sunday, but holidays count for this as well. Now in the event you go to Tartarus on the night you would receive a call, the call gets rescheduled to a later date. We wanted to do this with Kaz, since accepting the invite would have denied us a free day to advance the Hierophant link. I believe a call can be rescheduled this way up to two times before that particular date is just gone from the game entirely.

-We get the ability to give the Mad Bull and Weird Takoyaki to Maiko on 5/6, and we do that right away in all versions of the game. It isn't critical to do this at the first opportunity, but we may as well get this flag set before we have a chance to forget about it when we need to do it. Once you've given the sweets to her, you can initiate the Hanged Man social link at any time when she's at the shrine playground.

-Be mindful of what you say to Chihiro in FES, you do need to pick the right options to advance her sequence flags.

In Portable

-I remember to buy some Yawn-B-Gone at the school store. This little item takes a character out of the Tired status when used on them. We can buy up to 3 of them from the school store each Saturday, and sometimes Tanaka has them as the main item he is selling or a bonus item. Due to how fatigue has been reworked in Portable, this item isn't quite as helpful as you'd expect. That said, there are some times where we are forced to pick up the Tired status, and Yawn-B-Gone allows us to just ignore that completely. Build up a good supply early on if you plan on gearing out for the end game bonus bosses, this can help a lot with removing fatigue from your party when going on Tartarus trips.

-Requests in this version of the game more often give good equipment and things like skill cards, making them even more valuable to do. Some of the stuff Theo can give us is quite a bit ahead of the stuff we can buy for quite some time, like the Angora Sweater.

-Speaking of buying, Officer Kurosawa's inventory updates early on into May, giving us more purchasing options than we have in FES at the moment. Kind of strange actually, because after this point it reverses and we generally get access to better stuff to buy earlier in FES. The main things to note are the new accessories, specifically the elemental bracers. These handy accessories boost the damage of their corresponding element by 25%! Not huge, but direct boosts to your damage are always way better than boosting the relevant stat. Kurosawa also sells new armor and weapons now but that's generally less important.

-A new Tartarus mechanic is Accident prone nights. Despite the name, this is actually a really good thing. When going to Tartarus on an accident prone night, you are much more likely to get floor events when revisiting cleared floors. Accident prone nights always happen on the same calendar days for every playthrough, and there's a helpful guide on GameFaqs that lists when all these nights are, so it's something to consider when routing your nights for farming/training.

-We start the Temperance link for the FemC, which is a shared link with the MC. We'll see it in due time in Reload. One important thing to note about the Temperance link in FES and Portable is that it can become permanently inaccessible if you do not initiate it after a certain point. I believe it's the 3rd full moon where it becomes inaccessible if not already started. You need Rank 2 Academics to start it, but thankfully the threshold for that is a measly +20 points, so it's not too hard to get this link started on time.

In Reload

-Actually there's surprisingly little to say here that wasn't mostly covered in the previous notes. The major differences are picking up some additional social stat points with the shared computer and the Iwatodai Strip Mall restaurants. It'll be a bit before we see more new mechanics crop up.

-I do make use of the compendium, which burns some of my limited funds but it shouldn't be too big a deal. I can liquidate some stuff if I have to. We don't need the relevant Personae for too many links at this point, but some of them like Hermit are advancing high enough that I will need to relevant Persona if I want the progress to keep happening. One nice thing about the compendium in this version of the game that we will come to know all too well once it unlocks in the other versions: it is a hell of a lot cheaper and much less of a funds hit to use in Reload.

-Tanaka sells some shit I don't care about in this version, so I skip over buying from him to conserve funds. It'll be a bit before I buy from him even just for the hell of it, as we really need to stretch our money for the time being. Thankfully, Elizabeth's requests will open up in the near future, which will open up an alternate revenue source for me.

-We're brave enough to enter Club Escapade at this point, and the URL salesman is now available as of 5/3. We'll be buying from this guy later, but he doesn't have too much that I care about for the time being.

-Every restaurant at the strip mall has a special menu item available on certain days that you can order should you have the right social stats for it and you've hit the sequence trigger for knowing about it. These special menu items give +4 to their corresponding stat, essentially giving us an alternate avenue for Arcade bonuses! There is pretty much no reason to ever use the standard +2 bonuses available at night in Reload.

Social Progress

In FES

Academics: +20 (Rank 2)
Courage: +46 (Rank 4)
Charm: +10 (Rank 1)

Hierophant Social Link: Rank 3
Emperor Social Link: Rank 1
Strength Social Link: Rank 2
Hermit Social Link: Rank 2
Chariot Social Link: Rank 4

We're doing quite well on Courage at this stage, well ahead of schedule for when I need to max it. Reviewing the calendar, we have 11 opportunities to play Horror House before we need max Courage for +44 points, 10 more than we actually need. I'll probably still pick up medicine boosts when I can get them, but at this point we're completely safe to ignore Karaoke going forward. I'll transition at this point to doing the photo booth on Mondays and Thursdays and getting coffee on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays assuming I don't need to go to Tartarus. My Academics will languish for a little bit, but all that means is we won't be able to get top placement on the first and second exams, which really doesn't matter at all. None of our links have really hit any impressive thresholds for making strong Personae at this point, though Hierophant will see some serious focus coming up as an Exam is fast approaching. Remember, the lead up week to an exam renders all in-school social links unavailable! We need to get a Hierophant Persona soon, but thankfully the need for it will be AFTER we get access to the compendium, which means I can easily fuse out Orpheus for one and then just pull him back right after.

In Portable

Academics: +30 (Rank 2)
Charm: +26 (Rank 2)
Courage: +30 (Rank 3)

Hierophant Social Link: Rank 5
Temperance Social Link: Rank 1
Magician Social Link: Rank 3

Not too much to say here. The FemC has less options on days off from school for what to do, so we've invested a lot more into the Hierophant link at this point. The number of available links for the FemC will become more consistent with the MC soon enough, but for now we just have to spend a lot of time with old people. Our stats proceed at a steady and balanced rate. One interesting thing to remark on coming up is that for FES and Reload, the lead up weeks for exams prevent us from doing any in-school social links. This will not be the case for the FemC, who has full access to all her social links in the lead up week to the exam.

In Reload

Academics: +4 (Rank 1)
Courage: +35 (Rank 3)
Charm: +35 (Rank 3)

Strength Social Link: Rank 2
Hermit Social Link: Rank 4
Emperor Social Link: Rank 2
Justice Social Link: Rank 1

Hey some Academics finally! We'll be something more than a ditz in the near future. Everything else is progressing steady. As previously mentioned, we're getting access to the special menu items at the strip mall, allowing us even faster progress on our stats throughout the week, resulting in much more balanced scheduling. Since the Hermit social link no longer eats our entire day, we can focus that a lot more and get it cleaned up early on with any holidays we get. Since we started Emperor earlier, we're also able to get Justice kickstarted sooner in this version as well. Very soon, we'll be getting some new Reload exclusive activities that will make both our nights and days a lot more interesting in contrast with FES and Portable, but for now it's just steady progress. Hermit having more levels this early does have some good Dark Hour benefits, as there are some very helpful Personae in the lower levels of the Hermit arcana.

Cullen · Sun Sep 01, 2024 11:12 pm

Supplemental video 3 is live! The FES social links are moving steady, though we hit a bit of a lull for the FemC due to not having an equivalent to the Hermit link at this point. At the very least, we get an early-bird appearance of everyone's favorite Frenchman, Bebe!

Cullen · Sun Sep 08, 2024 6:29 pm

Part 11 is out! The full moon is upon us, and it's probably no surprise that it heralds the approach of a major boss fight. Aside from some miscellaneous bits to take care of, this video is mostly dedicated to the different incarnations of the Full Moon boss, plus some minor changes in presentation I thought were worth including.

Extra Notes

In FES

-Rather obnoxiously, Full Moon days in the older versions of Persona 3 leave you with no opportunity to save at any moment during the proceedings. Consequently, if you screw up and game over, you get to sit through a bunch of cutscenes and scripted encounters holding the Triangle button the whole while. Perhaps with the devs realizing how annoying this is, Full Moon bosses in FES and Portable are somewhat notorious for actually being among the easier fights in Persona 3 despite their impressive visage.

-In the event you slacked on your training up to this point, the nights prior to the Full Moon in Persona 3 Vanilla and FES have it so that your party will not abandon you in Tartarus when the Tired status sets in for them allowing you to grind indefinitely. This isn't really helpful for dealing with bosses since Tired makes them way too hazardous to deal with, but if you're interested in farming/grinding endlessly with a bit more power backing you all the while, knock yourself out. With the reworking/removal of the Fatigue system in Portable and Reload, there is no equivalent mechanic or particular bonus for entering Tartarus on these nights.

-Speaking of grinding, the fixed encounters on the Full Moon night give out fairly high EXP payouts despite how easy they are. This is another way the game tries to help you out if you've been slacking.

-I do this fight pretty sloppy, and I also cut it close on time due to an unlucky random encounter with some Cupids eating up two minutes. Once the Priestess' adds come in, I'd recommend just knocking them down with Apsaras and then leaving them. They'll lose their turns and not be able to contribute, letting you keep up the pressure on the Priestess while she can't call in more help. The Priestess herself isn't too threatening, but keep Orpheus and Apsaras in your back pocket for Cadenza in case your party starts looking a little worse for wear.

-The first few major boss fights we beat will unlock new tactics for us. This first one, Conserve SP, is pretty unhelpful most of the time. You can generally accomplish what it does just by entering Rush and then cancelling it immediately. The next tactic we get is way more helpful and can functionally do the same thing a lot of the time on top of it.

-We see our first date event, a bromantic get away with our main man Kaz! Dates were a major part of Persona 3 Vanilla as they were the only way to get additional link points outside of interacting with your peers on their normally scheduled days. They're of less importance in FES, and in fact half the time we only schedule them for the points we get from the initiating phone call, but there are a couple times where we need both the call and the actual date to keep the link going. Kaz is not one of these instances and this was essentially a lost day for me since you cannot cancel a date once it's scheduled. Date events are essentially mini social link events with their own singular dialogue choice that awards more points the more your friend/lover likes the answer. You get a whopping +30 link points for the right answer, and +45 if you have the matching Persona! When on a date with a female classmate, you can also offer a gift that gives a variable amount of points depending on how much/if they like it, up to +50 points. This was necessary a couple times in Vanilla, but amusingly enough you never need this in FES.

In Portable

-We get a new social link! Saori fills in for the Hermit link, though unlike that link she functions much like a standard school link. Her time slot is the exact same as Junpei's, so it'll be some time before we really see a ton of her as we can much more quickly max Junpei's.

-Not too much to say here regarding the boss, we have higher levels and better gear so the Priestess largely does not stand a chance in this version of the game. One thing that is worth noting though is by far the worst aspect of Portable's highest difficulty. I haven't been able to focus on this too much, but one of the major changes of Maniac mode in P3P is the amount of damage enemies deal with crits. Normally, critical hits deal 50% more damage over a normal strike, but in Maniac mode (and only for the enemies, mind) these crits deal 150% more damage! This is an utterly ludicrous modifier to incoming damage most of the time, and if a character manages to survive it they will almost assuredly be killed by the One More follow up that ensues. I absolutely despise this mechanic as it introduces a nasty element of luck into a lot of the boss fights in the game. Had the critical strike the Priestess got been on the FemC, I would have lost and there would have been nothing I could have done about it. We will have counters to this later, but some early game bosses (especially if they have AoE's) can just score lucky crits and instantly boot you to the game over screen. This does actually result in some Full Moon bosses being harder in Portable, despite this version generally being easier than FES.

-Instead of Tactics, the first few major bosses instead backport some Persona 4 additions into the game when you beat them. Combination strikes are a pretty whatever mechanic in this game, but they can occasionally help out.

In Reload

-The train sequence has been simplified a bit, with the timer not starting until the boss fight begins and there are no wimpy enemies to slow you down on the way to her.

-The 30 minute time of course rapidly starts getting cut. In reality, you probably have around 7 or the original 8 minutes to actually win the fight.

-Since you can more easily prepare for them and the level curve and power curve has changed drastically from the older versions of the game, the High Priestess has been beefed up into a relatively tough fight. Not only does she have way more health, she hits way harder and Tarunda is necessary to keep yourself safe from serious harm on Merciless. The adds she summons are also generally more threatening and varied, which I got a nasty surprise on. Having Media on Yukari definitely helps a ton, though she is perfectly beatable without that being the case.

-There are definitely some stronger Personae than what I was using that you can bring to this fight, but sadly I just didn't have the funds to support that kind of fusing.

-Tragically, Reload did not see fit to add any kind of special bonus for triumphing over this boss, be it tactics or direct team upgrades.

Social Progress

In FES

Academics: +22 (Rank 2)
Courage: +50 (Rank 4)
Charm: +14 (Rank 1)

Magician Social Link: Rank 4

In Portable

Academics: +30 (Rank 2)
Courage: +34 (Rank 3)
Charm: +30 (Rank 3)

Hermit Social Link: Rank 1

In Reload

Academics: +7 (Rank 1)
Courage: +35 (Rank 3)
Charm: +39 (Rank 3)

Magician Social Link: Rank 3

Not too much to say for any particular game. I'm changing up my evenings going forward for FES, so we'll see more varied boosts for our stats going forward there. The FemC finally has a Hermit link of her own, though again it'll be awhile before we make any progress on that. In Reload, we're just about to do some Academics boosting as we do have an exam coming up. Unlike FES and Portable, we can ace this exam with just Rank 2 Academics, so we will be able to enjoy the full benefits of that.

