LP Beach

Supplemental: The Antique Store, or how unchecked materialism is good, actually

As of 6/9 in Persona 3 FES and Portable, we have gained access to the Antique Store! We gain access to it later in Reload, and I probably won't go in too detail on it since it is considerably less interesting there. FES and Portable, on the other hand, have plenty of notable things to remark on. Going forward, this will probably be the store service we use the most. Kurosawa only sporadically has things I care about, Be Blue V will have the last of its wares in the very near future, and Aohige Pharmacy doesn't get anywhere near the repertoire of good items it does in Reload, so the Antique Store is where the bulk of our business will be directed. Now on its most basic level, the Antique Store is analogous to Rag's Jeweler from the mainline MegaTen franchise. In fact, this was all it was in Vanilla. In FES, a brand new mechanic was added in Weapon Fusion (Brand new for Persona 3 anyway, weapon fusion as a series mechanics has been a thing since SMT 2), which was retained for Portable with some minor tweaks and additions while still mostly working the same. Let's go over the trading post aspect first before delving into the more complicated weapon fusion mechanics.

Trading Gems

If you're playing FES or Portable for yourself, you'll have noticed that upon entering Arqa enemies begin to drop gemstones every now and again. We're now at the point where we can begin to make use of those, as the Antique Store does not accept money. All transactions are conducted via trading gems, with every item having a specific gem cost to obtain. Now we're not able to collect every variety of gem at this stage of the game, so it'll be a bit before we can trade for all of these things. Definitely note down enemies that drop gems that trade for particularly valuable items, in the event you want to do some farming. Gem trading has two dedicated menus.

For Cards

In Vanilla and FES, this menu was dedicated to the stat boosting Minor Arcana cards, and is the one stop shop for powering up your Personae independent of levels in these versions of the game. In Vanilla where the arcade didn't actually do anything, this was your only option for bulking up your Personae. There are 4 types of cards with 4 different levels of potency. The types are Sword, Cup, Wand and Coin(Like the shuffle time cards!), with the potency levels being Page, Knight, Queen and King. Sword boosts ST, Cup boosts EN, Wand boosts MA and Coin boosts AG. The bonuses are +1 for Page, +2 for Knight, +3 for Queen and +4 for King. Additionally, Page and Knight cards give +1 LU, while Queen and King cards give +2 LU. There is not a dedicated card type for boosting LU specifically. The gems required for these cards are actually rather varied in Vanilla, with more standardized costs being introduced in FES and retained in Portable. To obtain these cards in Vanilla, you needed:

Sword: 1 Turquoise at any potency level plus an additional gem that differs from level to level. Page requires 1 Aquamarine, Knight requires 1 Onyx, Queen requires 1 Emerald and King requires 1 Garnet.
Cup: 1 Onyx at any potency level, and then Page requires 1 Emerald, Knight requires 1 Garnet, Queen requires 1 Opal and King requires 1 Topaz.
Wand: 1 Aquamarine at any potency level, and then Page requires 1 Onyx, Knight requires 1 Emerald, Queen requires 1 Garnet and King requires 1 Opal.
Coin: 1 Amethyst at any potency level, and then Page requires 1 Turquoise, Knight requires 1 Aquamarine, Queen requires 1 Onyx and King requires 1 Emerald.

Pretty complicated and difficult to farm for as you can imagine. Atlus must have thought the same thing, as the costs were heavily simplified in FES and Portable. In these versions of the game, Onyx has become the standard gem to trade for stat cards, with Page requiring 1 Onyx, Knight requiring 2X, Queen 3X and King 4X. Additionally, Knight and King require an additional gem depending on the card arcana, with Knight requiring 1 of the additional gem while King requires 2. These additional gems are as follows:

Sword: Amethyst
Cup: Turquoise
Wand: Garnet
Coin: Aquamarine

If you plan to take on the big bonus boss of the game, you will want plenty of stat cards to max out the stats of your best Personae. Keep in mind the types of Shadows that drop the gems that allow you to get the cards you need, particularly those that provide gems for Cup and Wand cards. Now this is the end of what you can get here in FES, but Portable expanded the menu further with Skill cards as well! Some valuable cards can be traded for at the Antique Shop, and then you can turn around and dupe them at the Inari Shrine to have as many as you could ever want for no cash investment. The Skill cards you can trade for in Portable are:

Regenerate 1, 2, and 3: 1, 5X and 7X Aquamarine, respectively
Invigorate 1, 2, and 3: Same as Regenerate but with Amethyst
Growth 1, 2, and 3: Same as Regenerate but with Opal
Null Poison: 1 Turquoise
Null Charm: 1 Turquoise
Fire Boost: 1 Turquoise and 1 Garnet
Ice Boost: 1 Turquoise and 1 Garnet
Elec Boost: 1 Turquoise and 1 Topaz
Wind Boost: 1 Turquoise and 1 Emerald
Auto Tarukaja and Auto Rakukaja: 4X Turquoise
Resist Slash, Strike, Pierce: 1 Sapphire and 1 Diamond
Resist Fire: 2X Sapphire and 1 Ruby
Resist Ice: 2X Sapphire and 1 Pearl
Resist Elec: 2X Sapphire and 1 Ruby
Resist Wind: 2X Sapphire and 1 Pearl
Arms Master: 10X Pearl
Speall Master: 10X Diamond
Megidolaon: 10X Ruby

Some very powerful skills to be had here! The most notable ones for my money are Growth 3, the physical resists, Arms Master and Spell Master. The elemental resist cards are occasionally helpful for patching out weaknesses, while the boost are mostly just there for if you have the spare gems and don't feel like spending money on the Personae that produce them as cards. Invigorate sounds like it might be good, but it actually scales really terribly in this game so I wouldn't recommend investing in it. Plus it's just a pain in the ass to remember to set the Personae that have it after every fight unless you card Invigorate 3 onto everything you have. Definitely pick up a Growth 3 as soon as possible and have the Inari shrine dupe the hell out of it, as it makes leveling up Personae much easier and faster. (For those who don't know, Growth 3 is a passive that gives Personae full experience at the end of battle even if they were not your equipped Persona at its conclusion) With all that laid out, lets move onto,

For Items

Now it'll be a bit before we can get a good supply of cards of any type from the Antique Store, but something we can do a bit more readily is trade for the copious valuable items that are available. The Antique Store is the main place for us to reliably obtain the most powerful healing items available in the game plus numerous other useful combat items such as reflecting mirrors and sutras. The full selection of items are as follows,

*Bead: 1 Opal and 1 Garnet
Bead Chain: 2X Opal
*Snuff Soul: 2X Emerald
Chewing Soul: 3X Emerald
Precious Egg: 1 Ruby and 1 Pearl, 2X Ruby and 1 Pearl in FES/Portable (This is the only non-card item that had its cost changed across versions)
Balm of Life: 1 Pearl and 1 Garnet
*Purifying Rice: 2X Aquamarine
*Cursed Paper: 2X Turquoise
Homunculus: 1 Diamond and 1 Sapphire
Magic Mirror: 1 Sapphire and 1 Topaz
Attack Mirror: 1 Diamond and 1 Opal
Dekaja Gem: 1 Topaz and 1 Opal
Dekunda Gem: 1 Topaz and 1 Emerald
*Fierce Sutra: 1 Amethyst and 1 Aquamarine
*Agility Sutra: 1 Aquamarine and 1 Turquoise
*Protection Sutra: 1 Turquoise and 1 Amethyst
Megido Gem: 2X Garnet
Traesto Gem: 2X Topaz
**Trafuri Gem: 2X Amethyst
Teddy Bear: 2X Amethyst
Japanese Doll: 2X Onyx
Kaleidoscope: 2X Aquamarine
Goggle-eyed Doll: 2X Turquoise
*Means the item was added in FES
**For some reason, the Trafuri Gem is not immediately available in FES, but it does become available around July or August.

A bevvy of useful and not so useful items to be certain! For the former category, stuff like the date gifts like the dolls and Kaleidoscope are not really useful at all outside of very rare cases in Vanilla. By the time you actually get the gems for them with any regularity, items like Snuff Souls and Beads are also generally not that useful to grab. On the better side of things, Bead Chains, Balms of Life, the mirrors and the sutras (specifically Fierce and Protection) are fantastically useful and this is the only place you can reliably get them. Sutras are doubly good in Portable as your party members can now use them, giving everyone the capability to support the party! Another thing you may want to stock up on is Homunculi, as nothing will ruin your day faster than your Protagonist getting tagged by an insta-kill. The more Homunculi you have, the less of a problem that will be. Keep in mind the necessary gems for the aforementioned items and keep notes on what drops them when you see them. A healthy supply of these will help you go a long way. With that done, onto the bigger draw of the Antique Store.

Weapon Fusion

From the moment we unlock the Antique Store and receive our first Nihil Sword from the proprietor, Rare Forms will now begin to drop Nihil weaponry that we can then fuse with Personae from our stock to create unique weapons with effects they otherwise cannot get randomly. Nihil weapons come in various forms, with all types of weapons our party both current and future can use. Within FES, all but two of these weapon types can be used by the Protagonist, giving him a very large selection of powerful unique weapons once we get further in the game. Once a Nihil weapon has been fused, it can be fused once more to create a new weapon if you so desire. This means you never have to worry about getting multiple copies of a single Nihil weapon type and can just upgrade your already fused weapons when they begin to fall behind in power. All well and good, but why should you bother with Weapon Fusion if you can just buy or find weapons? Because fused weapons trump those options at every stage of the game, and by a huge margin once we're far enough along!

So how does this work exactly? Naturally we'll need to actually have a Persona to fuse with a weapon in order to do this. It also cannot be a Persona you currently have equipped, to make sure you don't leave yourself Personaless. Once those conditions have been fulfilled, we first need to determine the attack power and accuracy of the weapon. This is derived from your Persona's current level, so you can actually level up Personae to improve the strength and abilities of the weapons they fuse into. The way this works is that every experience level will fall into a "range", and within these ranges the resultant fused weapons will have an Attack and Accuracy stat derived from the relative value of the Persona's stats. Don't take this to mean high stats influence weapon power, rather stats are compared against each other to determine a weapon's Type, which can be one of three distinct stat spreads. (Shout outs to Misfit119 for their guide that has this handy dandy chart!)



