Memento Mori. Let's Play Persona 3! [Finished]
Part 54 is out! FES is a remarkably mundane affair, with the sole notable event being Keisuke's maxout, though Yukari is next in line. On the Portable front, we get an absolute explosion of maxouts, as Koromaru, Ken, and Hidetoshi are all done and dusted as of this video, with Ryoji rapidly shooting up the ranks as well. Reload sees us unlocking a new option that will make completing all remaining social links a breeze, and also sees more development for the mysterious Ryoji. It's kind of funny how little Ryoji does in he PS2 versions of the game. You can talk to him after school, but otherwise he just kind of bums around. We're due for the school vacation by the end of this video, but the eve of the trip is the perfect time for some Tartarus exploration. Guess what we're doing next video!
Extra Notes
In FES and Portable
-I've already made some movement on Tartarus in FES, and the spoils of war are sweet! For starters, we're able to pick up Odin now, who has one of the most broken spells in the game in Thunder Reign. To reiterate, Thunder Reign is the strongest Elec spell in the game that has a 100% chance to shock anything not immune to the Shock status. Which as far as I know, only the final boss is immune to that status. Thunder Reign allows you to set up for guaranteed crits, which can easily lead to follow-up All-Out Attacks dumpstering the enemy. It does have the limitation that non-story battles have random turn orders, which can wall out the best of it, but it's still a fantastic spell and is the preferred to cheese the Reaper prior to Portable just letting you trade for Armageddon. We'll definitely be maxing out Odin's MA in FES and Portable.
-We also pick up Siegfried. Siegfried is good for a different reason in this version of the game: Vorpal Blade. Vorpal Blade is an AoE physical skill with nearly the highest attack power of any physical skill in the game and a very unique property. When the character using Vorpal Blade is in the Great status, the damage of the skill is doubled. This is an incredible boost, and at 99 ST, Siegfried can post numbers comparable to Surt when you're in Great condition. Which will nearly be always in FES due to the Late Night timeslot giving us an opportunity to always rest, and I can easily fit in time for it in Portable. Siegfried also picks up Arms Master to halve the HP cost of physical skills, so pairing that with Cool Breeze can make an enemy clearer nearly as effective as Surt, albeit with a time limit in FES since the Great status will eventually turn to Tired. Siegfried also picks up 2-Handed Sword Mastery in FES/Weapon Mastery in Portable, giving him an additional physical boosting option. It's an interesting spread of skills since direct damage boosts to Physical attacks don't otherwise exist in the non-Reload version skills of the game.
-Since we're never going to see it in action, there is another skill that gets a condition boost in the game: Weary Thrust. Weary Thrust is a single target Strike move that gets a 50% damage boost... when you're Tired. Since you get a 25% damage reduction when you're tired anyway, and Weary Thrust's base power is about 80% of Vorpal Blade to begin with, combining all that essentially gets you a Non-Boosted Single Target Vorpal Blade. Weary Thrust is complete ass, don't bother with it.
-Aside from their direct prospects as Personae in combat, Odin and Siegfried allow us to fuse a couple good weapons. Odin, rather fittingly, creates Gungnir. Gungnir, in addition to boasting a solid 310 attack power and good accuracy, conveys the Elec boost ability though it does not have an Elec element on its physical attack like Gae Bolg. Its main purpose is to pair with Indra Bracers to maximize Ken's Ziodyne damage, which is a situationally useful thing to do. Siegfried, meanwhile, creates the 2-Handed Sword Balmung. Balmung has 310 attack power compared to Lavaeteinn's 340 (although it does have better accuracy) but it provides an extremely hearty +100 HP to the equipper. It's not super good for Junpei, but it's great for the protag in FES. It's basically a Legion weapon that doesn't gimp our All-Out Attack! Since Surt now has his own stack of Fire Boost and Fire Amp+Ragnarok, I don't really need Lavaeteinn on the protag anymore.
-Over in Portable, we're almost completely kitted out with the new and improved Maid set, but unfortunately Aigis is going to have to wait a bit as her outfit was moved to the Oden Juice request. We're going to be completing that after we do the main Tartarus trip for this cycle.
-Ryoji's version of the Fortune link has a unique rub: You MUST advance it every time you're given an opportunity to do so or it will stall out and end. This includes accepting his Sunday date, which is actually a bona fide link event rather than an opportunity to increase his link points. There is also a moment within the dialogue of a future event where you can choose to terminate the link and stop it at it's current rank via dialogue choice. Pretty strange!
-For some reason, despite it being a normal event day for the student council, I couldn't finish the link on 11/11. They let me do it the following Monday though. Not sure what was going on there, but it means I can get Odin during the Tartarus expedition for Portable like I did in FES. Just as I had planned!
In Reload
-We unlock a fantastically helpful new way of gaining social link points in Reload: The dating site url. This essentially functions as a relationship fortune we can use at night. Since we now literally have nothing but Arcade games and the scant few boosting softwares we have left as far as nightly activities go, we no longer need to ever worry about going out of our way to get link points for social links. Stock up on about 10-12 of these and you should be set for every remaining link in the game.
-Completing Fuuka's social link nets us Scathach, a weird generalist who picks up Myriad Arrows, Mabufudyne and Magarudyne, plus some passives I don't care much about. She is one of the options for getting Auto-Mataru, though you need a Lovers card to get it on fusion. Since Atavaka is level 72 and she's level 75, the former is probably the avenue I'll take towards getting that skill online.
-We also gain access to Yurlungur, a Persona remarkable in how unremarkable he is. He picks up Maziodyne and Makougaon, plus a bunch of Evade skills that I really can't be bothered to care about.
-I'll demonstrate this eventually, but it hasn't really come up at this point what you should do if you deleted a party member's skill and maybe you're regretting. Be Blue V is now a service that can restore lost skills to your party member, if you're so inclined to respec them in minor ways. It's not super helpful since only a handful of characters really force tough choices like that, but it is there if you did some ill-advised, like deleted Marakunda off of Mitsuru or something.
Social Progress
In FES
Temperance Social Link: Rank 9
Fortune Social Link: Max Rank
Lovers Social Link: Rank 9
Star Social Link: Rank 6
We've got Fortune maxed out, giving us access to Norn. Norn is notable in being probably the last Persona I have any serious interest in stat maxing in FES and Portable, as she's the last elemental specialist we'll be seeing for awhile that is both close to my current level and can feasibly have her main attack stat maxed out before the game finishes without serious gem farming.
In Portable
Strength Social Link: Max Rank
Justice Social Link: Max Rank
Emperor Social Link: Max Rank
Fortune Social Link: Max Rank
We're hitting an interesting point in Portable. We've maxed out all the night links in the game, and for that matter we've also maxed out all the out-of-school links save for Akinari, and all but one of the FemC exclusive links. There is going to come a point very soon where there will be literally nothing for me to talk about in Portable save for Tartarus trips. This results in an amusing situation where the FemC's version of the story exacerbates a pretty infamous problem with Persona 3's late game.
In Reload
High Priestess Social Link: Max Rank
Temperance Social Link: Max Rank
Fortune Social Link: Rank 6
Sun Social Link: Rank 8
Ken's Linked Episode: Episode 3 Complete
Ryoji's Linked Episode: Episode 2 Complete
The max outs are coming fast and heavy in Reload as well! That said, we will be picking up a new link very soon that's going to take some of our focus. With the new dating site url, we're never going to have a moment where we aren't advancing something.
Continuing the stream playthrough of Vanilla, it will begin soon!
Interesting Things I Learned This Stream
-I'm not 100% sure how Tanaka's daytime availability works. Days off, maybe? I should pay more attention to that next time.
-Surt is available relatively sooner in this version, at level 50 instead of 52. And he has the same skill list in FES, so while we can't stat max him as easily he's still an easy to create powerhouse.
-Having a much less dominant offense on the protag, I appreciate the options I can use for my other characters as well as the value of the support options of the protag himself. The Knights in this version gave me quite a bit of trouble until I reigned myself in and made better use of my defensive skills.
-Virus Breath is really interesting in this version of the game, dealing 25% of the enemy's current HP in damage and attempting to inflict poison. It's a pretty good battle opener in these trio bosses for Tartarus, and gave me a whole new appreciation for Mot.
-Jin and Takaya actually got a chance to fight, so I heard some fight dialogue from them for the first time ever lol
Interesting Things I Learned This Stream
-I'm not 100% sure how Tanaka's daytime availability works. Days off, maybe? I should pay more attention to that next time.
-Surt is available relatively sooner in this version, at level 50 instead of 52. And he has the same skill list in FES, so while we can't stat max him as easily he's still an easy to create powerhouse.
-Having a much less dominant offense on the protag, I appreciate the options I can use for my other characters as well as the value of the support options of the protag himself. The Knights in this version gave me quite a bit of trouble until I reigned myself in and made better use of my defensive skills.
-Virus Breath is really interesting in this version of the game, dealing 25% of the enemy's current HP in damage and attempting to inflict poison. It's a pretty good battle opener in these trio bosses for Tartarus, and gave me a whole new appreciation for Mot.
-Jin and Takaya actually got a chance to fight, so I heard some fight dialogue from them for the first time ever lol
The next supplemental video is up, compiling the previous 2 main parts since just part 53 would have been a tad short. We have the Elizabeth/Theo dates here, plus a smattering of max outs or people getting close to max outs. We've been pretty light on Portable content for these as we've mostly had exclusive links for Portable to cover as of late, but we will see a new link that will give Portable some floor time in these videos soon enough. At least, when we're not on break from school since we have no out-of-school links for Portable anymore save for Akinari. I've got most of the Tartarus footage recorded now, just need to save some time next weekend to get Portable recorded. Next time we'll be covering the first half of the new block, Harabah!
Part 55 is out! We're left kind of rudderless as far as the Dark Hour is concerned, but no reason we can't still explore Tartarus to keep ourselves primed for any potential disasters. This moon cycle sees us getting access to Haraba, which is a somewhat interesting block in the older versions of the game (if gaudy) but is fairly standard in Reload. It's also pretty widely disliked due to an eye-straining aesthetic and being fairly lengthy in a portion of the game that is already pretty often criticized for dragging it's heels. Fortunately, in the context of this LP the exploration will be broken up with a vacation in the middle!
Extra Notes
In FES and Portable
-Unlike previously explored Blocks which were divided into two halves opened up over two moon cycles, we actually have full access to Haraba. For the first time since Thebel, we have more than two boss fights we can do this month with 5 altogether, though the block does have an informal point where it transitions into a second half. Considering that, I'll limit my exploration to the first "half" of Haraba since otherwise we'd be bogged down with Tartarus for several videos in a row. Even though we can fully explore Haraba right now, there are still several quests that unlock next Moon Cycle that cannot be done right now. We also have until 12/29 to get the last old document, so it's not a big deal if we don't go all the way to the end.
-We'll be facing off against 3 bosses altogether this cycle. Note that at this point, boss fights in Tartarus are pretty quick affairs: either you have a refined offense that crushes them within about 3 turns, or they do the same to you and it's back to the drawing board.
-As covered previously, we pick up Odin and Siegfried over the course of these trips, very useful Personae who are well worth stat maxing due to the ease with which we can set them up for the specialties. Like Surt, Siegfried comes in with everything he needs by default, while Odin takes a little extra effort to get Elec Boost. Hokuto Seikun and Byakko are good Personae within his level bracket that pick up that skill, if you're curious.
-By fusing Thor into Kumbhanda, and then using Kumbhanda to create a Raphael, that's an easy chain you can do to get a Persona that has all auto-team buffs. I only get step two accomplished in FES and Portable during this video, but the last step is another major goal for this cycle. Raphael is level 61, which you should get pretty close to through normal gameplay and will only need a little extra work to put yourself at the right level.
-fuckin fusion accidents man
-We can finally upgrade Aigis and Yukari's fusion weapons, and that should probably have them set for a good while. At level 60, you can create Bishamonten as a new option for Tower weapons. It's not super critical, but it will juice up our All-out attacks more, and Aigis would definitely appreciate the attack power as her physical skills are crazy out of date.
In Reload
-Haraba is much more conventional in Reload, for better or worse. Actually, it's actually pretty light on things compared to previous Blocks really. Only 4 bosses, none of them are back-to-back, and the Monad Passage is also only two fights. The fights themselves don't necessarily task us with moving mountains either.
-We now have access to the Hanged Man major arcana in Shuffle Time, which gives us an incense when drawn. The higher up you are in Tartarus, the better the incense you get, so it can be undesirable to take this if you're doing my method of nuking lower floor Monad Doors to get Major Arcana cards with no trouble.
-We're pretty flush with cash and not a whole lot to spend it on at this point, so feel free to spam the compendium to scoop up completion percentage. It's much more affordable here, and it's very easy now to get funds to fuel your fusion drives. We finally get the upgrade to the Protag's characteristic, meaning we've officially maxed out all characteristics!
-We get access to a Theurgy that I could have gotten before Scarlet Havoc, but it's pretty situational so I wasn't super pressed about it. By having Decarabia and Forneus registered, you can cast Best Friends as your Theurgy. This used to be Heat Riser in the old versions of the game, but here it instead casts Charge and Concentrate on a single target. Only a handful of characters can actually make effective use of this, so how useful this is to you depends on how heavily you're investing in said characters. Once Akihiko has Elec Boost+Elec Amp and God's Hand, he's an amazing recipient for this. Believe it or not, Junpei can also make this work. Outside of them though, the rest of the character's only specialize in one attack type, so I'm not really sure if it's worth it to juice up Mitsuru's Neuro slash or Yukari's normal attack. The protagonist can also cast it on himself, but this is very dubious over having Koromaru or Yukari juice him up so he can carry that buff into a different Theurgy instead.
-This trip went a long way to show how cracked Scarlet Havoc is. Most of the boss fights were so short, I legitimately had trouble finding them on the timeline for editing this video over a normal encounter.
-Once you've had your fill of fusing, there is one cash threshold we want to save up for: At this point we want to store 500k to purchase the ailment immunity accessory from Club Escapade. By having this on at least one character, we can shut down every single status ailment in the game since we now have multi-targeting items that replicate any status cure you could desire. Luckily, Rarity Fortunes make it quite easy to get the treasure to acquire that kind of cash.
Part 56 is out! It's time for another vacation arc, which gives Mitsuru a chance to sort out her feelings and the boys a chance to get themselves into a really stupid situation that they handle terribly! It's a nice break from the recent tension though, if nothing else.
Extra Notes
All Games
-The most important thing to know for the Kyoto interlude is that if you want to complete all the requests in the game, you must buy one of each drink from the vending machine in the hotel. Otherwise, you will not be able to complete the trade for the Oden Juice, and subsequently you'll have an unfulfilled request filling out your log for the remainder of the game. This is one of the few non-time sensitive requests you can permanently fail in the game. Less important but a fun little side detail, you can also buy souvenirs and get a variety of reactions from Ken depending on how he feels about the gift. In Portable, this awards you social link points if you hadn't already completed his link (for as much as that's worth even if that is the case) but in the other versions it's purely just to be nice to the lad.
-If you've completed Bebe's link (which is pretty likely at this stage), he'll be absent from Kyoto since his link concludes with him immediately returning to France. Perhaps because of this, he has noticeably less interesting dialogue than the other Social Link characters who are present. I'm not actually sure if Saori is here if you haven't completed her link yet, pretty much the only reason you wouldn't have it done by now is the chance to see her here. If anyone happens to know the answer to this, fill me in!
*EDIT: ApplesandOranges has the answer!
This poor girl can't catch a breakApplesandOranges wrote: An old topic about Saori says:
"I was on Rank 9, continually dodging Saori so that I didn't max the social link, and the trip finally came up, but when I got there, there was no sign of Saori anywhere; spoke to Yuko who told me that another girl remarked about Saori's absence saying "she finally got the hint.""
So yeah, she doesn't show up anyway and you get an extra helping of being bummed for her. Presumably there's tailored dialogue depending on if Saori finds out what the other students actually think about her (I think it was rank 7 or 8, not sure).
-Mitsure steels her resolve and gets her Persona upgrade, which means we get a new Theurgy! Blade of Execution is better than it's reputation would have you think: contrary to popular belief it is in fact stronger than Blizzard Edge with Ice Boost+Amp (337.5 base power with those two skills factored in versus 350 base power) and rolling in Debilitate can be nice. Because it's Almighty, though, Mitsuru has very limited options to boost it further and it's debatable how practical it is to build for this over having dedicated Debilitate bots. If Mitsuru herself were a stronger character, this would probably be a nice option on top of her existing kit, but unfortunately the buffs other characters got in this version make them much more appealing than her so this Theurgy can be a bit of a let down. No reason not to use it when you have it though, it is just better than Blizzard Edge unless you're going for a Freeze on the enemy. When it comes to pure damage though, Theurgies like Electric Onslaught, Hack 'n Blast, Junpei's second Theurgy, and of course Scarlet Havoc blow this one out of the water.
-If you like sabotaging yourself, you can tell Ryoji you don't want to talk to him again at the end of his Rank 5 social link event and permanently maroon the Fortune link at rank 5. There's obviously no reason to do this, but it's really funny they give you the choice at all.
-Mercifully, FES gives you an option to save before the Hot Springs scenario, so it's easy to reload your save if screw up/want to see both outcomes.
-There's no reward for escaping execution, so don't be too pressed about screwing up the hot spring event if you fail. Especially because the solution in FES is very unintuitive, though I appreciate the effort put into making it more like some kind of mini-game.
-The way this sequence is portrayed in Reload is an egregious example of recreating the scene without the visual information from the PS2 version lol. Ryoji making drowning noises when Junpei covers his mouth for some reason and the nonsensical way Junpei and Ryoji end up passed out if you escape come across as funny in a bad way to me.
Part 57 is out! We're back in Harabah, cleaning up what's left to do there. In Reload anyway, in FES and Portable we could keep going but we won't have all available requests to clear for the block until the next Moon cycle, so we may as well just wait until then to keep our exploration efficient.
Extra Notes
All Games
-We've kind of hit the point where there's not really too much to say that I don't already cover in the videos, but I suppose I can still put some random musings down. I pick up a few extra Fusion Spells, and you might have noticed that's a mechanic I haven't been interfacing with too much at this stage. We did use one relatively recently with Thunder Call, but that was just to dunk on a fight that doesn't take much effort to begin with. Sadly, Fusion Spells prove to be a slightly undercooked mechanic. Several of the spells just don't have particularly worthwhile effects or require too much set up to be worth using (Like Frolic), and many of them suffer from the specific Personae required to use them. They're often too weak or have skill suits too ill-suited to make the most out of the spells themselves. The Percent based SP costs also make most Fusion Spells too costly to use on the regular. Something like King and I could be a fun option, but it takes way more investment to max out Black Frosts MA compared to say, Surt, and it requires grappling with fusion inheritance shenanigans to get Ice Amp and Ice Boost onto him. Then there are some spells like Justice or Summer Dream which just have useless (potentially detrimental in the latter's case) effects. The situation is even worse in Portable, where you can't use the spells organically and must farm items and then remember to trade for them in order to utilize them. And the attacking ones are weaker due to not being able to benefit from passives like they can in FES! There are some fusion spells that are super critical for the game's bonus boss, but don't expect to see Fusion Spells at all for the remainder of the main game.
-Speaking of Fusion Spells and the Bonus Boss, the questline for discovering all fusion spells is well worth your time to complete if you are planning on going for that fight in FES. A super valuable item that makes the fight way more consistent awaits you at the end of this questline!
-On the Reload front, we've officially hit the point where Theurgies invalidate all potential challenge a boss could throw our way. I've wasn't even going for one shot kills, but Scarlet Havoc is just way too spicy for most things in the game when sufficiently revved up.