Cullen · Sun Sep 08, 2024 7:12 pm

But wait there's more! I said that I wanted to cover Persona 3 Vanilla as a side thing with some live streams, and I do plan to do that! However, I'm uncertain of if I should cover the whole game, or wait until we reach the third full moon in the videos and start from the second full moon on stream. On the one hand, the latter would let us skip a bunch of the uninteresting early game (though do mind I'd be fast forwarding/skipping all cutscenes since otherwise what are the videos for?) but on the other there are some differences in scheduling and how fights can be approached in the first month that might be interesting to show, on top of giving a better idea of how the game flows in comparison. I've posted a poll on my youtube channel, let me know what you think!

https://www.youtube.com/post/Ugkx5deRu_ ... cK_fdu-q7T

Cullen · Sat Sep 14, 2024 4:33 pm

I'm a little behind on the next video, but the votes I got from the poll indicated that I should stream the entirety of Persona 3 Vanilla, so that's what I'll be starting on today! I'll be playing up until the Priestess fight, catching up with the videos currently are. I'll also be getting totally trashed to keep things interesting for myself, so expect slightly less coherent commentary towards the 4 hour mark. Tune in if you're interested to see the original, no frills version of Persona 3!

Cullen · Tue Sep 17, 2024 11:34 pm

After a couple delays and setbacks, Part 12 is out! It's funny, every time I think we're hitting the point where the game starts to streamline and the weeks should go faster, we hit a whole load of new mechanics that slow my roll quite a bit. Things are starting to get interesting across the multiple versions as we get into the juicier bits of Junpei's social link (Juicepei?) in Portable and start getting access to a whole load of new scenes and mechanics in Reload. We'll likely be seeing less focus being put on FES' day-to-day going forward as it will be awhile before we see any interesting shake ups to the status quo of that game. Speaking of, we're fast approaching our first social stat cap in FES and in general I think everybody has a good understanding of the game flow by now. Going forward, the cuts to FES (and Portable on the days without unique social links) will likely be much quicker and I'll just lay out what I plan to do on that day at the first event I get to and then cut the rest of the chaff. Obviously if anything interesting or unique happens, I'll be sure to throw it in.

Extra Notes

In FES

-It's exam lead up week! This is true for Reload as well, but may as well just cover it right from the jump. All social links that take place in school are unavailable in the lead up to exams, so you'll have to find activities outside of the school to pass the time. For our purposes, we can work on the Hierophant social link, start the Hanged Man link or start the Moon social link. Hermit is also available in its normal time slot of Sundays and Holidays. In FES, we just focus on the Hierophant link to fast track it close to completion. This has the fringe perk of also heavily strengthening the Hierophant arcana in fusion, which actually is pretty useful coming up soon.

-A new section of Tartarus and a whole slew of new requests are available, but you're better off saving that for the back half of May for a reason we'll see in the next video. This is true of every version, but I don't have too much to say for FES this time so may as well lay that out here.

-Officer Kurosawa and Be Blue V have expanded their wares now, so if you have disposable income and want to gear up, you have the option now. In particular, Be Blue V is now selling the elemental boost accessories which are very useful.

In Portable

-One notable difference about scheduling in Portable is that the exam lead up week does not lock us out of most of our school links. Likely this is for the benefit of the FemC since she has less options when it comes to out of school links at this stage of the game, though interestingly this is also a thing for the MC in this version. I guess to create parity between the two stories?

In Reload

-We get our first Link Event in this video! Link events essentially serve as social links for the party members who did not have them originally, AKA every male member of SEES. Link events are a shorter chain of events with a limited time frame to access them, and the chain can be ended if you do not advance them after a certain point. For the most part, you just want to do Link Events as they pop up, though some are a bit more flexible than that. The rewards for attending them vary in usefulness, but Junpei's first event gives him a pretty excellent +3 ST. It's well worth your time to get that!

-Elizabeth's requests are finally available in Reload after an arbitrary delay. A lot of new milestone requests have been added that you don't need to accept, such as killing shadows and opening chests. For the requests you need to accept to advance, there's no longer any limit on the requests you can take and correspondingly no option to cancel them for a fee. A good chunk of these you should be able to clear as soon as you get them. Elizabeth's dates are tied to the number of requests you clear, so be sure to do plenty of requests to unlock those as well!

-The party member item requests thankfully no longer have set dates where you can get the requested item, and you can just do them whenever up until their stated deadline.

-With the burger challenge request done and the requisite stats met for Wakatsu Kitchen, we now have full access to the special menu items available in Iwatodai Strip mall! This will get us to our maximum potential much faster.

-We have our first instance of drawing a relationship fortune! These handy dandy fortunes are equivalent to doing a non-rank up social link event with someone. To reiterate, that's +10 Link points if you don't have the matching Persona, and +15 if you do. A lot of the time, this will allow us to rank up with someone next time we see them, but do keep in mind some links require a hefty amount of points for rank up towards the end of their story line, so that's not always a guarantee.

-New study sessions with your party members have been added in the lead up to exams! These aren't really any more effective than the Quiz Game or the Prodigy Platter, but they do give some fun banter scenes with SEES. The exception will always be the last available one, which gives the biggest boost of Academics you can get from any activity that raises that stat! I believe the boost is +6, but it's hard to tell because you get the same animation for every 2 point increment of a stat boost. (1 note for 1-2 points, 2 notes for 3-4 and 3 notes for 5-6 if you forgot)

-We meet the mysterious business man and perhaps to our detriment woo him with our charm. I'll rip the band-aid off and just let you know we'll be 40k in the hole by the time we're done with this guy, so be sure to keep that in mind with your finances!

Social Progress

In FES

Academics: +34 (Rank 2)
Courage: +64 (Rank 5)
Charm: +30 (Rank3)

Hierophant Social Link: Rank 8

In Portable

Academics: +42 (Rank 2)
Courage: +48 (Rank 4)
Charm: +44 (Rank 3)

Chariot Social Link: Rank 2
Lovers Social Link: Rank 2
Emperor Social Link: Rank 2
Magician Social Link: Rank 4
Hierophant Social Link: Rank 6
Hanged Man Social Link: Rank 1

As you can see, the freedom to social link as we please has created an interesting diversion from the kind of rank ups we'll see in the other versions of the game. Still, hyper focusing Hierophant in FES has its own benefits that will come into play for the next couple Tartarus trips.

In Reload

Academics: +24 (Rank 2)
Courage: +41 (Rank 3)
Charm: +51 (Rank 4)

Hermit Social Link: Rank 5
Hanged Man Social Link: Rank 3
Junpei's Link Event: Rank 1

I'm slightly guessing on that point we have for our social stats, since I don't know the exact values we get from group study sessions or the burger challenge, but this should be close enough anyway, I'd only be a couple points off. Less vertical momentum is happening for our social life in Reload, but we did grab a couple fortunes that will prime some links that would otherwise be stalled out when we next visited them. Links like Hierophant have absurd amounts of free time to dedicate to them anyway, so it's not a big deal if it isn't advanced as far as it is in FES.

Cullen · Thu Sep 19, 2024 2:20 am

Another round of socialization means another supplemental video! We're quite ahead on the Hierophant link in FES, though progress on that will stall out for quite some time as it'll be awhile before we have time where we have nothing else to do but that link. I also threw in the FES/Portable version of the first console recording. They actually took the effort to come up with new jokes for Ikutsuki for Reload, which is effort I appreciate. Note that the scenes in Portable are identical to FES with the standard exception of the visuals. Mostly this makes the scenes less funny, though there is one where it does have an amusing impact on making the scene more suggestive than it was originally.

Cullen · Fri Sep 20, 2024 3:38 am

It's a double dose of supplemental videos! Just for fun, I wanted to compile all the boss fights of the different stages of the game into a single video so there's a more consolidated place to compare the mandatory challenges we'll face in the game. It is actually pretty interesting to see how my general approach changes for the different iterations of each boss in the game. You'd think the fights in FES and Portable would be fairly similar, and later on they will be, but for right now there is actually a lot of pressure to try new tactics since a lot of the old mechanics you'd make use of on PS2 simply don't exist anymore. It's also fascinating to see how they just completely overhauled the bosses in Reload, with even situations where you're fighting a visually similar enemy to FES/Portable still working wildly differently. Another for fun thing, here's how I'd rank the bosses in terms of difficulty!

Ruthless Ice Ravens<FES Venus Eagles<Portable Venus Eagles

This might come as a surprise given the number of quality of life improvements brought on by this version, but all too often in the early game it's actually Portable that has the toughest bosses. There's an obvious caveat here, Portable gives out much more generous EXP payouts so it's a lot easier to grind up to a point where you can just pound bosses into dust. Plus the fatigue system is a complete non-issue while exploring, so there's no limiting factor with that either. If you're not doing that though, the Persona 4 mechanics unintentionally make these fights a lot tougher than they were supposed to be, as evidenced by the fact that it took me 4 times as long to beat Portable Venus Eagles compared to the other versions of this boss. The Ruthless Ice Ravens are peak warm up bosses, fittingly being weak to Agi instead of draining it. The fact there's only two of them just makes the fight even more of a non-issue, especially if you leveled up Junpei enough so that he has Agi also. The Venus Eagles in FES are generally just as easy, but a single miss can cause the fight to absolutely spiral out of control. Still, with the ability to have both the MC and Yukari knock down the Eagles, plus the fact that they lose their turn from knock down recoveries, means that the fight largely just boils down to dropping the Eagles until you can finish them off with one All-out attack. Buying an Agility Band and equipping a higher AG Persona makes this fight a lot more consistent. Portable's is a nightmare because none of the previous saving graces I mentioned apply here. You have to rely on the amazingly inaccurate Yukari to knock these guys down, and with the introduction of the dizzy status, only one of them can be robbed of a turn per turn cycle. Taking this fight on below level 6 is close to suicide, and you need to be very meticulous in how you approach. Junpei is also a complete liability in the Portable version, though at least you can just set him to Guard to cover his weakness. Finally, something we'll have to deal with for most bosses going forward in Portable is critical hits. The bonus critical damage enemies get in Maniac mode is obscene, and many fights can just be randomly lost if the enemy scores a lucky crit on the FemC. We'll have means for working around this later, but early on it's another obnoxious bit of luck we have to contend with in battle.

Barbaric Beast Wheel<Portable Dancing Hands=FES Dancing Hands

The Reload fight is comedically easy in comparison, with two normal ass Magic Hands flanking the Beast Wheel. They contribute almost nothing and will almost assuredly be dead by your second all-out attack. The Beast Wheel itself is nothing to write home about. Portable and FES are about the same here, as this time we only have one option for striking weaknesses in both versions of the game. It's a little bit easier to have the much stronger Ara Mitama at this point over Orpheus in Portable, but that's not much of a swing factor. FES is a bit more consistent since we can just deny the Hands their turn until a single All-Out Attack will finish them off, much like the Eagles, but you'll also generally pull ahead in attack strength at this point in Portable meaning they'll die faster. Portable probably is just a little bit tougher due to the fact that at least two of the hands will get an attack out and having a weakness hit makes things dicey, but I ultimately didn't have any problems dealing with these things.

Swift Axle<FES Rampage Drive<Portable Rampage Drive

The Swift Axle having actual weaknesses just relegates it to push over status. Especially since we can easily have access to Tarunda at this point to neuter his damage output, though in fairness a layer of tactical complexity is there since the fight is much tougher without doing that. FES Rampage Drive is by far the most random fight of the early Tartarus bosses. Cadenza is our best healing right now, so this fight largely boils down to how often Yukari can dodge Mazios and how little the boss uses Assault Dive and Tarukaja. That said, by the time you reach him you should have enough defense to weather even his Tarukaja boosted attacks and still keep up the offensive pressure. I got a pretty lucky fight with this guy, saving me in resources as I was able to end the fight relatively quickly. Portable is a nightmare by comparison. At most, we can have 3 uses of Cadenza here, so our healing options are terrible. If Yukari is not guarding, she'll be giving the boss extra turns, so it's almost not even worth it to bring her. The best thing she does is tank the occasional Assault Dive. We weren't able to leave Tartarus in Portable, so I had to scrounge up gear to mitigate the huge damage this boss can deal in Maniac mode. And as always, stray crits can just ruin your day. One nice thing we have going for us is that attack items deal fixed damage. Those Mazio Gems we got from the Dancing Hands hit for a cool 50 a pop, speeding up the fight quite a bit. If you're lucky enough to get some Megido gems, those deal 150 damage! I rather foolishly wasted a Megido gem on the Dancing Hands, so I had a rough go of this fight considering most turns only Junpei could attack. He really is the MVP here though, because it's consistent damage and the only thing he's at risk from is a critical hit. It took me 4 tries to beat this version of the fight, and I had to power up considerably by gathering gear just to make it reasonably consistent.

Portable Priestess<FES Priestess<Reload High Priestess

Now this is a nice inversion to see! Portable Priestess is basically zero effort. We're so much stronger than we are in FES, from both higher levels and having access to the element boosting accessories. The Priestess can still get a random crit on the FemC to just randomly decide that we lose, but that's true of almost all fights in Portable so it's not really worth considering in an objective ranking. I tear her down in about two minutes and don't even come close to having the train crash. We're a lot weaker in FES and the game is a bit slower, so the time is a genuine concern here. The Priestess herself though is even less threatening on offense, so you really shouldn't have much trouble with this fight. Bucking the trend, Reload has the hardest version of this fight by a mile. The time limit is actually pretty tight, the very first time I played the game I only won one because I got a crit with Junpei on the literal last second of the clock. The adds she summons are much more varied in weaknesses and attacking options (as I found out in devastating fashion), and the Priestess herself both hits harder and has a dangerous AOE ice spell at her disposal. This fight can be brutal if you don't have Media and especially Tarunda. Don't be afraid to use those powerful healing items here! They can be the difference between life and death, and they're no good unused.

Cullen · Tue Sep 24, 2024 11:18 pm

Part 13 is out! It's everyone's favorite time of the school year, exam time. Exams work quite simply, there's a check against your current Academics rank to see if you have the minimum required, and then a procession of 4 questions taken from lectures/pop quizzes that you had experienced previously (Though the answers they are looking for aren't always the same as the ones for the pop quizzes). It is more than possible to ace the Academics requirement for the exam in FES and Portable, but not really worth going out of your way for reasons I'll describe below. Once that's taken care of, we tackle some minor busy work in the Bay Area and then make our grand return to Tartarus to explore the second block, Arqa. This is where the Tartarus climbs become longer and quite a bit more difficult, so be prepared for the occasional game over at this stage of the game where we are woefully lacking in fire power.