Type A happens when the Persona's highest stat is either ST or EN, and this type has balanced attack power and accuracy. Type B is when MA or AG is the highest stat, and trades a small amount of accuracy for a decent amount of attack. Type C is when LU is the highest stat, and focuses on accuracy over power. The only exception to this is a Weapon variety we won't see for a little bit. Gun type weapons invert Type A and B for some reason.

So a handful of things to remark on here. As you can see, even from the jump fused weapons trump anything Kurosawa is selling in FES. His best stuff has around 50 attack power and even fusing off a piss gremlin like Pixie will get us something stronger than that. Kurosawa is a bit more competitive in Portable as his stock updates more regularly and he's selling some ~80 power weapons at the time of this writing, but we can still pretty easily create Personae that will trump his inventory on a fused weapon. As the game goes on, Fused Weapons rocket past all other available options. The level ranges for hitting the next tier of power can be as little as 4 levels, and as we develop our social links we can easily have situations where a Persona starts in one range and then upgrades to the next upon fusion, giving us access to a much stronger weapon for the stage of the game we are in. Having your team kitted out with fused weapons wildly accelerates your All Out Attack damage, and your physical fighters all too often can deal better damage with their fused weapons than their skills. And keep in mind that the best weapons we can find or buy top out around 290-310 Attack power by the end game, so there's never going to be a point where we luck into something better than Fused Weapons. That alone makes Fused Weapons a great investment, but there's something else going for them. Fused Weapons will have special abilities otherwise not seen on weapons you can find or buy, often replicating the effects of powerful accessories. These abilities are dependent on the Arcana of the Persona used in the weapon fusion. These abilities are as follows,

Magician: Replicates the Ice Evasion line of skills, with the effectiveness of the ability improving with the level of the Magician used. The ranges for this are,

Level 1-29: Low Evasion Chance

Level 30-59: Medium Evasion Chance

Level 60+: High Evasion Chance

Note that for reasons we'll get into later, you're not liable to ever actually see the Level 60+ variant of this effect without doing some impractical prep work. Regardless, this is something Akihiko obviously likes and is a good investment for him. This ability is similar for the Priestess, Emperor and Justice Arcana, with them instead covering Fire, Elec and Wind respectively with the same level scaling for the ability's effectiveness. Obviously good pick ups for the characters that have the relevant weaknesses.

Empress: At all levels, Empress Personae convey low resistance to Wind damage. This overwrites a weakness, making it a great way to cover a character's weakness while dedicating their accessory slot to boosting their damage. The Tower, Star and Sun Arcana have the same effect with the same level scaling for the Elec, Ice and Fire elements respectively.

Hierophant: Grants Auto-Sukukaja. Not bad for the Protagonist if you'd prefer they rock a Bracer instead of a Speed Enhancer, but of minimal use for anyone else. Strength and Temperance work similarly, conveying the Auto-Tarukaja and Auto-Rakukaja abilities instead. Strength is probably the most useful as everyone would enjoy stacking Tarukaja and another damage boosting passive from the battle's offset. That being said, all of these abilities get invalidated by later Persona passives, so late game they're essentially useless options.

Lovers: At all levels, Lovers weapons give you a flat resistance to the Charm ailment, though not immunity. Situationally useful, but I'd rather just farm the accessory that grants Charm immunity since that isn't actually that tall an ask. Hermit, Death and Devil do the same thing for the Poison, Rage and Fear ailments respectively. Hermit and Death are never helpful, while Devil can be useful for exactly one fight I can think of offhand. I'll leave it up to you if you think that's worth keeping it in mind for.

Chariot: Replicates the Counter line of skills, scaling depending on the level of the Persona used.

Level 1-29: Replicates Counter, a roughly 30% chance to repel physical attacks for low damage. (Note that Persona 3 Reload nerfed these abilities a ton, not that it's relevant to the rest of this post)

Level 30-59: Replicates Counterstrike, roughly a 40% chance to repel physical attacks for slightly more damage than they would have dealt to you.

Level 60+: Replicates High Counter, a 50% chance to repel physical attacks for about double the damage they would have dealt.

Like the most of the evasion abilities, you're not liable to see the 60+ variant without taking some special preparations. Note that these abilities do not stack with characters that learn them naturally, when two counter skills exist on a skill set the game either uses the stronger of the two or just cancels one out if it's the same ability. That all being said, this actually isn't a bad choice for your low hp, defensively frail characters like Yukari. It's essentially an extra dodge chance against any physical attacks hurled your way, and that can be useful in many situations though not something to bank on.

Fortune: Gives a bonus to your Max SP depending on the level of the Persona used. The scaling is as follows,

Level 1-39: +10 Max SP

Level 40-69: +20 Max SP

Level 70+: +30 Max SP

Absolutely terrible, what the hell is this scaling!?! Even at the game's offset, +10 SP will let you cast 2-3 more single target spells. This ability does not take at all to the end game, where +30 Max SP will only buy you one more spell, and you'll have likely come up with an SP engine anyway. Never create a Fortune weapon, this ability blows.

Hanged Man: Gives a bonus to your Max HP. The scaling for this is as follows,

Level 1-19: +20 Max HP

Level 20-39: +30 Max HP

Level 40-69: +40 Max HP

Level 70+: +50 Max HP

Much better, from the scaling to the effect! More HP is one of the simpler ways of improving your character's survivability, so pretty much everyone benefits from having Hanged Man weapons. That being said, for boss fights specifically, there is something that can trump Hanged Man weapons when it comes to survivability. In general though, Hanged Man weapons afford great power AND extra defense to those that use them, so nobody suffers from having them. If you're not interested in Dodges or more niche abilities like Counter, Hanged Man weapons are the ones to create for everyone in your party.

Moon: Provides a critical rate boost to your normal attacks, scaling with the level of the Persona used. The scaling is as follows,

Level 1-39: Small crit rate boost

Level 40-69: Medium crit rate boost

Level 70+: High crit rate boost

Now boosting the critical hit rate of your normal attacks sounds pretty unappealing, but as mentioned previously weapon attacks don't actually suck in Persona 3, and can often trump your skill damage precisely because of fused weapons. Boosting the chance of landing crits is great for characters like Junpei, who never get access to the weapon boosting passive relevant to them. I believe this also improves the chance you land a double hit strike (when you get the longer animation that isn't a crit), so it can be a remarkably big boost to your outgoing damage. The main caveat to this ability is that it's tied to the Moon arcana. It is going to be forever and a half before we pursue that Arcana in FES, so it's kind of tough to get the most out of this one. Portable actually benefits a bit here, because not only will we be addressing the Moon social link sooner, we'll be maxing it in short order as well. Still, if you see a Moon persona that falls into a good level range, don't hesitate to fuse it for your physical bruisers.

Judgement: Grants the ability to inflict all ailments in the game to your weapon (Excepting for Down, Freeze and Shock). The scaling for this is as follows,

Level 30-59: Medium Chance

Level 60+: High Chance

Note that the lowest leveled Judgement Persona is level 59, so it's just barely possible to even get the weakest version of this effect. Anyways this is a whatever effect. I'm not a huge fan of ailments in this game since they mostly only work on regular enemies, with the exception of things like Freeze and Shock which do work on most bosses. Since this can't inflict those and there are abilities that inflict them 100% of the time, I don't consider this to be worth much. It can be fun to screw around with, but I wouldn't recommend it as a serious ability to use.

Aeon: Boosts all stats of the equipper (Except HP and SP). The new Arcana to FES gets the simplest but arguably most useful effect. Because the lowest level Aeon is already level 63, like Judgement there's not much to the scaling on this.

Level 60-79: +4 to all stats

Level 80+: +5 to all stats

Simple and effective, like I said. Once you're able to fuse an Aeon, there's essentially no reason not to just use it to create Aeon weapons for your entire party. +4 to everything is a decent bit of power that everyone appreciates, and most weapons that boost stats don't even afford this kind of boost to a single stat. That said, it's not the end all be all.

Now you may have noticed I skipped over the Fool Arcana. Fool works a bit differently. Regardless of level of the Persona used, Fool weapons will always have 1 attack power and 99 accuracy. Pretty useless against anything except Rare forms, but the caveat is that each Fool Persona has a unique ability it conveys to a fused weapon. As follows,

Orpheus: Small chance to inflict all ailments on attack. Same as Judgement but weaker. Not a fan, but it may come in handy against strong single enemies early on.

Slime: SP +20. Fortune can't catch a break huh? This is the same effect you get from a level 40 Fortune. Still sucks obviously, but if you're really hard up for casting 5 more Zio spells with the drawback of tanking your All Out Attack damage, here you go.

Legion: Grants +100 Max HP. Christ, this one is on steroids. This is the ability I mentioned that invalidates Hanged Man weapons for most boss fights. +100 HP is a huge durability boost, and I highly recommend having this on hand for your protagonist and squishier characters like Yukari. For fights where you will be using All Out Attacks, it's a bit of a bad idea because it drops your damage so much, but when survivability is all you care about, this fused weapon is aces. It eventually falls off, but it'll be a long while before that happens.

Black Frost: +10 MA. This one is okay, it's decent for characters who just hurl spells like Yukari and Mitsuru. +10 Magic is about 25-50 more damage depending on the defenses of what you're dealing with, so it can help close out fights faster on occasion. We can't get this until mid September though, so we'll see if I can remember to cook up some weapons with it.

Ose: +10 ST. Okay they're just taking the piss on this one. It makes your skills stronger, but since Fused Weapons tend to trump single target skills, I really could not recommend going for this one. I guess it's okay for boosting up AOE skills, but I'm not a huge fan of AOE physicals in this game save for one.

Decarabia: +10 EN. This one is okay, that's a pretty solid defense boost. The HP from Legion is probably better for most characters, but there are some high HP characters who might benefit from the durability boost this provides instead. Again though, you need to really consider if it's worth tanking your All Out Attack damage.

Loki: Medium chance to inflict all ailments. See Judgement.

Susano-o: +3 to all stats except HP and SP. What the hell is this!?! The weakest Aeon in the game gives you literally the exact same effect but better, and gives you a strong weapon on top of it. Susano-o is 13 levels higher than the weakest Aeon for a worse effect and weapon. Absolute trash, never get this.