Part 58 is out! Pretty quickly after the Kyoto trip, we get another mid-month plot bomb followed by a week skip, so we're finding ourselves on the cusp of another Full Moon. For as much as that means now I guess. Sadly yet another tragedy strikes, and the team is really starting to rack up the emotional damage. And if that wasn't enough, we get to follow it up with soul crushing minimum unwaged labor. It would be nice if we could at least get some good news next time!
Extra Notes
In FES and Portable
-Once the Kyoto trip concludes, Mitsuru is available to social link with on any day that she is normally standing in the Faculty hall (Tues, Thurs and Sat if haven't caught that before). She's has quite a combo of requirements to social link with. Aside from the obvious late availability due to the November unlock date, you must have maxed out your Academics in order to catch Mitsuru's attention. You must also have placed at the top of your class in at least one exam since the start of the game, it doesn't matter which one. I'm actually not sure if Reload keeps that latter requirement, but it's not as big a deal in Portable or Reload since the Summer exam relaxed the required Academics to ace it from Rank 5 to Rank 4. There is one more exam left in the game that you can ace if you haven't accomplished that already, but with how little time there is left in the game after that exam, I'm not sure if it's actually possible to max out Mitsuru alongside the remaining links of the game if you need that one for the trigger. It's best to consider the October exam as your deadline for qualifying for this link, which thankfully is a pretty easy one to ace regardless. Obviously if you fail to top any exam, Mitsuru can be rendered permanently unavailable as a social link, so try to avoid that!
-We finally get the last piece of Maid armor in Portable after an unfortunate delay due to it being shuffled onto the Oden Juice quest reward, but now we're set up with the armor we need for the rest of the game. There are slightly stronger armor pieces left to get of course, but the upgrade they provide is very negligible as the Defense stat has minimal influence over the damage you take at this stage of the game.
-For a plot detail to comment on for once, the fusion of Hermes and Medea to create Trismegistus was actually a detail that was added in Portable, believe it or not. While it's still strongly implied that Trismegistus is imbued with power from Medea and by extension Chidori, the express combination of the two was a little bit of expansion on the scene that they included for Portable. We'll get to see the extent of this transformation come next time.
In Reload
-We don't start Mitsuru's link just yet in Reload, but she is also available here if you'd like to get started on that.
-The Chidori fight is actually somewhat scripted. It's not really possible to "win" the fight and it'll end by default after 4 turns. Possibly it can end if you manage to kill them before that time passes, and I'm not actually sure if you can lose it. They make it difficult for you to chew through the boss' HP, as they pointedly shut off Theurgies for this fight and it seems like you can't crit either. An even more optimized, or simply higher leveled, team probably could blast through this boss' health before the time limit expires, but I haven't cared to personally test that.
Social Progress
In FES
Sun Social Link: Rank 8
Empress Social Link: Rank 1
Star Social Link: Rank 7
In Portable
Empress Social Link: Rank 1
Fortune Social Link: Rank 7
In Reload
Lovers Social Link: Max Rank
Sun Social Link: Rank 9
Hanged Man Social Link: Max Rank
Ryoji's Linked Episode: Episode 4 Complete
Not too much movement here in any version of the game, Career Experience ends up eating all our potential free time post-Kyoto. Particularly in FES where there's not even a bit of dialogue expositing on what you even did.
Part 59 is out! With all major loose ends for November tied up, we're really just idling the time away until the Full Moon rolls around. Everyone probably expected at least SOMETHING to happen given what we've had to deal with up to this point, but I don't think we could ever have fully prepared for what that something is...
At least it wasn't a boss fight, I guess?
Extra Notes
All Games
-Elizabeth and Theo slide in late with the rescues this month, which is honestly kind of preferable because it's nice to have them all in one neat and tidy payload to clear out at once. No particularly interesting rewards this go around, though we do get the Weapon Mastery (which is called Phys Boost on the card for some reason) Skill Card in Portable. This would be more interesting if Siegfried didn't already learn that skill to begin with, but hey.
-We get Mitsuru's social link up and running in Reload, and this one is actually pretty easy to max out without much effort. Obviously you need the correct answers, but having a matching Persona is usually enough to keep the link going with no breaks for additional point gathering. I'm pretty sure the Dating Site Url my Reload guide had me use was unnecessary, but it's not like we have much else to do.
-I decide to check out Be Blue V for fun in Reload. In Portable, this was changed from a jewelry store to a new age health shop that allowed you the amazingly unhelpful ability to set your condition to Great during the daytime. Reload has it in a weird spot of visibly being a jewelry store, but also being some kind of weird health shop. Regardless, you can bring your allies here for a treatment that will allow them to relearn lost skills. Most character's forgotten skills will be lower tiered versions of their current attacking skills, so for most characters this is of limited use. Characters with more diverse skill lists like Mitsuru, Ken and Koromaru can occasionally find value out of this if you dropped a useful skill from them and regretted it, but I'm confident enough in my picks that I don't think I'll ever seriously use this.
-The ending for Akinari's social link in Portable is probably one of the very few times where the lack of visuals is to the benefit of the presentation. Not that the game is lacking in super natural elements, but given how grounded the general feel is for everything that happens in Iwatodai during the day, it can definitely feel a little out of place. Also the visuals they do go for with depicting Akinari's departure in the final event just look like ass in both FES and Reload.
-Not since the Empress and Emperor encounter in FES have we been able to use our free time on a Full Moon night! Honestly feels kind of nice.
Social Progress
In FES
Empress Social Link: Rank 3
Sun Social Link: Rank 9
Star Social Link: Rank 8
In Portable
Fortune Social Link: Rank 9
Empress Social Link: Rank 2
Temperance Social Link: Max Rank
In Reload
Empress Social Link: Rank 2
Sun Social Link: Max Rank
Fortune Social Link: Rank 7
Ryoji's Linked Episode: Episode 5 Clear
A couple of max outs here, Akinari in Reload and Bebe in Portable! Ryoji's Linked Episode is not quite done yet in spite of 5 usually being the end point for these. I don't think you have to work very hard to guess when the final event for it will be, all things considered.
The 28th supplemental video is out! That number is honestly lower than I was expecting at this point in the game, but then again we haven't really had the need to pop out a companion video to go along with any Iwatodai focused part for quite some time. Spoiler, that trend will continue because uhhhhh
Choices for who to hang with are a bit sparse at this stage of the game for Portable. Regardless, we have Mitsuru to pad out our time when there's no exam lead up, and there's still a handful of links that are more than a stone's throw away from finishing. Aside from getting Mitsuru into the rotation, this part also sees us wrap up for Bebe in Portable and has us revisiting Mamoru after some neglect in FES. Mamoru and Nozomi will definitely comprise the bulk of the next Supplemental video, as we're just one rank from being done with Akinari in FES, there's literally no one else to hang with when an exam is coming up, and the only other thing we really need to do is relationship fortune Yukari a couple times to prime her for max out once school is back in session. It's nice when these forced breaks allow us to meta-game our social life!
The next Vanilla stream will be going live shortly! This should be a relatively quick and sweet one since November is a fairly uneventful month of the game.
Interesting Things I Learned This Stream
-Something I've gone quite a bit without noticing is that for some reason the positioning of a lot of the NPCs in this version are different. For instance, in the 2F Hallway, the two gossiping girls and the girl complaining about her parents have their positions reversed. It's an amusing way that they decided to mix things up when going back for FES, considering most people don't go out of their way to interact with the NPCs. Hell, I have been going out of my way, and it's only now I've noticed!
-Yet another thing that I would have never have guessed was an FES addition, none of your Social Link friends appear in Kyoto during the class trip. This does result in the Kyoto hotel feeling oddly lonely. This also means your progress in Bebe's link has no bearing on whether or not he appears here, since he just never appears at all!
-Getting a souvenir for Ken is either an unimplemented mini-quest that just assumes you did it, or the game checks your inventory for the correct item and then fails to deduct it. Regardless, Ken seemed to assume I gave him a souvenir he liked, and I walked away with the Nama-Yatsuhashi snugly in my pocket.
-I thought Chidori might get a chance to stunt in this version, but no, even without Thunder Reign she got demolished in short order.
-It is really funny how underutilized Ryoji was until Portable considering his ultimate importance. He has a single digit number of mandatory appearances until the reveal, and if you just count all his appearances in the Kyoto trip as one lengthy mandatory appearance, the number of times he comes into the plot until the reveal can be counted on one hand.
Part 60 is out! Hard to believe, but the end is in sight for the Journey. The end of all things that is. Ryoji has given us a month to ruminate on his ultimatum, resulting in a month of the game that tends to get flacked for being a little dull and aimless. I never really minded it that much, but Reload has added in some things to keep our interest hooked a bit more than prior versions of the game. Regardless, we have some forced downtime from Tartarus as unsurprisingly no one is really feeling it after the nuclear reveal we got slammed with last time. What will we do?
Extra Notes
All Games
-As stated above, we can't do anything with Tartarus until 12/10, so keep that in mind if you're light on cash. Be frugal if you need to fetch anything from the Compendium.
-Aigis is out for repairs and is sidelined for almost the entire month, so if she's been a fixture of your line up that is also something you need to be mindful of for when you return to Harabah.
-We have an Exam coming up, and the typical rules are adhered to in Portable this time. While we still have plenty of Social Links to interact with in FES, Portable unfortunately has close to nothing to pad out the time. We do have a link with Akinari on Sunday, but otherwise it's strictly school links that remain, and Mitsuru doesn't want to hang when there's an exam coming up. Aside from Arcade games, I pad the time out with something I've been neglecting for awhile.
-Ever since Summer school, we've been able to visit Mr. Edogawa to get follow up lessons on Tarot and how to read the cards. I've just been forgetting about this for awhile, but there's no deadline for when you can partake in these lessons (excepting for the end of the game, obviously) so I figured I'd use the ample downtime we have in Portable to scope them out.
-Mitsuru's schedule is way more generous in Reload. Not only is she available to hang with during the Exam lead up, Weds has been added to her normal schedule and she's also available Mon and Fri until 12/25 passes. This gives us ample time to progress her link before the time slots become more competitive. This results in some neglect to Mamoru and Nozomi, but we have another bit of school downtime coming up that gives us time to focus on them.
-Studying with our team has no practical benefit, but the scenes are wonderful so we'll do it anyway!
Social Progress
In FES
Temperance Social Link: Max Rank
Star Social Link: Max Rank
Sun Social Link: Max Rank
We also have to funnel some Relationship fortunes into Yukari for when we can next hang with her, but otherwise we're running out of Out of School Links. Expect Nozomi hyper-focus soon.
In Portable
Sun Social Link: Rank 7
lol
In Reload
Magician Social Link: Rank 9
Empress Social Link: Rank 7
Star Social Link: Rank 7
It is funny how fast you can rank up Mitsuru in this version. I feel like her script was written with the mindsight that you'd be doing most of it after you had given your answer to Ryoji.
Part 61 is out! With the team hashing out their anxiety, I think it's also a good time to hash out their aggression and get Tartarus done for the month. The section of Harabah we're going through has been available for awhile in FES and Portable, but the relevant sidequests for it don't appear until 12/10 anyway, so it's slightly more efficient to leave it for now. It is kind of weird to go through Tartarus without their being anything clear to prep for, I must admit.
Extra Notes
All Games
-We get a good insight into just how obnoxious ailment spam enemies are in Persona 3, especially on PS2. There's ultimately not much good counterplay to these short of farming up immunity accessories for the nastiest things they can inflict, which admittedly leveling up Narcissus 3 more times to get 3 more flowers isn't a tall ask at this stage. I get lucky enough to just blunder through, but keep that in mind if you're struggling.
-Ailment spam is much easier to deal with in Portable due to everyone being able to use your item stock, and more overtly than that, not having to grapple with the AI's inability to handle ailments. This will probably be the last time it comes up in a serious capacity, but the AI in this game is infamous for having no clue how to handle mental ailments, and will obsessively heal an afflicted character until they are at max HP before attempting to address the ailment.
-If you're willing to do a bit of grinding, getting to Level 68 will let you fuse Abaddon. Abaddon produces an accessory that does wonders for your ailment woes. It takes a bit of time to get it now, but definitely keep it in mind for the final boss as it will be critical there.
-In Portable specifically, there is an incentive to grind to Level 70, which we'll be going over next part. Since the Wand cards in this version had their multipliers increased by 1, it doesn't take all that much time to reach that level. I won't be doing it, but it's worth mentioning.
-This LP has been so intense an effort it's literally killing my PS2.
-Blaze of Life is an interesting alternative option for Junpei if you're willing to spec for it. Funnel as many Strength and Magic Incenses into him as you can afford, and it can pretty quickly rack up impressive numbers with the proper ability and team support. I'm not super big on it since equipping Junpei for it is at an anti-synergy with his core critical hit mechanics, but it can be a fun alt build and looks really impressive when you do get the Theurgy fired off.
-Related to the previous point, Blaze of Life is technically a Magic skill, so you'll want Yukari's Tranquility Theurgy to juice it up over Koromaru's Power Howling.
-I used Ken for fun in Reload, but I could have easily subbed him out for Akihiko. Akihiko's damage really takes off at this point, so I could leave the heavy lifting to him and Junpei while the Protag and Koromaru focus on support. Scarlet Havoc is still our best damage option by a mile, but you can easily just have the Protag hold back and support until it's ready to bust out and not harm your output at all. That's the power have having a stock of specialists to rotate through.
Part 62 is out! As if our impending doom wasn't enough, I'm afraid school examinations are still looming over our future as well. I will say, the added group study sessions and linked episodes do make this portion of the game feel a bit more substantial than all prior versions. The only reason my raw footage for Portable was over 20 minutes is because I decided to cover the lectures from Edogawa with that version. Regardless, time marches on towards the inevitable, and a decision must be made. Maybe some more Tartarus exploration next time will make the current situation easier to mull over.
Extra Notes
All Versions
-I'm pretty close to out of things to say at this point, but I do want to comment on something for Portable specifically. If you're planning on taking on this versions bonus content (which is fully available on a fresh file, in contrast to Vanilla/FES where you must be on New Game + to face the final bonus boss), it would be a good idea to start gathering money and resources for it right now. Get as many Luxury Coins and equipment pieces as possible to bank cash, as compendium prices sky rocket once you get to the point where you need to clear out your maximized Personae just so you have room in the stock for extensive fusing. It's a bit tougher to get gems for stat cards in this game, so it's better to farm for those early if you want to get your final Persona line up maxed out. Luckily, we do have a new sidequest that gets us a ton of free stat cards later, making this a bit easier for the first couple final Personae we will be making. More on that later!
-For FES, while the bonus boss isn't available until New Game +, it would be ideal to get everything you need for it together on your first playthrough anyway if you care to face it down. Getting money and gems to use is much easier at the end of the game than the beginning for a variety of reasons I'll cover later. Gems are not something that carry over into New Game +, so card up whatever you plan to use for the bonus boss before the game ends and make sure they're registered. Luckily, FES has a more reliable way to gather up gems than Portable that I'll be covering soon as we're almost completely done with our Out-of-School links and we have a bit of vacation time coming up from school.
-Onto to more immediately relevant things, the final Velvet Attendant date allows us to fuse Kartikeya. It's a phenomenally uninteresting Persona in FES, and not super important for the MC in Portable, but for the FemC it is the Persona that produces her ultimate weapon (450 Attack Power and +10 to ALL stats). It's a Level 70 Persona, so it's not all that difficult to power level for it if you solo venture into Harabah and stick to fights that Surt, Siegfried and Odin can torch immediately. I may or may not do this, the weapon is at its most useful if we get it before the final section of Tartarus opens.
-Just to have something for Reload, if you haven't done Koromaru's linked episodes at this point, they're still kicking around for you to do. His final episode doesn't unlock until January, so there isn't much of a rush to get them done if you'd rather focus Social Links when they first start popping up.
Social Progress
In FES
Moon Social Link: Rank 6
Empress Social Link: Rank 4
We will get a brief opportunity to advance our school social links post-final exams, but afterwards a Winter vacation kicks off and Nozomi will be our only person to hang with for awhile. He's going to max out very quickly, so there will be a lull in activity for FES once that happens.
In Portable
Sun Social Link: Rank 9
Empress Social Link: Rank 3
See previous entry but sub Akinari for Nozomi and increase the amount of time where nothing is happening.
In Reload
Star Social Link: Rank 9
Hierophant Social Link: Rank 9
Junpei's Linked Episode: Episode 4 Complete
Akihiko's Linked Episode: Episode 4 Complete
We've got some out-of-school links in Reload that still need some dusting off, and we've mostly just been waiting for the Dating Url to become available to push those last couple stages to completion. The penultimate linked episodes for everyone except Koromaru (and Shinji obviously) are popping up now, with the grand finale for each one coming in January. If we even make it that far...
The next supplemental video is up, containing a variety of finales for various links and events! In addition to rolling in the final Elizabeth/Theo dates, I also threw in the FES version of Yukari and Mitsuru's end-of-days heart-to-heart for flavor. We're not going to be seeing much variety in links for the remainder of these videos, so I may as well mix in what I can.
Part 63 is out! Wrapping up the rest of Harabah, now there's nothing left to do but wait to
Part 64 is out, in which the protagonist of Reload is in the unenviable position of having to spend his Christmas Eve with Kenji. We'll have a big 'ol montage of Christmas Eve dates for FES when the time comes for me to compile the next supplemental video, while Akihiko got to doof it up for the FemC. Sadly we don't get much time to enjoy the Holiday season as the time for decision is rapidly closing in, and we'll have to make it in the next video.
Extra Notes
In Portable
-I elected to level the FemC up to 70 in Portable, as this will allow us to fuse Kartikeya and get her ultimate weapon before we tackle the final block of Tartarus. This ended up being a really quick affair, I got a floor with all Strong Shadows that at this point I can just torch on the first turn with Surt. It took about 7 or so minutes to get to level 70, and that's only because I got really terrible luck on Shuffle Time with getting Wand Cards.
In Reload
-Since we have no active romances at this moment, Christmas Eve was a lonely day indeed. It's worth noting that in all versions of the game, even FES where you're liable to have a couple dates queued up, you can reject them all and have a completely standard day. For potential dates who are also members of SEES, you can get slightly different dialogue from them in the evening if you rebuff them, which is a little funny.
Social Progress
In FES
Lovers Social Link: Max Rank
Moon Social Link: Rank 8
Empress Social Link: Rank 6
We're actually about to have a serious lull in activity for FES, as Nozomi is our only remaining out-of-school link and Winter Vacation goes on for a decent amount of time.
In Portable
Empress Social Link: Rank 5
The situation is even more dire in Portable. We have just one last rank of the Sun social link to attain, and then after that there is literally nothing to do until 1/8 when school is back in session.
In Reload
Empress Social Link: Rank 9
Fortune Social Link: Rank 8
Hierophant Social Link: Max Rank
Star Social Link: Max Rank
Magician Social Link: Max Rank
Ken's Linked Episode: Episode 4 Complete
It's a cascade of max outs in Reload, with a couple more waiting in the wings! We have a bit more work to do on Nozomi in Reload as well, but like the other versions of the game we're pretty close to tapped out in regards to what we can do when school isn't in session.
Supplemental: Social Links Part 4, or Live Fat, Die Young
I could probably fit Nozomi and Shinji comfortably into the last post, but I feel this final post would be just a tad short without them. Anyway!