Extra Notes

In FES

-As mentioned previously, it's not all that difficult to get the Rank 3 Academics required to ace the first exam, but it really isn't worthwhile. Obviously it detracts a bit from our efforts for maximizing Courage since we need to minimize the amount of times we become Tired to keep our study sessions fruitful, in addition to taking away some Karaoke time, but beyond that the basic reward for acing an exam and simply answering all the questions correctly are one in the same. We do need to ace AT LEAST one exam in order to unlock a social link later in the game, but it's pretty trivial to max out your Academics well before that becomes something to worry about. In Vanilla, it's actually pretty easy to ace the first exam due to the offertory box not eating up any time when used. While it is an RNG check, more often than not it's a free +2 Academics every single day, including ones where you go to Tartarus.

-Officer Kurosawa and Be Blue V finally have new wares. While the former is close to pointless, there's quite a lot of good stuff in Be Blue V. Obviously there's the elemental bracers, but we also now have access to the Enhancer line of accessories! These apply an auto-buff to the equipper upon entering the battle, which can be tremendously useful in this game since it isn't always practical to keep an auto-buff Persona on hand. The most useful one in my opinion is the Speed Enhancer, which provides Auto-Sukukaja. This nearly eliminates the chance a character will miss, and makes it very easy for the MC to clear encounters on his first turn when equipped. Power Enhancers can also be worth picking up when you have the extra income. In random encounters, they're a free 50% boost to all damage a character does, and they can be situationally useful for boss fights you know you can clear within 3 turns with that kind of power.

-I do need to correct something I said in a previous update (which I've scrubbed but it's worth mentioning), I previously claimed that the elemental bracers stack with the corresponding boost skill. Sadly, this is not true. While Ice Boost and Ice Amp, for instance, can stack you cannot stack the exact same ability together. It's a bit hard to realize this with how wildly damage can vary across enemies and circumstances in this game, but I had that nagging doubt that made me test this a bit more thoroughly and sadly we cannot double up on Boosts. It doesn't help the game is a little inconsistent with how this works in general, passive crit boosts can stack up to as many as you can fit (albeit they only affect weapon attacks) while abilities like Counters or Dodge/Evade skills have no capability of stacking, with the weaker effect being flatly cancelled out by the stronger one.

-Arqa presents some challenges for us at this stage. The enemies are much more credible while we're not really much stronger than we were in Thebel. In can be tricky to money farm Arqa right now, so don't be afraid to treasure hunt in Thebel if trying to get chests in Arqa proves to be too much of an ordeal.

-We have Akihiko now! He doesn't really have the cornerstones of his arsenal at the moment, but he does come in at level 12 with pretty high ST and MA, making him a very capable fighter over the rest of our party. Definitely get a Thunder Bracer for him, he can do some good work with Zio. He also adds a small amount of extra healing to our party when the situation calls for it.

-I'd highly recommend completing Elizabeth's request for a Lead Medal ASAP. The Toy Bow is an extremely useful weapon at this stage of the game.

-I went into the boss fight a little under prepared. If you can manage it, the ideal thing to bring to the Crying Tables fight is Yomotsu Shikome. Not only does she have access to Bufu with no weaknesses to worry about, with the Hermit social link at our disposal she also levels up enough to get Auto-Tarukaja. Starting battle with that and the Ice Bracers equipped gives us an amazing +75% damage, which means you can play the fight a lot more aggressively.

In Portable

-I'm actually going slightly off my schedule here because it should affect anything if I miss one Charm boost to do Tartarus on 5/24, and I'd like to keep the playthroughs as close as I can manage. This expedition proved to be a bit rougher than the FES one, the random crits from enemies at this point in the game can really ruin your day. I had about 4 game overs over the course of the recording.

-We enter Tartarus on an accident prone night, and there are a lot more event floors in Arqa than there were in Thebel. Be prepared for some random disasters to spring up if you have to revisit any floors.

-One other thing to note about Accident prone nights is that the chance of Fusion Accidents in the Velvet room also increase. We'll get to see this in the next Tartarus video, where I get very salty about it.

-Don't be like me, remember to buy some Revival Beads before entering Tartarus. Having to avoid any knockouts to your team makes the proceedings even more annoying, though it's not a huge deal if you stock up on Yawn-Be-Gones to counteract Tired.

-Akihiko is relatively less impressive in Portable. Not as much of a level advantage, he doesn't have the Great status on the night I decided to explore, and I couldn't afford to pick up Thunder Bracers for him. Still, the help is much appreciated, and since I had a spare Shirt of Chivalry for him I was able to eke a bit more damage out of All-out Attacks from him.

-We have Co-Op strikes now! These are a weird mechanic that's heavily watered down from a similar system in Persona 4. When knocking down an enemy via hitting their weakness or scoring a crit, an ally might chime in to do a combo. This combo is a guaranteed crit on a random standing enemy. These are only really worth it if there is only one enemy standing, as it's a nice way to save SP. Otherwise, I'd mostly just reject these since you do not get One More off of the crits these inflict.

-The Crying Tables are not really much of an issue in this game. Yomotsu Shikome is a bit weaker in this version since I haven't gotten as many Hermit rank ups, but she still handles the fight admirably. The next boss we'll see is a lot trickier.

In Reload

-I went to Tartarus MUCH earlier in Reload. Before we got Akihiko in fact! This obviously makes the trip a lot harder, but you do get some unique dialogue acknowledging your progress without him so that's fun. Definitely ration your SP wisely, our All-out Attacks are weaker than they should be and we have less options for spreading the expenditures around.

-Defeating the full moon Shadow awarded us a new Major Arcana card! The High Priestess increases the damage of our All-Out Attack, though not really to a degree that lets us kill anything faster. Right now it's kind of a detriment, since we need to draw all Major Arcana Cards we currently have access to in order to trigger Arcana Burst.

-Collect as many Personae as you can and don't be afraid to shop around with fusions. We have a lot more options to work with at this stage of the game compared to FES and Portable, and the right Persona for the right job can save you a ton of headaches.

-Not too much to say about the Will O' Wisp Raven and the Lightning Eagles. They kind of low ball this boss to account for the fact you might not have Akihiko and allow you to easily beat it down without him. We won't be so lucky for the next fight.

Social Progress

We did make progress here, but not much. I'll just roll it into the next video.

Cullen · Thu Sep 26, 2024 11:29 pm

Supplemental: Akihiko Sanada FES/Portable

Alright, say it with me now everyone.

"I've been waiting for this!"

Level 99 Stats

ST: 69
MA: 70
EN: 55
AG: 63
LU: 47

Akihiko resists Elec attacks and is weak to Ice.

Skills

Sonic Punch, Zio and Dia: Starts with
Tarunda Level 16
Mazio Level 21
Rakunda Level 25
Zionga Level 29
Sukunda Level 33
Elec Boost Level 37
Diarama Level 38
Mazionga Level 41
Matarunda Level 47*
Fist Master Level 50*
Ziodyne Level 53*
Marakunda Level 57*
Diarahan Level 65*
Masukunda Level 66*
Maziodyne Level 74*
Elec Amp Level 76*

*Skills marked with an asterisk are ones only obtainable after an in-story upgrade.

Junpei may be Da Man, but Akihiko is also pretty up there in being awesome. With his in-story focus on physical strength and being a boxer by trade, you'd expect Akihiko to be a pure bruiser. Going to show that people are much more than meets the eye, Akihiko is actually a potent jack-of-all trades. His ST is almost always in proportion with his MA, and his relatively early access to his boosting passives plus stronger spells means he is often one of your more potent mages. Sonic Punch is solid damage in the early game, but it falls off quickly and you'll be waiting for Fist Master to augment his weapon strikes. Once that does become available though, Akihiko is an amazing striker, and believe it or not he actually has a trick up his sleeve that can make him a phenomenal Ice attacker. Of course beyond that, Akihiko has some light healing at his disposal and even better than that, access to all debuff skills in the game. When it comes to boss fights, there's almost never a bad time to bring Akihiko. Having someone who can take the stress off of weakening the bosses from the MC is beyond valuable. This can unfortunately make Akihiko a little one-note in boss fights, but he'll still be able to throw a strong hit in every couple turns when he's not debuff botting. When I'm not actively trying to mix up my party, I pretty much always include Akihiko, and like Junpei I've never failed to put him on my end game party. Akihiko does have low LU, meaning he's susceptible to ailments and insta-death, on top of having lower magic accuracy but this is far from a major weakness. His EN is also a tad low, but since he can assure the bosses will always be attacking at 50% less potency, that is also mostly a non-issue. Probably the best party member in the game.

In FES

As usual, the AI control restrains Akihiko a little bit. Setting him to Heal/Support will generally make him use his debuffs unless someone is under 50% HP, but his priorities on which debuff to use can be questionable. The AI's judgement seems to be rooted in Normal mode where attack damage is much lower, so Akihiko can be a bit slow to hurl out the critical Tarundas. Still, he has a pretty consistent pattern he'll use them in for any given boss fight, so once you know that pattern you can work around it. Akihiko's abilities as an attacker are excellent though, so it is fully feasible to forgo his support options and just have him punch/shock things. End game he can be a cracked physical fighter even though he's limited to just weapon attacks. Fist Mastery is a 50% bonus to weapon strikes, and there are some very powerful weapons that are MC/Akihiko exclusive later. Don't sleep on that if you feel comfortable sticking to having the MC on Tarunda duty.

In Portable

This is probably the biggest instance of direct control salvaging a particular use of a character, though it's not the only one. Having full control over which debuffs Akihiko uses makes him a hell of a lot more consistently useful, as you'd imagine. Weapons are relatively weaker in this version, so he doesn't light the world on fire there anymore. This just makes his magic stand out more, though, and he often puts the higher MA Yukari to shame with the damage he can deal. There's a bigger divide between Akihiko's use in random battles and in boss fights in this version, though since most random fights won't go past the main character's turn that probably isn't that big of a change up.

In Reload

This is the first character that is radically different in Reload compared to how they were in the older versions. While the basic building blocks of Akihiko are still there, he is much more geared towards being an offensive powerhouse in Reload rather than being a generalist. Most of his debuffs are gone save for Tarunda (which is at least the most useful one) and he has a number of traits that boost his damage potential to the stratosphere. Akihiko is much less useful in the early game of Reload, but he's a real late game killer if you use him right.

Cullen · Sun Sep 29, 2024 7:10 pm

Part 14 is out! Once again we have a new mechanic coming into play in Reload that extends the length of the video by about an extra 10 minutes. It's a cool one though, as we can now start gardening! More on that below. Otherwise it's a nice and breezy video where we go about our day-to-day before ending off in Tartarus once again. Fortunately, this is the last "Need-to-Make" trip of the moon cycle if I play my cards right with the sidequests.

Extra Notes

In FES and Portable

-We've pretty much hit the point where our day-to-day activities in FES and Portable become completely rigid and predictable. Tartarus now gives us money at a rate that well exceeds the incidental expenses of social stat raising, to say nothing of how we're closing in on capping Courage in both versions of the game. It'll be awhile before there are new noteworthy mechanics, so I'll likely combine these two for their notes or not even mention them at all if there's nothing to say. There are some miscellaneous points to make though. Once we cap Courage in FES (which will happen very soon), Tuesday and Friday go from dead nights for Tartarus to the obvious nights to sacrifice if we need to make a trip. Naturally once we cap Charm, that'll also free up Mondays and Thursdays, meaning we only need to set aside Wednesdays and Saturdays for +4 boosts to Academics. In FES where we can study regardless of what we do in a night, we'll rapidly find ourselves swamped with free time to enter Tartarus if there happens to be anything we need to accomplish on a particular night.

-Mitsuru's rewards for passing exams are the same regardless of if you place top 10 or number 1. You do need to place #1 in at least one exam for a sequence trigger later. For this specific exam, we get a Page card set, a set of +1 stat booster cards for the Protagonist's personae. Each one gives +1 Luck and +1 to another stat depending on what kind of card it is. (Sword is ST, Wand is MA, Coin is AG and Cup is EN.)

-Bringing things back to money for a bit, this is the stage of the game in Portable where selling junk REALLY takes off in profitability. If you're going to Tartarus with the intent of making money, always take Weapon cards from Shuffle Time and keep an eye out for chests that give equipment. You can get some serious paydays by liquidating crap you'd never equip anyway.

-Officer Kurosawa's wares have also updated now in Portable. The weapons he sells at this point are stronger than what we have, though not to a degree I'd really care to waste money on them. One interesting update though is that he now sells Evasion accessories that give you a bonus dodge chance against specific elements. Most of these are too situational for me to really consider, but since Junpei is lacking in good accessories at the moment a Wind Charm plus a good pair of shoes are not a terrible investment for him.

In Reload

-Mitsuru's reward for placing top 10 is much better in this game, stat incenses that can be used on our party members! I'll likely hang onto these for a bit, but I do have particular characters I like to funnel specific incenses into. Two other minor notes here, one is that we can get the rewards from Mitsuru both the day of the exam results AND at night. In the previous versions, Mitsuru only gives you the rewards during the day and IF she happens to be in the Faculty hall. It is possible to advance the game enough to miss out on her rewards. Another thing to note is that she actually does give you an extra reward if you place #1 in this version, in this instance a Proto-Choker.

-Gardening is now available! And it's available early enough in the game to make an appreciable difference! Now with the rooftop garden unlocked, there's essentially no reason to not have a constant supply of veggies growing. Keep yourself informed of what Rafflesia is selling, and always be sure to rotate out your crops once the previous plant can be harvested. Many of the veggies we can plant are SP recovery items, which means the garden is hugely helpful for allowing us to operate in Tartarus for longer periods.

-We get access to the Devil link, and this one functions a bit uniquely. I go over this in the video, but since it doesn't hurt to reiterate, there are a handful of "Semi-Automatic" links in the game. These are links that we need to actively engage with, unlike say The Fool, but do not require any particular effort on our part to Rank up. The Devil link will always rank up when you interact with it, regardless of what you say or if you have a matching Persona. If you really like the Devil Arcana, you can hyper focus this link and make some really powerful Devils in the early game. Since it's also a night time link, it is very easy to work it into your schedule without detracting from your other social links.