Orpheus Telos: Halve incoming Magic damage. Thankfully the real ultimate Fool gives a way better ability. An Orpheus Telos weapon halves the damage of most attacks in the game, affording you a huge durability boost. This one is good to pick up for something later in the game.

But wait, there is more! Because there's one more aspect of weapon fusion I have yet to go over.

Special Fusions

There are a number of Personae that, when fused into a weapon, will ignore the normal rules of Weapon Fusion and instead create a Unique Weapon. These weapons are extremely powerful and have useful abilities tied to them, often being way ahead of anything else you can get at the stage of the game they become available. Like, even more so for fused weapon standards. Note that these Unique Weapons will always be a specific weapon variety, even if the base weapon used is something different. For instance, Cu Chulainn will always produce the Spear Gae Bolg, even if you fuse him onto a bow. These Unique Weapons also cannot be re-fused once created, so be mindful that they represent a lost weapon to fuse once created. This is a more than acceptable cost, as you'll see when I list them out.

1-Handed Swords*

Deus Xiphos: 400 Attack Power and 94 Accuracy. +10 to MA. Created by weapon fusing the Level 72 Judgement Persona Michael.

Lucifer's Blade: 450 Attack Power and 100 Accuracy. +10 to All Stats. Created by weapon fusing the level 89 Judgement Persona Lucifer. (Shocker, I know.)

Look at those numbers! And those stat bonuses! Yes, these unique fusions create the strongest weapons in the game by a ridiculous margin. Memorize which Persona creates what, because you'll want to be able to make these when it's time for the final boss. This does actually represent something unfortunate for the MC in Portable, as he will not be able to get his ultimate weapon come time for the final boss unless you did a ludicrous amount of grinding that would invalidate the need for the sword anyway. In FES, the protagonist has his pick of the litter when it comes to Ultimate weapons, and not all ultimate weapons are created equal in terms of their materials. Some can be obtained much sooner, including funnily enough, the FemC's ultimate weapon.

*In FES, Mitsuru and the MC use the same 1-Handed swords, so these are also the best pieces of gear for Mitsuru. Portable introduced a new Rapier sword type that is used by Mitsuru exclusively, while 1-Handed swords are now MC exclusive weapons.

2-Handed Swords

Balmung: 310 Attack Power and 93 Accuracy. Gives +100 HP to the equipper. Created with the Level 59 Strength Persona Siegfried.

Laevateinn: 340 Attack Power and 83 Accuracy. Gives the Fire Boost ability to the equipper and has the unique property of making your weapon attacks Fire elemental. Created with the Level 52 Magician Persona Surt.

Masakado's Katana: 450 Attack Power and 100 Accuracy. +10 to all stats. Created with the Level 73 Tower Persona Masakado.

Balmung replaces Legion weapons for Junpei and the MC in FES, but it's not one of my preferred weapons since it's less useful at the time you get it compared to Legion weapons. Laevateinn on the other hand is awesome. It's the first Elemental weapon we can get, boosting its own attack power with Fire Boost to sweeten the pot. Elemental weapons cannot crit, but they have high attack power and can have their damage augmented with elemental passives. Slap the Agni Bracers on Junpei or the MC and they can run roughshod with this weapon! I believe Elemental weapons can also get an extra boost from weapon boosting passives, though I need to test this more to make sure. Finally, Masakado's Katana is the ultimate 2-Handed sword and is available at reasonable time for the end game. This is invariably what I put in the hands of the MC in FES.

Fists

Sabazios: 340 attack power and 85 Accuracy. Grants Ice Boost and makes your weapon attacks Ice element. Created with the level 68 Lovers Persona Cybele.

Evil Gloves: 450 Attack Power and 100 Accuracy. +10 to all stats. Created with the Level 77 Tower Persona Mara.

Sabazios allows Akihiko to blow Mitsuru's Ice damage out of the water (no pun intended) if you gear him up properly. Evil Gloves are the ultimate fist weapon, and they're ideal for beating off your foes. Mara is quite a high level though, so you're only really going to have them in time for the final boss really. Still a more than worthwhile pick up for it though.

Axes/Cudgels

Mjolnir: 340 Attack Power and 80 Accuracy. Grants Elec Boost and makes your weapon attacks Elec element. Created with the Level 53 Chariot Persona Thor.

Corpse Rod: 450 Attack Power and 100 Accuracy. +10 to all stats. Created with the Level 81 Devil Persona Beelzebub.

These are mostly useless in Persona 3 Portable for reasons we won't be covering for a long time. In FES, the protagonist can make good use of Mjolnir if geared for it, but the Corpse Rod is available too late for me to really think it's the ideal ultimate weapon to slap in his hands.

Spears

Gae Bolg: 260 Attack Power and 85 Accuracy. Grants Wind Boost and makes weapon attacks Wind Element. In Portable, it grants the fairly useless Dodge Wind ability instead, though still makes attacks wind elemental (There may be other changes like this I haven't gotten a chance to discover, will update this post if I see any). Created with the Level 40 Tower Persona Cu Chulainn.

Gungnir: 310 Attack Power and 97 Accuracy. Grants the Elec Boost ability but does not change your weapon attack type. Created with the Level 57 Emperor Persona Odin.

Pinaka: 450 Attack Power and 100 Accuracy. +10 to all stats. Created with the Level 82 Tower Persona Shiva.

So many of these come from Tower Personae now that I think about it. Anyway, Gae Bolg is an incredible weapon for the stage of the game it's available in. While it is the weakest Unique weapon, it's available so much earlier and is so much better than everything else at that point, it secures itself a place as one of the best weapons in the game. Augmenting it with Wind Amp creates wind damage that makes Yukari deeply jealous, and it makes the dedicated Spear user of the game alongside the protagonist in FES the premiere damage dealers for a huge chunk of the game. Portable nerfed it slightly by removing Wind Boost from it, but Vayu Bracers still give it tremendous punching power. Gungnir is kind of whatever honestly, if only because the character that uses it will never really reach the same height for Elec damage that Akihiko or the protagonist will. Pinaka might just barely be fusable in time for the final boss, but don't be surprised if you have to supplant it with an Aeon weapon instead.

Bows

Saarnga: 400 Attack Power and 90 Accuracy. Grants Wind Boost but does not change your weapon attack type. Created with the Level 78 Sun Persona Vishnu.

Quintessence Bow: 450 Attack Power and 100 Accuracy. +10 to all stats. Created with the Level 86 Tower Persona Chi You.

Man Yukari stays losing here. Why do these both require such high level Personae? You're not liable to get the Quintessence Bow in time for the final boss and while Saarnga will more than likely be available, it's not that big of a help to Yukari. She'll mostly be on healing duty if you use her, and you'd likely prefer the defensive bonuses of an Aeon weapon or even a Legion bow. Poor girl can't catch a break.

Guns*

Metatronius: 450 Attack Power and 94 Accuracy (I can appreciate the irony). +10 to all stats. Created with the Level 87 Aeon Persona Metatron.

Only one weapon for guns. Available too late and the character that can use it is pretty bad in fights anyway.

*Guns are exclusive to the party member that uses them, and are not usable for the protagonist even in Vanilla and FES. So there's not even a preference reason to use this for the bonus boss.

Knives*

Vajra: 450 Attack Power and 100 Accuracy. +10 to all stats. Created with the Level 85 Sun Persona Asura.

You ever get the feeling of deja vu? Read the description for Unique guns.

*Like guns, this weapon type is exclusive to the party member that uses them and cannot be used by the protagonist in Vanilla and FES. Methinks they put a little less care into the options for these weapons.

Naginatas*

Khakkhara: 400 Attack Power and 100 Accuracy. +10 to all stats. Created with the Level 80 Aeon Persona Atavaka.

Vel Vel Muruga: 450 Attack Power and 100 Accuracy. Created with the Level 70 Star Persona Kartikeya.

No I did not make any typos there. For some reason, there are two Naginatas with the exact same effect except one is stronger and made with a much lower leveled Persona. Kartikeya is a sidequest reward, so I guess Khakkhara is there as a back up in case you didn't get that. Regardless, Vel Vel Muruga is available way sooner than Lucifer's Blade, creating an amusing example of game preferred gender as the MC is not going to have this level of power at his disposal in time for the final boss, much less anything in the last block of Tartarus. Definitely pick up Vel Vel asap.

*Naturally, Naginatas are exclusive to Portable and only make an appearance for the FemC. Since I won't get to mention it anywhere else really, Naginatas also have a different naming scheme for their base materials for some reason, you get Void Naginatas instead of Nihil Naginatas.

Rapiers*

Kokuseki Senjin: 400 Attack Power and 100 Accuracy. Grants Ice Boost but does not change your weapon attack type. Created with the Level 84 Empress Persona Alilat.

Snow Queen Whip: 450 Attack Power and 100 Accuracy. +10 to all stats. Created with the Level 80 Empress Persona Skadi.

What's with these fusions where the lower leveled Persona creates the stronger weapon? That being said, if you want to free up an accessory slot for Mitsuru while still getting the most out of her Ice damage, the Kokuseki Senjin isn't a terrible option. +10 EN and MA though is pretty hard to pass up, and Skadi can be obtained just in time for the final boss, so that's probably what you should go for regardless.

*Rapiers are Mitsuru's new exclusive weapon type in Portable, neither of these exist in FES and are newly added.

Phew, that was quite a lot! Weapon fusion is a service I'll be making heavy use of going forward, and we can probably expect me to do some Rare form hunting in the very near future.

I meant to get this out awhile ago, the next supplemental video! I decide to go with the music club for the Fortune link in FES since that seems like it'd be the most different from the art club option. Much like all alternative links though, the whole thing plays out essentially the same. Not sure if it was for the better the Persona 4 way of actually making these choices result in different stories for the links, or if it was a smart idea to just remove this concept entirely. On the one hand, it's cool to have variation like that but it is annoying to have to do multiple playthroughs if you want to see all the story content. On the other hand, I'm fine with meaningless choices being removed but there's definitely less flavor to it. This has been mentioned previously, but the framing for Fuuka's link is slightly different for the FemC, with Fuuka's cooking efforts being part of a bona fide club she made. It ultimately has very little bearing on the link as the script is still mostly the same, but you do get food items from this link to gift people on dates. It's a nice little gameplay variation and there's like one or two times it can be helpful.