The Moon
For FES, the male protagonist in Portable and Reload, The Moon Arcana is represented by the corpulent cultist Nozomi Suemitsu. Nozomi will take up residence in Paulownia Mall once you reach Rank 4 for Kenji's social link, with Kenji informing you of Nozomi's existence the next time you speak to him. Nozomi has a few requirements to start his link, the first being Charm Rank 2 (which is trivial to have by even the earliest time he can become available). Once you meet that low bar, he'll pop quiz you, with the answers varying slightly depending on the version of the game ("Pheromone Coffee, Green and Hagakure Bowl" for non-Reload versions and "Red" for the second question in Reload). Finally, he'll task you with finding a food stuff he hasn't had before, which you need an Odd Morsel for, which is surprisingly easy to fail as those are otherwise vendor trash that sell for a relatively decent chunk in Portable especially. Note that if you get any of his quiz questions wrong, he'll rebuff any attempt to fish for the correct answer for the remainder of the day, forcing you to come back again at a future date. After all that, Nozomi will be available to hang out with every day of the week except for Sunday. For some reason, it's Thursday instead in Portable, though obviously that's not relevant to this LP. There is one weird caveat to Nozomi's schedule in Reload specifically: for whatever reason, if you fail to start his link before Summer Vacation begins, he disappears entirely until school is back in session. He'll be there as normal if you start it BEFORE vacation begins. This isn't super important or damaging in a max social links run, but it is certainly weird and I think it might be a mistake/oversight since the other versions of the game don't have this problem. Regardless, his progression is as follows,
Initial | 1(22) | 15(22) | 15(22) | 22(22) | 22(22) | 22(22) | 22(22) | 5(0)| Max
Initial | O | O | O | O | O | O | O | X | Max
Pretty close to a perfectly streamlined link save for Rank 9, which has no points available within the link and forces some downtime. Since most people wait until the end of the game where Nozomi is literally the only person left to talk to during Winter Break, it's not that big a deal as far as scheduling goes. The most notable thing about this link is that it is pretty much the only place a normal player is going to see the Reversal animation for Social Links in Portable and Reload: the Rank 9 event features a fake out where Nozomi's link reverses, before it slides back in for the rank up when Nozomi realizes you're probably a better friend than a doomsday cult. Funnily enough, this fake out isn't present in Vanilla and FES, it was actually invented for Portable. A casual player going in blind for those games probably would actually see at least one reversal before the end, but you have to intentionally pick bad choices in Portable and Reload to see this happen, and you gotta be the densest mother fucker on the planet to sincerely pick the bad choices that result in reversals. What was I talking about again?
Oh right, for the FemC, instead of the short, fat, bulldog looking dickhead con artist, the Moon Arcana is instead represented by the endlessly cool member of SEES Shinjiro Aragaki. Probably the purest example of the FemC winning in the social link department (I actually do kind of like Nozomi's link despite my comments, partially because of how weird and unconventional it is). Shinji becomes available to link with shortly after he rejoins SEES, on September 7th. Shinji's link swaps the unconventional narrative of the Moon link with an unconventional progression: he's a semi-automatic night time link with a very strict time limit to complete the link, and a late-link sidequest that requires an outside activity to actually finish the link. Shinji is available to spend time with on Mon, Weds, Fri and Sat, and due to the typhoon event in the middle of September, that gives you 14 opportunities to advance his link. Once the Strength and Fortune battle is passed, this link is no longer available to advance and you're stuck with what you got for it. The specific dates you can participate in this link are 9/7, 9/9, 9/11, 9/12, 9/14, 9/16, 9/21, 9/23, 9/25, 9/26, 9/28, 9/30, 10/2 and 10/3. Fortunately, as a Semi-Automatic link you just have to attend it to advance it with one exception: After his Rank 9 event, Shinji will mention his pocket watch is missing. At any point after he mentions that, you can head to the Paulownia Police Kiosk to find the watch, and then you can return it to him when he is next available to get the Rank 10 event. Nothing else is required past that, though Shinji's romance has a unique requirement to start, requiring you to hang out with him one more time after the link finishes and picking the right options to initiate the romance. This does mean you need to finish his main link events by 10/2 if you want to get all lovey-dovey with him before the link closes off. Starting his romance on 10/3, just before the 10/4 Full Moon event is a hilarious amount of tragedy that I'm kicking myself for not going for within the LP. Onto Personae!
In FES and Portable, we have
Gurr: Level 15
Yamatano-Orochi: Level 26
Girimehkala: Level 42 (Special Fusion)
Dionysus: Level 48
Chernobog: Level 58
Seth: Level 66
Baal Zebul: Level 71
Sandalphon: Level 74 (Special Fusion, Unlocked at Max Rank)
I've had a lot of trouble coming up with things to say about these Arcana that are at the bottom of compendium and that problem is going to continue as there is just nothing good in the Moon Arcana that's relevant to a standard playthrough. Yamatono-Orochi produces a Fear Null accessory which can be handy to scoop up, but the rest of these guys often find their most interesting traits rendered redundant by stuff that's available earlier and performed better by the things that have them! Seth has a good basic loadout for Fire magic, but Surt has a better one and is available a staggering 14 levels sooner. True, Surt is an Ultimate Persona, but he's an Ultimate for the literal first link you unlock in the game, and you will assuredly have that completed before you can fuse either unless you have an even more raging hate-boner for Kenji than I do. About the only guy that has anything interesting about him besides Orochi is Baal Zebul, who is required to fuse a Persona that has Victory Cry (no points for guessing which one) and is a niche pick for the game's bonus boss as he resists but is critically not immune to Wind and Elec. Sandalphon comes up for something in Portable, but not in a way that requires you to actually fuse him. Other than that, Moon Personae can be used to fuse Weapons that boost your crit rate, and even after playing these games over a half dozen times at this point, I'm still not sure if Crit Rate boosts affect your physical skills or not.
Anything better in Reload?
Gurulu: Level 14
Yamata-no-Orochi: Level 25
Girimehkala: Level 39
Dionysus: Level 49
Chernobog: Level 56
Seth: Level 62
Baal Zebul: Level 72
Sandalphon: Level 80 (Special Fusion, Unlocked at Max Rank)
Eh? There's slightly more interesting options here. In general, you see Dark Magic pop up more on these guys. Orochi is an easy way to pick up Single-Target Boos, and Girimehkala has been buffed to ALMOST be like the physical wall he usually is in MegaTen, repelling Pierce attacks in addition to Slash attacks when originally it was just the latter. Dionysus isn't a bad choice for an Elec Caster due to his relatively early access to Ziodyne. The rest of these guys have the previous problem of being outclassed by things that are available at the same time as them or sooner. Chernobog has Apt Pupil and Brave Blade, but Siegfried also has those plus Slash Amp and creating what is possibly the best Theurgy in the game. Baal Zebul has picked up Ice Resist and innate Phanta Rhei, which can be nice if you customize him up. Sandalphon gains Salvation on fusion now and also has Dark Repel as his final skill, patching out his only weakness. I usually get my specialists set up before these guys hit the scene, but they're not bad and you could totally bench someone in exchange for them if you so desire.
The Sun
Across all versions of Persona 3, The Sun Arcana is represented the terminally ill and existentially confused Akinari Kamiki. It's actually quite a process to gain access to his link, though none of the individual steps are too taxing. Akinari will enter the game via Rank 4 of the Hanged Man social link, and will be available at the bench by the playground in Naganaki Shrine every Sunday going forward and his Social Link quest can begin if you've reached Rank 4 Academics. While this can be accomplished fairly early, you'll be barred from starting the link proper for a bit as Akinari is unwilling to speak to you until he's reclaimed his Red Fountain Pen. The Pen can be found after Koromaru joins the team, simply speak to him during the evening after having learned of the Pen from Akinari. The earliest this all can be done by is 8/9, at which point Akinari will be available to hang out with every Sunday, and no other day. Fortunately, things get a lot simpler there as Akinari is a Semi-Automatic link, in the same vein as Tanaka. No proper choices or matching Personae are needed, just show up and you'll be done in 10 events. Funnily enough, Akinari is actually pretty problematic for a Max Social Link run in Vanilla, as you regularly need to use Sunday to advance other links via dates. This can leave precious little time for Akinari, and most guides will have him being maxed out as the absolute last social link for that version (which is surprisingly apropos all things considered). Even outside of that, people playing casually for the first time can easily end up neglecting this guy as hanging out with anyone who asks you to on Sunday can seem like a good idea to a new player even if it accomplishes nothing. With that said, let's move onto Personae!
In FES and Portable, we have,
Yatagarasu: Level 30
Quetzalcoatl: Level 43
Jatayu: Level 55
Horus: Level 63
Suparna: Level 70
Vishnu: Level 78
Asura: Level 85 (Special Fusion, Unlocked at Max Rank)
Another "boss" Arcana of sorts, Sun Personae are largely created through Triangle Spreads and pick up some interesting skills that make them valuable for further fusion antics. In particular, the lower tiered Sun Personae are among the easiest ways to grab the Growth line of skills. Yatagarasu picks up Growth 2 via levels, Quetzalcoatl has it by default and Jatayu comes with innate Growth 3. Doing chain fusions off of Jatayu is the easiest way to grab Growth 3 in Vanilla and FES, while in Portable Jatayu also produces the Growth 3 card. Once the Social Link is maxed out, Jatayu produces the card directly from the levels gained via Fusion Exp, so he's a great way for farming those for all your end game Personae! After that, Horus and Suparna are nothing too special (though Horus does immediately patch out his soul weakness if you have a maxed Social Link), but Vishnu and Asura are pretty important. Vishnu is among the easiest ways to gain Salvation, the ultimate healing spell, and is also a component in a fusion spell that is mandatory for the game's Bonus Boss. Asura is the only Persona that comes with the Unshaken Will passive, which gives you immunity to all Mental status ailments. Asura is, again, critical to at least grab that skill from for the Bonus Boss, but he's also decent enough on his own with innate Akasha Arts I guess. You'll definitely want to fuse Jatayu plenty of times for Growth 3, so the Sun Arcana has great value off of that alone.
In Reload, we have,
Yatagarasu: Level 24
Thunderbird: Level 35
Quetzalcoatl: Level 45
Jatayu: Level 55
Horus: Level 67
Vishnu: Level 78
Asura: Level 85 (Special Fusion, Unlocked at Max Rank)
Actually largely similar here, with some slight retools. Yatagarasu is available earlier with innate Growth 1, but no longer picks up Growth 2. Thunderbird is a decent elec attacked added into the fold and Quetzalcoatl now has access to innate Growth 3, which is super handy for fusion. Vishnu now picks up Phanta Rhei as an attacking option, as well as the Ali Dance passive which halves the hit rate of attacking enemies. Pretty solid! Asura is now more complacent as a strike specialist, with innate Strike Amp and access to God's Hand, while still retaining Unshaken Will. He also picks up the incredibly powerful Firm Stance passive, which disables your ability to dodge but halves all incoming damage. On the whole though, this Arcana is still largely one you hit up for Growth passives to spread around, which is at least something more than an Arcana like, I dunno, Devil has.
The Judgement
The final Arcana of Persona 3 Vanilla and the penultimate one of all succeeding versions of the game, the Judgement Arcana is essentially the successor to the Fool. It is not represented by any specific character, and is instead represented by SEES as a whole, also being unlocked via story progression (at the same time as Fool maxes out, in fact). You do need to be on the good ending route to get it, but in Persona 3 that is simply a matter of making an obviously correct choice at the critical moment. Prior to the FemC story in Portable adding a bunch of weird and off-kilter link progressions, this was probably the most unique Link of Persona 3 in how you advance it. It's kind of an Automatic link, and it will be completed as a matter of advancing the story, but the exact trigger for advancing it is tied to Tartarus progression. The link is established on 12/31, and gains its first rank up upon entering the final Block of Tartarus, Adamah. In the PS2 and PSP versions of the game, it advances further by defeating the bosses of Adamah (one rank per boss) and by reaching specific floors of Adamah, those being 224, 240 and 254 (which is the final rank up and also the final barricaded floor). Reload changed this a bit, retaining the rank up for entering Adamah but removing the floor checkpoints for it. Instead, Adamah has 3 additional boss encounters, each one granting a rank up on defeat like all the rest. Since there's not much more to it than that, for some fun trivia the PSP version added Shinji to the list of people this link represents, allowing him to transcend death/coma and be with the team in spirit. This was retained for Reload as well, where he's back to being a guaranteed plotline death. It's a sweet meta gesture, I think. Onto Personae!
In FES and Portable, we have,
Anubis: Level 59
Trumpeter: Level 65
Michael: Level 72
Satan: Level 79
Lucifer: Level 89 (Special Fusion)
Messiah: Level 90 (Unlocked at Max Rank, Special Normal Spread fusion of Orpheus and Thanatos)
It's kind of hard to objectively rank the Judgement Arcana as they basically don't exist until the very end of the game, and by the time you can get good level ups out of them, you're literally right before the final boss. They're also exclusively made via special fusion or Triangle Spreads, making it even less likely the average player will see them, much less get them in a usable state. Their value is essentially loaded entirely into how well they do against the Bonus Boss of the game, and there are some notable ones here in that regard at least. Anubis has the distinction of being resistant to Light and Dark, with no immunities to anything, which is actually pretty important. Michael has the semi-unique Heaven's Blade skill, a low cost slash move with an extremely high 25% crit right, though slightly lower power than Brave Blade (500 opposed to 550). Satan is a necessary component of the overwhelming Armageddon fusion spell, which is guaranteed 9,999 damage at the cost of ALL your SP, and Lucifer provided both Victory Cry and the Male Character's Ultimate weapon in Portable. Messiah is resistant to the 4 main elements, Repels Light, has Regenerate 3, Enduring Soul, God's Hand and Megidolaon, and just enough skill flexibility off his restrictive Special Fusion to be pick up a dedicated Tier 4 spell+boosts for the Bonus Boss. In Portable, Messiah received a buff and gained the unique Magic Skill Up passive. This passive is an additional 1.25X multiplier to any magic damage (including Almighty, which otherwise lacks boosts in non-Reload versions of the game) that stacks with Elemental boosts. By stacking Boost+Amp+Skill Up for a total 2.34X multiplier, Messiah is the de facto best damage dealer with Magic in Persona 3 Portable by a pretty considerable margin. I strongly recommend you create him with Nifelheim for a very particular reason we'll get into later. Just for some additional trivia, Lucifer is the demonic form of the recurring figure in the series, the big 'ol blue guy. Originally in Persona 3 Vanilla Helel bore the name of Lucifer, and Big Blue Lucifer didn't exist. While several new Personae were added in the transition to FES, this is the only case until Reload where a Persona got renamed between versions.
In Reload, we have
Anubis: Level 40
Trumpeter: Level 59
Michael: Level 70
Satan: Level 82
Lucifer: Level 89 (Special Fusion)
Messiah: Level 91 (Unlocked at Max Rank, same Special Fusion as before)
With the retooled level curve and some level drops for the Arcana, you can actually reasonably expect to see the Judgement Arcana around mid-game this go around, albeit only Anubis for a decent while. Not too much to say here, Judgement is almost identical to how it is in FES and Portable beyond some light tweaks. Trumpeter gets a substantial buff in being your earliest access to Debilitate (which didn't exist at all in earlier versions of Persona 3) and with the ease of getting Growth 3 spread around in this version, it's not that hard to pick it up relatively early into the late game with him. Michael's Heaven Blade is relatively worse, actually getting a buff to 30% crit rate but still retaining the 500 power. Brave Blade is now 650 power with a 20% crit rate (previously it had no crit bonus), which for my money just makes it a flatly superior skill. Satan now unlocks Armageddon as a Theurgy, and while it still functions the same it can't be used freely anymore and also costs all your HP in addition to SP, the one Theurgy in the game that has an extra cost beyond your Theurgy gauge. For some reason, Lucifer no longer has Victory Cry and instead the dubiously useful trait of possessing all Tier 4 elemental spells, and Messiah is basically identical to his Portable counterpart, Magic Skill Up now being called Magic Ability. Messiah does pick up an interesting new defensive passive in Null Phys, which does exactly what it says on the tin, but for the purposes of the Bonus Boss you REALLY don't want to have it.
The Aeon
An arcana that didn't exist in the original release of Persona 3, with amusingly overt text in FES and Portable highlighting the fact, the Aeon Arcana across all releases is attributed to the awakening automaton Aigis. Yes, despite her prominence in the game's narrative, Aigis originally did not have a Social Link. FES sought to correct this, and began the series long tradition of adding in new social links for a polished/re-done re-release. Aigis also shares a distinction with Adachi in being a new social link that wasn't a character created for the re-release. With that mundane trivia out of the way, Aigis becomes available to Social Link with on 1/8, just as school resumes following Winter break. You can spend time with her on Mon, Weds, Fri and Sat, which is expanded to the entire week save for Sunday in the final week of the game. Since she comes online so late, Aigis' social link isn't too particularly demanding, and the progressions are as follows,
Initial | 1(22) | 1(7) | 1(22) | 1(22) | 1(22) | 1(0) | 1(22) | 22(22)| Max
Initial | 0(22/34) | 0(7/11) | 0(22/34) | 0(22/34) | 0(22/34) | 0(0) | 0(7/11) | 30(22/34)| Max
Initial | O | O | O | O | O | O | O | O | Max
Since there's a pretty limited timeframe to close out Aigis' link, they don't work you too hard here, with only one forced stoppage in FES and one potential stumbling point on Rank 9 in Portable. Hilariously, you don't even have to pick the correct choice in most of the Portable events, as they dropped the required points from 1 to nothing. This results in probably the only time in a non-Semi Automatic link where there are no points to gain and the link still trucks on like normal. In Reload, you have the infinite affection trick in the dating site, so any potential progression gates are rendered completely moot there. Nice to have a non-stressor of a link to close out a glum period of the game. Onto Personae!
In FES and Portable, we have,
Uriel: Level 63
Nidhoggr: Level 69
Ananta: Level 75
Atavaka: Level 80
Metatron: Level 87 (Special Fusion, Unlocked at Max Rank)
Like Judgement, the Aeon Arcana basically fails to exist for most of the game. The earliest rep is available at level 63, meaning you're probably just finishing up Harabah when getting access to it, and it'll be over a month before you could fuse it with any appreciable social link bonuses. Past that, none of these guys really have anything that would make you care about them on their own merits, resulting in a case where all of them except for Ananta can't even claim value in the bonus boss fight. And for Ananta, he's simply a component in the Infinity Fusion spell that is mandatory for that fight, and not something you need to use specifically. Where the Aeon Arcana really finds its value is in weapon fusion. Starting from Uriel, Aeon weapons convey a +4 bonus to all stats and close to the highest attack power that any non-ultimate fusion weapon can have. Atavaka comes in at a level that results in +5 to all stats (the highest possible boost from an Aeon weapon) and the highest attack power from a non-ultimate weapon. This makes Atavaka a great way to attain powerful fusion weapons for characters who have the misfortune of their ultimates being tied to Personae that are far too high leveled to obtain without excessive grinding. Perhaps coincidentally, Metatron is necessary for making Aigis' ultimate, and you're definitely not getting him in a normal playthrough. About the only interesting to say about this arcana is that Uriel had a bit more value in vanilla where he was a Tower Persona instead. Since the arcade isn't a thing in that version, fusing Surt up to Uriel is a decent way to fuse up a good fire caster.
In Reload, we have
Nidhoggr: Level 47
Uriel: Level 57
Ananta: Level 73
Metatron: level 87
There's a bit more to talk about here regarding the actual merits of the Personae. NIdhoggr isn't too great, but he does give relatively easy access to the Null Light passive, and is available around the mid-to-late game this go around. Uriel has the Angelic Grace passive, which gives a big boost in evasion against non-almighty magic attacks, as well as having access to Vorpal Blade and Heaven's Blade (which hilariously is actually weaker than Vorpal Blade if it doesn't crit). Ananta is just a crappy Persona with dubious defensive passives, most notably though gaining Drain Slash at level 80 to patch out one of his weaknesses. Due to the slightly rebalanced level curve and the Sun major arcana card, Metatron is actually usable in a normal playthrough here, though he doesn't really come in with anything super inspiring. We've seen about a half dozen Personae up to this point that come in with Makougaon and Light Amp, as well as stuff that ALSO has the combo of God's Hand and Salvation. He does pick up Repel Elec at level 94 to patch out his Elec Weakness, and it's not an ordeal to get Null Dark onto him for a pretty potent defender, but I don't really find defensive approaches to be quite as good in Reload.
