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!