Part 20 is out! For a change of pace (in the recording process anyway) Reload ended up being a pretty light load this time around with a lot of the more interesting and new stuff occurring in FES and Portable. The supplemental video to go with this one is going be pretty hefty this time. Disregarding that, this is a fairly breezy in game week with some very light though enigmatically compelling story progression. We also have several links that are on the cusp of maxing across all versions of the game, giving us both catharsis and some interesting fusion prospects once we return to Tartarus. Speaking of, next video will be a Tartarus excursion! Money is going to become increasingly less of an issue as we progress in the game, resulting in Tartarus excursions generally finding themselves relegated to the back end of moon cycles. It does not help the Rescue sidequests encourage tackling it this way as well.

Extra Notes

In FES

-Since it turns out I was ahead on Charm relative to what you need in FES, that is now Maxed we have almost complete freedom with our schedule in FES now. I'll still want to hit the quiz game every time it's available, but now there is ample time to fit in other things since the night time portion of FES is pretty low on things to do (It was even worse in Vanilla where the Arcade did nothing). We can now work in the Tower social link into evenings, which we can now participate in on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays with absolutely no opportunity cost since we can still study while doing that. The Tower social link develops quite slowly, even with a Tower Persona (which we're a ways off from having) but we have so much time to dedicate to it before the game is over that hardly matters. Likely it will max out around the end of August.

-I'm not sure the exact date this happened, but new gear is now available at the Police Station and Be Blue V. Kurosawa is just selling shit, as usual, but Be Blue V has a number of fantastic accessories added to the inventory now. The most worthwhile one is the Vitality Ring, which gives a tremendous 30% bonus to your HP. (Yes the Energy Ring that unlocked last month is already invalidated) This is a very appreciable durability boost for the MC, and Yukari also likes to have this if she's not gearing out for damage. Another interesting line of accessories now available are the Charm/Ward line, that convey the Dodge passives to a corresponding element. It'll be awhile before we can patch out weaknesses, so increasing the chance of dodging dangerous spells is the next best thing for now. I generally prefer fused weapons to get these abilities, but until we can both obtain the relevant Nihil weapons and decent Personae to create them, this is our only reliable option for it. A Wind Charm can be nice for Junpei, as there isn't really anything else he cares to have at the moment. The only other interesting accessory is the Magic Ring, which does the same as the Vitality Ring but for SP. Increasing SP isn't too helpful right now, but it might be a good idea to keep in mind once we start breaking into Tier 2 magic, which will happen very soon.

-Money is essentially a non-concern in FES now. While the compendium can drain it pretty quickly, we'll be getting tons of passive income from Tartarus exploration and the only offsetting drain now is the Quiz Game. Try to keep yourself around 20k just so you always have enough to play Quiz Game. This does mean we can start to play around with fusion a bit more and start making some solid Personae to turn the MC into the death machine he's destined to be.

In Portable

-Charm is maxed out here as well, and this has more interesting gameplay implications in Portable! Now, the FemC actually never needs to cap Charm, as Akihiko is the last social link that checks against it (Requiring Rank 4, if you forgot). One perk of the stat though is that it actually has a gameplay effect that isn't just clearing event flags, exclusively in Portable! Once you hit Rank 6 Charm, you now gain a bonus to social link points equal to that of having the relevant Arcana in your Persona stock, and this stacks with the Arcana bonus! Because the bonus is around a 51% increase rounded up in Portable, this can more than double the social link points you earn for answering correctly. Not only does this mean we don't have to be as mindful of our Persona stock going forward, it also means we can get enough points to get Rank Ups in situations where we normally wouldn't be able to. The only limitation to this bonus is that as far as I can tell, it doesn't apply to Relationship Fortunes. Social Linking will be a lot easier going forward in Portable!

-One nice thing about the modified Request rewards in this version of the game is that I've been able to mostly keep my equipment up to speed with the game's power curve. Between some additional joke weapons being added and some Requests giving out relatively strong armor, we're not too set back by the incredibly limited funds we've had to work with up to this point. Much like the other versions of the game, we'll be moving past that particular hurdle now since we're getting much more money from the average exploration while our passive income drain has become limited to bi-weekly quiz game sessions.

-Like the MC, the FemC can form romantic connections that don't really result in much new being added to the game, but unlike the MC she can actually choose to keep things platonic. I'm bringing this up now because Akihiko is an option for romance, but rather infamously the first flag to trigger this route in his social link is buried in an innocuous choice in his Rank 4 link that actually directs away from an answer that gives you social link points. I can only assume this was a deliberate means to troll Akihiko's fans, which I kind of respect.

In Reload

-Truth be told I actually don't have much to say here for once since not much really opens up to us this week, and the more interesting stuff is going to be happening in Tartarus now. Probably the most interesting things we have coming up in that regard is that we several high level links that can produce very strong Personae for us now (Chariot, Emperor, Justice and Hermit) so it's definitely a good idea to look out for those Arcana when performing fusions. The only other thing to mention is that we only really need to optimize our schedule for maxing out Charm in the near future. It's a long ways off before we need max Academics and it takes awhile to get there. I'm a little ahead on Academics, so if I see a good chance to work in a team night activity in the future, I'll probably take it.

Social Progress

In FES

Academics: +114 (Rank 3)
Courage: MAX
Charm: MAX

Priestess Social Link: Rank 3
Fortune Social Link: Rank 2
Justice Social Link: Rank 9

Charm has been maxed out well ahead of schedule, so we have a pretty good amount of freedom with our night time slot going forward. Academics will be growing pretty steadily, though between the high point requirement to max it and various other factors, it likely won't be until around August until we max it. With the time we have until the next exam, I should be able to secure enough points to place in the Top 10 for that, securing us a reward but we'll likely have to wait until the finals to get the #1 placement we need. Chihiro is just about ready to max out, the date with her on Sunday gave us the remaining social link points we needed for that and it'll be taken care ASAP next in-game week. For all the fans of Yuko out there, don't worry she'll be back in our social link schedule soon... just in time for Summer!

In Portable

Academics: +98 (Rank 3)
Courage: MAX
Charm: MAX

Priestess Social Link: Rank 3
Hermit Social Link: Rank 3
Temperance Social Link: Rank 4
Magician Social Link: Rank 9
Star Social Link: Rank 4


Things have been surprisingly tight and stressful in Portable, largely due to the much more limited time spent in Tartarus forcing me to play much more frugally. With Charm maxed though, we're pretty much over that hump and we'll be resolving all these problems with the next Tartarus trip. The social link bonus for Max charm means I don't need to stress which Personae I have on hand nearly as much, and the passive income drain of Quiz Game is greatly outpaced by the amount of money we're going to start bringing in. In particular, equipment really starts to take off in value at this stage of Portable. Draw those sword cards frequently and unload your treasure trove at Kurosawa first thing the next day! Junpei is close to maxing out, but otherwise most of our links are just mid-way in their progression.

In Reload

Academics: +108 (Rank 4)
Courage: MAX
Charm: +78 (Rank 5)

Emperor Social Link: Rank 9
Justice Social Link: Rank 6

As stated previously, we're going to be hyperfocusing Charm in the near future. We're getting close to the deadline for that, and we have a handful of days that the game is going eat up on us due to exams and story events. We're pretty close to maxing it though, so it's just going to take a couple weeks of the special Hagakure bowl and then we'll be golden. Hidetoshi is just about ready to max, giving us our second maxed out link already! We're doing good there, though it'll be a bit before we can enjoy the full benefits of it.

Supplemental: Fuuka Yamagishi Et All



"What an easy win!"

Just taking the time to preemptively state that Fuuka's original English voice is perfect for her, and the critics of it are just hating. With that out of the way, Fuuka is the new addition to SEES as of the third full moon operation, though she's not a proper party member per se. Instead, she takes over navigation duties for Mitsuru, a designation that in the original releases of Persona 3 and 4 were more relevant to the plot than the actual gameplay. Since Fuuka isn't really a full party member (though rest assured, we did get an actual combatant on her joining with Mitsuru rejoining the frontlines) we'll just cover what she can do across all versions in a single post. Starting out with,

In FES and Portable

There's a very thin difference between the PS2 and PSP versions for Fuuka in terms of her abilities, since she's not an actual fighter. As stated previously, Fuuka takes over on navigation for Mitsuru, becoming the party's new disembodied voice who offers insipid battle commentary and unhelpful directions. The key difference between Mitsuru and Fuuka in this role is that Fuuka gains EXP alongside the party and her abilities gradually upgrade. These upgrades are varying degrees of helpful or useless, and the easiest way to demonstrate this is to just lay them out bare.

Full Analysis: Fuuka starts with this ability, and it is a very small increase in information that you get for scanning enemies. Mitsuru's analysis only displayed the enemy's HP, SP and resistances. In addition to that, Fuuka's Full Analysis displays the enemy's skills as well. This might also be confirmation bias, but it certainly feels like Fuuka scans enemies faster than Mitsuru. When I'm bothering to keep track of it, Mitsuru usually takes full round of 4 party members taking turns to analyze enemies, while Fuuka usually does the same in 2-3 turns. If this is actually the case, I can't say for sure because Mitsuru has such a relatively brief time in this role. This ability isn't too helpful most of the time, but it can be nice to know what the enemy is about to fuck you up with if you take too long to kill them. Note that Fuuka cannot discern the information of Tartarus guardians for you, despite the game making several mentions of her superior scanning abilities in universe. She is able to give the skinny on Full Moon bosses at least.

Support Scan: Fuuka learns this at level 23 in Vanilla and FES only. It was removed in Portable with nothing to replace it. The reason for that is because this ability is merely a UI upgrade, displaying what buffs and debuffs the enemy has when you are selecting them for your attacks. Portable made this a standard UI feature from the beginning of the game, so this ability just vanished from Fuuka's skill list and is the sole difference she has in Portable. Anyway, it's a helpful way to know when buffs and debuffs are in effect if you're like me and have short term memory of 5 seconds, but it does not actually tell you how many turns are left before the effects expire. You have to keep track of that yourself, I'm afraid.