Oh man, we're at the end of the social links! I'll admit, it's feeling pretty weird to finally be at the point where there's not much left to talk about. Onward, to the end we go!
I could probably fit Nozomi and Shinji comfortably into the last post, but I feel this final post would be just a tad short without them. Anyway!
The Moon
For FES, the male protagonist in Portable and Reload, The Moon Arcana is represented by the corpulent cultist Nozomi Suemitsu. Nozomi will take up residence in Paulownia Mall once you reach Rank 4 for Kenji's social link, with Kenji informing you of Nozomi's existence the next time you speak to him. Nozomi has a few requirements to start his link, the first being Charm Rank 2 (which is trivial to have by even the earliest time he can become available). Once you meet that low bar, he'll pop quiz you, with the answers varying slightly depending on the version of the game ("Pheromone Coffee, Green and Hagakure Bowl" for non-Reload versions and "Red" for the second question in Reload). Finally, he'll task you with finding a food stuff he hasn't had before, which you need an Odd Morsel for, which is surprisingly easy to fail as those are otherwise vendor trash that sell for a relatively decent chunk in Portable especially. Note that if you get any of his quiz questions wrong, he'll rebuff any attempt to fish for the correct answer for the remainder of the day, forcing you to come back again at a future date. After all that, Nozomi will be available to hang out with every day of the week except for Sunday. For some reason, it's Thursday instead in Portable, though obviously that's not relevant to this LP. There is one weird caveat to Nozomi's schedule in Reload specifically: for whatever reason, if you fail to start his link before Summer Vacation begins, he disappears entirely until school is back in session. He'll be there as normal if you start it BEFORE vacation begins. This isn't super important or damaging in a max social links run, but it is certainly weird and I think it might be a mistake/oversight since the other versions of the game don't have this problem. Regardless, his progression is as follows,
Initial | 1(22) | 15(22) | 15(22) | 22(22) | 22(22) | 22(22) | 22(22) | 5(0)| Max
Initial | O | O | O | O | O | O | O | X | Max
Pretty close to a perfectly streamlined link save for Rank 9, which has no points available within the link and forces some downtime. Since most people wait until the end of the game where Nozomi is literally the only person left to talk to during Winter Break, it's not that big a deal as far as scheduling goes. The most notable thing about this link is that it is pretty much the only place a normal player is going to see the Reversal animation for Social Links in Portable and Reload: the Rank 9 event features a fake out where Nozomi's link reverses, before it slides back in for the rank up when Nozomi realizes you're probably a better friend than a doomsday cult. Funnily enough, this fake out isn't present in Vanilla and FES, it was actually invented for Portable. A casual player going in blind for those games probably would actually see at least one reversal before the end, but you have to intentionally pick bad choices in Portable and Reload to see this happen, and you gotta be the densest mother fucker on the planet to sincerely pick the bad choices that result in reversals. What was I talking about again?
Oh right, for the FemC, instead of the short, fat, bulldog looking dickhead con artist, the Moon Arcana is instead represented by the endlessly cool member of SEES Shinjiro Aragaki. Probably the purest example of the FemC winning in the social link department (I actually do kind of like Nozomi's link despite my comments, partially because of how weird and unconventional it is). Shinji becomes available to link with shortly after he rejoins SEES, on September 7th. Shinji's link swaps the unconventional narrative of the Moon link with an unconventional progression: he's a semi-automatic night time link with a very strict time limit to complete the link, and a late-link sidequest that requires an outside activity to actually finish the link. Shinji is available to spend time with on Mon, Weds, Fri and Sat, and due to the typhoon event in the middle of September, that gives you 14 opportunities to advance his link. Once the Strength and Fortune battle is passed, this link is no longer available to advance and you're stuck with what you got for it. The specific dates you can participate in this link are 9/7, 9/9, 9/11, 9/12, 9/14, 9/16, 9/21, 9/23, 9/25, 9/26, 9/28, 9/30, 10/2 and 10/3. Fortunately, as a Semi-Automatic link you just have to attend it to advance it with one exception: After his Rank 9 event, Shinji will mention his pocket watch is missing. At any point after he mentions that, you can head to the Paulownia Police Kiosk to find the watch, and then you can return it to him when he is next available to get the Rank 10 event. Nothing else is required past that, though Shinji's romance has a unique requirement to start, requiring you to hang out with him one more time after the link finishes and picking the right options to initiate the romance. This does mean you need to finish his main link events by 10/2 if you want to get all lovey-dovey with him before the link closes off. Starting his romance on 10/3, just before the 10/4 Full Moon event is a hilarious amount of tragedy that I'm kicking myself for not going for within the LP. Onto Personae!
In FES and Portable, we have
Gurr: Level 15
Yamatano-Orochi: Level 26
Girimehkala: Level 42 (Special Fusion)
Dionysus: Level 48
Chernobog: Level 58
Seth: Level 66
Baal Zebul: Level 71
Sandalphon: Level 74 (Special Fusion, Unlocked at Max Rank)
I've had a lot of trouble coming up with things to say about these Arcana that are at the bottom of compendium and that problem is going to continue as there is just nothing good in the Moon Arcana that's relevant to a standard playthrough. Yamatono-Orochi produces a Fear Null accessory which can be handy to scoop up, but the rest of these guys often find their most interesting traits rendered redundant by stuff that's available earlier and performed better by the things that have them! Seth has a good basic loadout for Fire magic, but Surt has a better one and is available a staggering 14 levels sooner. True, Surt is an Ultimate Persona, but he's an Ultimate for the literal first link you unlock in the game, and you will assuredly have that completed before you can fuse either unless you have an even more raging hate-boner for Kenji than I do. About the only guy that has anything interesting about him besides Orochi is Baal Zebul, who is required to fuse a Persona that has Victory Cry (no points for guessing which one) and is a niche pick for the game's bonus boss as he resists but is critically not immune to Wind and Elec. Sandalphon comes up for something in Portable, but not in a way that requires you to actually fuse him. Other than that, Moon Personae can be used to fuse Weapons that boost your crit rate, and even after playing these games over a half dozen times at this point, I'm still not sure if Crit Rate boosts affect your physical skills or not.
Anything better in Reload?
Gurulu: Level 14
Yamata-no-Orochi: Level 25
Girimehkala: Level 39
Dionysus: Level 49
Chernobog: Level 56
Seth: Level 62
Baal Zebul: Level 72
Sandalphon: Level 80 (Special Fusion, Unlocked at Max Rank)
Eh? There's slightly more interesting options here. In general, you see Dark Magic pop up more on these guys. Orochi is an easy way to pick up Single-Target Boos, and Girimehkala has been buffed to ALMOST be like the physical wall he usually is in MegaTen, repelling Pierce attacks in addition to Slash attacks when originally it was just the latter. Dionysus isn't a bad choice for an Elec Caster due to his relatively early access to Ziodyne. The rest of these guys have the previous problem of being outclassed by things that are available at the same time as them or sooner. Chernobog has Apt Pupil and Brave Blade, but Siegfried also has those plus Slash Amp and creating what is possibly the best Theurgy in the game. Baal Zebul has picked up Ice Resist and innate Phanta Rhei, which can be nice if you customize him up. Sandalphon gains Salvation on fusion now and also has Dark Repel as his final skill, patching out his only weakness. I usually get my specialists set up before these guys hit the scene, but they're not bad and you could totally bench someone in exchange for them if you so desire.
The Sun
Across all versions of Persona 3, The Sun Arcana is represented the terminally ill and existentially confused Akinari Kamiki. It's actually quite a process to gain access to his link, though none of the individual steps are too taxing. Akinari will enter the game via Rank 4 of the Hanged Man social link, and will be available at the bench by the playground in Naganaki Shrine every Sunday going forward and his Social Link quest can begin if you've reached Rank 4 Academics. While this can be accomplished fairly early, you'll be barred from starting the link proper for a bit as Akinari is unwilling to speak to you until he's reclaimed his Red Fountain Pen. The Pen can be found after Koromaru joins the team, simply speak to him during the evening after having learned of the Pen from Akinari. The earliest this all can be done by is 8/9, at which point Akinari will be available to hang out with every Sunday, and no other day. Fortunately, things get a lot simpler there as Akinari is a Semi-Automatic link, in the same vein as Tanaka. No proper choices or matching Personae are needed, just show up and you'll be done in 10 events. Funnily enough, Akinari is actually pretty problematic for a Max Social Link run in Vanilla, as you regularly need to use Sunday to advance other links via dates. This can leave precious little time for Akinari, and most guides will have him being maxed out as the absolute last social link for that version (which is surprisingly apropos all things considered). Even outside of that, people playing casually for the first time can easily end up neglecting this guy as hanging out with anyone who asks you to on Sunday can seem like a good idea to a new player even if it accomplishes nothing. With that said, let's move onto Personae!
In FES and Portable, we have,
Yatagarasu: Level 30
Quetzalcoatl: Level 43
Jatayu: Level 55
Horus: Level 63
Suparna: Level 70
Vishnu: Level 78
Asura: Level 85 (Special Fusion, Unlocked at Max Rank)
Another "boss" Arcana of sorts, Sun Personae are largely created through Triangle Spreads and pick up some interesting skills that make them valuable for further fusion antics. In particular, the lower tiered Sun Personae are among the easiest ways to grab the Growth line of skills. Yatagarasu picks up Growth 2 via levels, Quetzalcoatl has it by default and Jatayu comes with innate Growth 3. Doing chain fusions off of Jatayu is the easiest way to grab Growth 3 in Vanilla and FES, while in Portable Jatayu also produces the Growth 3 card. Once the Social Link is maxed out, Jatayu produces the card directly from the levels gained via Fusion Exp, so he's a great way for farming those for all your end game Personae! After that, Horus and Suparna are nothing too special (though Horus does immediately patch out his soul weakness if you have a maxed Social Link), but Vishnu and Asura are pretty important. Vishnu is among the easiest ways to gain Salvation, the ultimate healing spell, and is also a component in a fusion spell that is mandatory for the game's Bonus Boss. Asura is the only Persona that comes with the Unshaken Will passive, which gives you immunity to all Mental status ailments. Asura is, again, critical to at least grab that skill from for the Bonus Boss, but he's also decent enough on his own with innate Akasha Arts I guess. You'll definitely want to fuse Jatayu plenty of times for Growth 3, so the Sun Arcana has great value off of that alone.
In Reload, we have,
Yatagarasu: Level 24
Thunderbird: Level 35
Quetzalcoatl: Level 45
Jatayu: Level 55
Horus: Level 67
Vishnu: Level 78
Asura: Level 85 (Special Fusion, Unlocked at Max Rank)
Actually largely similar here, with some slight retools. Yatagarasu is available earlier with innate Growth 1, but no longer picks up Growth 2. Thunderbird is a decent elec attacked added into the fold and Quetzalcoatl now has access to innate Growth 3, which is super handy for fusion. Vishnu now picks up Phanta Rhei as an attacking option, as well as the Ali Dance passive which halves the hit rate of attacking enemies. Pretty solid! Asura is now more complacent as a strike specialist, with innate Strike Amp and access to God's Hand, while still retaining Unshaken Will. He also picks up the incredibly powerful Firm Stance passive, which disables your ability to dodge but halves all incoming damage. On the whole though, this Arcana is still largely one you hit up for Growth passives to spread around, which is at least something more than an Arcana like, I dunno, Devil has.
The Judgement
The final Arcana of Persona 3 Vanilla and the penultimate one of all succeeding versions of the game, the Judgement Arcana is essentially the successor to the Fool. It is not represented by any specific character, and is instead represented by SEES as a whole, also being unlocked via story progression (at the same time as Fool maxes out, in fact). You do need to be on the good ending route to get it, but in Persona 3 that is simply a matter of making an obviously correct choice at the critical moment. Prior to the FemC story in Portable adding a bunch of weird and off-kilter link progressions, this was probably the most unique Link of Persona 3 in how you advance it. It's kind of an Automatic link, and it will be completed as a matter of advancing the story, but the exact trigger for advancing it is tied to Tartarus progression. The link is established on 12/31, and gains its first rank up upon entering the final Block of Tartarus, Adamah. In the PS2 and PSP versions of the game, it advances further by defeating the bosses of Adamah (one rank per boss) and by reaching specific floors of Adamah, those being 224, 240 and 254 (which is the final rank up and also the final barricaded floor). Reload changed this a bit, retaining the rank up for entering Adamah but removing the floor checkpoints for it. Instead, Adamah has 3 additional boss encounters, each one granting a rank up on defeat like all the rest. Since there's not much more to it than that, for some fun trivia the PSP version added Shinji to the list of people this link represents, allowing him to transcend death/coma and be with the team in spirit. This was retained for Reload as well, where he's back to being a guaranteed plotline death. It's a sweet meta gesture, I think. Onto Personae!
In FES and Portable, we have,
Anubis: Level 59
Trumpeter: Level 65
Michael: Level 72
Satan: Level 79
Lucifer: Level 89 (Special Fusion)
Messiah: Level 90 (Unlocked at Max Rank, Special Normal Spread fusion of Orpheus and Thanatos)
It's kind of hard to objectively rank the Judgement Arcana as they basically don't exist until the very end of the game, and by the time you can get good level ups out of them, you're literally right before the final boss. They're also exclusively made via special fusion or Triangle Spreads, making it even less likely the average player will see them, much less get them in a usable state. Their value is essentially loaded entirely into how well they do against the Bonus Boss of the game, and there are some notable ones here in that regard at least. Anubis has the distinction of being resistant to Light and Dark, with no immunities to anything, which is actually pretty important. Michael has the semi-unique Heaven's Blade skill, a low cost slash move with an extremely high 25% crit right, though slightly lower power than Brave Blade (500 opposed to 550). Satan is a necessary component of the overwhelming Armageddon fusion spell, which is guaranteed 9,999 damage at the cost of ALL your SP, and Lucifer provided both Victory Cry and the Male Character's Ultimate weapon in Portable. Messiah is resistant to the 4 main elements, Repels Light, has Regenerate 3, Enduring Soul, God's Hand and Megidolaon, and just enough skill flexibility off his restrictive Special Fusion to be pick up a dedicated Tier 4 spell+boosts for the Bonus Boss. In Portable, Messiah received a buff and gained the unique Magic Skill Up passive. This passive is an additional 1.25X multiplier to any magic damage (including Almighty, which otherwise lacks boosts in non-Reload versions of the game) that stacks with Elemental boosts. By stacking Boost+Amp+Skill Up for a total 2.34X multiplier, Messiah is the de facto best damage dealer with Magic in Persona 3 Portable by a pretty considerable margin. I strongly recommend you create him with Nifelheim for a very particular reason we'll get into later. Just for some additional trivia, Lucifer is the demonic form of the recurring figure in the series, the big 'ol blue guy. Originally in Persona 3 Vanilla Helel bore the name of Lucifer, and Big Blue Lucifer didn't exist. While several new Personae were added in the transition to FES, this is the only case until Reload where a Persona got renamed between versions.
In Reload, we have
Anubis: Level 40
Trumpeter: Level 59
Michael: Level 70
Satan: Level 82
Lucifer: Level 89 (Special Fusion)
Messiah: Level 91 (Unlocked at Max Rank, same Special Fusion as before)
With the retooled level curve and some level drops for the Arcana, you can actually reasonably expect to see the Judgement Arcana around mid-game this go around, albeit only Anubis for a decent while. Not too much to say here, Judgement is almost identical to how it is in FES and Portable beyond some light tweaks. Trumpeter gets a substantial buff in being your earliest access to Debilitate (which didn't exist at all in earlier versions of Persona 3) and with the ease of getting Growth 3 spread around in this version, it's not that hard to pick it up relatively early into the late game with him. Michael's Heaven Blade is relatively worse, actually getting a buff to 30% crit rate but still retaining the 500 power. Brave Blade is now 650 power with a 20% crit rate (previously it had no crit bonus), which for my money just makes it a flatly superior skill. Satan now unlocks Armageddon as a Theurgy, and while it still functions the same it can't be used freely anymore and also costs all your HP in addition to SP, the one Theurgy in the game that has an extra cost beyond your Theurgy gauge. For some reason, Lucifer no longer has Victory Cry and instead the dubiously useful trait of possessing all Tier 4 elemental spells, and Messiah is basically identical to his Portable counterpart, Magic Skill Up now being called Magic Ability. Messiah does pick up an interesting new defensive passive in Null Phys, which does exactly what it says on the tin, but for the purposes of the Bonus Boss you REALLY don't want to have it.
The Aeon
An arcana that didn't exist in the original release of Persona 3, with amusingly overt text in FES and Portable highlighting the fact, the Aeon Arcana across all releases is attributed to the awakening automaton Aigis. Yes, despite her prominence in the game's narrative, Aigis originally did not have a Social Link. FES sought to correct this, and began the series long tradition of adding in new social links for a polished/re-done re-release. Aigis also shares a distinction with Adachi in being a new social link that wasn't a character created for the re-release. With that mundane trivia out of the way, Aigis becomes available to Social Link with on 1/8, just as school resumes following Winter break. You can spend time with her on Mon, Weds, Fri and Sat, which is expanded to the entire week save for Sunday in the final week of the game. Since she comes online so late, Aigis' social link isn't too particularly demanding, and the progressions are as follows,
Initial | 1(22) | 1(7) | 1(22) | 1(22) | 1(22) | 1(0) | 1(22) | 22(22)| Max
Initial | 0(22/34) | 0(7/11) | 0(22/34) | 0(22/34) | 0(22/34) | 0(0) | 0(7/11) | 30(22/34)| Max
Initial | O | O | O | O | O | O | O | O | Max
Since there's a pretty limited timeframe to close out Aigis' link, they don't work you too hard here, with only one forced stoppage in FES and one potential stumbling point on Rank 9 in Portable. Hilariously, you don't even have to pick the correct choice in most of the Portable events, as they dropped the required points from 1 to nothing. This results in probably the only time in a non-Semi Automatic link where there are no points to gain and the link still trucks on like normal. In Reload, you have the infinite affection trick in the dating site, so any potential progression gates are rendered completely moot there. Nice to have a non-stressor of a link to close out a glum period of the game. Onto Personae!
In FES and Portable, we have,
Uriel: Level 63
Nidhoggr: Level 69
Ananta: Level 75
Atavaka: Level 80
Metatron: Level 87 (Special Fusion, Unlocked at Max Rank)
Like Judgement, the Aeon Arcana basically fails to exist for most of the game. The earliest rep is available at level 63, meaning you're probably just finishing up Harabah when getting access to it, and it'll be over a month before you could fuse it with any appreciable social link bonuses. Past that, none of these guys really have anything that would make you care about them on their own merits, resulting in a case where all of them except for Ananta can't even claim value in the bonus boss fight. And for Ananta, he's simply a component in the Infinity Fusion spell that is mandatory for that fight, and not something you need to use specifically. Where the Aeon Arcana really finds its value is in weapon fusion. Starting from Uriel, Aeon weapons convey a +4 bonus to all stats and close to the highest attack power that any non-ultimate fusion weapon can have. Atavaka comes in at a level that results in +5 to all stats (the highest possible boost from an Aeon weapon) and the highest attack power from a non-ultimate weapon. This makes Atavaka a great way to attain powerful fusion weapons for characters who have the misfortune of their ultimates being tied to Personae that are far too high leveled to obtain without excessive grinding. Perhaps coincidentally, Metatron is necessary for making Aigis' ultimate, and you're definitely not getting him in a normal playthrough. About the only interesting to say about this arcana is that Uriel had a bit more value in vanilla where he was a Tower Persona instead. Since the arcade isn't a thing in that version, fusing Surt up to Uriel is a decent way to fuse up a good fire caster.