Social Progress

In FES

Academics: +38 (Rank 2)
Courage: +70 (Rank 5)
Charm: +38 (Rank 3)

Strength Social Link: Rank 4
Magician Social Link: Rank 5
Hermit Social Link: Rank 4
Chariot Social Link: Rank 5
Justice Social Link: Not started, but we have hit all the flags for it.

Courage is on the cusp of maxing. After this next Tartarus trip, we can use the medicine to get us to +72 points, which then means we only need two more Horror House plays to max it out. Once that's done, Tuesdays and Fridays are essentially free days. The Devil social link is available on Tuesdays, so that gives us a convenient night to slowly grind that down throughout the game. What's more, since it's FES we can still gain Academics on nights we social link as well! We couldn't get a great Charm boost from the exam, but a free +2 is still nothing to be upset about. Charm is about to explode upward now that we're going to focus on it, and it should be maxed out well ahead of time between arcade trips and pop quizzes.

In Portable

Academics: +48 (Rank 2)
Courage: +58 (Rank 4)
Charm: +53 (Rank 4)

Hanged Man Social Link: Rank 2
Chariot Social Link: Rank 3
Lovers Social Link: Rank 3
Temperance Social Link: Rank 2

Courage isn't quite as close to capping out as it is in FES, but it's still due for it in no time. One thing to note about Charm is that as far as social links go, we technically don't need to work on it anymore. The last stat check for Charm when it comes to initiating a social link is only Rank 4. Developing it past that has a fringe perk we'll get into later, plus it's necessary for an Elizabeth request down the line. It's totally possible in this version of the game to max out your social links without capping Charm if you're really meticulous in your scheduling, although the MC still needs to cap it.

In Reload

Academics: +36 (Rank 2)
Courage: +49 (Rank 4)
Charm: +54 (Rank 4)

Hierophant Social Link: Rank 3
Hermit Social Link: Rank 7
Emperor Social Link: Rank 3
Temperance Social Link: Rank 1
Strength Social Link: Rank 3

We now have all the special menu items available at Iwatodai strip mall, so we can really blast through stat development now. We also have the Devil Social Link started, though since we can't study while still participating in it, it'll be awhile before we really focus on this one in Reload.

Cullen · Mon Sep 30, 2024 11:36 pm

Supplemental video 6 is out! Notable moments that made me actually chuckle in FES are Maya complaining about being called a drunk slut by Tanaka and the MC not even pretending to care about what Kenji has to say (which Kenji is too stupid to notice). The FemC meanwhile gets to see some of Yukari's softer side and gets insight into her backstory far sooner than the MC does.

Cullen · Thu Oct 03, 2024 1:30 am

Supplemental: Fusion, or 22 Arcana Pick Up

We're getting into the point of the game where our options when it comes to fusion as a means of acquiring new Personae will expand greatly, so this is a good time to go over the basics of fusion and how to work the system to your favor. Do note this will mostly focus on the system as it is in FES/Portable as it's a lot more complicated and far less user friendly than it is in Reload. Reload retooled and simplified a lot of the aspects of the system, so it's far easier to just mash things together and pick obviously good skills when it comes to fusion. Let's get into it!

Arcana

There are 22 (21 in Vanilla) Arcana in Persona 3, each with their own roster of Personae. They are, in order:

Fool
Magician
(High) Priestess
Empress
Emperor
Hierophant
Lovers
Chariot
Justice
Hermit
Fortune
Strength
Hanged Man
Death
Temperance
Devil
Tower
Star
Moon
Sun
Judgement
Aeon

Obviously, these are derived from the Arcana of tarot cards, though Aeon takes the place of World for some reason. (I think Aeon is based on a minor card from expanded Tarot sets? It doesn't really matter) Each Arcana vaguely follows a theme for each Persona within it, though a lot of the ones in the early game follow this pretty loosely and have a handful of outliers within them. Magician, for instance, is generally geared towards Fire based casters by the end game, but has a number of non-fire Personae like Jack Frost or Orobas while Death is pretty much exclusively Dark element Personae as the name would imply. The first means we have of obtaining Personae is the highly unreliable Shuffle Time. Once we get a good stock going though, we can transition into the alternative and more reliable means of obtaining new Personae: Fusion! (And the compendium but that's just buying stuff we've already earned back) This is where Arcana becomes a major factor. When performing a normal spread (that is, fusing 2 Personae together to make 1), one Arcana will combine with another to always produce the same resultant arcana i.e. fusing a Fool with a Priestess will always make a Justice Persona. There are a handful of special fusions that ignore this rule, but they are far and away in the minority. Luckily, the game manual includes a handy-dandy chart with all possible fusion combos!

It's a bit inconvenient to have to haul that out, so thankfully we also have more cleanly structured and filled out charts we can look up online.

Note that the bottom half of this chart is dedicated to Triangle Spreads (Fusions where we cram 3 Personae into 1), we'll get into that later. With these charts, we can easily see ahead of time what in our stock we can combine to hopefully get a specific Arcana that contains a desired Persona. Or it just helps with general compendium filling to consult these charts until you commit some of these to memory. Note that any blank spot is a fusion that has no result, those two particular Arcana can never be combined into anything. You'll also note that certain Arcana (Fool, Tower, Sun and Judgement) can only be made via Triangle Spreads while Arcana like Star and Moon more often result from fusions involving Triangle Spreads or their byproducts. This is where the first major simplification of the system comes in with Reload. Triangle Spread was given the boot, and all Arcana are now generally created through simple 2 Personae Normal Spreads.

So now we know how the Arcana intermingle when it comes to Fusion. Let's get a bit more specific.

Levels and the Persona within the resultant Arcana

For Normal Spreads, this is actually pretty straight forward. Let's go back the previous example for combining Arcana:

Fool + Priestess= Justice

Let's go with the lowest leveled of the component Persona of each Arcana, which would be the Cadenza crew themselves Orpheus and Apsaras. When fusing two Personae together, you take the average of their base levels (NOT their current levels) added together (so (1+3)/2) and then add 1 to it. This would give us 3, and the Persona created will be a level that is Greater Than or Equal to that number in the resultant Arcana. In this case, we'd get a level 4 Angel. Now, say for the sake of example Apsaras was base Level 7 and we got an Average+1 of 5. Since the resultant Persona has a level Greater Than or Equal to that number, we'd get a level 10 Archangel instead. This is why when you do a mass of fusion, the general levels across your stock trend upwards as there can be some big jumps in levels at certain points in the various Arcana. (Like in P3 Vanilla, Hua Po doesn't exist so the Magician Arcana goes from a level 14 Pyro Jack to a level 28 Sati) Note that CURRENT level does not factor into Normal Spread fusion. This system works exactly the same in Reload, there's just more variety in what you can get from a Normal Spread. Next up, let's go over

Triangle Spreads

This is the version of fusion few people engage with beyond occasionally mashing three outdated Personae together to clear up stock and hopefully get something high leveled and powerful. It's not hard to see why, Triangle Spreads are pretty confusing and there's only one Arcana (Tower) obtained through it that's actually required to speed up a Social Link, and even then the affected link is under absolutely no time crunch. Still, there are some useful skills on Personae that can only be gotten through Triangle Spreads, so at least having a vague idea of how it works can be beneficial. One of the most important things to note about Triangle Spreads right out the gate is that instead of being based on a Persona's Base Level, Triangle Spread instead uses Current level. This means that leveling up the Personae involved can modify both the resultant Arcana as well as the level of the created Persona. Another thing to note is that while Triangle Spread still uses the Average Level of the component Personae to determine the value it's going to check against to see what the level of the created Persona will be, Triangle Spreads add +5 to this number instead of +1. This means you're much more likely to get Personae from two level brackets ahead of the fusion materials instead of one bracket like Normal Spreads would often give.

So with that established, how does it work in terms of how it actually combines the Personae? Let's go back to our previous example of Orpheus and Apsaras, and instead use them in a Triangle Spread with the Lovers Alp thrown into the mix. Their levels are 1, 3 and 6 respectively. The order you select them in when going to fuse them does not matter, instead what the game does is take the two lowest leveled of the Personae selected (Orpheus and Apsaras) and fuses them together to generate the Justice Arcana. Once that is done, it will then fuse in Alp, the highest leveled Persona, to get our final result. Now typically LoversXJustice results in a Chariot Persona. However, since it's fusing in a Triangle Spread we get a different end result, in this case a Hanged Man Persona. Our average level +5 for this fusion is ~8, so we get a Level 10 Hanged Man Inugami. Since Triangle Spreads use Current Level though, this result can be modified in a number of ways. If both Orpheus and Apsaras were Level 5 and Alp was level 8, the fusion order would still be the same but our average +5 would be 11 and our Persona would be the level 21 Hanged Man Take-Minakata. Say Apsaras was Level 8 while Orpheus and Alp are still their base levels, our fusion order would be FoolXLovers, which creates a Priestess that Apsaras would then fuse into. This will allow me to springboard into the next topic, but let's finish up here first. As you can see, Triangle Spreads are a lot more complicated than Normal Spreads even beyond what you'd expect from using 3 Personae over 2. If you want to get the most out of fusion, you will need to engage with it periodically, but it's far from a requirement to beat the game. I'd highly recommend saving before ever performing Triangle Spreads and always keep a chart handy so you can better keep up with what the hell you're trying to make. I guess Atlus noticed people either really struggled with Triangle Spreads or just never used them in a meaningful way, so this system was removed from Reload.

Same Arcana Fusion

Fusion works a little differently if you're fusing two of the same Arcana together. In a Normal Spread, fusing the two lowest leveled members of the same Arcana together does nothing. Say they're the Tier 2 and Tier 3 reps for the Arcana though (Like, Slime and Legion for Fool), the lower tiered Persona will "Rank Down", in this case becoming Orpheus. What if you fuse the highest leveled and lowest leveled members of the Arcana together? The Average +1 system is still in play, so you can expect to get the median result between the two. (LokiXOrpheus would give us Ose, for instance) The key thing to keep in mind is that you can only Rank Down Personae this way and the end result will always be weaker than the strongest component in terms of level. There are some ways you can use this system to get high end skills on to really weak Personae, but there's not much point to that in Persona 3 (save some specific cases regarding fusion spells) and it's mostly just used for filling out the Compendium.

Now for Triangle Spreads, it's a little more complicated as you'd expect but thankfully there's also a very easy way to make use of it for great benefit. The first thing to note is that Same Arcana fusions in Triangle spreads result in a "Rank Up" instead. The resultant Persona will be one tier up from the highest leveled one used in the fusion. The easiest way to do this is to simply fuse 3 Personae of the same arcana together to get the desired "Upgrade" to the Arcana you want. While the Average +5 system is still in play, the amount of fusions that wouldn't result in a straight rank up from the Highest Leveled X The Two Weakest is pretty negligible, so you can pretty much always pull out the two cheapest Personae in an Arcana to "upgrade" whatever you might currently be using from the Arcana. This is a fantastic thing to do for Arcana's that have a very distinct niche and tend to flatly upgrade from one tier to the next like Chariot or Fortune. The slightly more complicated way you can get this result is like in the final example from the previous section. Since FoolXLovers results in a Priestess Arcana, fusing Apsaras into it would give us Unicorn, the next tier up for the Priestess Arcana. This is the variant of Same Arcana fusion I most frequently use, and I usually just pull weaker versions of the Arcana I want to upgrade out of the Compendium when I want to do it, unless I just so happen to have some Personae on hand that get me the desired result already.

Special Fusions

Here's a mechanic we already have access to in Reload but for some reason doesn't become available until September in FES and Portable. Special Fusions use specific Personae in spreads of 4 or more (Reload adds some that only take 3, carrying the spirit of Triangle Spreads) and until often give us high end Persona with unique and/or powerful skills or resistances. Many special fusions are the ultimate Personae of their associated Arcana, obtainable only by both the fusion and maxing out the relevant social link. Others are just generically useful "boss monsters" that probably would be too good if you could just fuse into them randomly. While Reload just has one generic "Special Fusion" menu, FES and Portable has Cross, Pentagon and Hexagon Spreads as their own options. Annoyingly in FES, you actually don't know what a special spread makes until you've already gathered the relevant component Personae for them and have them in your stock. Regardless of when we get access to it, you're not liable to create most of these before the end game since the weakest among them are usually in the high 50's for levels with many pushing levels well beyond that.

Note there are also some Special Fusions not found underneath the relevant tabs and are instead obtained through Normal/Triangle Spreads of specific Personae. I'm sure most of you are familiar with the RangdaXBarong combo that creates Shiva. That fusion is alive and well in Persona 3, and as usual is the only way to obtain Shiva. Let's cover one last fusion mechanic, and then we'll talk about the benefits of fusion beyond obtaining more Personae.

Fusion Accidents

A very annoying mechanic to say the least, and it provokes a decent amount of rage from me in Part 15. Sometimes when performing a fusion, there will be an accident that results in a Persona that is not the one you intended to create. This Persona will have the same skills inherited that the Persona you intended to make, but it will be a Persona from a random Arcana within -5 to +5 levels of what you intended to create. While this does occasionally mean you can get something that's a higher level that what you were going to make, even in those cases it mostly means you get some unhelpful crap Persona and it wastes the Personae you just invested. It's also not impossible to have an accident spit one of the fusion ingredients back at you, resulting in a straight loss of one Persona. The odds of an Accident happening are 1/64 for Normal Spreads and 1/32 for Triangle Spreads. In Portable, Accident Prone nights accelerate the rate of Fusion Accidents by quite a bit depending on the Spread, though I'm having trouble locating the exact rates they get boosted to. Special Fusions will never suffer fusion Accidents. This is another reason you should always save before doing fusion, as it's very easy to have a whole bunch of resources wasted due to unpredictable accidents. Now let's move onto benefits.