Third Eye: Learned at level 32. This is another UI upgrade, but a much more helpful one. Once you have scanned an enemy, Third Eye will change your targeting cursor when selecting an enemy if they nullify, absorb or reflect an attack. It's a nice little reminder if you haven't committed an enemy's weakness to memory and forgot to review the scanned information before going to attack. The one problem with this ability is that it only changes your cursor for nullification type defenses, it doesn't highlight if an enemy is merely resistant to something or if they are weak to it.

Healing Wave: Learned at level 41. This is a field ability that causes your party to recover 15% of their HP when traveling to a new floor. It's generally unwise to go around at low HP just on the off chance you let an enemy ambush slip through, but this is a nice little bit of passive healing to offset physical skill costs or to just top off your party.

Oracle: This isn't learned by leveling up, but is instead gained after a story event later in the game. It's not the most exciting reward though, because this skill is ass. Once Fuuka has learned Oracle, a new option will be added to your Tactics menu where you can command Fuuka to prepare and use the skill. After a few turns pass, Oracle will do one of the following,

1.) Fully Restore the party's HP
2.) Fully Restore the party's SP
3.) Fully Restore the party's HP and SP
4.) Cure all ailments
5.) LOWER THE PARTY'S HP AND SP TO 1

That's right, the skill has a 20% chance to backfire and actually just about kill your party. I would also like to point out that by the time you get it, it's not at all hard to have access to Medirahan to reliably fully heal your party or even just the Divine Grace skill that makes Mediarama almost as good as Mediarahan. So this skill only really has about a 40% chance of doing something useful most of the time, and it doesn't even come out instantly! Adding to the ridiculousness of this skill, you can also only use it once per day for no real reason. I get once per fight, but per day? Oracle can be fun to play Russian Roulette with (how fitting) but it is not at all something you should seriously consider as a tactical option for battle. It's also not the only random effect skill in this game, there's also a fusion spell with similar effects but more chances to screw your party over. I don't know what the devs obsession was with this kind of skill, I was so upset in Persona 4 Golden when Teddie's final upgrade turned out to be Kamui Miracle, an even worse version of Oracle. Fortunately, the story upgrade that yields this skill also unlocks the remaining skill Fuuka can learn which is way more helpful.

Escape Route: Learned at level 62 after a certain story event. Escape Route is a field skill that allows Fuuka to pull the party out of Tartarus on command, with no limits to it. It completely invalidates Traesto Gems and teleporters, and in Portable it allows you to explore Tartarus almost completely risk free due to Floor Jump being a thing. It's learned pretty late, but it makes end game exploration so much easier so it easily earns the designation of Fuuka's best skill.

And for one final thing Fuuka can do that isn't really a gameplay boon but is neat nonetheless, she has an additional option in the field menu where she can change the background music in Tartarus. Her music options are 4 random remixes of songs from previous Persona and SMT games. They're also only about 30 seconds to a minute in length and are somehow more droning and repetitive than the standard Tartarus music, so I rarely play them.

Now you're probably thinking "wow, this all sounds not very helpful". Atlus probably thought the same thing, as Fuuka was heavily retooled for Reload and given some actually helpful abilities to assist the party with.

In Reload



"Hear my prayers... let me help you all!"

In the intervening decade and a half since Portable released, the dev team for Persona got the novel idea that maybe it'd be cool if the navigator characters got abilities that were actually helpful to the player. Persona 4 Golden first flirted with this by... making Rise stupidly broken as she just randomly threw out buffs to the entire party every couple turns, knew every enemy's weaknesses instantly, and gave the protagonist a second copy of the Enduring Soul ability. This got reigned back a bit for Persona 5, but the general concepts they were going for with Golden Rise have stuck around and are now featured in a much more balanced form that's also fun to play around with in Reload. Let's start things out with the more interesting exclusive mechanics of Reload.

Fuuka has the Theurgy Oracle. Now that might sound like a dire thing to start with, but Oracle has been reworked to be a bona fide limit break that isn't complete dogshit. As turns pass in battle, Fuuka's Theurgy gauge slowly builds up, and naturally she can use Oracle once it is full. Fuuka gets a slight bonus to her Theurgy gauge when she fully scans an enemy, though this is much less pronounced than the Theurgy bonuses other characters get. Oracle takes about 25-30 turns to charge up, and once fully charged it can be used during anyone's turn without taking up an action. It's essentially an on demand One More! Oracle can do one of three things,

1.) Restore the party's HP and cure ailments
2.) Restore the party's SP
3.) Apply Tarukaja, Rakukaja and Sukukaja to the entire party

Note the lack of a negative effect in this list. It's also worth noting that Oracle does not decide what effect it applies at complete random and is actually influenced by the party's current status. If everyone is low on HP and suffering from ailments? Effect 1 will almost certainly trigger. Effect 2 has an increasing chance to occur the lower the party's SP becomes, with it almost certainly happening if the party is full on HP and 2 characters are completely spent on SP. If neither of those are the case, you'll get the extremely useful effect 3 to rev your party up. That's not all though! In the same story event that originally unlocked Oracle in older versions, Oracle in Reload will instead upgrade to become Revelation. Revelation is functionally the same as Oracle with two new effects,

4.) Cast Concentrate and Charge on the entire party
5.) Fully restore the party's HP, SP and revive any fallen party members

Effect 4 generally goes off if the party is in good condition, and they are fully buffed up with no buffs in line to expire. Sadly, the game can be a little arbitrary about that and it can be surprisingly difficult to rig this effect to happen. It's awesome when you do get it though. Effect 5 is essentially an emergency comeback effect. You will almost certainly see if fire off if your entire party is incapacitated save for the MC. A well timed Oracle/Revelation can heavily swing a fight in your favor! Past that, Fuuka also has the Characteristic Weakness Buffer. This passive effect is obtained from either attending all of Fuuka's Reading events or Gardening events, and it reduces the amount of damage a character suffers when their weakness is struck. If all of Fuuka's night time hangouts are attended, it will upgrade to Weakness Mitigator which is the same but stronger. The exact values are a 10% reduction for Buffer and a 15% reduction for Mitigator.

We've had a lot to say and haven't even gotten to Fuuka's skills yet! Luckily, she picked up some fantastic new tools here as well.

Full Analysis: Fuuka starts with this. Less a skill and more of a retooled version of the scanning system featured in the old versions of Persona 3. After a full round of combat has passed, you can order Fuuka to scan the enemy and unveil their weaknesses/resistances for the price of 35 of her SP. Note that while Fuuka does have stats in the old versions, they didn't actually affect anything. In Reload, Fuuka's SP does actually fuel a lot of her abilities, so it can be a good idea to hook her up with equipment that increases it. That aside, if a fight goes on for more than a turn you obviously want Fuuka to give you this information so you can always use the optimal actions for all future encounters. Also unlike the older versions, this actually does let Fuuka scan literally everything for their full capabilities, though most bosses hide their skill lists from you. As mentioned previously, using this ability also slightly fills Fuuka's Theurgy gauge, allowing her to prep Oracle faster.

Jamming: Fuuka starts with this. It's worth noting now that save for her Theurgy, Characteristic and Full Analysis, all of Fuuka's abilities are utilized in the field. Jamming costs 20 SP to use and lasts until you travel to a new floor or engage in combat. When in effect, Jamming prevents shadows from noticing you, though Rare Forms and the Reaper ignore it. Not terribly helpful, it's not that hard to run from enemies in this game if you really need to avoid conflict.

Sylphid Aura: Learned at level 26. Now this one is something special! Sylphid Aura costs 24 SP to use, and it provides Rakukaja and Sukukaja to the entire party for the next fight they get into. The most obvious use of this is applying it before a boss fight, giving you a tremendous advantage right out of the gate. This is a huge boon for a large chunk of the game, though it does fall off once you get access to the Auto-Party Buff passives later in the game. Until then though, this is a fantastic way to open battles and should always be used before tough fights.

Shock Noise: Learned at level 38. Costs 30 SP inflicts Distress on every enemy on the current floor, though again it doesn't impact Strong Shadows or Rare Forms. This is a cool idea for an ability but it's a bit too expensive to be practical. Very rarely do you need more than the advantage a pre-emptive strike already gives you, but I guess if you're really struggling with enemies in a new section of Tartarus, it's worth considering.

Escape Route: Learned at level 51. This is the same as it is in the PS2 and PSP versions, with the exceptions that it costs 24 of Fuuka's SP to use now and it's available much earlier without the need for the story event upgrade. It's relatively less useful in Reload since it's generally much easier to make your way to teleporters while avoiding conflict and there is an actual cost to it now, but it is a nice option if you need to egress out in a hurry.

Tartarus Search: Learned at level 64. Costs 50 SP to use and fully maps out a floor for you. This is actually a pretty useless ability for its intended effect. 50 SP is a lot, and in general floors in Reload are very short and easy to explore so the time save it gives you a lot of the time is minimal. That said, it does have a more helpful secondary use, but it's going to be awhile before we see the relevant mechanic for that at the time I'm writing this.

And that's a wrap. I actually really appreciate the expanded abilities Fuuka got in Reload, even if some of them are too gimmicky to be consistently useful. We'll be seeing Oracle and Sylphid Aura help out immensely going forward.

Another supplemental video to the pile! Over in FES, the dramatic climax of Chihiro's storyline takes place and now all that is left is for the MC to close in for the finisher. And then he'll never talk to her again. We also spend some quality time with Elizabeth in one of her more amusing scenes, spy on Junpei's personal life, and develop late night friendships with grouchy old men! Meanwhile, the FemC gets to hang out with Theodore who continues to establish himself as a goober, engage in some delightful club activities, and also get ripped off by the same sketch old guy the MC does!

Supplemental: Mitsuru Kirijo FES/Portable



"You'll fall by my hand!"

Level 99 Stats

ST: 55
MA: 85
EN: 52
AG: 61
LU: 51

Mitsuru resists Ice attacks and is weak to Fire.