In Reload, we have
Nidhoggr: Level 47
Uriel: Level 57
Ananta: Level 73
Metatron: level 87
There's a bit more to talk about here regarding the actual merits of the Personae. NIdhoggr isn't too great, but he does give relatively easy access to the Null Light passive, and is available around the mid-to-late game this go around. Uriel has the Angelic Grace passive, which gives a big boost in evasion against non-almighty magic attacks, as well as having access to Vorpal Blade and Heaven's Blade (which hilariously is actually weaker than Vorpal Blade if it doesn't crit). Ananta is just a crappy Persona with dubious defensive passives, most notably though gaining Drain Slash at level 80 to patch out one of his weaknesses. Due to the slightly rebalanced level curve and the Sun major arcana card, Metatron is actually usable in a normal playthrough here, though he doesn't really come in with anything super inspiring. We've seen about a half dozen Personae up to this point that come in with Makougaon and Light Amp, as well as stuff that ALSO has the combo of God's Hand and Salvation. He does pick up Repel Elec at level 94 to patch out his Elec Weakness, and it's not an ordeal to get Null Dark onto him for a pretty potent defender, but I don't really find defensive approaches to be quite as good in Reload.
Oh man, we're at the end of the social links! I'll admit, it's feeling pretty weird to finally be at the point where there's not much left to talk about. Onward, to the end we go!
Last edited by Cullen on Tue Nov 04, 2025 3:18 pm, edited 3 times in total.
The next supplemental video is up! Aside from social links and miscellaneous meaningful story scenes, I've also rolled in the FES Christmas Eve dates and the FES version of the bad ending for this one. I was originally going to include the Portable bad ending as well, but it has the exact same script as the FES version, and even omits a couple things. Probably not worth rolling in. Portable also only has 3 potential Christmas Eve dates for the FemC, one of which we've seen in the main videos. I could have included the girl's night date, but the other one would have required a whole extra playthrough from me, which is not a level of dedication I have. Luckily, MegaTen focused Channel BuffMaister has a compilation of all the Portable Christmas dates for your viewing pleasure/horror.
There's going to be a bit of a halt in uploads for a bit as I'm going out of town to visit family this week and won't be back at my apartment until October 5th. I may update the most recent Social Links post in that timeframe, but otherwise the LP is on pause until I return to my usual abode.
Part 66 is out! This time around, let's go with the path of most resistance since... well there's really no reason not to if we're gonna die either way, may as well take the fighting chance! The final block of Tartarus opens to us immediately, though naturally in non-PS2 versions of the game we'll have some NPCs to rescue after a point. Regardless, there's close to nothing going on for the day-to-day until we're back in school since we've wrapped up all out of school links and every Linked Episode will also be closing in this final month. It's a wild feeling to be at this stage after all this time!
Extra Notes
All Versions
-While we still have some links to wrap up and one final one after Judgement to initiate, Tartarus is otherwise our primary task for this month. The Final boss is a toughie in non-Reload versions of the game, so we'll want to be sure we're adequately leveled for it. 80 is the number you should shoot for, and you'll also want to fuse and register an item-bearing Abaddon so you can farm Tomes of the Void off of it. This accessory is critical for the Final Boss, and you'll want 4 for everyone in FES and at least 2 in Portable. Reload by contrast, the level curve kind of already has us where we need to be at this stage, so anything we get during standard exploration is just gravy. We can also just simply buy a status immunity accessory, so that's also of lesser concern. Looping back to FES and Portable, level 80 will allow us to fuse a number of Ultimate Weapons, specifically Masakado's Katana for Junpei and the FES protag, Vel Vel Muruga for the FemC, the Evil Gloves for Akihiko, and in Portable we can get the Snow Queen's Whip for Mitsuru. The +10 to all stats is just about the biggest power boost you can hope to get from any weapon in the game, though it's not necessarily a bad idea to opt for a weakness patch weapon for more general use. The remaining ultimate weapons require so much grinding to get that the additional stats end up just being overkill in comparison to the raw power you get from levels alone, so I wouldn't really consider them.
-Something to note that is Portable exclusive, Akihiko's Music Box that we got from his Christmas date actually has function. The Music Box can be used in battle (and only in battle!) to restore 50 SP to a single party member... an infinite number of times! It's essentially the Chakra Elixir from Nocturne and DDS, and this can actually give you a greater degree of flexibility with hitting weaknesses. The FemC already has infinite SP with Cool Breeze, so if there's something she can't knock down, she can use her turn to Music Box someone who can, thus ensuring no one ever runs out of SP. This is actually the first time I've played this particular version of the game that I never noticed this, likely because I never actually got Akihiko's romance since it's very dumb to activate. Cool stuff, and it's a shame it wasn't retained for Reload.
Social Progress
In Portable
Fortune Social Link: Max Rank
Ryoji's ultimatum feeds directly into his final link event should you spare him, thus finally maxing the link out! The Fortune link finishing off so much later does slightly dampen the usefulness of Norn, but she's still generally worth your time to fuse.
In Reload
Akihiko's Linked Episode: Episode Complete
Koromaru's Linked Episode: Episode Complete
The remaining Linked episodes will be concluding this month, awarding us new Personae of varying usefulness. These are also going to be the main plot events we'll be seeing until school resumes, as again we've done basically everything else in the game.
Last edited by Cullen on Fri Oct 17, 2025 3:06 am, edited 3 times in total.
Going live to re-experience the most boring month in the game immediately with its most stripped down version!
Interesting Things I Learned This Stream
-Not super inspiring, but I've noticed more of the NPC's having slightly different positionings this time. For instance, the girl at Iwatodai Station is standing off to the side of the station entrance instead of sitting on the bench.
-This was my first time doing a recovery event for a social link. Interestingly, the relevant characters can be found in unusual positions compared to where they usually stand. Fuuka, in this instance, was found in the Lab hallway instead of her usual position of being in the 2F classroom hallway. As long as you pick the right choice, you can easily get your links back on track, though obviously there's some time lost in doing these.
-Siegfried is much weaker in this version, not learning Vorpal Blade on fusion and have a fairly different skill list compared to FES/Portable. In fact, he never learns it at all. That being said, he does have Deathbound, which has a 370 power compared to the 320 of Scarlet Havoc, so that skill is still completely useless. Picking up Regenerate 3 is kind of interesting I guess.
-The Christmas Eve date seems to be just one text, randomly chosen from a girl you are romantic with. In this stream, Yuko texted me and no one else. Of course, I had to turn them down and instead hangout with Nozomi. Beautiful.
The compilation for the Harabah bosses is up! I forwent including Chidori in this because the fight just isn't that interesting, over in two attacks in FES and Portable and is a glorified cutscene in Reload. Speaking of things foregone, I don't really have a boss ranking here because everything falls under the same pattern. Does it use ailments and barrier spells, or otherwise has weird gimmicks that are tough because of the dumb AI party members? Then it's the toughest in FES. Does it spam AOE physical skills with a decent chance to crit? It's hardest in Portable. The Reload fights are over hilariously quickly as we're able to stack enough damage boosting passives onto Theurgies now that their damage rockets past the HP of anything we're fighting. The only interesting exception to this general pattern was the Royal Dancers fight in Portable. In both my practice playthroughs of FES and Portable, they never used Charm skills on me so that was a nasty surprise that stalled out the fight a ton. Aigis being MIA when she was one of my main party members also caused some issues, since Orgia Mode actually would have made her pretty decent here. All in all though, I was adequately prepared for most of the fights and breezed through, resulting in a compilation that's a third of the length of the last one, though the lack of story bosses assists with that a bit.
It was one year and almost 4 months ago that we made our first awkward steps into the Tartarus Tutorial in Thebel, and now we've ascended to the peak in Adamah! This is the true final block (technically) of Tartarus, and is structured much like Harabah albeit a bit condensed. The full block is available to us with 5 bosses in FES and Portable, while Reload faces us with 8 bosses and one Final Monad Passage. This is the staging ground for the end game, and it's where we'll be doing our final preparations for Nyx as the treasure and EXP here are bountiful, and there are some notable rewards we can get from the Personae we can fuse at this point. Let's get cracking!
Extra Notes
In FES and Portable
-There are several Personae that are worth creating at this stage for the items they bear. I previously mentioned Abaddon, and to reiterate with him: He's a level 68 Devil that produces a Tome of The Void at Level 74, meaning we need to get one more level with him to get that item. Tome of The Void gives immunity to every mental ailment, and you'll definitely want 4 of them in FES and at least 2 in Portable. He only gets to level 73 off of Social Link EXP, so you'll need to get one more level for him past that to get the item. It's easy enough to card Growth 3 onto him in Portable, but you might want to be more considerate of how you fuse him to get that in FES. I lucked into him getting a skill mutation that gave me Akasha Arts in FES, but if that doesn't happen you'll be more reliant on your team to win battles for him since he has basically no innate offensive presence. Be sure to scan enemies so your team knows how to set up All Out Attacks! When Abaddon is getting close to the level up he needs, be sure to register him so you can quickly pull him out of the compendium for another Tome.
-Other worthwhile Personae to create in FES are Masakado (level 73) and Mara (Level 77). The can be used via weapon fusion to create the ultimate Katana and Glove type weapons, giving the protage, Junpei and Akihiko huge attack power and +10 to all stats. If you overlevel a bit, Shiva can be fused at Level 82 for the ultimate Spear for Ken. In Portable, we Kartikeya (already done, Level 70) and Skadi (Level 80). The remaining ultimate weapons for the characters I'm using take too much grinding to get, so for anyone else we can create Aeon weapons, which are almost as good. An Aeon weapon from a Level 80 Persona (which will be easier to get shortly into January) will give +5 to all stats, which is still an appreciable bonus! Alternatively, you can just stick to weakness patching weapons since that's great in its own way.
-For money farming in Adama, you'll want to stick to the lower floors where the enemies are weaker, as the entire block has the same treasure pool and you'll quickly be able to intimidate the enemies towards the bottom and loot the place with ease. Just for the sake of completeness though, all Payday Floors for Adamah are as follows: 215, 218, 219, 221, 223, 225, 227, 230, 233, 234, 235, 238, 241, 242, 245, 247, 248, 250 and 253. The best range is 221-227, since there's 4 payday floors in an alternating pattern with the weakest enemies to contend with.
-For EXP grinding, naturally you'll want to stick to the higher floors. The enemies give way more EXP at this point, 3k-4k with a wand card which is several times the amount the enemies from the lower floors of Adamah. It's up to you if you want to stick to floor 253 and manipulate respawns, or if you just keep going between floor 245-251 to pick ups some money and gear while you're at it.
-The Vision Quest is perfectly completable with a party that's ready for the Final Boss, so we'll be checking that out several videos from now as I plan to get my preparation done now in Portable.
-Some other notable items that might be worth picking up from Personae are the Elemental Immunity accessories such as Blazing Flame and Lightning Gloves. The Resistance boosting fused weapons are fine enough, but the extra protection from these can still be nice. It's fairly easy to grab these in Portable with Growth 3 cards, so consider it for an upcoming bonus boss we'll be taking on. If you're using Ken or Koromaru, definitely consider getting the covers for their weaknesses, as they can't patch those out with weapons like the rest of SEES. The Radiant Halo that blocks Light skills is produced by Melchizedek at Level 69 (Nice) while Thanatos produces the Ring of Darkness that blocks Dark skills at Level 71.
In Reload
-We don't really need to do any grinding in this version since the bosses at this stage give ridiculous amounts of EXP that rocket you up to level 78-80. Because we're taking a certain bonus boss later, we're going to be even more overpowered for the final boss. The level curve in this version is kind of screwy honestly, a lot of the Adamah enemies were already intimidated by us upon reaching them for the first time.
-The Sun Arcana card allows us to fuse Personae 5 levels above our current level, and it's pretty broken, allowing you to fuse the bulk of the best Personae with just the game's natural overtuned level curve. I won't get too crazy with it, but I will pick up a few things I otherwise couldn't with it.
-For Reload, it's more worth your time to pick up the accessories that nullify weaknesses since we can't just make weapons that do the same thing. For my final party, I'd like the Frozen Stone, the Lightning Gloves and the Radiant Halo, though this is really only necessary for one of the bonus bosses. Any other time, you're generally better off using your accessory slot to optimize your offense.
-A lot of the end game equipment from the Antique shop will require copious amounts of Nihil White, Nihil Black, Rubies and Diamonds, so make sure you're collecting plenty of those and ration them wisely if you don't want to do a ton of farming.
-Pretty much any final party is workable in this game, so don't feel like you need to bring anyone in particular along. I'll be going with Akihiko, Aigis and Koromaru as this is a good hyper-offense party and Reload vastly favors offensively minded parties compared to FES and Portable, where defensive ones tend to be wiser choices in most parts of the game.
-The final Monad Passage MUST be completed in this version to unlock the ultimate bonus boss. Technically, the specific requirement is beating the Shadow of The Void, but he's the final fight of the final Monad passage that can only be unlocked by clearing all previous passages, so the two things are one and the same. The Shadow of The Void is notable for outright encouraging a party to enter with fully charged Theurgies and blowing him away after a little set up, because you can't really beat him any other way unless you get lucky with crits.
After some delays, Part 68 is up! After a fairly uneventful Winter break across all versions of the game, School is ushered back in for its final month with a somber new school theme, some final lectures and quizzes, big scenes between the members of SEES and one final Social Link popping up. In Vanilla P3, January is liable to be an incredibly busy month with every single day dedicated to closing off numerous ongoing links, but with even a halfway decent ability to manage time you'll likely just be working on Empress and Aeon at this point, and maybe have just one more to take care of in Reload.
Extra Notes
In FES and Portable
-It's slightly less obvious the Aeon link is available here without the big flashing card over Aigis' head, but like Reload it's just ready to go as soon as the 8th rolls arounds. The Aeon Social Link is the first in a grand tradition of Persona re-releases adding new Social Links with non-standard or invented major Arcana in order to create new content that makes the re-release worth buying. The lack of a social link for Aigis was among many things that stuck out in the pretty obviously unfinished vanilla release, and its new presence has a fairly amusing and overt message about it being a Brand New Arcana that's something of an artifact in Portable. Amusingly, the Aeon Arcana itself actually features only 2 newly added Personae in Nidhoggr and Atavaka, with Uriel, Ananta and Metatron all being repurposed from the Arcana they were originally a part of in Vanilla (Tower, Hierophant and Sun respectively if you're curious.) In a funny twist, Atavaka would go on to be shuffled into the Strength Arcana in Reload.
-Aside from a few more level ups and getting new weapons for Akihiko and Ken, we're mostly done with our end game set up for FES. For Portable, we'll want to actually do a bit more set up. Due to mechanical changes heavily complicating the final boss fight in ways that were probably accidental, we're going to want to set up a dedicated core of 3 Personae to handle the final encounter, and I'll have Odin for a couple incidental encounters along the way. My core in Portable will be Surt (who because we've had him so long, has the best stats all around in addition to being an optimized striker), Scathach (Comes with Amrita which has some value, and I've set her up with a Mediarahan card) and Kartikeya (I need a buffer with Matarukaja and also Matarunda for some damage mitigation, and he was the highest leveled thing I could set up with both). I'll be setting these 3 up with duplicated copies of the Enduring Soul card we got from the vision quest, and I'll also be fusing Zochouten 3 times for Sharp Student cards for all of them. Crit chance reduction is super important for the final fight, and Enduring Soul gives me a bit of insurance for any potential disaster scenarios. I'll also, at some point, want to clear out the Resistance Door two more times in the Vision Quest for the Cup cards that we receive from it. Maxing out the EN of all these Personae should give the FemC all the defensive insurance she needs for the final encounter.
-For non-FemC set ups in Portable, we're just about set with everyone else, but one notable thing you don't need to worry about too much in the final fight are weaknesses. When the time comes, I'll be fusing up level 80+ Aeon weapons for Aigis and Yukari, so they can enjoy some bonus stats. We already have the Snow Queen's Whip for Mitsuru, and I'll be slapping an Ice Bracer on her to beef up Bufudyne further. Aigis will stick with the Giga Power Band that has served her well up to this point, and Yukari will be rocking a Tome of The Void alongside the FemC.
In Reload
-Due to a myriad of new events, it's possible to have a couple more outstanding links like the Fortune Link at this stage of the game. Obnoxiously, there's a couple of holidays that can force you to lose link time in January, so if you haven't been routing out your days well, it's entirely possible to fail getting all max links despite the game being a bit more generous with the whole process. As is typical for people, I failed to get Fortune done on my first playthrough.
-Mitsuru is maxed out quickly, so now we've just got Aigis to focus on, plus Junpei's Linked Episode dangling in the air. The proceedings for Reload are going to become pretty predictable going forward, adding to the general melancholic malaise that has swept over Iwatodai and Tatsumi Port Island.
-Weird story change for once, Junpei's rooftop Heart-to-Heart with the MC/FemC has had Yukari butt into the proceedings, resulting in a slightly different scene. It's an interesting change and sort of builds up the "main three" dynamic between them, but I do kind of dislike how its framed with Junpei cutting class. Junpei becoming slightly more serious about his life in general and becoming a better student because of it is one of the ongoing sub-plots of the game if you pay attention to him, and it annoys me that they're undercutting it here damnit!
Social Progress
In FES
Empress Social Link: Rank 8
Aeon Social Link: Rank 2
In Portable
Empress Social Link: Rank 7
Aeon Social Link: Rank 2
In Reload
Empress Social Link: Max Rank
Fortune Social Link: Max Rank
Aeon Social Link: Rank 1
As stated earlier, the day-to-day is going to become very predictable going forward. The Empress link can't be advanced as far at this point in FES and Portable, so we'll have a slight bit of variety for at least another week in that regard, but otherwise these remaining videos are going to be the Aigis Hour, excepting for any Linked Episodes we need to finish in Reload. And you know what? She deserves it.
Part 69(nice) is out! After a melancholic return to school for one last month, I think some good ol' fashioned violence is just the thing to take our mind off of Strega and their cult hokum. For FES and Reload, we've essentially done everything there is to do in Tartarus in the context of a fresh new game playthrough, save for one thing. Portable, of course, has a much more substantial remaining task in the Vision Quest, which we'll be seeing after the next video.
Extra Notes
In FES and Portable
-For the Fierce Cyclops battle, Myriad Arrows and just a bit of luck will win the day. It's generally better to take a defensive approach in this fight and wait for the MC/FemC's turn to come back around, since you're not exactly flush with good options for dealing with this fight otherwise.
-The Jotun of Grief is a pretty infamous boss, draining all damage types save for Pierce, which aside from the protag is carried by the weakest physical fighters in SEES across the board (though Ken does pretty decent because of Spear Mastery). A critical thing a lot of players miss though is that Elemental breaks work on this guy just fine, so pick up a breaking spell and your hyper-specialists can do their work! This is even easier to accomplish in Portable since you have full control over what your party does and can easily slap a break with say, Akihiko, and then suddenly him, the FemC and Ken can all cut loose with Elec spells and fry this fool. For FES, I instead opted to pick up a Seth for the Protag, giving me Fire Break for setting up Surt while also allowing Junpei to swing for the fences with Laveataenn unimpeded.