Social Link Bonuses

The most prominent perk of fusion are the bonus levels you get from fusion when you have the relevant social link for a given Arcana established. The simplest way to put this is that you get a free level up at Rank 1, and then another level up every 2 ranks after with the exception of Rank 7. So, 1 level up for Rank 1, 2 for Rank 3, 3 for Rank 5, 4 for Rank 8 and a whopping +5 levels if you have a maxed out social link for the Arcana you are making. Quite a power boost for the things you make, often getting them all their skills in one swoop on top of a good stat bonus if you have a maxed out social link! This also has a snowball effect, as you can then fuse the created Personae into even stronger Personae who have wider skill pools to pull from. Speaking of that,

Skill Inheritance

Fused Personae can inherit skills from the Personae they fused from. Obviously this allows you to carry good skills from weak and outdated Personae onto higher leveled, stronger Personae when the time comes. The way this works is a little obnoxious in Vanilla/FES though. Most infamously, you cannot directly select the skills you get when creating a fusion. If the projected Persona does not have the skills you want to inherit, you have to cancel the fusion and select the involved Personae again to "Re-roll" it. Personae also have inheritance types that dictate what skills they can learn and how often you can expect to see them in the results. The main things to note is that Personae are 4-8 times as likely to inherit skills relevant to their inheritance type, only 0.2x as likely to inherit skills outside their niche, and then things like Passive skills and buffs have a standard inheritance rate that guarantees at least one of them will typically carry over. One very critical thing to note about this system is that several of the Inheritance types have skills they flatly CANNOT inherit. Physical Inheritance types flatly cannot inherit Elemental attack magics, while Personae geared towards a specific element cannot inherit spells outside of that element, with the exception of Light and Dark i.e. Jack Frost could inherit Bufula and Hamaon, but not Garula, Zionga or more obviously Agilao.

While Portable follows the same rules, it does give us an option to largely ignore the system with Skill Cards. The vast majority of the skills you care about are available in Skill Card form, and this allows you to cheat skills that Personae are not normally capable of obtaining onto their skills lists. Want a Fire specialist Jack Frost? Go nuts.

Reload largely dismantles this system as it worked previously. Most obviously, you can now just pick the skills you want to inherit, which is great for the free time of all who play the game. Additionally, Inheritance types aren't as nearly as restrictive, generally only forbidding Personae from learning skills that are their direct weakness. Jack Frost still can't naturally inherit fire spells, but he's not barred from spec'ing towards Wind or Elec if you want him too. Finally, Skill Cards also still exist and allow you to completely ignore the system entirely if you know how to get the cards you need.

As a final note, what determines the amount of skills a fused Persona inherits? It's actually dependent on the number of learned skills between the Personae involved in the fusion. For less than 6 skills learned, you inherit 1 skill. 6-8 is two skills, 9-11 is 3, 12-23 is 4 skills, 24-31 is 5 and 32+ is 6. You'll basically never see the latter two come into play save for one potential Triangle spread. Special Fusions can actually inherit more than 6 skills, but again there's only one fusion where you can potentially see this happen.

Persona Items

Sometimes when fusing Personae, the created Persona will be holding an item within itself. This can only happen through fusion, you will never see it through Shuffle Time. It also only applies to specific Personae, not every Persona can have an item. In FES and Portable, these will always be equipment. It'll be accessories for the vast majority of them, but one specific Persona can produce powerful armors. These accessories have a number of wonderful effects from blanket ailment immunities to replicating passives that are normally exclusive to the protagonist to even nullifying elemental weaknesses! It pays to note what Personae can produce these items, so always keep an eye out for them. The items will produce when the Persona learns all of its skills.

In Reload, this works slightly differently. First off, Personae don't directly produce equipment anymore and instead produce items that are instead traded for equipment that is often similar to what you got in FES and Portable. Additionally, every Persona that produces an item now instead needs a specific number of level ups to produce it instead of needing to learn all their skills. Sometimes this comes ahead of learning all their skills, and sometimes the item won't produce until well after. I'm not really a fan of how this works since it adds a lot more busy work for the same end result, but it is ultimately just as useful as it was in FES/Portable. Which is to say, very.

Phew, that was a lot! But that's a rudimentary breakdown of fusion and all the perks therein. Don't hesitate to ask if you're curious about any specifics that this breakdown doesn't cover!

Cullen · Thu Oct 03, 2024 2:01 am

Part 15 is out, rounding out our final Tartarus trip for this moon cycle! Overall went much better than I expected as the boss this time is one that has given me quite a bit of trouble in my practice playthroughs. I ended up having the hardest time in Reload for once due to the obvious drawbacks of not having Akihiko along. I get it done though, and now we're ready to head into the next full moon! I also lose myself in sidequests for a bit because clearing requests gives me an endorphin rush.

Extra Notes

In FES

-As far as funding goes going forward, we really don't have to worry too much about reserving expenses for Arcade games anymore. Obviously we do still want to keep money on hand for that until we cap all our social stats, but the amount of funds we're getting from Tartarus will vastly exceed those expenses in the coming months, giving us a good amount of discretionary income for accessories. I'd highly recommend tucking aside cash to pick up Power Enhancers for your party to use in boss fights and random encounters, since an all-encompassing 50% damage boost for 3 turns is good in almost any situation.

-I'd highly recommend completing the first two Medal requests as I did in this video, as the joke weapons they provide are quite good for right now. Shortly into June we'll gain a means to create far better weapons that the joke weapons (which are all 100 Attack with 99 Accuracy in FES), but for this brief moment these weapons are well ahead of anything we could find or buy. If you can get the Toy Boy onto the MC and the Spiked Bat onto Junpei, it will help immensely come the next Full Moon.

-If you're higher leveled than I am, a very good Persona to fuse for the Change Relic is Gurr. Not only does he resist Wind like Alp, he is a level 15 physical bruiser. He won't get any Social Link bonuses, but he's still good enough on his own merits to help a lot with the boss fight.

-Don't be afraid to use your stat cards to buff up your weaker Personae if you feel like it'd help obtain victory in a tough boss fight. Those cards are no good unused, and I certainly could of helped myself if I boosted Apsaras or Orpheus' lackluster Endurance.

-This video does a good job of showing how much of an impact EN makes in the early game. I took what, 80 more damage when I had the 3 EN Apsaras equipped over something with around 10 EN? Keep in mind that for the MC, all calculations involving level scaling are tied to his own level rather than the level of his Persona.

-For the most part, you don't need to complete any requests without a deadline right away if you don't feel like it. Many of them just unlock a succeeding request you likely will be incapable of completing right away anyway, with only marginally useful rewards. Fusion requests, in particular, are just best addressed when you have an excess of funds and the Personae that are best suited to the fusion are relatively cheap from the compendium.

In Portable

-We have the Star social link coming up soon for the FemC, so I needed to get Neko Shogun (a new Persona added to Portable just to accommodate for the earlier Star link). This is probably the worst grind we'll see in the game. There will be one more notable one later, but it should go a lot faster for a variety of reasons.

-With the Guard mechanic, Junpei can now tank in the Change Relic fight and possibly contribute to All-out attacks if you're lucky. I ultimately had him go death or glory at the end, which did kind of work out.

-One of the Accident Floor events we can get is a roughly 20% boost to experience for every fight you get into. Definitely idle on floors where you get that if you're grinding!

-In a minor change to a previously existing event floor, Enemy Floors with only Rare Forms can now trigger shuffle time with cursed coin cards that are a better value than what you normally get for that section of Tartarus. It's interesting to try your luck on these if you get them!

In Reload

-Strong Shadows get a more formal introduction here in Reload. The Steel Gigas is quite rough because he's obviously meant to be handled by Akihiko, but thankfully he's easily handled by Pulinpa to confuse him as well. Status ailments aren't too useful in Persona 3, but they can be decent against these early game beef gate enemies! Strong Shadows in general are much more like mini bosses than they are in FES/Portable, so always err on the side of caution with them. If you do defeat them and get a shuffle time, they have an extremely high chance of producing a Major Arcana card if you haven't already obtained Arcana Burst.

-Reload introduces some new bosses and new challenges on top of that! Sometimes we'll have several boss encounters in a row without a chance to save in the middle, so be careful. Again, lacking Akihiko here makes these fights pretty brutal, but I pull through with my usual mix of luck and pluck.

-Change Relic is still here, now as the Clairvoyant Relic. They're more of a straight puzzle boss this time, casting Elec, Ice and Wind spells in that order to hit anyone weak to them. Once you know that, the fight is a relatively easy, but slow, affair.

-We've already seen this in prior videos, but completing enough of Elizabeth's requests unlocks her date requests in this version of the game.

-If you're more mindful of buying out vending machines than I am, you can have a decent stock of low SP restores to extend your time in Tartarus more than I was able to.

-Alternatively, if you don't mind some mind numbing tedium, you can just Rush battles in Thebel and still get about 1,000 yen per shuffle time. I was fine with just scraping by with what I got.

Social Progress

Tartarus video, so no changes here.

Cullen · Wed Oct 09, 2024 1:04 am

Part 16 is out! After a bit of a lull in the narrative, things start to pick up as rumors of a haunting sweep through Gekkoukan High. Alongside students being spirited away and returned in a state reminiscent of Apathy Syndrome, we're not seeing hide nor hair of Fuuka Yamagishi despite hearing quite a bit about her. A connection maybe? Beyond that, we're hitting our first social stat cap in FES and rapidly closing in on the same for Portable and Reload. It'll be a bit before we pick up any new social links, but we're about to have a windfall after we pass the next full moon.

Extra Notes

in FES

-There's enough specific to FES for it to have its own section this time! The most prominent thing to note is that we have officially capped out Courage. I could have done so sooner, but we're still over two weeks ahead of time on that and it's given us time to feed more boosts into Charm and Academics. Speaking of the former, that will be our next main focus. Remember that we need to max it out by 7/25! I've checked all the dates we can hit for the photo booth, and assuming I answer 1 pop quiz correctly or get at least one coffee (not at all an issue), we will absolutely have it maxed out by then. Since we have a bit of flexibility with that, we can also dedicate our Wednesdays and Saturdays to Quiz Game now to fast track Academics a bit more.

-I finally get around to using a mechanic that I've been meaning to mention in the videos proper forever. When visiting the bathroom, there's about a 50/50 chance you will have a particularly relieving visit and it'll improve your condition by 1 stage. (Sick to Tired, Tired to Good, and Good to Great) Obviously this was undesirable to do before since we wanted to be Tired to farm extra Courage boosts, but now that we're officially past the need for that, there's no reason to not visit the bathroom every day. Being in the Great condition, aside from helping out in Tartarus, also prevents us from getting stuck on a bad subject while studying. This means every day we're Great and don't go to Tartarus, we get a penalty free Academics boost! Now as far as I can tell, whether or not a bathroom trip is Relieving or not seems to be decided upon starting the day. You can use the bathrooms at the dorm to achieve the same effect as the school bathrooms, and I've tried enough to be reasonably sure you can't save scum that. This mechanic still exists in Portable, but it's generally less helpful there since you don't have the Late Night timeslot anymore. Can't hurt to try for it before going to Tartarus at least.

-Since I've hit Rank 4 charm, we can now initiate the Devil Link sidequest. I don't quite have the money to kick off this Link yet, but once I can get it going it's very easy to slot into your usual schedule with no loss in progress with Academics due to the Late Night timeslot. Definitely get this going as soon as you can once you've maxed Courage, since the Link is available on Tuesday which is now a dead night for the Arcade.

In Portable

-Akihiko's social link is now available, giving us the Star social link much earlier than we could get it in FES and Reload! There are even some spiffy new Personae like Neko Shogun and Setanta to add to the appeal of this. As far as Dark Hour gameplay goes, this does come very much in handy once we reach the mid-30's for levels. The Persona Nandi comes with the phenomenally useful Cool Breeze skill, which is something we'll want to pass around to as many Personae as we can manage once we can do so.

-We get our first opportunity to do a Date event in Portable! There's almost no reason to do these in Portable as you can easily get by with just doing Relationship fortunes for basically any link that is stalled out on points. Still, we wouldn't have done the fortune for Junpei anyway, so may as well show him some love even if I had to buy his respect over earning it.

In Reload

-It's an Akihiko-centric part it seems, since his Link Episode is also available in Reload! Link Episodes give wildly inconsistent rewards with no real rhyme or reason to them. Last time with Junpei's, Junpei got the tremendous gain of +3 ST, while this one only boosts our MC's HP by a negligible 5 points. Still, story content is story content so we'll of course be participating in every event for Akihiko. In due time, we'll get access to a better set of side events for improving our party.

-Maya is at Rank 8 now, but is going to be spending some time on the back burner. We'll be dedicating most of our Sundays going forward to dates and relationship fortunes in order to keep our links moving along steady. It'll be a bit before Sunday has any other competition for it's Daytime time slot.

-You don't have to investigate the ghost rumors at school, but you can earn Yukari's respect at the end of the week if you figure out what's going on.

Social Progress

In FES

Academics: +54 (Rank 2)
Courage: +80 (Rank MAX)
Charm: +50 (Rank 4)

Justice Social Link: Rank 3
Strength Social Link: Rank 5
Temperance Social Link: Rank 1
Hermit Social Link: Rank 5
Emperor Social Link: Rank 3

Courage has finally maxed! As mentioned previously, we're shifting gears to Charm. Assuming I hit every Photo Booth night available at Paulownia Mall, that'll get us to +98 Charm by 7/25. That means I just need either one coffee or one correct pop quiz to polish the stat off and we'll come in for it on time. Easy-peasy really. Now I will be doing coffee on nights I don't have anything else I want to do, but because I don't need to hyper focus Charm to max it, that means we can also comfortably work in Quiz Game nights to fast track Academics as well. The next Exam requires Rank 5 Academics to ace it, which isn't really realistic, but we might just be able to make Rank 4 in time for it which should get us in the top 10 if nothing else. Our social links are progressing smoothly, but the schedule is about to become a bit more cluttered and hectic in the near future.

In Portable

Academics: +62 (Rank 3)
Courage: +68 (Rank 5)
Charm: +63 (Rank 4)

Magician Social Link: Rank 6
Emperor Social Link: Rank 3
Hanged Man Social Link: Rank 3
Star Social Link: Rank 1
Hermit Social Link: Rank 2
Temperance Social Link: Rank 3

Akihiko's social link is the last time Charm is checked against for initiating social links for the FemC, but we do still have reasons to work on it. Not much to say for this otherwise, though it is worth noting we're soon going to be getting access to Night time social links for the FemC, and that's a bit more complicated for her.