Skills

Bufu, Mabufu, Dia and Marin Karin: Starts With
Bufula: Level 21
Diarama: Level 24
Spirit Drain: Level 27
Tentarafoo: Level 32
Mabufula: Level 42
Ice Boost: Level 45
Mind Charge: Level 50
Bufudyne: Level 55
Diarahan: Level 58*
Ice Break: Level 61*
Mabufudyne: Level 71*
Ice Amp: Level 76*

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

The SEES Ice Queen herself has joined the frontlines! Mitsuru is pretty alright for most of the game honestly. You may have heard legends of her insistence on using Marin Karin over something more useful, but really that'll cease to be an issue entirely by the next Full Moon when we unlock the Full Assault tactic that just flatly shuts that skill off. Even without that, the Knock Down tactic also shuts that skill off, so there are ways to work around it. With that out of the way, Mitsuru is probably the biggest one-trick pony in the entire game. She slams the enemy with high powered Ice magic, and that is all she does. While she has a couple of useless support skills like Tentarafoo and Spirit Drain (only drains around 16-20 SP from the enemy, absolute trash) and the single target healing nearly everyone in the game gets, Ice magic is the reason you're bringing Mitsuru. She breaks into higher tiered magic sooner than anyone else, she picks up the ability to invalidate ice resistances to make sure she isn't walled out, and she learns the relevant passive boosts to make her damage even more impressive. While Yukari does have a superior MA stat, Mitsuru's access to passive boosts without needing accessories means that she hits much harder than Yukari ever will. Mitsuru also possesses much higher HP than Yukari, meaning in spite of her slightly lower EN Mitsuru is far more durable than Yukari at basically any stage of the game. Really, Mitsuru's level cap stats really paint a misleading picture on how she is throughout the game. Her MA always has an edge, but her path through the game sees her with relatively balanced stats across the board and actually remarkably decent ST. She can put in some work with a good 1-handed sword, so despite being fairly singular in her intended usage, it's not like she'll often find herself completely useless either. That said, Mitsuru does falter in the fact that while she is a potent damage dealer, other characters are only slightly behind her in raw numbers and they often bring way more to the team dynamic in exchange. Hell, even Yukari has a huge leg up with her healing magic, which is definitely much more helpful than Mitsuru smacking things upside the head when she can't freeze them. Mitsuru can be a fun character to use and she's far from bad, but I do consider her to be the "top of the low-tiers" when rating her against other party members.

In FES

I've already covered the misconception regarding Marin Karin and Tentarafoo, but there is one really obnoxious skill in Mitsuru's kit that unfortunately she does like to uselessly fire off even when in Full Assault. Mind Charge. This skill is ass in FES and Portable. For some reason, I guess because it technically yields more damage on a single hit, Full Assault does not shut off Mind Charge. And the AI is absolutely horrible with deciding when to use it, eagerly seizing the opportunity to waste 15 SP. I've had Mitsuru Mind Charge against enemies she could finish off with a sword strike for crying out loud! Even if she had any intelligence with how to use the skill , it'd be for naught as Mind Charge only flatly doubles the damage of the next attack, which means it's useless over just attacking twice. Often worse than that actually due to variance in damage rolls. I'll go more in on Mind Charge and Power Charge later when the MC can access them, but know that in FES there is only one fight where these skills are helpful and two fights in Portable. Thankfully, there is a tactic that shuts off Mind Charge, but it has the annoying drawback of also disabling multi-targeting skills. Such is life. Regardless, when geared for damage, Mitsuru does quite well in this game. For a not insignificant chunk of the game, she'll easily be the best damage dealer after the Protagonist, and that definitely has value when the MC/FemC need to flex onto a supporting role. Still, as mentioned previously other characters aren't that far behind her and often have more flexibility when their primary function fails them. In particular, Special Fused Weapons tend to invalidate the need for Mitsuru as those lay out far more damage than she can ever hope to do. Sabazios in particular makes Akihko a way stronger Ice attacker than Mitsuru can dream of being, but even just generally speaking Junpei with Laevateinn and the Agni Bracers will punch well above a Mitsuru Bufudyne. Still, it'll be awhile before we reach that stage so Mitsuru has her time in the sun. She just melts before long.

In Portable

You don't have to worry about her using the ailment skills in her kit or wasting SP on Mind Charge, but otherwise Mitsuru is probably the least affected by the mechanics shake ups in Portable. She's still just laying out Ice magic, all day every day. She at least get some small boons in new Fusion weapons exclusive to her, but that's so late in the game it's hardly worth considering.

In Reload

This will probably be the last FES/Portable entry where I have this sub-section as we've hit the point where I can write up for the unique mechanics regarding party members in Reload going forward. Since I haven't gotten to that though, know that of the characters in Reload, Mitsuru is probably the closest in overall game design to her FES/Portable incarnation. She's still all about the big Ice damage, but her status ailment skills have seen both a bump in usefulness and given secondary reasons to use them, and she's swapped out her single-target healing for the much more useful Rakunda/Marakunda. Additionally, Theurgy gives her the ability to really pop off with the big numbers when it comes to Ice damage, and she doesn't need Ice Break for it on top of that! Mitsuru's actually really fun to use in Reload, even if I still think she falls short of what other party members are capable of.

Part 21 is out! After a lengthy break from it (save for a brief tutorial on Theurgy in Reload) we're finally back at it. This is the point of the game where general exploration becomes a lot easier as not only do we have access to much stronger options and more plentiful restoratives for our SP, we can now dedicate any money that we get to gearing up and tuning our team for the coming battles. As an opposing reaction though, bosses will generally become much trickier, and the Strong Shadows featured in Reload should always be taken on with caution. Still, this first excursion out isn't too bad, and the bosses featured definitely lowball the challenge.

Extra Notes

In FES

-This is the point of the game where when you have some free time (both in and out of Universe), you should definitely look into hunting Rare Forms to gather up every variety of Nihil weapon in the game. Thankfully, all Rare Forms, regardless of where you find them, can drop Nihil weapons, so the easiest way to do this is to just explore an older block of Tartarus you've grown past. Usually by the time you're exploring a new leg of Tartarus, you should be able to create a Persona that is high enough level to scare off every enemy in the previous leg. This makes for a good way to gather money and treasure in addition to searching down Rare Forms.

-This applies to all versions of the game, but Yukari will be mandatory for the next Full Moon boss. Be sure to bring her along, as the game doesn't have leaked experience and nothing sucks more than having to bring a much weaker character to a big boss battle. Thankfully, this is the last time the game does outright character select forcing, but there are a couple instances where some of your preferred characters may be MIA for a fight, so it's a good idea to train up someone outside your A-Team every now and again.

-Take note of anything that can drop Turquoise. That can be traded for Protection Sutras, which are an amazingly helpful item for this stage of the game. It'll be a bit before we gain proper access to multi-targeting defense buffs, and Tarunda alone isn't always enough to halt near party wipe damage.

-I play the Golden Beetle fight pretty safe here, but as shown if you enter the fight with most of the party having Auto-Tarukaja, you can just knock them all down with a Mazio and end the fight immediately with an All Out Attack.

In Portable

-I make a pretty big blunder in this version and enter Tartarus without buying any new supplies or trading for any helpful items. I was able to wing it in the full recording, but always be sure to catch yourself and make sure you're fully prepared before entering Tartarus. This version plays very fast in comparison to FES and even Reload, so it's surprisingly easy to make a simple mistake like that.

-Rescuing people is very simple. Elizabeth/Theo gives you a rough estimate of where someone is, you find them on one of the mentioned floors, and then Fuuka will ferry you and the lost individual out of Tartarus (even though she doesn't learn that ability until 50 levels later but whatever). Since Floor Jump is a thing in this version, you don't really lose any progress by hauling people out unless you had to explore the entire floor to find them. Thankfully, they usually spawn in pretty close to where you enter.

-The Golden Beetles are one of the few instances I've noticed a boss being slightly tuned up to make them more of a threat in Portable. They have more than double the health in this version of the game, likely to prevent the chance for an immediate victory like FES had. It doesn't affect the fight too much, though do note the slight annoyance in that we can't see the whole turn order so it can make the proceedings a little precarious after they get their Tarukajas up.

In Reload

-We now get to properly play around with Theurgy! Theurgy as a whole has several slow but conventional ways it builds for each character. Whenever somebody has their turn come up or they get Shifted to, they gain a small bit on their Theurgy gauge. Characters also gain a slight amount on their gauge when they hit a weakness, which can be procced multiple times a turn through One More! Beyond that, each character has a unique condition that gives them a much larger boost to their Theurgy gauge when they fulfill it. In order, Yukari gains gauge when she heals someone, Junpei gains gauge when he lands a critical hit, Akhiko gains gauge when he starts his turn with a buff in effect (and I believe he also gains some on his gauge when he receives a buff) and Mitsuru gains gauge when she lands an ailment on an enemy OR debuffs them with Rakunda (which her description doesn't directly state) and Fuuka's charges a bit when she uses Full Analysis on something. Not all of these conditions are created equal in how much gauge they provide. Yukari generates way more Theurgy gauge via casting Media, for instance, while Akihiko builds up much more slow and steady with his buff condition. The obvious benefit in contrast though is that Akihiko can always have his condition fulfilled without having to sacrifice his turn, while Yukari needs at least one person to not be at full health and must use up her turn for healing instead of attacking. Gauge charge is retained between battles, and you can stock your Theurgy to use in a situation you feel is ideal. Naturally this is often a great way to gain a huge advantage at the start of fights with bosses or Strong Shadows, but it can also help with defeating Rare Forms or even just as a panic button. In particular, multi-targeting Theurgies like Akihiko's or the Protagonist's Jack Brothers are a great way to regain control of fights that might be looking a little rough. The only way you can lose Theurgy gauge is by being KO'd, which halves your gauge. Ailments also prevent you from using Theurgy or gaining Gauge. Oh and speaking of Jack Brothers!

-By simply having fused Jack Frost and Jack 'o Lantern, we gain access to the Protagonist's second Theurgy, Jack Brothers! Theurgy fills in for Fusion Spells in Reload, and it's a much more consistently useful system in this game. Jack Brothers is much better than the crappy joke skill it was originally, in addition to having a higher chance of the Knock Down going through it also deals some pretty solid Almighty damage. It's far from the best damaging Theurgy the protagonist gets, but it will be awhile before we get another one, and there are actually some ways to further augment Almighty damage in this game. You do not need to have either of the Jack Brothers (the characters) in your stock to use it, simply having the relevant Personae in your compendium is enough for using Fusion Spells in this game. That means, fuse, fuse, fuse to unlock more fusion spells! There's several other fringe perks of filling the compendium in this version we haven't had a chance to see yet, so all the more reason to do so.