-For the most part, the Judgement Arcana is of little use in these versions of the game, so maxing out the Social Link doesn't mean much as far as the final boss is concerned. Michael might be worth your time to pick up though, depending on your attacking preferences.
-Once you finally hit Level 80, for any character that you cannot pick up the Ultimate weapon for, you can instead fuse the Level 80 Aeon Persona Atavaka, and create an Aeon weapon that gives +5 to all stats. Still an appreciable boost for pretty much anyone, and also a decent bit ahead of any weapon you can buy or find in terms of attack power.
In Reload
-Completing the final Monad Passage has been added into the list of requirements for unlocking the ultimate bonus boss battle, so if you're going for that you'll want to make sure to get it done. I'm sure you'd be completing all the Monad passages anyway, but hey, it is a difference from the previous versions of the game.
-Take full advantage of the Sun major Arcana card to fuse anything that seems worthwhile before you leave Tartarus. Your level will have risen considerably by the end of Adamah, so quite a few powerful things can be made available to you sooner than you'd otherwise normally be able to get them. For my part, I fused Asura, who is very easy to set up as an S+ tier user of Strike skills, comes with God's Hand, and has Unshaken Will to give us protection against the most dangerous ailments in the game.
-Once you'd decided on a team you like for the end of the game, don't forget to buy up as many incenses as you can get from the Antique Store, in order to maximize their capabilities. I've got a very offensively minded team in Koromaru-Akihiko-Aigis, so I'll definitely be looking to pad out their attacking stats even further.
The next supplemental video is up! There's going to be a lot of Aigis and Mitsuru for the remainder of these because... well they're all that's left! To keep these relatively interesting, I mixed in some FES and Portable versions of story scenes, since it can be fun to see how they might have subtly changed in the transition to Reload. The rooftop scene with Junpei in particular has not a Yukari in sight and is instead the solidification of the bromance. More importantly, he didn't cut class in this version! I'll also find the direction Mitsuru's link goes for the FemC to be pretty interesting, though if it was an attempt to make the link less overtly romantic, mission failed spectacularly there. As a final aside, I have finally gotten all the Social Link write ups finalized! It's just video updates and grinding for the bonus boss I have to work on until we reach The Answer.
Part 70 is out! We're officially in the final month doldrums of idling our time away with Aigis (with some brief cameos from Mitsuru in FES and Portable) and we're just about prepared for the end. There's still a couple bombshells to come before the final encounter though, so it's not like we'll be devoid of excitement! Reload also threw in another brief encounter with Takaya, who once again tries to doomsay to the protagonist and mostly comes across like he's trying to convince himself.
No major things to talk about in any version really, though I did check the command room console in FES and discovered that the final recording we saw in Reload exists there as well. This video was actually my first time seeing that recording, because there aren't any new ones added post-Hanged Man encounter until just now, I had never thought to check the console in the back half of January specifically. Doing LPs is always a great way to learn new things about your favorite games!
Social Progress
In FES
Empress Social Link: Max Rank
Aeon Social Link: Max Rank
In Portable
Empress Social Link: Rank 9
Aeon Social Link: Rank 6
In Reload
Aeon Social Link: Rank 6
Junpei's Linked Episode: Final Episode Complete
Ken's Linked Episode: Final Episode Complete
Mitsuru is finally done and dusted in FES, though due to the way the schedule fell in Portable, it will actually be another couple videos before we're done with her their. We've seen every Linked Episode through to their conclusion, and they were pretty nice additions I have to say! Ken in particular benefitted from his as he is pretty light on screentime after Shinji's passing/incapacitation in the older games. It's also nice that the way Persona 3 was originally written, no major character arcs are locked within social links while being divorced from the main plot, which is a problem the sequels tend to run into. Now we'll truly just be focusing on Aigis going forward, though despite Junpei's linked episode being done we do have one more major (missable!) story event coming up for him that will round out his personal arcs.
Last edited by Cullen on Thu Nov 13, 2025 3:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Part 71 is out, in which I bumble my way through the Vision Quest! The Vision Quest sees us refighting all of the Full Moon Shadows, juiced up to be end game caliber opponents, in addition to some stupid trial-and-error puzzle boss fights that are best solved with a guide on hand. A myriad of fantastic rewards awaits you for clearing these fights, and the first couple doors plus the puzzle doors can easily be beaten without any fine tuning to your team, so it's worth doing a few of these in preparation for the final boss in a normal playthrough. I struggled a bit with this, as using a party with two of the squishiest fighters and not having Akihiko to debuff bot ratchets up the difficulty of these fights quite a bit, but ultimately the only one I had to do any extra grind for was Hanged Man, and even that was just to make the fight more consistent. To go a little more in depth on each fight,
Priestess: Completely free, Thunder Reign into an All Out Attack will end this fight instantly with either an average party level of 70 or if someone has an ultimate weapon. This fight is notable for being a very efficient way to farm Opals, as you'll get 1 or 5 after exhausting the non-repeatable rewards for clearing it. Opals can in turn be traded for Growth 3 cards, making it a good way to stockpile those if you'd rather not repeatedly fuse Jatayu. Opals can also be turned over for Bead Chains, which is fantastic for creating a party with no access to Mediarahan. Since anybody can use items in this version, it's just as good in practice really.
Empress and Emperor: Almost though not quite as free as the last one. They're still fully weak to all Phys and Magic skills respectively, you can immediately go into uncorking All Out Attacks on them. Were I using my normal party of Ken, Akihiko and Junpei, this fight would have ended within two turns. Junpei and Akihiko are much weaker than normal for me though, so I had to settle for getting it under the wire.
Hierophant: Not much to say about this one. Patch out Yukari's Elec weakness and make sure both her and the FemC are immune to Fear and you're essentially good to go here. Ideally your second best damage dealer also isn't sick going into the fight...
Lovers: Not much to say about this one. Patch out
Chariot & Justice: The first of several fights where you'll definitely want Attack Mirrors or Tetrakarn as insurance, as a single crit from an AOE physical attack is an instant loss in almost any case where it happens. One thing you can do to handle this fight more efficiently than I did is make use of Thunder Call items. The tank form is immune to knock down, but the individual parts are not, allowing you to guarantee shock both of them with Thunder Call and do All Out Attacks to keep your damage evenly spread between them. Combine all that together, and you have a pretty simple fight.
Hermit: If you register a Thor on the cusp of leveling up to his last skill and he's item bearing, you can get 3 copies of Lightning Gloves to give the rest of your party Elec immunity while the FemC can run Odin to drain incoming Elec attacks. That completely dismantles the Hermit's main offense leaving Spirit Drain (which is much stronger for enemies and is very annoying but not threatening) and Megidolaon. Mind Charge into Megidolaon is something of an unfortunate RNG check for this fight if you take it on without grinding up more than I did. You either have the stats to survive it, or you don't, and Mitsuru and Yukari definitely don't. Again, having Akihiko here to give us more reliable damage mitigation on the turns we need it (plus being Elec immune himself) makes this much simpler and easier to win without powering up the team. My original plan was to quickly grind out Thor to get Lightning Gloves for the entire team (It would only take a few minutes at this stage of the game), which meant I could have the FemC only deploy Matarunda as a counter to Mind Charge, but the AI for the Hermit seemed to have broken after he wiped out the rest of the team. I thought the Solo win where I just drained every elec attack he threw at me was funny, so I decided to roll with it.
Strength and Fortune: Essentially a combination of the Hierophant and Lovers battle with the Chariot and Justice battle. You need Attack Mirrors/Tetrakarn for insurance and ailment immunity to make sure your lead characters don't do anything that dismantles your game plan. After that, like the Hermit this is just a pretty slow and grindy battle. Once Fortune comes out, you can either use something Wind Immune or Resistant to cover for the occasional Magarudyne, but he mostly sticks to The Wheel so just blast away with Thunder Reign and All Out Attacks and throw up a Magic Mirror since he doesn't drain his own Wind Magic thankfully.
Hanged Man: Pretty simple though very annoying fight that I was approaching pretty badly due to poor memory of it. Spamming Vorpal Blade with a Great Buff is definitely better for this fight than elemental magic. If you roll a crit on one of the summoned Shadows, that can allow you to take out the statues in a single round of combat. Tetrakarn is a must here as opposed to Attack Mirrors, as Hanged Man has nothing but physicals and you'll need far too many reflective barriers to sustain that kind of strategy with just rare items. The main RNG swing for this fight is if the Summoned Shadows break the FemC's barrier. In those cases, it's a good idea to have something Strike Immune/Resistant to deal with that. You can get the Absorb Strike card from the Empress/Emperor door, so grabbing that and slapping it onto whatever you have with Tetrakarn is a decent way to make this fight free. Otherwise, it's just a very tedious and slow battle as the Hanged Man decides completely at random if he's going to summon more statues or not. Note that to get the 10X Armageddon items, you'll need to let a summoned Shadow explode on you, which sets the reward to the Armageddon drop. If you're planning on taking on both of the bonus bosses, you'll need Armageddon for one of them and it makes the other fight a lot shorter, so this is a good thing to come back to once you've hit level 99 for your preferred party.
Power Door: Onto the puzzle doors, and boy are these stupid as hell. The Power Door faces you with 3 Gigas who initially do nothing. They are immune to all magic, but they have rotating physical vulnerabilities that they will begin to shuffle upon taking damage. They can be Weak to Strike while absorbing Slash and nullifying Pierce, they can be neutral to Slash while nulling Strike and absorbing Pierce, or they can be neutral to Pierce while nulling Slash and absorbing Strike. Your goal is to take them down one by one, always trying to at least deal damage to them each turn. If they are not damaged once they are activated, they will Power Charge and then launch an attack the next turn they go undamaged. If they are damaged in a turn, they will instead shuffle around their vulnerabilities. The ideal turns to damage them are when they are Strike weak, which you can tell is the case if they absorb a Slash from the protag. Shinji will just power charge and wait until that opportunity comes up, while Mitsuru and Yukari mostly go on stand by, though Yukari of course is helpful when you need to hit the Pierce vulnerability. Once you know how this fight works, it is just an extremely boring affair of whittling down a single Gigas and then moving onto the next one. One thing that can speed it up is that when you do hit a Strike weakness, Yukari and Mitsuru can break the Gigas' elemental immunities and deal decent damage to it the next turn. Having Mitsuru Mind Charge in anticipation for this opportunity is a good idea. Note that the Gigas' shuffling their resistances also wipes out the elemental Breaks. I had a disaster happen in this recording where because I never actually used Shinji, he was still on AI control and immediately activated two of the Gigas', making the fight way tougher than it needed to be. Fortunately, these pre-set teams get a pretty generous assortment of items and the FemC gets a handful of spells that can avert some of the disaster. I'm pretty sure these puzzle bosses are impossible if you use AI controlled teams, or at least this one and the Resistance Door are.
Magic Door: Way simpler and shorter than the last one. Have the FemC equip Raphael and spam Makarakarn. Every turn, at least one of the Ghosts will throw out Mahamaon, bouncing the spell back at itself and killing it. If you're lucky, this will happen twice in one turn, and with Raphael also bouncing light spells back, you can win this fight in as little as two turns. The Makarakarns also account for the chance of non-Hamaon spells being tossed your way.
Resistance Door: This one is really stupid and I'm not sure how the hell you're supposed to figure it out. Basically, the Samurai you're facing down will throw out debuffs and ailment skills, and you must "resist" these by not directly countering them with buffs, dekaja, status cures, what have you. Akihiko's debuffs and healing spells are fair game. If you've resisted these attacks, the Samurai will whiff their coordinated physical attacks when they make them, opening them up for an uber All-Out Attack that wipes out most of their health. In between all that, you can blast away with elemental magic to slowly whittle them down, with one of them being weak to Magarudyne. How fast this fight goes is dependent on how many times you're able to successfully hit the wind weak Samurai, though it will absolutely end after you hit the second All-Out Attack. Annoyingly, you'll want to do this fight a few times as it awards the 10x King and Queen of Cups card set, which is very helpful for getting the EN you need on your bonus boss Personae.
Speed Door: I don't really know what this fight has to do with Speed, truth be told. Anyway, this is pure trial and error, even moreso than the rest of these puzzle fights. The boss has one of 4 patterns of attacks it can run through, switching its weaknesses and resistances with each attack it makes, and your goal is to switch into the Persona that can strike its current weakness while ideally being immune to the next thing the boss will do or at least neutral to it. You seriously just need to write down what the boss does each turn under separate headings until eventually you come up with a script that allows you to win the fight. Even then, if you miss an attack or the boss lands a crit on you, you've pretty much just lost the fight regardless.
Luck Door: This one's pretty funny and can be approached in one of two ways. The one way to do it is just spam Mudoon and Hamaon until eventually you get lucky and it hits, while the boss does the same to you. The alternative strategy is to just guard endlessly (insta-kills and ailments auto miss against Guarding characters*) until eventually the boss uses a seemingly useless skill called 1 or 2. 1 makes it 100% vulnerable to Mudoon while 2 makes it 100% vulnerable to Hamaon, allowing you to win the fight instantly. Adding into the luck based nature of the battle, if it ends up going on for 9 turns, the boss instead will use Megidolaon, killing you instantly. Pretty silly fight, but relatively quick most of the time. It's worth doing this door a couple times, as it awards a set of 20 Homunculi and 5 Homonculi, which is more than enough for the bonus boss should you be light on those at this point in the game.
*Ghastly Wail still hits a guarding character provided they're afraid, but that's not super relevant most of the time.
Of course, there is technically one more door to do in the Vision Quest, but we'll be taking that on in a separate video with the other major bonus boss of Persona 3 Portable.
Part 72 is out! It's official: We've completed every Social Link, every Linked Episode, and every nightly hangout! Well, in Reload anyway, there's one event each left in Portable and FES but those will be taken care of shortly into the next video. I'll be waiting until those are done to compile the next supplemental video, since we may as well knock out everything in one fell swoop. We're just waiting for the end now, but there is one bit of miscellaneous business we can take care of before it comes at least.
Extra Notes
All Games
-While we will mostly want ultimate weapons for the final boss, be sure to get as many covers for your preferred party's weaknesses as you can. The elemental resistance weapons I have kicking around in FES and Portable should do fine, and I mostly have my weaknesses covered via accessories in Reload. Ken in FES is the odd man out since I wasn't able to get Thanatos' accessory for him, but funnily enough insta-kill weaknesses are probably the least necessary to check for what's coming up.
Social Progress
In FES
Aeon Social Link: Rank 9
In Portable
Aeon Social Link: Max Rank
In Reload
Everything completed!
There is one reward I haven't mentioned for completing all social links, but it'll be a part of the minutiae for the next video anyway so we'll cover it then.
Part 73 is out! With social links done and wrapped, we have just have some loose ends in Tartarus to deal with. Obviously there are the people needing rescue, but we also are finally capable of taking on The Reaper. The Reaper is the final sidequest in a normal playthrough of Vanilla and FES, and is required to clear in Portable and Reload to unlock the true final sidequest. This isn't super relevant to what we're going to be doing for the next few videos, but I do need to establish it somewhere.
Extra Notes
-Now for FES, beating the Reaper can be something of an ordeal without extra leveling. Because it's technically a random encounter, you are saddled with a completely random turn order that makes it very hard to depend on your allies to act in the way you need them to for it's duration, to say nothing of how messy it can get if people start dropping and need to be revived. I was a little underprepared for this encounter sadly, but there are some things I picked up that can give you an easier time than I had. First off, being around level 85 instead of 80 is more ideal. It takes time to get there, but you don't really have much else going on in the evenings at this point so it's not the toughest ordeal in the world. Obviously you'll want everyone's weakness patched out, so I'd have done well to fuse Thanatos in order to get Ken a Dark Immunity accessory. Having debuffs and buffs on the protag, particularly Matarunda for the former, is immensely helpful. Akihiko just can't be counted on to use them if he's going after the Reaper but before a dedicated healer in the turn order with how the AI strategies work. Failing all that, you can of course use the Thunder Reign cheese strat that I did. This completely shuts down the Reaper if it goes right, though funnily enough the variant I got is actually slightly sub-optimal. Akihiko, and in fact your entire party, will never pass up a chance for a free crit regardless of what you're telling them to do, and Akihiko isn't programmed to use his debuffs while in the Knockdown tactic. Having Akihko go after the Reaper gets back up would allow him to perpetually keep him debuffed and minimize the chance of any misses coming from the Protag. Tying back to the first point, getting this strategy to work does require some luck, as half the time you'll get a turn order where the Reaper immediately goes after the Protag and you won't be able to knock him down at all. Since it's not actually a boss fight though, you can actually run from the encounter by either knocking him down or more reliably by using the Trafuri spell. The Reaper will still be on the field after escaping, so you can just keep running into him until you get a workable turn order.
-I didn't really focus on this, but in FES and Portable never use Magic Mirrors. The Reaper will just switch to using Megiodlaon to punish you for your attempt to cheat the fight. This is not a forbidden tactic in Reload as Magic Mirrors are now single target and the Reaper goes twice anyway, so he can't truly be walled with them. This means that Ken's Divine Intervention is also perfectly fine to use.
-Portable introduces some mechanical changes that make the fight trickier but also easier. Due to the way the turn order is reworked in this version, the Reaper's gets two opening actions instead of one, which can definitely start the fight on a bad note. If you survive that with no issues, the fight is arguably easier than FES for several reasons. For one, we'll always have a turn order where the entire team is going before the Reaper, and the FemC will be going early enough in the order that she can set up a Thunder Reign Shock into knockdowns. While we can't permanently stun lock the Reaper, we can reliably rob him of turns every single time he recovers from Dizzy. Since I can directly control my party, I now have full control over who buffs, who debuffs and who heals. We do have to face down more attacks from the Reaper in this version, but we're able to reliably drop his damage to the point where that's perfectly manageable. It only took me one try to win this version of the fight, whereas FES took 5 tries.
-Besides patching out weaknesses, a notable equipment piece that can help is the Vitality Ring. It gives about 200 extra HP to most characters at this point, greatly enhancing you're survivability and making a Mind Charged Megidola, should it come up, perfectly survivable if you have all buffs and debuffs in play. Legion Weapons can function almost as well for this purpose if you need your accessory slot to patch out your weakness.
-In Reload.... this fight is really easy. Being able to Debilitate the Reaper is a god-send for your action economy, and we just generally have stronger options available to us to expedite the fight and afford us more safety. We can spread the buffing duties around the entire team as well, so while the Reaper is technically more threatening due to getting two turns in this version, he's just infinitely more manageable on the whole. Also very nicely, his two actions don't actually tick down his debuff counter two turns, so you get consistent mileage out of Debilitate vis-a-vis other fights in the game. It's kind of ridiculous such an easy fight gives you such an embarrassment of EXP.
-One final note unrelated to the Reaper, before entering Tartarus for the final battle, you are given a chance to save and go to Paulownia Mall for any last minute shopping. This is good in Portable and Reload, because I forgot to claim our rewards for rescuing the last two people.
Social Progress
We're all done! We now can fuse Orpheus Telos, a badge we can wear with pride.
The Final Social Link supplemental video, plus a smattering of significant story scenes as they were in FES, is out! Rather than a bunch of shorter videos for the previous recordings, I decided to just bundle these all together since the playlist is already long enough, and we still have the Answer to do! With this, all social links are formally wrapped and we're able to enter the final battle with an nice assortment of unbreakable bonds at our back. Got any favorite social links from this game?
Part 74, the prelude to the final boss and the final encounter with Strega, is out! Not a whole lot to say here, Strega is once again a complete joke in FES and Portable, and they're pretty undercooked in Reload as well though the fights do have a bit more going on there. I do think it's amusing Reload changed it so that the final barrier in Adamah is already done when you reach it, sidestepping the question of how the heck Strega got to the higher floors before you. Next time, the moment the past two in-game months have been building up to: Nyx.