In Reload

Academics: +58 (Rank 3)
Courage: +61 (Rank 5)
Charm: +54 (Rank 4)

Chariot Social Link: Rank 6
Hermit Social Link: Rank 8
Justice Social Link: Rank 3
Strength Social Link: Rank 4
Emperor Social Link: Rank 4

Courage is on the precipice of maxing out, and it'll be right on schedule. I might actually be able to pull ahead of the schedule I'm using, since it doesn't factor in Edogawa's medicine, though the effect that'll have for me is minimal. Maya is going to be going on the back burner for awhile, as we'll now need our Sundays free to boost up other people, but it won't take too long to close that one out when we get back to it. For the most part, it's not that helpful to max out social links at this stage of the game anyway, as it'll be a long time before you can use the Personae that doing so unlocks.

Cullen · Thu Oct 10, 2024 2:46 am

We've got another FES and Portable link round up, though mostly FES this time as we had quite a bit of unique content in Portable last video. The looming shadow of the infamous philandering nature of the MC's social links in FES grows ever larger. Meanwhile, the FemC has her own problems as Hidetoshi and Bebe are speedrunning their way to eventual heart break.

Cullen · Mon Oct 14, 2024 2:01 pm

Part 17 is out! We wind down the rest of the days until the next full moon, resolving the ghost story situation and devising a rescue mission along the way. During the latter, the expected happens and we have our next major boss fight of the game. Even better than that though, we get our next party member! Or I should say, our next two, but we'll get there when we get there.

Extra Notes

In FES

-While this has been a thing since the start of the game, we do get a good display of one of Vanilla and FES' more annoying aspects of trying to make the team members feel like their own people: We can't actually modify the equipment of anyone but the protagonist outside of Tartarus/The Dark Hour. Now the remaining full moon events of the game will give us a moment to gear up our team should we need to, but this one rather annoyingly doesn't. It's not too big a deal since I wanted to go into Tartarus to quickly pick up some cash for Tanaka's social link, but always be mindful of this kind of thing before your party members have a chance to bail during an expedition.

-FES actually gives us some free time to play around with before the Full Moon rolls in, so we have a chance to pick up some gear or supplies if we so desire. We also get a chance to work on a social link too, which is not a luxury we are going to get on nights of the full moon again for a long while. Portable and Reload remove this, sadly.

-I'd recommend avoiding all conflict up until the boss fight during the brief Arqa jaunt your are thrust into. It's just not worth your while and it can be quite risky if you get first struck.

-The Chests in FES/Portable either have Medicines or Snuff Souls in them. Also not really worth going out of your way for, but I'll leave it up to you.

-As far as I know, the boss has the same gimmick in FES and Portable that it does in Reload, but since they start with so many more weaknesses from the offset, it is very easy to win this fight before they get a chance to do anything.

In Portable

-Not too much to say here compared to FES. We don't have Power Enhancers available to us at this point, but the higher levels and slightly better weaponry I have to work with still allows me to obliterate the boss before they can do literally anything.

-Money is getting a bit tight at this point, so we'll really have to stretch our available funds until we return to Tartarus. I can modify the schedule to drop a coffee night if necessary, but I can probably also get by with selling quest rewards and some additional items we're going to be able to obtain very soon.

In Reload

-The Arqa jaunt actually has more worthwhile treasure to grab in attacking items that can be helpful in the boss fight. I actually would recommend gathering the treasure if you can avoid conflict while doing it.

-Once again, Reload actually makes the Full Moon boss more of a real challenge, especially considering Akihiko is much less powerful than he's probably intended to be at this point. That said, it still largely banks on you not knowing how it's supposed to work, so I'm able to defeat it with relative ease.

-The fight also serves as a good demo for the revises abilities of our new party member! We'll go over these in detail in due time.

Social Progress

In FES

Academics: +62 (Rank 2)
Courage: MAX
Charm: +56 (Rank 4)

Temperance Social Link: Rank 2
Chariot Social Link: Rank 6
Justice Social Link: Rank 4

Unless I seriously miscounted somewhere, I'm discovering in real time that Rank 3 Academics requires a fair deal more points than it does in Portable and Reload. Not a huge deal since the points required for Rank 6 are still the same, but it does mean acing the first exam is even more of a pipe dream. We get some extra progress on the Chariot social link since we didn't lose out on daytime for 6/8, so that's nice!

In Portable

Academics; +70 (Rank 3)
Courage: +78 (Rank 5)
Charm: +69 (Rank 4)

Star Social Link: Rank 2

Courage is almost capped out! We'll just be carrying our fatigue into 6/10 and using Edogawa's medicine to polish it off. Since we could roll 4 days of Tired and Sick, we also have a couple days worth of error had we missed a boosting opportunity prior. This will be great because not having to do Horror House is another 3,000 yen saved. We'll be transitioning to Charm next, and we'll be able to see the perk of capped Charm in Portable soon! We've hit designated roadblocks for a bunch of our links at this point, so even considering the lost daytime, there's still not much material progress made for social links in this video.

In Reload

Academics: +66 (Rank 3)
Courage: +69 (Rank 5)
Charm: +54 (Rank 4)

Emperor Social Link: Rank 5
Hanged Man Social Link: Rank 4

Nothing major to report here. I'm sure Hidetoshi feels loved in this version of the game if nothing else.

Cullen · Fri Oct 18, 2024 2:37 pm

We've officially passed the third full moon, meaning it's now time to catch up on the earliest version of Persona 3! Tomorrow I'll be playing up to the Emperor and Empress fight on stream, starting at 12 PM central time. Copious amounts of gin and juice will be consumed in the process, I'm sure it'll be a blast.

Cullen · Sat Oct 19, 2024 4:32 pm

Stream is live and gameplay will begin in 30 minutes!

Interesting Things I Learned this Stream!

-I was surprised to find out that the Enhancer line of equipment was a new addition to Persona 3 FES. That threw off my strategy for the Full Moon this session but it mostly didn't matter.

-Interestingly, it seems that the Exams do take attention of your overall Academics points beyond just your displayed Rank. Even though I was only Rank 2 the same way I was in FES, I had more rank points overall and actually placed in the top 10!

-....Not that it really mattered since Mitsuru does not give you rewards for placing well like she does in all future versions. Such is life. This also means that beyond the minor charm bonus, placing well in exams is meaningless if you don't ace it.

-While I was vaguely aware of this going into the game, some Personae have different base levels than they do in FES. I was surprised how quickly this became a factor, as Valkyrie is actually level 13 in this version instead of 11. This lead to a fairly boring stretch of the stream where I had to grind for 30 minutes to reach that level so I could keep Yuko's social link on track.

-Incidentally, I was surprised to see that equipment like the Chivalry Shirt and the High-Cut Armor exist in this game, but don't actually yield any costume change when equipped. Based on the reactions when you give them to party members, I'm guessing this was something they planned for but had to cut due to time constraints, and then restored it once they made FES.

-Shadows seem to have different Gem drops in this version of the game, I got way more Turquoise than I have in FES from enemies that definitely don't drop it in FES. This becomes relevant to a future point.

-The bonus points you get for Social Links when having matching Personae are super random in this game. Sometimes it's a 50% bonus like it is in all future versions, but other times it just seems to be completely arbitrary. The fact you aren't always getting that 50% bonus is a part of why links take more effort to develop in this game.

-While I knew that the Antique Store didn't have Weapon Fusion in this version, I was surprised to see that quite a few items are also missing from the Gem Trading. Some good stuff you can get from here is only available in FES, like Sutras. Incidentally, this means that I don't really have anything I care to use my abundant Turquoise on.

Cullen · Mon Oct 21, 2024 11:47 am

A new part is out! Another full moon and another return to normalcy, though we do have a few shake ups to the status quo both in the dorm and in game mechanics. We have a new member in Fuuka Yamagishi, and functionally this results in us getting two new members as Mitsuru can return to combat duties over navigation! Some new services open up for in FES and Portable as well, which we'll cover in due time. Reload gets the more interesting shake up with some of the more fun mechanics added to this version of the game.

Extra Notes

In FES

-Starting from 6/13, we can go to Tartarus with Fuuka guiding us! We actually have pretty ample freedom to explore Tartarus whenever now that we've maxed Courage. We have tons of time to cap Academics, so as long as we just reserve Monday's and Thursday's for our Arcade time, we can essentially wrap up our Tartarus needs at any time.

-The Antique store is now available to us! This affects the game in a number of ways going forward. All those gems we've been getting can be traded for extremely helpful items, and more than that we can now perform Weapon Fusion! Weapon Fusion was a big new addition for FES and it is incredibly useful for powering up your characters. Weapon Fusion warrants its own Mechanics post, so I'll go into detail on it when I have some spare time. The main thing to know now is that Rare Forms in FES and Portable can now drop Nihil Weapons, the base component for Weapon Fusion. Definitely take some time to hunt down Rare Forms and collect a Nihil weapon of each weapon type, you'll definitely want to gear your party up with fused weapons ASAP.

-We have our first romance established. Romantic Social Links are forced upon you in the Male storyline of any version of Persona EXCEPT Reload. This is a widely hated mechanic gameplay-wise as well as narrative-wise because it forces you to be a philandering prick. Gameplay-wise, now that we're Romantic with Chihiro, she will become jealous if we spend time with any other links that have the potential to become Romantic, even if they aren't currently Romantic. Right now, this means she'll just get mad if we hang out with Yuko, but more Romantic links will become available in short order. I've briefly gone over this, but just to reiterate: Social Links with female classmates normally Reverse if neglected for more than 60 days. When Romance comes into play, triggering a jealous reaction by hanging out with another girl will deduct this timer by a flat 15 days. So if we were able to hang out with different girls 4 days in a row, Chihiro would immediately have her link reverse. Now thankfully, you can get through the game without this ever becoming much of an issue since it only affects links that have become Romantic and you never really need to interact with more than two girls at a time to max all social links. Just be mindful of what links have become romantic and try not to juggle more than two of these at a time. Obviously, these links are also the preferred ones to max out asap so you don't have to deal with this nonsense for too long.

In Portable

-Courage has been maxed out in Portable! We've been doing things a bit more balanced in this game, so this doesn't have quite the impact on our schedule that it does in Persona 3 FES, but it is one less thing to stress about.

-This is true of Reload as well, but a certain mechanic will be coming up in the future that really behooves us to delay our Tartarus trips for as long as possible. More on this in the next video.

-With the Antique store unlocked, we can now obtain new fusion spells and replenish our stock of Cadenzas! I'd definitely recommend picking up as many Cadenzas as possible, they're the best healing we'll have for quite some time. Other spells are varying degrees of useful in Portable, but it'll be awhile before we have the items to pick them up en masse. This is what all that Malachite has been for if you were curious.

-The Antique store also carries Skill Cards in Portable! Quite a few useful ones too, definitely look into picking up a Growth 3 card to dupe at the Inari Shrine when you can, plus anything else you might want for customizing Personae in the late game. The Resist cards can be especially handy if you plan to tackle the bonus bosses!

-Weapon Fusion mostly works as it does in FES, but a handful of Special Weapons have had their effects changed, plus two new special weapon have been added: A new weapon for Mitsuru since originally she used the same One-handed swords the MC did, and a new Naginata for the FemC to use. Fused weapons also take a slight hit in usefulness since the Protagonist can no longer use almost any fused weapon they please.

In Reload

-The Antique shop... is not available yet in Reload!!! For some reason it unlocks in the middle of July in this version of the game. Ironically, it's functionally more like it was in Vanilla where Weapon Fusion didn't exist and it was a pure trading outpost, though obviously that does not mean the spirit of weapon fusion as a mechanic was removed. I do find the Reload antique shop to be a little boring in comparison because of this though. More on that later.

-Because I visited Mr. Edogawa a couple times, I've actually pulled ahead of the schedule I'm using and capped Courage a little early. This lets me get an extra Academics boost later, for as much as that's worth. I must have lost count somewhere, or something was more valuable than I thought it was, because I was pretty sure I at least needed 2 or 3 more points after the last activity I did to get the rank up.

-We unlock the coolest new mechanic of Persona 3 Reload, Theurgy! Theurgy is the Limit Break mechanic of Reload, bestowing every character powerful super attacks AND super support abilities! For the protagonist, this is also the functional replacement of Fusion skills, fittingly his first Theurgy being Cadenza. Every other character will have two Theurgies by the end of the game, some of these being alternative super attacks while others are the aforementioned support abilities. I forget the exact count, but the Protagonist has like 8 or so Theurgies by the end of the game. Every character builds up Theurgy gauge in different ways, though they also gain a little bit on the gauge any time their turn comes around or they are Shifted to. We will also be unlocking special new passives for our party members in the near future. I plan to write the Reload bios soon, so I'll likely just spoil what these are in those as it's not much of a plot thing regarding these abilities and it's not impossible for you to go through the game without unlocking any of them if you're an idiot like me.

-While every other character gets new Theurgies via plot progression, the protagonist gets them through obtaining the requisite Personae like with Fusion Spells. Fuse like crazy and you may just find excellent new Theurgies!

Social Progress

In FES

Academics: +74 (Rank 2)
Courage: MAX
Charm: +62 (Rank 5)

Temperance Social Link: Rank 4
Justice Social Link: Rank 6

I've discovered that Academics takes 78 points to hit Rank 3 in the PS2 versions of Persona 3, so we'll be seeing that rank up soon enough. Thankfully the overall points needed is still 230, so the remaining ranks should come in a little quicker. Charm won't see another Rank Up for quite a few videos as there is a vast gulf in points needed to go from Rank 5 to Rank 6. We should have no trouble maxing that though, we have plenty of nights we can hit the Photo Booth and numerous pop quizzes and coffee opportunities coming up before 7/25. Since Chihiro is Romantic now, her link will be getting a lot of focus this Moon Cycle so we can put the kibosh on her jealousy as soon as possible.