-One last thing to note about Theurgy is that offensive Theurgies have a completely unique formula for determining the damage they deal. Theurgy attacks use both a character's ST and MA in equal measure to determine damage, meaning that elemental Theurgies can benefit from boosting ST and the same applies to physical type Theurgies with MA. This means it's not actually worthless to increase MA on physical characters or to boost ST on caster characters. Akihiko in particular does well with his Theurgy since he has ST and MA in equal measure, allowing him to hit pretty close to Junpei, Yukari and Mitsuru despite his Theurgy having a lower damage modifier to compensate for it being AOE.

-Always throw up a Rarity fortune before entering Tartarus. It's easily the most helpful fortune in the game. I ran into 5 Rare Forms over the course of my Tartarus trip, more than making back the money I spent and giving several big EXP payouts! The coins Rare Forms give out increase greatly in value as the game goes on, so the static price of this Fortune becomes an absolute steal later on.

-Like FES and Portable, there is no leaked experience in this game (at least, not for party members). That said, a mechanic will be introduced later that does function as very silly alternative to it, so don't feel obligated to go out of your way to train up everyone evenly.

-As mentioned in her character bio, Fuuka's Theurgy weights itself towards the party's needs when deciding what effect it will use. This gives us a great new method of recovering our SP as the chance of it doing so rises greatly as the party's average SP total decreases, though unfortunately I had pretty bad luck with it this expedition.

-The boss this time around was nothing to write home about, and is a good cold run for how much Theurgy can speed up fights for you. We've also kind of hit the point where All Out Attacks really start to suck against anything that isn't a trash mob. Using your Theurgy on a downed enemy will always yield considerably more damage than an All Out Attack, to say nothing of having your entire party unload them.

-One last Theurgy thing, all Theurgies pierce resistances, so there's never going to be a situation you can't hit big damage with them!

Part 22 is out! Quite an eventful week as we max out 3 different social links across all 3 versions of the game. The next full moon is inbound, so I also take some time to to gear up for the coming battle. Reload is slowly inching towards the point where we'll have complete freedom with our evenings and get to regularly delve into new night time content, but we're not quite there yet. Before we get to the boss though, we have the rest of this moon cycle's available Tartarus content to go through, which is what we'll be doing next video.

Extra Notes

In FES

-We've got a maxed link in FES with the Justice social link! This gives us access to Melchizedek, a decent late game physical bruiser, though I kind of prefer Thor to him overall. This does mean going forward though that any Justice Persona we fuse will gain an additional 5 levels, a not inconsiderable power boost. Since Justice tend to be Light focused Personae, they also benefit from having flexible inherit lists, being able to pick up almost any kind of skill that isn't Dark type. If you're skilled with fusion, you can make some decent versatile Personae out of the Justice arcana.

-We've got a big boss battle coming up soon, so I start doing some Weapon Fusion to increase our team's abilities. The most recent Tartarus expedition got the Protagonist to Level 22, a good level to be as it allows us to fuse Fool Legion! If you forgot or didn't read the Antique Store post, Legion creates a weapon that grants a whopping +100 HP to the equipper! The downside is that the weapon only has 1 attack power, completely obliterating weapon and All Out Attack damage. This scarcely matters for Full Moon Bosses though and is purely a huge survivability boon for the Protagonist and anyone else with the weapon. Just look what happens when we stack it with a Vitality Ring!



That's nearly double the HP and it's also an HP total we won't see naturally until the late 50's/early 60's for levels. Note that all HP bonuses are applied to your base maximum HP rather than your current maximum HP, so you don't get bigger bonuses from stacking multiple HP boosts. So long as we have something with modest EN, there's essentially nothing that can take out the Protagonist when he's this sturdy. Aside from that, I got a Legion Bow made for Yukari. I was lucky to get some Combat Boots that gave her Elec Dodge (Med), so she's going into the next boss fight with about the best defenses possible. I fused up a Justice Sword for Junpei somewhat arbitrarily, but it will help him out when we get back to Tartarus exploration.

-Speaking of Weapon Fusion and the Antique Shop post, I did want to comment on and clarify something I wasn't sure on. The Empress, Star, Tower and Sun Arcanas grant resistance to specific elements. At the time of writing the post, I hadn't had a chance to test these to see if they overwrite weaknesses. I am pleased to report that they do indeed cover your weakness and have updated the Antique Shop post accordingly! I was uncertain on these weapons since Persona 4 introduced an accessory line (Pins, I think?) that reduced damage from specific elements but didn't actually invalidate weaknesses. Every post 4 game, including Reload, has accessories like these and the descriptions are very similar to the fused weapons so I wasn't sure if they worked the same. Knowing this will help me out a ton in the future given the team building plans I have for Portable.

-I haven't been doing much fusion since it's a huge money sink on Hard mode to pull stuff back out of the compendium, but it's important to reiterate that at this point there's not much keeping us from going to Tartarus on any given night. If you want to do laps to farm money chests for a couple hours, go nuts! I won't be doing that since it leads to more interesting gameplay decisions when I have to work within limited resources.

In Portable

-I pick up some Legion weapons in this version too, a Naginata and a Bow. Unfortunately, Vitality Rings become available much later in Portable, so we can't get quite as much HP in this version of the game. The slight level advantages we have on most everything though balance it out pretty well. Shame crits are still just a random failure point, but I'm having much better luck in that regard with this LP than I did with my practice playthrough.

-We max out another Link, this time the Junpei version of the Magician Link! The timing of this is rather amusing given a story event we'll be seeing in just a couple videos. Regardless, this unlocks Surt to fuse. Surt is an absolutely cracked Persona in FES and Portable, and he's also available super early relative to other Ultimate Personae, being the lowest leveled of the lot. Remember that all level scaling calculations use the MC/FemC's level rather than the equipped Persona's level (except for if the enemy is scared by you or not, for some reason), so the actual experience level of a Persona means nothing vis-a-vis the skills they actually have.

-For once I have a story content related comment. Doing this LP has made me realize something... I kind of hate Kenji! Not that anyone ever thought he was a super inspired character, but man even outside of his status as the designated tutorial social link, he's just a dumb annoying asshole. His social link is all about him pursuing some ridiculous fantasy he's tricked himself into believing, and the bulk of the link involves you encouraging this lunacy. And if that wasn't bad enough, he barges into Rio's social link and ends up becoming a huge focus of it, taking attention away from Rio. The cad! I'll be glad when we don't have to deal with this dumb fuck calling me once a week anymore. Even the MC seems to dislike him in a couple of the events.

In Reload

-This applies to Portable also but always be sure to check in with Officer Kurosawa after rescuing people! Some of the rewards for rescuing people are fantastic, and often they include big money payouts. We've finally got some discretionary income, and the compendium is much cheaper in this version of the game, so expect more of me playing around with fusion in the very near future.

-Starting with this video, I'll be making much more use of the Inari shrine to dupe my skill cards. We have tons of good Passive Skill cards now, and it's a good idea to have at least two copies of every passive so they can be used at your discretion and easily duped again right after. Generally you should focus your passives first, and then if you have any good attack or healing skills that are ahead of what's currently available to you (such as Tier 2 spells) dupe those after. The service is much less convenient to use in Portable since you can't directly pick the card that you dupe and it takes 5 days instead, so it'll be awhile before I use the service more regularly there. Since Personae produce cards for you in Portable, it's generally much easier to fuse the thing that has the card you want once you've maxed out the relevant link.

-We're getting close to maxing out Charm, and it'll be a long while before we need to cap Academics. Once Charm is capped, you can focus on hanging out with your team more often if you'd like in order to improve their effectiveness in battle. Yukari and Junpei definitely have the most immediately useful characteristics, followed by Akihiko then Mitsuru and lastly Fuuka. Don't take that as me saying that Akihiko or Mitsuru's Characteristics are bad! We're just not at a point where they are at their full potential.

-Speaking of hang outs, Gardening with your allies has the perk of both causing your harvest to yield more items and giving the additional items unique effects. It's one of the few hang out types that has additional use even after you've fully unlocked the participating character's Characteristic.

-We get a max out hat trick in this video with Hidetoshi maxing out as well! This gets us access to Odin. Odin is another absolutely cracked Persona in FES and Portable, but he's relatively less useful in Reload due to his signature move being nerfed. He's still well worth your time to fuse, but I'll almost certainly be fusing him up to something better in Reload since it's not as worthwhile to hyper focus him in this version of the game.

-Make sure to have a good supply of status cures for the upcoming events, Dis-charms and anything that cures Fear in particular will be very helpful.

Social Progress

In FES

Academics: +134 (Rank 3)
Courage: MAX
Charm: MAX

Priestess Social Link: Rank 5
Justice Social Link: MAX
Devil Social Link: Rank 4
Temperance Social Link: Rank 6
Magician Social Link: Rank 6
Strength Social Link: Rank 6
Tower Social Link: Rank 4
Chariot Social Link: Rank 8

Quite the haul there! Justice is now maxed out, so we no longer have to grapple with Chihiro's jealousy when it comes to planning our days. Good thing, because Fuuka and Yuko both are on the cusp of having that be a factor in our relationship with them. Beyond that, Devil and Tower are marching towards their inevitable completion, and Chariot is pretty far along but it will be awhile before we can close it out. Academics continues to slowly plod along. We can bury that Rank 5 dream for the upcoming exam, but hopefully it'll at least hit Rank 4 soon!

In Portable

Academics: +110 (Rank 4)
Courage: MAX
Charm: MAX

Star Social Link: Rank 5
Priestess Social Link: Rank 4
Lovers Social Link: Rank 7
Chariot Social Link: Rank 6
Magician Social Link: MAX
Devil Social Link: Rank 4
Tower Social Link: Rank 1

Our academia is plodding along even more in Portable! FES can easily overtake Portable in raw points gained at this stage since we're still able to study in addition to social linking (or hell, we can stack studying with the quiz game!). It'll be some time before we max out Academics in Portable since we'll be picking up even more night time links in the future and we definitely want to get cracking on advancing those since they take quite a bit more care that Tanaka or Mutatsu. Aside from that, we've maxed out Junpei, Kenji Kramers his way into Rio's link, and the FemC continues to have better romantic chemistry with Fuuka and Yukari than the MC does.