Here's something I haven't done in awhile, a mini-supplemental post about nitty-gritty details of the games that don't come up often! For the most part, I wanted to highlight the Vision Quest again as I was running into some issues with it when preparing for the bonus boss in Portable and thankfully found answers to my queries that are worth signal boosting. Shockingly recently (as in, just 6 months ago, year of our lord 2025), GameFaqs user pzl has tested and discovered the precise method for getting the Fusion spell items from each Full Moon Shadow. As it turns out, all these items have special requirements for getting them, not just the 10X Armageddon from the Hanged Man. You can found out what these are in the below message board post,
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/97 ... e/80984181
The main ones to care about are Infinity and Armageddon. Armageddon we already knew and I explained, but to re-iterate, you must let a summoned Maya explode on you for the 10X Armageddon to drop. A lesser known detail is that at least once in the fight, a buffing/debuffing skill must be used. Some people fail to get the Armageddons because they come back to this at Level 99 and go full auto pilot, but if you're trying to speed up the fight, you likely won't run into this issue. An issue you WILL probably run into if you are either consistently good at the game or are just on Level 99 Auto-Pilot mode is that in the Strength & Fortune battle, you must let a character get killed and then revive them (in addition to the weird buffing requirement) in order to proc the 10X Infinity. The Armageddons aren't strictly necessary to proc from the Vision Quest as you only need one (The Portable exclusive bonus boss can be beaten pretty handily without it), but the Inifinitys are mandatory to have for the main bonus boss and having to trade for both them and an Armageddon introduces a maddening amount of Malachite farming. Since the fight loses all teeth once you've hit the 99 marker, it can be really difficult to naturally fulfill the revival requirement if you decide to pick these up after you've done your grinding like I did. The other Fusion spell that's helpful to pick up for the bonus boss is Best Friends, and for that you'll need to let Priestess summon adds at least twice, in addition to the previously mentioned "cast a buff" requirement. Not at all difficult since you can easily sandbag for it, but you're not liable to figure that out naturally even before grinding as like I demonstrated, the fight can easily be won before the Priestess does anything at all. The 10X Best Friends are pretty much all you need for the bonus boss if you're going for the Divine Pillar strategy, and it's a nice extra amount to pick up if you're going the Barbaric Bracers route instead. Speaking of!
plz also debugged some the under-the-hood mechanics of the game, and while some of these have already been known, this is the first time I've seen documentation for other littler things.
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/93 ... s/80935729
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/97 ... e/80935773
While both of these are pretty interesting, the immediately relevant nuggets are in the second link regarding Portable. For starters, Sukukaja and Sukunda have actually been buffed in the transition to Portable, giving a 1.3X bonus to your evasion chance compared to the fairly minor 1.1X chance that they do in Vanilla/FES. Since the Barbaric Bracers straight up halve the accuracy of enemy skills and the Great condition adds in another 1.1X multiplier (mentioned in the first link regarding FES), this actually makes the Barbaric Bracers remarkably consistent against the bonus boss if you keep Best Friends up throughout the fight, and it's probably the better build over the Divine Pillar (especially since the Phys Resistant variant of the Armor of Light doesn't exist in Portable. That was another annoying thing I had to find out personally). Somewhat related to the bonus boss but mostly just neat to know in general, Power Charge and Mind Charge actually did get buffed in Portable and are now a 2.1X multiplier instead of the baffling 1.9X it is in Vanilla/FES. I still feel the bonus is too minor to really warrant upping it for every attack you do, but at least you're not operating at a strict damage loss for general use.
To close this out, I did just get done with my practice attempt against the bonus boss in Portable with my Barbaric Bracers build, and I absolutely clapped that fool on the first try without even having Enduring Soul go off, so I'm feeling confident for the recording. Obviously an evasion build has an inherent luck factor, but absolute worst case scenario, I'm looking at about a 7 or 8 cycle fight. I actually could have done the quick kill in the practice attempt since I got a lucky High Counter proc that let me skip the Diarahan phase, but I decided to let them heal up to do the fight completely honestly. It's not something I can expect to happen when I'm recording, after all. I'll probably do a dry run of the Portable exclusive bonus boss, but honestly they are WAY easier than the game's main bonus boss so I probably only really need to refresh myself on their pattern. I've had many boondoggles pop up in this LP due to overconfidence though, so maybe I should err on the side of caution. Now I just need to get my Reload file ready for the bonus boss, and we should have the Journey wrapped up with a nice bow for Christmas!
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/97 ... e/80984181
The main ones to care about are Infinity and Armageddon. Armageddon we already knew and I explained, but to re-iterate, you must let a summoned Maya explode on you for the 10X Armageddon to drop. A lesser known detail is that at least once in the fight, a buffing/debuffing skill must be used. Some people fail to get the Armageddons because they come back to this at Level 99 and go full auto pilot, but if you're trying to speed up the fight, you likely won't run into this issue. An issue you WILL probably run into if you are either consistently good at the game or are just on Level 99 Auto-Pilot mode is that in the Strength & Fortune battle, you must let a character get killed and then revive them (in addition to the weird buffing requirement) in order to proc the 10X Infinity. The Armageddons aren't strictly necessary to proc from the Vision Quest as you only need one (The Portable exclusive bonus boss can be beaten pretty handily without it), but the Inifinitys are mandatory to have for the main bonus boss and having to trade for both them and an Armageddon introduces a maddening amount of Malachite farming. Since the fight loses all teeth once you've hit the 99 marker, it can be really difficult to naturally fulfill the revival requirement if you decide to pick these up after you've done your grinding like I did. The other Fusion spell that's helpful to pick up for the bonus boss is Best Friends, and for that you'll need to let Priestess summon adds at least twice, in addition to the previously mentioned "cast a buff" requirement. Not at all difficult since you can easily sandbag for it, but you're not liable to figure that out naturally even before grinding as like I demonstrated, the fight can easily be won before the Priestess does anything at all. The 10X Best Friends are pretty much all you need for the bonus boss if you're going for the Divine Pillar strategy, and it's a nice extra amount to pick up if you're going the Barbaric Bracers route instead. Speaking of!
plz also debugged some the under-the-hood mechanics of the game, and while some of these have already been known, this is the first time I've seen documentation for other littler things.
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/93 ... s/80935729
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/97 ... e/80935773
While both of these are pretty interesting, the immediately relevant nuggets are in the second link regarding Portable. For starters, Sukukaja and Sukunda have actually been buffed in the transition to Portable, giving a 1.3X bonus to your evasion chance compared to the fairly minor 1.1X chance that they do in Vanilla/FES. Since the Barbaric Bracers straight up halve the accuracy of enemy skills and the Great condition adds in another 1.1X multiplier (mentioned in the first link regarding FES), this actually makes the Barbaric Bracers remarkably consistent against the bonus boss if you keep Best Friends up throughout the fight, and it's probably the better build over the Divine Pillar (especially since the Phys Resistant variant of the Armor of Light doesn't exist in Portable. That was another annoying thing I had to find out personally). Somewhat related to the bonus boss but mostly just neat to know in general, Power Charge and Mind Charge actually did get buffed in Portable and are now a 2.1X multiplier instead of the baffling 1.9X it is in Vanilla/FES. I still feel the bonus is too minor to really warrant upping it for every attack you do, but at least you're not operating at a strict damage loss for general use.
To close this out, I did just get done with my practice attempt against the bonus boss in Portable with my Barbaric Bracers build, and I absolutely clapped that fool on the first try without even having Enduring Soul go off, so I'm feeling confident for the recording. Obviously an evasion build has an inherent luck factor, but absolute worst case scenario, I'm looking at about a 7 or 8 cycle fight. I actually could have done the quick kill in the practice attempt since I got a lucky High Counter proc that let me skip the Diarahan phase, but I decided to let them heal up to do the fight completely honestly. It's not something I can expect to happen when I'm recording, after all. I'll probably do a dry run of the Portable exclusive bonus boss, but honestly they are WAY easier than the game's main bonus boss so I probably only really need to refresh myself on their pattern. I've had many boondoggles pop up in this LP due to overconfidence though, so maybe I should err on the side of caution. Now I just need to get my Reload file ready for the bonus boss, and we should have the Journey wrapped up with a nice bow for Christmas!
The Fool... The moment Man devoured the fruit of knowledge, He sealed His fate. Entrusting His future to the cards, Man clings to a dim hope. Yes, the Arcana is the means by which all is revealed...
The Magician.... Attaining one's dream requires a stern will and unfailing determination.
The High Priestess... The silent voice within one's heart whispers the most profound wisdom.
The Empress... Celebrate life's grandeur... its brilliance... its magnificence...
The Emperor... Only courage in the face of doubt can lead one to the answer...
The Hierophant... It is indeed a precious gift to understand the forces that guide oneself...
The Lovers... There is both joy and wonder in coming to understand the hearts of others...
The Chariot... One of life's greatest blessings is the freedom to pursue one's goals.
The Justice... To find the one true path, one must seek guidance amidst uncertainty...
The Hermit... It requires great courage to look within oneself, and forge one's own path...
The Fortune... Alongside time exists fate, the bearer of cruelty.
The Strength... Only with strength can one endure the suffering and torment.
The Hanged Man... In the face of unavoidable disaster lies the opportunity to search for redemption.
The moment Man devoured the fruit of knowledge, He sealed His fate... Entrusting His future to the cards, Man clings to a dim hope. Yet, the Arcana is the means by which all is revealed... Beyond the beaten path lies the absolute end. It matters not who you are.... Death awaits you.
The end is finally here, and what an ending it is! Almost everybody gets a little bit of something to say to send us off, and with that the Journey has concluded. Now obviously we have The Answer to get to, but I have just a couple things left to do before we get there. First and foremost, we have to topple the bonus bosses of the game, which lucky for you I've already done! I have all the footage recorded and it's not too much to edit together with the exception of a couple cuts. I'll get that edited sometime this weekend and schedule it for a Christmas upload for funsies, additionally giving some time for this lengthy epilogue to breathe. After that, I have one final boss compilation to throw together, which will contain the fully commentated versions of each version of the Nyx fight as a little bonus. Yes I kept running commentary for every version of the fight even though only about a third of each fight made it into Part 75. I'll also throw together the ending cutscenes and FES Epilogues/non-unique Portable epilogues for their own little video. After that, I'll take a bit of a break to work on other things, get the final Vanilla stream scheduled, and we'll likely get the Answer started sometime in mid-January. The Answer will be much less complicated to record for and slightly less complicated to edit, so once we hit that point this LP will be updating more regularly and speeding to its proper conclusion. Thanks in advance to everyone who's followed up this point, you've been truly remarkable guests!
Merry Christmas all, we've got a hefty finale to the Journey for the occasion! By fulfilling a variety of conditions, Persona 3 has a doozy of a bonus boss for you. In Vanilla and FES, you must be on a New Game + File and have defeated The Reaper and unlocked Monad (Which is opened after defeating the Reaper and reaching the end of Adamah, or by starting a New Game + File). In Portable, the requirements are the same minus the New Game + aspect to accommodate how Maniac doesn't allow you to carry over anything in New Game + because Atlus was in the early days of using that terrible idea. In Reload, you must also defeat the Shadow of the Void in the final Monad passage, by extension meaning you must clear all Monad passages. Get all that done, and you unlock the request to face your ultimate opponent: Elizabeth/Theodore! Portable also sweetens the pot by adding a unique bonus boss who can be faced after clearing every vision quest door, the more stoic Velvet sibling Margaret! And we're going to defeat them all in this monster of a video that took about as much time as a single playthrough of Reload to prepare (though a huge chunk of that was due to FES). We've got a lot to go over, so let's get cracking!
Rules of Engagement for Elizabeth/Theodore
-They must be faced with a Solo MC. If you attempt the fight with any party members present, they will immediately nuke your party with a damage capped Megidolaon. They will similarly respond this way to any other rule you break, so be mindful of all of these!
-You cannot have the Orb of Omnipotence equipped, which nullifies all but Almighty damage. Your odds of having it are very low anyway, as it only has a sub 1% chance of being produced by Messiah as his item.
-Your currently equipped Persona cannot nullify or otherwise eliminate the damage type of what Elizabeth/Theo is currently trying to hit you with. Unlike previous bonus bosses with similar rules, you are not in violation if you nullify anything at all, you just can't nullify what Elizabeth is currently using. Two notable exceptions are that you are allowed to void Ailment skills, and in Reload you can void insta death skills.
-If you use the Armageddon fusion spell, then it must kill Elizabeth/Theo or else you will be facing down a Megidolaon.
-In FES, you have an 80 turn limit (10 cycles of Elizabeth's pattern) and in Reload you have a 100 turn limit. I've heard that there's no turn limit in Portable, or at least that's what the Portable specific GameFaqs guide claims, but I've never personally tested that. If the fight goes past 80 turns anyway, it probably wasn't going well for you regardless.
-Exclusive to Reload, you cannot have the High Counter or any variation of the Counter ability in your skill loadout. This prevents you from passively generating damage with these abilities in the Reload version of the fight.
-For stuff that's fair game, being merely Resistant to incoming attacks does not count as a broken rule. Evasion boost abilities are also fair game, and you are allowed to have Enduring Soul and Endure for potential mulligans. Those last two abilities are straight out required for the Reload version of the fight. FES also allows you to have the unique Plume of the Dusk item (can be used to revive your party if you are killed in battle) you get from completing the Fusion Spells quest line, giving you another layer of Enduring Soul to work with.
Onto how the fight works!
Elizabeth/Theo's Pattern
-In FES and Portable, Elizabeth and Theo follow a strict pattern that they only deviate from in 3 situations (If they fall under 10k HP, if they fall under 5K HP after the initial 10K barrier is passed and if a rule is violated). Their pattern is as follows,
Fire Persona-Ice Persona- Elec Persona-Wind Persona-Light Persona-Dark Pesona-Ailment Persona-Maskado with damage capped Megidolaons.
Elizabeth and Theo get two actions per turn, randomly deciding to attack with either their current element or a random physical type attack. Note that in FES Elizabeth only ever deals Slash physical damage even if the attack claims to be Pierce or Strike (Bug or exploitable mercy for the player? You decide.) When it comes to Masakado, obviously you can't survive the Megidolaons under normal circumstances, but you are permitted to use the Infinity Fusion spell on this specific attack phase in order to survive. Their pattern loops back around to the Fire persona once Masakado finishes his attack phase.
-Elizabeth and Theo have 20K HP altogether, and you kind of sort of do that much damage to them due to how the fight works. Technically speaking though, you only really have to burn through 10K HP before you can get the killing blow.
-Each Persona has their own set of physical resistances and are obviously immune (Drain, natch) to their own element. Though they aren't truly weak to anything, they will take 50% extra damage from their opposing element. A nice bonus, but not super critical in FES and Portable as neutral magic hits are good enough. The Light, Dark and Ailment Persona nullify all core elements, but are fully vulnerable to every physical attack type if you can work that in. Masakado nulls everything, so your response to his phase after nullifying the Megidolaons should be some form of set up.
-When Elizabeth/Theo fall under 10K Hp, they will pull out Pixie to heal themselves to full with Diarahan and then loop back into the phase they were previously on (eg. if you get her under 10K when she's on her Elec Persona, Elizabeth will pull out Pixie to heal and then switch back to Thor on her second action and resume her normal pattern from there). They will not do this again after falling below 10K HP, but they will do so under 5K and every successive time they get that low (though with the turn limit if that happens at all you've probably lost). You must blast them with Armageddon the second time they go below 10K HP, or the fight cannot be won.
-Contrary to popular belief, no you do not need to luck out with High Counter and bounce a physical attack back at them on their second action in order to get the Armageddon kill. Emphasizing this point is probably why High Counter is just an outright banned skill in Reload.
-Speaking of Reload, Elizabeth has a couple new phases and changes to her existing patterns. While the core rotation is the same, each Persona now has a buffing/debuffing skill they can potentially use. The Light and Dark Persona now use Kougaon and Eigaon instead of Mahamoan and Mamudoon, but they also have Divine Judgement and Die for Me! respectively. Masakado no longer uses the damage capped Megidolaon and instead Concentrates a normal one, which can be survived with standard tactics. The most interesting change to Elizabeth's pattern is that when her "weakness" is struck, she will skip over the next Persona she was going to use if her weakness wasn't hit eg. hitting the Fire Persona with an Ice skill means she goes to the Elec Persona next. This can be used to skip potentially problematic match ups (*cough*Alice*cough*) so keep in mind what things you're going to be passing over when you strike a weakness. This only applies to the first phase of the battle, the third phase works slightly differently as detailed below.
-Speaking of the weaknesses, they are much more prominent in Reload as Elizabeth now takes about a third of the damage from anything she isn't vulnerable to, making it much more important to have a Persona set that can strike into multiple vulnerabilities.
-Elizabeth has a new phase when falling under 13K HP, where she will go into her Ailment Persona to debuff you and Concentrate an attack. She will then use a damage capped Megidolaon, Charge an attack, do two more turns with her Elec Persona, and then loop back into damage capped Megidolaons if you fail to get her under 10K HP by then. You must either get her under 10K HP on the ailment Persona, or survive at least 1 damage capped Megidolaon via Endure/Enduring Soul and get her under 10K HP on the Elec Persona to continue the fight. At that point, she heals herself to full and begins a new 15 turn pattern that goes as follows,
Fire/Ice-Elec/Wind-Light/Dark-Ailment/Elec-Ice/Elec-Dark/Fire-Wind/Light-Repeat Pattern-Dark/Masakado on Turn 15
She now uses two Personae per turn, and instead of skipping phases she instead modifies the second Persona she uses if her weakness was struck on your previous actions. The alternates she uses for each attack are Ailment-Fire-Ice-Masakado-Light-Ailment-Masakado respectively. She always uses Masakado on the second action for the 15th turn.
-Once she falls under 10k again, she will concentrate a Megidolaon that hits for the damage cap. You must have Endure or Enduring Soul to survive this, and you must follow up with Armageddon to end the fight. If you fail to do the latter, she will now just endlessly cast Diarahan and damage capped Megidolaons.
Phew! That was quite a lot of set up. Now how do we deal with all this nonsense?
In FES
-For FES, I went with a rotation of 3 core Personae for the battle plus reserves for the fusion spells I needed. The only non-mandatory set of Personae for the latter are Forneus and Decarabia, but since Masakado is a dead turn anyway, setting up Best Friends is a great way to make the next few turns more painful for Elizabeth and less painful for you. As far as customization goes for the Fusion Spell Personae goes, I set up Ananta with all Regenerate abilities for some passive healing on the turn I need to use Infinity, and Forneus is set up with Resist Fire and Resist Slash to help me mitigate damage from Surt, especially considering he's normally weak to fire. Obviously, every Personae I plan to actually fight with has capped stats, and every Personae I need to take hits with has capped Endurance.
-Messiah is our main form of active damage, with Ice Boost and Ice Amp for Nifelheim to deal huge damage on Elizabeth's initial Surt switch. He also comes with Enduring Soul and Regenerate 3 for extra healing value. I'd love to have Resist Slash on him, but High Counter is more valuable as its an extra 700 damage every time Elizabeth bounces an attack back at herself.
-Orpheus Telos is our main form of tanking and chip damage, with Ragnarok and the relevant boosts. I went with a Triangle spread for simplicity's sake, which slightly constrained my options as I could only create him with 5 skills that way. After over an hour of skill reshuffling, I settled on Mind Charge for a 4th skill and settled with whatever I got for the 5th. In hindsight, I should have gone for High Counter instead.