In Portable

Academics: +70 (Rank 3)
Courage: MAX
Charm: +75 (Rank 5)

Chariot Social Link: Rank 4
Magician Social Link: Rank 7
Lovers Social Link: Rank 4
Hanged Man Social Link: Rank 4

Courage is maxed, and with only slightly less time to spare than FES! In a slight reversal from FES, the Rank 5 for Charm got pushed back in contrast to the Rank 3 for Academics getting moved up. All our social links are moving along swimmingly, and we've been able to get into more of the FemC exclusive content! For all you Junpei fans out there, our boy will be seeing his storyline's conclusion within this moon cycle, which will be kind of funny for the plot independent of social links. Sadly, it'll be a bit before we get more FemC exclusive links in rotation, but there will be a huge windfall of them in a couple moon cycles.

In Reload

Academics: +76 (Rank 3)
Courage: MAX
Charm: +54 (Rank 4)

Chariot Social Link: Rank 8
Strength Social Link: Rank 6
Emperor Social Link: Rank 6

And Courage has been maxed in Reload! A little bit ahead of time to, so like I mentioned before I can pick up an extra Academics boost. The Chariot Social Link is close to maxing, and that will be a big focus of the next video. Sadly, it'll be awhile before we can enjoy all the fruits of a maxed out Social Link, but it's a cool accomplishment nonetheless! Things continue to look up for us.

As a random aside, for those who don't care to watch the Vanilla livestreams, I've added some liner notes to the thread post for the second stream highlighting some interesting differences I found while playing. I was only nebulously aware of the additions made in FES since that's the only PS2 version of the game I've played up until now, so it's been cool to see just how much was tweaked in the update! I'll also be adding gem requirements to the Fusion Spell list in the FES/Portable bio for the protagonist since we've now actually hit the point where that information is pertinent.

Cullen · Wed Oct 23, 2024 11:49 am

Part 17 didn't really have enough going on to warrant its own supplemental video, so I've rolled the scant few links that happened there in with part 18! We build our rapport with Bebe quite a bit this time around and also decide to toy with Chihiro's feelings because that's how things work in FES. Surprisingly little of the FemC is seen here since we actually had mostly unique links for her in the main videos this go around.

Cullen · Fri Oct 25, 2024 2:39 am

Supplemental: Status Ailments, or the part where we remember how Charm made DarkSydePhil rage quit this game

I've been meaning to write this for awhile but

I'll get to the more interesting Antique Shop and Weapon Fusion post in due time, but better get this taken care of before it gets lost in the lurch.

Just as well, we're hitting the point where this will become more relevant as many tough fights going forward will gain a ton of their difficulty from the ailments employed against us! There's a variety of status ailments in Persona 3 that are of dubious use for us in FES/Portable and are decently useful in Reload with proper team building. Understanding what Ailment does what and which ones you should watch out for are critical if you want to succeed in combat in this game, because there's nothing worse than a party member getting Charmed and using Diarahan on a boss. Let's go down the list.

Freeze

Let's start off with the unconventional ones. Freeze as an ailment has no spells that can be cast purely for the purpose of inflicting it. Instead, all Ice spells have a chance of Freezing enemies that they connect with. Now in Nocturne and Digital Devil Saga, this ailment was absolutely cracked (no pun intended) because it disabled an enemy's physical resistance (e.g. if they Repel physical attacks normally they are now susceptible to them instead.) and made your attacks guaranteed crits. This was considered to be too good in the context of Persona 3 I guess because in FES and Portable, the main thing this ailment does is prevent characters and enemies from dodging attacks. It also prevents characters from participating in All Out Attacks. It is cured when the afflicted character/enemy's turn comes around. It feels like this ailment is half implemented. Too bad they did show the same care for a similar ailment.

In Reload, Freeze works a little differently. In addition to disabling evasion, Frozen characters/enemies will also lose 1 turn unless they have the Fast Heal passive. Additionally, while crits are not guaranteed, your chance of inflicting them on frozen enemies are increased. One thing to note about ailments in general in Reload is that ALL OF THEM prevent participation in All Out Attacks, as well as denying the use of your Theurgy. Additionally, if the Protagonist has an ailment, All Out Attacks can't be used period. Items also exist that can cure this status in Reload, anything that cures Poison will also cure Freeze. Reload has also introduced the Freeze Boost passive skill to improve the odds that Ice skills will tag enemies with this status. Mitsuru's Theurgy also has an extremely high chance of Freezing enemies that are not immune to the status.

As far as dealing with this status goes, Jack Frost can produce an accessory that makes you immune to it in FES/Portable, and there's a Null Freeze passive. It's such a non-issue though that I wouldn't pay much attention to this status in any capacity in FES/Portable. The same cannot be said for,

Shock

The electric counterpart to Freeze, only capable of being inflicted via elec spells. In Nocturne and DDS, this ailment was just Freeze but worse since it didn't remove physical resistances. The relationship is reversed in Persona 3 FES/Portable, as while it doesn't disable physical resistances still it did at least retain the guaranteed crits. This is quite broken in FES, as a Shocked enemy can be endlessly stun locked with crits with the right set up. Even beyond that, this status boosts your physical damage into the stratosphere for a turn depending how the turn order lines up. The big problem with this status is that like Freeze, it cures when the afflicted character/enemy's turn comes around, so depending on the random turn order you got it can potentially be impossible to take advantage of this. Regardless, Shock is broken due to the existence of a couple of spells: Thunder Reign and Thunder Call. These spells have a 100% chance of inflicting the Shock status on anything not immune to elec attacks, and in story boss fights where you team always gets to go before the bosses, this breaks most of them once you have access to these spells. Keep that in mind for later. Oh and like Freeze, it also prevents afflicted characters from participating in All Out Attacks.

Shock is basically the same as Freeze in Reload, so read above. Shock Boost increases the chances that elec spells will stick the enemy with this ailment, and Akihiko's Theurgy has high odds of tagging susceptible enemies with it.

As for dealing with this ailment, it actually seldom comes up as a problem for you. There is a Null Shock passive though, that believe it or not, can be useful in exactly one situation. It's tough to secure it for that situation in FES though.

Down

When someone has their weakness struck or they are hit critically, they are put in the Down status. This ailment has subtle differences across all versions of the game. In Vanilla and FES, Downed character/enemy's will take 50% more damage and will lose a turn having to get up when their chance to act comes around. Should a Downed character be struck though, they will be brought to their feet and get their turn when it comes around (assuming they survive the attack that is). Portable removes the latter aspects, but adds the Dizzy status to the mix. The 50% damage bonus still applies. In Reload, Down works identically to Portable but the Dizzy status had a nerf done to it.

The Re Patra spell can take characters out of the down status in FES/Portable, while Reload introduces some items that put character's on their feet. Since the non-PS2 versions do not inherently deny a character a turn when they are downed, these items aren't too helpful. Re Patra kind of sucks in general because only Junpei and the MC/FemC can use it, meaning it's hard to really any get any value out of it when you need it.

Dizzy

New to Portable and heavily nerfed in Reload, Dizzy is a status that can occur on Downed characters. In Portable, a character/enemy will be made Dizzy if their weakness is struck or they are hit with a crit while down. The Dizzy status will cause them to lose their next turn, though it does not cause the afflicted to take an even harsher damage penalty. Additionally, all attacks to someone who is Downed has a small chance of resulting in Dizzy.

In Reload, this status has been nerfed so that it can no longer be applied 100% of the time. The chance of Dizzy occurring is just that: pure chance. Hitting weaknesses or with crits does seem to have better odds of inflicting it, though the odds are still rather frustratingly low. As a small compensations, All Out Attacks can now randomly apply Dizzy.

Re Patra picks up the ability to cure Dizzy in Portable, while items that cure Down in Reload also cure Dizzy.

Distress

How I feel dumping all the recorded footage and audio into Sony Vegas, and also an ailment in this game!

In FES/Portable, this ailment increases received damage by 50%, lowers outgoing damage by 50%, and makes its recipient incredibly susceptible to crits, something like an 80% chance. It'll cure itself in 1-4 turns depending on the luck of the afflicted.

This is actually pretty much unchanged for Reload, except that the Distress status will be purged upon the afflicted receiving an attack. I guess to make it less broken if the player finds a way to make it stick 100% of the time? There's also the Fast Heal passive, which will cure it automatically when the turn of the afflicted comes around.

Patra and Me Patra gems exist as items to cure this status, plus a number of alternatively named items that have the same effect in Reload. There is also the identically named Patra spell line. If you're really cagey about being inflicted with it, the Persona Flauros can poop out an accessory that makes you immune to the status, to say nothing of the actual Null Distress passive. For the most part, I wouldn't worry about having these ailment specific accessories in Reload since you can just save up to buy an omni-null accessory for ailments from Club Escapade, so just presume that as the default recommendation for all ailments going forward. The specific versions still exist, but with the additional step of having to trade Persona items for them at the antique store once that opens.

For inflicting Distress, there is the single-target Bewilder spell or the multi-targeting Eerie Sound spell. Distress can also be randomly applied when first striking an enemy if you sufficiently outlevel them. Reload also adds upgrades to your field strikes that improve the odds you'll enter the battle with Distressed enemies. Distress Boost is a passive that increases the odds that your Distress spells will work. Distress is pretty impractical in FES and Portable as by the time you get the pieces to make any ailment work, the Protagonist can easily just nuke any enemy formation you come across if you know what you're doing. Ailment builds are a lot more practical in Reload due to tougher enemies (Strong Shadows in particular) that warrant the use of ailments and several surrounding new mechanics that get a lot of extra mileage out of ailment skills.

Panic

This one actually works completely differently in all versions of Persona 3 prior to Reload. Panic is more like a Silence skill in these games. All it does is prevent the usage of skills, and that is it. You will never randomly lose your turn, and it does not prevent All Out Attack participation.

Reload makes this ailment work more like the confusion effect you're probably used to. Character/enemies afflicted with Panic will lose their turn for as long as they suffer from it, and can randomly throw away items or money while under the ailment. You never have to worry about Pokemon-style self-harm though.

Anything that cures Distress will also cure Panic, so Patra/Me Patra et. all. In Persona 3 FES/Portable, you can obtain an accessory from the Persona Legion to also give yourself immunity.

Panic can be inflicted via the single-target Pulinpa or the multi-target Tentarafoo. Panic Boost is a passive that boosts the success chance for these spells by 50%. This ailment is actually quite good early on in Reload as it's an easy way to completely disable strong enemies. It's a remarkably unthreatening and easy to work around ailment in FES/Portable, but can result in some serious losses in Reload. Always keep a large number of Me Patra gems in your pocket, the last thing you want is for your team to toss away you entire cash supply.

Poison

A staple of the RPG genre, it functions as simple as it always does. When afflicted with poison, you'll lose about 12% or so of your HP at the conclusion of your turn. In Reload, this definitely ticks every time you get a One More, but I'm actually not sure if this is the case in FES/Portable because it rarely comes up. Unlike other PS2 entries for the MegaTen series, Poison cannot actually kill you, just reduce you to 1HP. It's also worth noting that Poison is the one ailment that will never naturally wear off. It must be cured with an item or spell if you want to be rid of it. It mostly works the same in Reload, with the exception that it does cure itself at the conclusion of battle.

You'll need either Dis-Poisons or the Posmudi spell to cure it. Reload instead has the Baisudi gems and the generic brand version of said item sold at the Pharmacy, with the correspondingly named Baisudi spell. Unicorn can produce an accessory that makes you immune, though like I said this ailment rarely comes up in FES/Portable, so it's not really critical.

Poison is the least useful ailment by far for you to make use of, it mostly exists to be used against you. HP values actually trend pretty low in Persona 3, and the things with large enough HP for poison to make a dent are naturally immune to it. Poisma, Poison Mist and Poison Boost are all the relevant skills for it.

Fear

Here's an annoying status ailment, functionally the paralysis effect of Persona 3.

This ailment works the same in all versions of the game, Fear afflicted character/enemies will have a 50% chance of being paralyzed with Fear and not taking an action. In non-boss encounters, there's also a chance that those afflicted with Fear (with the exception of the Protagonist) will flee the battle entirely, leaving you short handed if this happens with your party. Fear also increases susceptibility to critical hits, though not to the same degree that Distress does. It's very obnoxious, and is one of the few ailments to come with a synergistic skill that isn't just a boosting passive. In FES and Portable, this skill just exists to be used against you. It's easier to take advantage of this skill in Reload.

Fear is another one of the ailments that falls under the Patra umbra of cures. What a versatile spell/item! In FES/Portable, Yamatano-orochi can produce an accessory that makes you immune to this status. I haven't really mentioned this until now, but there are also Weapon Fusions that will bolster your resistance to specific ailments, though they can't make you outright immune. A couple bosses in the game make use of Fear, so it can be handy to have weapons with the Resist Fear ability on hand for those cases.

Fear has the Evil Touch, Evil Smile, and Fear Boost as the primary skills for inflicting Fear, but I did mention that this ailment has a synergizing skill to go along with it. That would be Ghastly Wail, which has the ability to insta-kill anyone inflicted with Fear with 100% accuracy. It FES/Portable, this is guaranteed death, while Reload allows you to avoid it with the Homunculus item. As far it goes in your hands, it's pretty useless in FES/Portable since only the Protagonist can do the combo and it's just easier to set up to kill with raw damage. The Shift mechanic in Reload makes it much easier for the protagonist to set the ailment, have someone get a crit, and then pass it back to the MC for a Ghastly Wail finisher. Not my style really, but it is worth considering against Strong Shadows that aren't immune to Fear.

Charm

Probably the most widely hated ailment in MegaTen as a whole, and the one you need to watch out for the most when you know it's going to be in play.

Once again, this works identically across all versions of the game. A Charmed character/enemy will be uncontrollable and will instead take one of three actions: 1.) Do nothing. 2.) Attack a random ally of theirs. 3.) Cast a support spell on their opposition. That last one is the big reason this ailment is hated. If a healer gets tagged with it, there's a decent chance late game they will cast a full heal on whatever you're fighting and completely reset the fight on you. By the end of the game, most of the characters in Persona 3 have access to some form of Diarahan, so this can be much more likely to occur than you'd think. In FES it is especially obnoxious because only the Protagonist can really cure it and you're often hosed if he gets hit with it. The AI is infamous for not knowing what to do with ailments when they come into play, and often they uselessly heal HP over actually purging the ailment, even if they have the means to cure it! It's less of a problem in Portable and Reload since now you can directly control your party and they have access to all your items, but that doesn't mean at all you should take it lightly.