-Many people foolishly try to take this fight with just Orpheus Telos, which is a terrible idea that greatly constrains your options and makes the fight even more luck based. To stuff Elizabeth's Ailment skills, I instead created an Alilat that has Unshaken Will and Null Poison (and High Counter of course). If I were to redo my set up, I would instead create a Helel with those skills, as he also has resistance to all physical types like Alilat does and innately has Mind Charge. That would let me just use the Ailment turn as a way to set up Mind Charge, and Orpheus Telos could then bounce more hits back via High Counter and speed the fight up considerably.
-For Equipment, we have a fusion weapon made via Orpheus Telos. This gives us the Resist Magic passive that gives an additional 50% damage reduction to any spell Elizabeth uses. Our Armor is the Physical variant of the Armor of Light produced by Messiah, which does the same for physical skills (note that if you get the resist magic variant of the Armor of Light, it doesn't stack with the Orpheus Telos weapon.) Our shoes don't matter because our Accessory is the Divine Pillar, which removes our ability to dodge but halves all incoming damage in addition to all our resistances. Stacking all these together, Elizabeth's magic skills are fairly unthreatening, though her physical skills can still be problematic. You could alternatively use an Ultimate weapon to get in some chip damage on the Light and Dark Personae, but I'd rather have the extra damage reduction. If you do go that route, go for the Quintessence Bow since you cannot stumble if you miss with that.
-Our main goal is to uncork a Mind Charged Nifelheim on her Fire Persona, and then heal as needed with Orpheus Telos while getting in some chip with Ragnarok. If we're able to chain Nifelheim into Ragnarok, that's about 2k Damage per cycle, letting us clear the 80 turn limit pretty comfortably although somewhat close. Obviously, every High Counter proc we do get makes things that much more secure, but there are some luck based elements to contend with. Crits add a huge degree of uncertainty to the battle, with her Elec Persona Thor being the huge headache in that regard. If Thor shocks us on his first action, that sets us up for a guaranteed crit, and almost certainly a lost Plume of Dusk. I had pretty bad luck with the attempts I threw at this, which is why if I were to do it again I'd get High Counter onto OT instead, since that can proc even if we're shocked or Downed, and I can easily get Helel with the skills I want. This could have gone better, but I think I did well enough. The only other point to address is that you want about 20 Homunculi, which you get a bunch of those on the way to the top of Adamah anyway so that shouldn't be a big deal. Worst case scenario, you'd want 40 since that is the maximum number of times Elizabeth could theoretically proc instant death on you, but with max Luck and OT to resist Light and Dark, the odds of that are thankfully quite low and Elizabeth often mixes in physical attacks into those phases anyway.
-The worst part about this fight in FES is the set up for it: FES is a painfully slow game and you can only do this on New Game + which means for a good chunk of the game Monad is your only avenue for the resources you need and that's very undesirable. Due to inefficiency on my part, this took close to the length of a normal playthrough to set up for, about 60-70 hours I'd say. Getting the skills you need onto your Personae is also annoying since you have no choice but to rely on the standard inheritance system. It literally takes hours of going in and out of the fusion result screen to get the skills you want, so be prepared for that.
-This was probably the roughest version of the fight for me, though it's hard to say if it's the most difficult version of it. With the exact same skillsets, I'd say Portable is probably the tougher version of the fight due to crits being even worse there, but thanks to skill cards it is much easier to get perfect set ups for this fight, with the Tier 4 Elemental spells being the only things you can't just card onto a Persona. Speaking of!
In Portable
-Alilat is out and Helel is in for the reasons I previously covered, though I decided to drop Mind Charge on him and stick with that on Orpheus Telos. I instead worked in Vorpal Blade and Arms Master for the occasional chip potential, and all Regenerate abilities like Ananta. Everyone has Sharp Student to minimize crits from Theo, which will absolutely end your battle in this version due to the insane multiplier enemy crits get in Maniac mode. Nobody directly has High Counter anymore, but we still have it in play for reasons I'll detail below. I have Enduring Soul on Messiah and Orpheus Telos, meaning most parts of the battle we have a second chance on deck that I ultimately didn't need. There is no Plume of the Dusk unless you're on the Beginner difficulties, so that's a second chance we don't have here.
-In addition to OT now having Regenerate 3, he gets an amusing fringe skill: Null Shock. Normally a passive that is too situational to ever care about, it is vital for consistency in the Portable version of this battle. If Theo shocks you on his first action with his Elec Persona, you lose guaranteed. The Critical damage is way too high, and even if you have Enduring Soul to survive his initial follow up, the Dizzy status going into the next turn will also assure that you cannot live unless you get insanely lucky with High Counter. Null Shock allows me to avoid that nonsense entirely, making it an insanely good thing to have for this fight. This is another reason why you shouldn't put all your skills onto OT and just stick to him, you wouldn't be able to fit in niche stuff like this!
-Our equipment is actually quite different here because I went with an alternate strategy. We have a Fused Weapon made from a Chariot Persona, specifically a Level 70 Komoukuten. Remember that Thor always creates Mjolnir, so we need to level up the next thing down from him in order to get something that will result in the Weapon having High Counter. Technically we only need a level 60 Chariot to get that, but I took him to 70 to get the highest attack power possible on the weapon in case it became relevant (it didn't). Annoyingly, the Armor of Light in Portable can only ever be the Resist Magic variant, so an OT weapon does us no good here as it doesn't stack with the Armor of Light. I got the Shoes of Light since our footwear matters here and this is the best evasion possible for the FemC. It also gets us Evade Phys (High), giving us a flat 15% bonus to our chance to dodge physical attacks, very nice. Finally, our Accessory is the Barbaric Bracers, which has the Ali Dance ability. This halves the accuracy of ANY incoming attack, making a dodge tank build very viable. Since we can use Best Friends via item at any time now, and Sukukaja has been buffed to give a 1.3X multiplier to your evasion in Portable instead of the 1.1X it does in FES, it only gets even better. This is a remarkably consistent strategy, and dare I say the flatly better one for Portable. Case in point, both my practice attempt of this battle and the recorded version here were first try successes!
-The general flow of the battle is basically the same as FES, though with much more variance to when I need to heal since this is still a strategy rooted in chance. Still, the basics are the same, with the main difference being needing fusion spell items to match the number of cycles you have to work with for this battle, assuming you are limited to 10 cycles like in FES. So we want 10 Infinities, at least one Armageddon and 20 Best Friends. Infinity and Armageddon can be gotten from the Vision Quest, with 10 Best Friends also being obtainable there and the rest easily being tradeable for. 20 Homunculi should do fine, once again.
-One other niche thing I could have worked in that hasn't been relevant for awhile: Cadenza! I generally want to heal around the 400 HP marker, which the combo of Cadenza's 50% healing and Regenerate 3 means I'll essentially be fully healed from the two in tandem. Cadenza's Evasion buff is also an additional 1.3X multiplier that stacks with Sukukaja, just about giving us guaranteed dodges if both are in play. Not exactly critical, but it would be a cool thing to implement if I were to do the fight again.
-Having the High Counter weapon also helped this fight go faster since I was able to get procs for it on every single turn potentially, a luxury I didn't have in FES. Pour one out for that, because you can't get that kind of help in Reload!
In Reload
-The most prominent thing to note here is that we no longer get 999 HP and SP at level 99 like we did in FES and Portable, but Elizabeth actually deals reasonable damage now so that's not that big of a deal. You could probably still win this fight without any resistances, though obviously that's not recommended. Anyways, Messiah and OT are pretty much the same as they were in the older games, so let's just address to new additions here. Atropos can hit into the Elec and Wind Personae, and then resists the Light/Dark who are going to switch in. Yurlungur is just here to cast Debilitate and occasionally tank for me. Thanatos is mostly here to just use Scarlet Havoc, but I do also have him set up with Eigaon for reasons I'll go over in a bit.
-For Equipment, Lucifer's Blade gives us +7 stats and the Magic Boost ability, giving us an extra 1.25 multiplier to our elemental damage, the Armor of Light gives us Resist Magic like it does in Portable, the Shoes of Light give us Ali Dance like the Barbaric Bracers, and we have the Amritie Necklace to completely shut down ailments. One potentially worthwhile switch is to take the Shoes of Bane over the Shoes of Light. You're way less likely to dodge anything with those due to lower evade and no Ali Dance, but it allows you to stuff insta death from Die For Me! which very annoyingly bypasses Homunculus protection. It's up to you how you want to approach that, I opted to just use Eigaon to skip Alice when I could in Phase 1, and then either got her out of rotation or guarded into her in Phase 3.
-Phase 1 is almost identical to the old fight though generally much easier because again, Elizabeth doesn't hit nearly as hard here. Use your Theurgy wisely, as we do need it to kill Elizabeth like in FES and Portable, though you can use it pretty freely in Phase 1. I forgot to get the fortune that boosts the recharge rate for it, so don't make that mistake like I did.
-The main way I use the Persona skipping mechanic is by hitting into Metatron with Eigaon in order to skip Alice. Die For Me! is completely unfair in how it works and makes your Homunculi useless, so we just want to avoid her as much as possible. This was an on the fly revision I made when I realized the fight worked this way, had I known that would have been an issue I'd have gotten a dedicated Eigaon user made so we were dealing more than just chip damage with it, since I was using the spell anyway. You do need some kind of counter to Alice/Die For Me! since you will absolutely need at least Endure still ready to go for the final phase of the battle.
-If you time it right, you can bypass phase 2 and the damage cap Megidolaon by hitting Nebiros with a primed Scarlet Havoc. You need to be counting your damage quite well and have your buffs and debuffs in play to make this work, but it's not a bad idea to shoot for it since it leaves Enduring Soul as a true mulligan for you.
-Phase 3 is a lot slower and again mostly just based around me accounting for Alice. Guarding when she's the first Persona in line in case Die For Me! is thrown out (remember that you are guaranteed to dodge insta kills while guarding!) and skipping her by hitting Elizabeth's weakness when she's the second. Keeping track of your damage here is crucial, because you need to be on something with a still active enduring passive when Elizabeth passes that 10K damage threshold again.
-Thankfully the new phase 4 lets you know when it's time to use Armageddon. Have it ready to go, Endure the damage capped Megiodlaon Elizabeth throws out and it's GG. Just remember that if you don't have Armageddon ready to go at this point, the fight is now unwinnable as Elizabeth just endlessly uses Diarahan and capped Megidolaon until you're dead.
BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!
Portable adds a battle with Margaret, and it's a retooled version of her fight from Persona 4. Unlike Elizabeth, you can bring a full party here and the only rules you need to abide are No Omnipotent Orb and Armageddon must kill if you use it. Anything else is fair game as far as am I aware except maybe Infinity, haven't tried that. The fight also technically has no turn limit, though there is an intended end point.
The Margaret Battle
-Like I said, any resistances are fair game so roll into this fight with the best stuff possible and ideally with your team geared up with the best stuff they can have. If I were to redo this, I would give Ken the Divine Pillar so he'd be around more reliably and probably go with Tome of the Void on Aigis instead. I'd also of course get ultimate equipment for everyone, but I knew it wasn't necessary so I just rolled in unprepared. I reaped what I sowed there because this fight took multiple tries this playthrough, when on my casual playthrough I actually got it on the first try. I had a slightly better set up for this battle specifically I guess.
-Margaret has 30K HP to Theo's 20K, though she never directly tries to heal herself and you don't actually need Armageddon to win this fight. Still, there's no reason not to use it once she's entered her "hurt" state.
-Margaret has a much more simplistic pattern compared to Theo, using 10 turn cycles where she gets two actions with a specific theme in mind. Her first cycle is Physical, with Akasha Arts, God's Hand, Primal Force, Myriad Arrows, Brave Blade and Vorpal Blade at her disposal. If she gets a crit, she'll up Power Charge for her next attack. She is only vulnerable to physical skills during this cycle, but she'll drain the element she just used. You actually want High Counter off your skill list for this battle, as the Counter to proc the Drain effect for her. Ideally you hit her with Vorpal Blade while in the Great condition, it's not a bad idea to just Power Charge when she drains Slash. Now I've read that you need to deal at least 7,000 damage before this phase is over, but I've never failed to do so on an attempt that made it out of here, so I'm not sure how true that is.
-Cycle 2 is much easier to deal with. Margaret will use party wide ailment skills in this phase, and once something sticks, she will use a mixture of physical skills and elemental skills to bombard your party. The elemental skills are fairly weak, and can actually be magic mirrored back if you so desire since none of her Personae in this phase have any immunities and Margaret does not prohibit the use of Reflection spells/Mirrors. Obviously stuff like Charm is undesirable to have around, so be sure to have your lead either immune to ailments or not running any healing skills. One ailment that can be HEAVILY abused is Rage, which can seal Margaret's doom early if you get lucky with it. I didn't have a good set up for taking advantage of this, so we didn't get to see anything other than a brief snippet of how that strat works. This is much more manageable that the previous cycle, and you should be able to get in good damage with your Elemental specialists.
-Cycle 3 will have Margaret go to pure Elemental casting, with her only vulnerability being the opposing element of the last spell she casted. She's much more defensively robust in this phase than she was in the previous, but having your FemC loaded out with specialists for each element still makes this a good phase to rack up damage in. If all is going well, you should be able to use Armageddon soon, just stay on top of your healing and buffs and go for the most damage you can in any turn.
-Cycle 4 will see Margaret using Power Charge, Mind Charge, Tetrakarn, Makarakarn and attacks to take advantage of of said Charges. She's no longer immune to anything, so you can easily stuff the physical attacks with Attack Mirrors/Tetrakarn, and the Megidolaons she uses are hardly a concern as everyone has 999 HP to work with in this game. If you weren't able to finish her off in the previous phase, you should be able to do so now.
-Should you fail to kill Margaret in Phase 4, she will bust out her own damage cap Megidolaons for one turn, before looping back to Cycle 1 and essentially restarting the fight. I'm not sure if you can just us Infinity to survive this, because honestly I've just never had a fight go bad enough that I survived to this point but couldn't Armageddon her here. Regardless, you can also survive with a combo of Endure and Enduring Soul, though getting your team back on their feet can prove to be problematic.
-Honestly, the only Phase that makes this fight hard is the first cycle, purely because of the RNG involved with Critical hits. If I had a better set up, I could get out of here reasonably consistently, but I just didn't feel like doing anymore grinding so instead I got to play critical roulette. Every other cycle is remarkably conventional in the tactics you can use, and with adequate preparation Margaret is a WAY easier fight than Theo. I wasn't adequately prepared for this one though, so I had a bit of a rougher time. Once I managed to get out of Cycle 1 in a decent state though and took her Ailment phase a bit more seriously, I just blasted her down with my best skills and cruised to an Armageddon win.
And that's a wrap for the Journey! I have a couple more supplemental videos to upload, one already rendered and the other I just need to edit together, and then we're good for The Answer! I hope you're looking forward to it.
Happy New Year! One final boss compilation for the Journey has been served up, and we'll have one more coming up this weekend for the FES and Portable epilogues. After that, it'll be a brief break before we continue with The Answer. I'll have a little side project to pad out my video schedule in the meantime! Like Harabah, there's not too much to say about the Guardian shadows at this stage of the game, but there is one burning question.
Which game has the hardest version of Nyx? My official ranking is as follows!
Reload<FES<Portable
As per usual, Reload's level curve and better equipment options means that the final boss is just not as threatening as previous iterations of the battle were. Nyx does have some interesting new options that can be dangerous, but as long as you have Enduring Soul on the MC, that shields against any major potential disasters adequately enough. Debilitate existing and Nyx ticking through debuffs on a turn-based basis rather than an per-action basis also goes a long way to make this fight more manageable. With Tomes of the Void, FES doesn't have any major headaches and mostly finds its difficulty coming from quirks with the dumb AI. For the first time ever, I had the bad luck of Ken getting tagged with Mudo, throwing my turn order out of whack and Moonless Gown being a serious headache. We also ran into the amusing issue that the AI saw Nyx would die from one more attack, and would charge into Moonless Gown even if they were on an AI setting that would otherwise stop them from doing so. The fight was otherwise perfectly in hand. Why is Portable the hardest fight? After all, it didn't look that bad in this LP. One simple reason: RNG. I actually got insanely lucky with the Portable fight and Nyx never got a Critical hit once. Because of the stupidly high damage multiplier for enemy crits in Maniac mode, Nyx getting a critical Almighty Attack on your party essentially guarantees the crit'd party will die unless they have Enduring Soul. If Nyx chains back-to-back crits on vulnerable party members, you pretty much just lose due to no fault of your own. In FES, this isn't an issue because you can only get One More off of AOE attacks if they crit or hit the weakness of everything they target, but Portable worked it to be more like Persona 4 without adequately adjusting the game around it to not make that completely unfair. I had a very lucky run of the Portable battle, making it look much easier than it actually is and making my preparations seem like overkill.
And that's a wrap for the Journey's gameplay, just one more side video for the story!
The final Supplemental video for The Journey is out! Okay, I may publicly list that clear of Elizabeth I got with no Orpheus Telos as a Supplemental 36, but otherwise this is the last of the supplemental videos we'll be seeing regarding the Journey FES, and the last supplemental that will contain Portable at all. This is just a compilation of the Social Link epilogues in FES plus the non-unique epilogues featured in Portable. As an added bonus, I threw in the full ending cutscenes for each version of the game so that we have the full unedited endings for each version of the game available within the LP. This means Reload gets a cameo here, which it's been more than a minute since Reload has featured in a non-boss compilation supplemental! That's all the B-roll footage I had in reserve, so now we just kick back until it's time for The Answer!
It's been a minute! After wrapping up the Journey, I wanted to take a break from Persona 3 to focus my efforts on other things. Ended up taking a longer break than I expected, but I'm ready to dive back into this LP and finally start the Answer! We have one more send off for the Journey though, finishing off the frills free Vanilla version of Persona 3. I'll be doing the final stream tomorrow, Noon Central US time. I actually played ahead so I could do some clowny things to cap off the stream, so I already know there's some interesting details to go over in the game's 11th hour compared to FES and Portable.
It's time to end the Journey just one last time. This looks to be entertainingly messy as I am very much lacking in the tools I was using in other versions of the game.
Interesting Things I Learned This Stream
-Preparing for the bosses of Adamah is much trickier in this version, as you are severely limited in options compared to FES if you're going for max social links. The only good ultimates we had by this month are Surt and Siegfried, and Siegfried is much weaker in this version. I had to do the best I can to combat the threats that the bosses of Adamah posed here, and thankfully I was able to manage.
-Monad unlocks simply by reaching the top floor of Adamah in this version (prior to 1/31 that is), making getting to this post game area much easier. No need to subjugate the Reaper here, you can just break the intended progression of the game by completing it normally.
-Skadi is a bit more reasonable in this version, being a Level 75 Persona instead of Level 80. This means it's more likely to have an end game Ice specialist in Vanilla than FES. I'm not really sure why they felt in necessary to nerf this Persona and make them available so much later.
-Helel is known as Lucifer in this version, and is both weaker and stronger. Their physical resistances are now Nulls instead of Resists, which is arguably worse since they are not a viable check for Elizabeth in this version. Lucifer also naturally gains Victory Cry via level up, making Armageddon that much easier to abuse. Granted, in FES and Portable, you can easily get Victory Cry onto Satan via fusion involving Beelezebu or Shiva, but hey, less work involved in this version.
-There is no reward for maxing all social links in this version. I already knew this, but it's funny to see in action.
-Nyx is way easier in this version, considering you are able to grind in Monad with no special restrictions like beating the Reaper and also just the damage thrown your way being much lower on the whole.
-There are no epilogues for the social links after beating Nyx. I was absolutely floored by this, I did not realize the epilogue scenes for everybody in the final days of the game was an FES addition. I kind of get why this is the case, but it was still shocking to see in action.