You'll need Dis-charms to cure charm, or the Charmdi spell. Or you know, Amrita, but that checks everything so it's kind of redundant to mention. The Persona Narcissus produces an accessory that prevents Charm in FES/Portable, and this is the one single ailment immunity accessory I'd recommend you pick up. Any boss that uses Charm against you shouldn't be screwed around with, and you should at least make sure your Protagonist is immune to the status. Thankfully, Narcissus is only a Level 20 Persona, so it's not much of a task to pick up several copies of the accessory if you know what you're doing.

Marin Karin, Sexy Dance and Charm Boost are the tools of trade for inflicting this ailment. As always, I don't find even the strongest ailments to be all that helpful to your cause in FES and Portable, but in Reload it's not a terrible idea to make a Charm specialist that's fast enough to let the MC consistently go before the enemy in battle. It's a powerful shut down tool that effectively weaponizes your enemies to your benefit. I don't typically care to go out of my way for this, but I may try to get something like that online for the LP.

Rage

Here's a weird ailment that's pretty much detrimental if you use it against the enemy, but can be weirdly beneficial if YOU get hit by it.

Once again, the ailment mostly works the same across all versions of the game, with one notable change in Reload. Rage is a berserk-type status that robs the afflicted character/enemy of the ability to do anything but normal physical attacks. In this state, they deal 50% more damage while also taking 50% more damage in turn. In FES and Portable, this ailment also causes the afflicted to attack twice per turn, which can be abused in some situations. I guess they considered this to be too silly, since it doesn't do that anymore in Reload. This is a horrible ailment for you to make use of most of the time since it often makes enemies way more dangerous. This a'int exactly the Taunt spell from Nocturne/DDS. Most of the time when it's used against you, it's either the enemy signing their own death warrant, or it's a boss that repels/drains physical attacks.

Dis-rage or Enradi are your prescriptions for this ailment. The Persona Fortuna can also produce an accessory that guards against this in FES/Portable, though like I said this ailment is honestly often to your benefit.

Provoke, Infuriate and Rage Boost are your weapons for doling out this ailment. I would never advise using them. Rage also has its own synergistic skill, though it's much weirder than Ghastly Wail. Raging Tiger is a passive that boosts the damage you deal while under the Rage status even further, though by how much I'm not actually sure. If there were reliable ways to self-inflict rage, this might make for an interesting meme build, but as it is you mostly see it come out in the Persona 3 Portable exclusive bonus boss fight that rather foolishly uses Rage against you, to their complete detriment.

Great, Tired and Sick

Not status ailments per se, but conditions you'll see in FES and Portable. Reload removed these entirely.

Great is a status you get either from sleeping at night without doing anything, dozing off in class when given the chance, or you can randomly get it when you go to the bathroom. Relationship Fortunes also have a chance of putting you in the Great condition if you get an excellent fortune. Great provide minor bonuses to all attributes, the effects being much less pronounced than the impact of being tired. I'd hazard a guess it's around a 5-10% increase to things like damage you deal, your crit rate, your accuracy and dodge rate. There's also a skill that has its damage doubled when you're in the Great status. Your teammates will also have this condition on random days throughout the calendar (assuming they didn't start the day Tired or Sick) but it's not really something that's worth planning around.

Tired and Sick have the opposite effect, making you worse and tremendously so at that. When you are Tired, the damage you deal is about 70% of what it is normally, while you take about 50% more damage. I believe you also suffer minor penalties to accuracy and evasion, though I'm not sure on that. Sick takes this even further, the damage you deal is about 25% of what it normally is and the damage you take is doubled. You're also more susceptible to crits, and healing received is ALSO halved. Tired and Sick will come up naturally for your team and you should never under any circumstances have anyone try to fight in these conditions. It's just asking for trouble. Not that you'll too often get the opportunity for that in FES since Tired and Sick teammates will bail on you as soon as you return to the Tartarus lobby.

Portable introduces the Yawn-be-Gone item which can cure the Tired status. I'm not sure if it affects Sick party members, but Sick doesn't come up very much in Portable anyway so it's not much of an issue to worry about anyway.

Other Ailment Related Skills

There's a universal Ailment Boost passive that provides a 50% success bonus to all ailment skills, though I'm unsure if it stacks with the dedicated ailment boosts. There's also the spells Foul Breath and Foul Air. These spells lower the ailment resistance of one enemy and all enemies and allies in battle respectively. There's the very strange Virus Breath skill, which deals 25% current HP damage to all enemies with a small chance to poison. Several Fusion Spells revolve around ailments, and there are some weapons that can deal ailments on hit, but I wouldn't really focus too much on these as they are unreliable. I would also just like to mention the Thunder Call and Thunder Reign spells as not only are they really broken ailment spells, they're also very strong attacks in general. Definitely get those set up once you reach the levels for them.

Cullen · Mon Oct 28, 2024 2:54 am

Part 19 is out! I forgot how much new stuff unlocks in this moon cycle for Reload, as we already have picked up a new means for progressing our characters and picking up some extra items. More on that later. On the FES and Portable fronts, I run into a myriad of issues due to poor luck, but past this is pretty much the last stage of the game where my schedule can be thrown off by RNG. On the brighter side, we're also breaking into one of the most interesting mechanics specific to these versions, the Weapon Fusion system!

Extra Notes

In FES

-I have to actually issue a surprise correction because a little bit after the recording for the FES segment, I actually found out something interesting that runs counter to what I've been saying about the social stats thus far. Turns out Charm also maxes out at +80 like Courage in FES. I never had a reason to manually track my points up until this LP, so I always just assumed it was +100 like the future versions. This does mean that by next video, we'll be having essentially complete freedom with our schedule for the rest of the game since Studying has basically no time cost in this version.

-The wares at Paulownia Mall have yet to update, so I decide to do a weapon fusion to add to our arsenal. The current level of the Persona determines the strength of the fused weapon, so you ideally want to use the highest leveled thing you can make when creating one. Right now, the highest leveled Personae we can make are all in the same level bracket in terms of power on the resultant weapon, so I go with Oberon since he was the cheapest and easiest for me to make and I wanted to have him around anyway. This gives us a sword with the Dodge Elec ability, which isn't too helpful, but remember that fused weapons can be re-fused into new weapons once created.

-We get a good look into the drawbacks of the Late Night study sessions, sometimes you'll just get slapped with Tired into immediate sickness which can completely scuttle your Tartarus plans. Save often if you want to avoid this, because as far as I can tell if the game rolls Tired on a given study night, you will always get Tired no matter what. Thankfully, as mentioned previously, Charm is going to be a non-issue soon so this will be relegated to a minor nuisance in short order.

-I make another goof at the end of the video, I say I'll be going to Tartarus on 6/21 but if I actually took the second to talk to Fuuka I would have found out Akihiko and Mitsuru were MIA and we couldn't go. Fortunately, there's a pop quiz on 6/22 and with a Coffee boost the night prior, that'll put us at capped Charm and I can just go on Monday anyway.

In Portable

-Fuuka is available to social link slightly earlier for the FemC with slightly streamlined requirements, this time only needing Max Courage (Not a small ask, to be fair). I guess the butterfly effect of the protagonist being a girl cost her own courage to join an arts club.... or maybe gave her the courage to form her own? That's for you to decide!

-We get the first recorded instance of a pop quiz being identical between all versions of the game! (Except maybe Vanilla, we'll see) Figures it would be Mr. Edogawa drawling on about magic. (Truthfully I actually find his lectures to be very interesting!)

-It's kind of cool that a lot of the requests have new rewards in Portable, but it is certainly frustrating too because I ended up having to sell a lot of the stuff anyway to keep developing our social stats. On the bright side, this is another good avenue to get gear for our team and is another thing that allows us to avoid spending too much money on Kurosawa.

--Another avenue for making funds is trading for items at the Antique store. In particular, I can pick up 3 Trafuri Gems for 6 Amethyst right now for a quick bit of cash if I need it. This is obviously less useful later on, but it's a good consideration for the moment.

-This applies to Reload also, but Tartarus Victims are now a thing to worry about! Following up on the impetus for rescuing Fuuka, Portable added a new type of sidequest where residents of the Bay Area are drawn into Tartarus, and will become Lost if not rescued by a certain deadline, usually the same cut off for Elizabeth/Theo's timed requests. I kind of wish they put more pressure on this with shorter and more varied deadlines, because in both Portable and Reload this just means you should delay your Tartarus trips for as long possible so you can clear as many rescues that are available for the moon cycle at once. Actually rescuing people is pretty simple, Elizabeth/Theo will give you a nebulous range of where people are located when spoken too, and the victims will always be found on a specific floor. Just interact with them, and bam, rescue!

-I take on a part time job since I can do it without throwing off the schedule and it scores us a mostly free quiz game. You can work at various spots around the Bay Area such as Chegall Cafe and the Screenshot Movie theater for +1 bonuses to two social stats and a small chunk of change. The money you make falls off in usefulness pretty quickly, but if you can work it in without breaking the flow of the schedule, why not?

-We get to see the bad result of a fortune in the version where I'm struggling with money the most. Thankfully, the fatigue penalty is very easy to deal with since we have Yawn-be-gone.

In Reload

-We get the second night time social link, the Tower Mutatsu! The sidequest to initiate this link is the same in all versions of the game, so I'll likely speed by it when we get around to it in the other versions. Unlike Tanaka, Mutatsu does require more effort to advance because you do actually need to earn points to advance the link, it's not a guaranteed rank up every time. It's actually one of the slower links in the game, but there is so much free time to get to it that it hardly matters. For the MC, this is the last night time social link in the game, and the game goes until January 31st, so yeah we've got some time for this one.

-We unlock a new night time mechanic, team hang outs! On various nights, your teammates may want to cook together, watch a movie, read some books or tend the garden. Attending these events can yield social stat bonuses as well as decently powerful items. The big draw of these though (beyond the added story content of course) is that when you attend 3 of a specific hang out, the character you hang out with will unlock new passives to power them up in combat (and in some cases, out of combat!). To be clear, you can't mix and match hangouts to unlock these passives, you must attend 3 of a specific kind to unlock them. So Fuuka is available to garden with as well as read. We can attend 3 garden hangouts to get her passive, but 2 gardening hangouts and then reading will not unlock it. That said, if we attend 3 gardening events to unlock the passive, and then 3 reading events, the passive will upgrade to become even more potent once the reading events are also done! Regardless, it'll be a bit before we get any of the abilities since specific hang outs are only sporadically available and seldom can you hyper focus them to complete them within a few days.

-We max out our first social link, with Kaz being the lucky boy to hold the honor! The direct perks of maxing out a Social Link are that all fused Personae within the Arcana gain 5 levels upon fusion, and we also unlock a brand new Persona to fuse: Thor! Thor is a very powerful physical/elec hybrid Persona who picks up powerful Strike AOEs, Ziodyne spells, and potent passives such as Elec Amp and Auto-Matarukaja! Which is great, but he's also in the 50's for levels, so it'll be a bit before we can use him. Correspondingly, there actually isn't that much reason or pressure to max out links quickly since it'll be awhile before we can make good use of the full rewards for doing so. The indirect benefits of maxing social links though... are only relevant in FES. In FES, maxing the social link means we no longer have to attend it all to prevent it from reversing, making our schedule much less cluttered and meticulous as we max more links. This benefit doesn't matter post-FES since the neglect mechanic was kicked to the curb and you can ignore links for months on end if you so desire.

-It's not really a big deal mechanically or anything, but Fuuka does have a pretty amusing double jeopardy unlock requirement for her Social Link. Not only do we need to attend the first rank of the Fortune social link which as far as I know there's nothing prior that says Fuuka is an art club member, we also need maxed Courage to break the ice with her. One thing that is interesting to note though is actually in regards to Portable: In Portable, Fuuka's link generally follows the same beats but the framing is different. In that version, she's running a cooking club, and we get the minor fringe perk of picking up food items from our cooking practice with her.

Social Progress

In FES

Academics +96 (Rank 3)
Courage: MAX
Charm: +76 (Rank 5)

Hermit Social Link: Rank 6
Justice Social Link: Rank 7
Chariot Social Link: Rank 7
Fortune Social Link: Rank 1
Priestess Social Link: Rank 1
Temperance Social Link: Rank 5

Finally got rank 3 academics! Turns it's +82 in this version, which is actually different from Vanilla in addition to Portable and Reload. What a strange thing to change. Beyond that, we actually will be capping Charm at the start of the next video since that has the same cap as Courage in this version, as mentioned prior. It's funny to say, but these weird little difference are what make this project so fun because I'm picking up on things I've never even thought about before! As far as our social links go, we'll be going hard on Chihiro so we can stop her jealousy from blowing up in our face (God that sounds so cynical). Yuko is on the cusp of developing jealousy, so she'll be on the back burner until Chihiro is done because Fuuka is now entering the mix as well and stringing along 3 women is a reversed link waiting to happen. Who would have thought that cheating on multiple women would complicate your social life this much!

In Portable

Academics: +88 (Rank 3)
Courage: MAX
Charm: +95 (Rank 5)

Hierophant Social Link: Rank 7
Priestess Social Link: Rank 1
Lovers Social Link: Rank 5
Emperor Social Link: Rank 4
Magician Social Link: Rank 8
Star Social Link: Rank 3

Charm is also on the cusp of capping in Portable despite the higher requirements. Funnily enough, now that we can more readily take advantage of a constant +2 Academics in FES, the MC is actually pulling ahead on Academics in that version. Junpei is close to maxing out, which will happen in a couple weeks. Nothing too exciting going on here otherwise.

In Reload

Academics: +92 (Rank 3)
Courage: MAX
Charm: +62 (Rank 4)

Tower Social Link: Rank 1
Chariot Social Link: MAX
Fortune Social Link: Rank 1
Magician Social Link: Rank 4
Priestess Social Link: Rank 1

We've got our first maxed social link! A momentous occasion to be sure, and we'll have plenty more to come across all versions of the game! Outside of that, Charm and Academics are inching along, but it'll be a bit before the latter caps in this version since we haven't been focusing it too much.