In Reload

Academics: +116 (Rank 4)
Courage: MAX
Charm: +92 (Rank 5)

Priestess Social Link: Rank 3
Justice Social Link: Rank 7
Strength Social Link: Rank 7
Magician Social Link: Rank 5
Emperor Social Link: MAX
Tower Social Link: Rank 3

Another day, another max out. Charm will be capping soon enough, though it'll be a couple videos before we get there since we have a ton of Dark Hour content coming up. Academics is going to languish for a bit in the future since we have a ton of new night time activities coming up mixed with a considerably generous deadline for when we need to have Rank 6. That said, if you're more aggressive about your Academics in Reload, it's fairly trivial to ace every exam in contrast Portable and especially FES/Vanilla. We already have two maxed social links in this version! The game is a bit more generous with the rank up points, likely because there are more daytime events that can detract from social linking in the future.

The next supplemental video is out! It was a good week for social links in FES, between having plenty of free time for Tanaka and Mutatsu and maxing out the Justice link. We're approaching the end of the Chariot link in FES, but Summer vacation is coming up so it'll be a bit before we formally close it out. Otherwise, we're just chugging along through the middle of links such as Magician and Temperance. There's a small blooper in the game at the end of the Chariot Rank 8 scene. Can you spot it? Over for the FemC, the relationships with Yukari and Fuuka are intensifying and the sparks are beginning to fly. Tanaka also comes off as even sketchier in this version of the game, and we get the Tower link going for the FemC as well.

Pseudo-update! I was originally going to write a dedicated supplemental post for the Protagonist as he is in Reload, but I found there wasn't really enough to say at this stage compared to other characters for that to really make sense. I've instead updated the original Protagonist Supplemental post to go over Reload additions. Like with Fusion Spells, I'll be adding in new Theurgies as we unlock them.

CullenDaGaDee wrote: In Reload



"Alright."

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

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

Theurgy

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

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

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

Part 23 is out! We wind back the clock a little bit and return to Tartarus gameplay in progress. Funnily, though the bosses featured in this video are definitely tougher than the last, due to my more meticulous preparation this time plus the fact in one of the fights I get a serious case of dumb luck, this ends up being a fairly breezy and relaxed jaunt through the final leg of Arqa. Next Moon Cycle is when the FES/Portable Tartarus bosses really start to ratchet up the asshole tendencies while in Reload we get access to a whole slew of new Tartarus mechanics. Look forward to that!

Extra Notes

In FES

-I came into the Intrepid Knight fight well prepared. Junpei is an obvious pass since his wind weakness is too much of a liability (Garudyne will paste him no matter what you do), so gearing everybody sans Yukari up with Wind Charms and spamming Cadenza puts us in a pretty good place. I pumped up Orpheus' EN something fierce, and it's amazing how much of a difference that makes. The only real sub-optimal thing for this fight was that Principality had fairly low EN due to bad levels, but mixing in Tarunda or coming in with a bunch of Protection Sutras patches up that problem. The way I elected to handle it in this version was a fairly slow but pretty reliable strategy that wasn't too resource intensive. I can definitely see how my skill and planning with the game has improved since my practice run, I was generally a higher level and had to sink a lot more time into preparing in contrast.

-If you have someone you want to level up quickly, the best way to do so is what I did with Junpei: disband the entire party sans the person you want to train and then roam the strongest floors you can with Personae geared to deal with most anything that pops up. Once the Protag has the levels and skills to deal big damage and set up All Out Attacks, it's not super critical to have a full team in order to win fights in 1 turn. If there is anything that's too dicey or time intensive to deal with using an understaffed party, you can simply run if you managed to get the First Strike. If you haven't, there is actually a somewhat obscure but helpful mechanic: If all enemies in a battle are knocked down, you can run from the battle with 100% success rate like if you had gotten the First Strike. Great for those single powerful enemies that have a weakness to exploit.

-I'd been teasing the Reaper for awhile, so I decided to finally show him off (This totally wasn't influenced by Reload finally tutorializing the Reaper). The timer is super generous, so you're not liable to encounter him while roaming a standard floor. On event floors though, the timer is quite short, somewhere between 1 and 2 minutes. Always keep that in mind and make securing the staircase your top priority before screwing around on those floors. It'll be a long time before we can beat the Reaper, though Vanilla and FES have a famous cheese strat that allows you to beat him with minimal effort (albeit requiring some luck with the random turn order).

In Portable

-The Intrepid Knight fight in this version is the polar opposite of what I got in FES. I completely forgot to stock up on anything before entering Tartarus, and I bumbled into an incredibly effective strategy for winning this fight with my non-existent resources on the first try. Who'da thought this guy was vulnerable to Rage? Normally Rage is a bad thing for you, but this guy's physical attacks are much less threatening (provided he doesn't crit) than his magic, so it ended up working out beautifully with a Fire Boost Tarukaja'd Hua Poa torching half his health bar in a single hit. I may have gotten lucky in discovering this strat, but I think I can take some credit for capitalizing on it. No? Well whatever, it was a fun way to handle it. I'm not sure how consistent this particular strat would be if I geared out for it and I also don't know if it works in FES. It's definitely something to keep in mind if you play this game yourself though! I was dreading this fight and am shocked how it ended up being the shortest and easiest attempt I had at it.

-I've been mentioning this point repeatedly, but it really bears that much emphasis: grab up as much equipment as you can and then turn around and sell it. I got a modest amount of money from this Tartarus run, but selling off every bit of treasure and spare gear I collected in addition to turning in requests/rescues got me up to 450k yen after this trip, by far the most money I've gotten from a Tartarus trip in any version of the game thus far. Sale values are ridiculously good in Portable, and if you don't need money right away for compendium purposes, you should always go for Sword cards over Coin cards if they're the same rank in this version.

In Reload

-Rescuing people got a slight change in this version, allowing you to call in a reserve member to escort the lost person back to the entrance and keeps you from having to suspend your exploration for a bit. Given that floor jump is a thing (to say nothing of how floors don't re-randomize during on an ongoing exploration in this version), this isn't that helpful but it is a slight time save I guess.

-Scouting gets introduced to us here, and it's pretty simple. After defeating an enemy, there's a random chance you can send a party member to scout. They'll immediately make their way to the next floor, filling in the map for the stairs if you have not yet discovered them yet. You can keep exploring the floor you are on minus one party member, or just quick jump to the next floor. Once you make it to the next floor, you'll reconvene with the scout member, who will provide you with some of the treasure found on the next floor (plus some material items to sell) and a bit of the map filled in. Generally you should just let people scout when the option comes up but there are situations later in the game where you might not want to do that. The relevant mechanics haven't come up yet though, so we'll discuss that when we do.

-The bosses were fairly unremarkable in this version. I'm probably going to have to carefully rewatch what I did once I make the Arqa boss supercut, because broadly speaking my strategy was just entering the fights with Theurgy charged and uncorking those to ruin the boss' day. That said, that's probably the intent for these fights, to give you an index of just how useful Theurgy can be in battle. After this point, bosses become a hell of a lot more durable in Reload and simple Theurgy spam alone is not enough to win fights convincingly.

-Now that we have Fuuka and Oracle online, we have another avenue for extending our SP. The less SP your party has, the more likely Oracle is to give a nice big restore of it to the whole party when used. Once two characters are completely spent, Oracle is incredibly likely to do that for you. You can cheese it a bit by explore old floors and just Rushing battles until Fuuka's Theurgy is ready, if you'd like to spend some time farming.

-Don't underestimate Oracle's buffing effect either! It'll be awhile before we have freely usable sources of Multi-target buffing, and the only skill that buffs all 3 character aspects at once is strictly single target. When you're looking to unload Theurgy, hitting the enemy with Rakunda and then popping Oracle to buff the whole party can result in some amazing numbers.

-We get to see Jamming in effect, and it's far too situational for me to ever care to use it myself. Enemies aren't too tough to avoid in this game, and Fuuka's SP is better spent on other things. Y'know, like scanning the enemy, her main function.

-The Reaper is introduced here and he works much the same as he does in the older versions. The timer is generally a bit more generous though, taking around 10 minutes for the Reaper to show up as opposed to the 5 or so he takes in FES/Portable. The Reaper can chase you between floors in this version when he does appear though, so watch out for that!

Supplemental: Yukari Takeba P3 Reload



"And with this, you're finished!"

Skills

Garu, Dia: Starts With
Patra: Level 5
Pulinpa: Level 8
Media: Level 11
Magaru: Level 14
Sukunda: Level 17
Diarama: Level 21
Garula: Level 24
Recarm: Levl 27
Wind Break: Level 30
Me Patra: Level 33
Magarula: Level 37
Mediarama: Level 40
Poison Mist: Level 43
Amrita Drop: Level 46
Garudyne: Level 50
Diarahan: Level 53
Samarecarm: Level 56
Masukunda: Level 59
Amrita Shower: Level 62
Magarudyne: Level 66
Mediarahan: Level 70
Wind Amp: Level 74

Our first proper Reload bio, which means I'll take this time to cover a waterfront of changes that aren't really Yukari specific and apply to more-or-less the whole cast. First off, I'm not really going to bother listing out level 99 stats since Incenses existing now means we can bump up anyone's flagging stats or fast track them to the cap, so it's not really worth considering how those look in the long run. Secondly, while resistances and weaknesses are identical between versions of the game, the actual potency of every party member's elemental resistance has been nerfed a bit. Originally party members carried a 90% reduction in damage to the element they resist, practically making them immune to said elements. This was toned down to a 50% reduction in Reload. Thirdly, everyone learns their better skills much more quickly in this version of the game, allowing them to function better in their assigned niches for the party and not be so quickly outclassed by the MC. Fourthly, the story related Personae upgrades for party members does something different in Reload, meaning that characters have full access to their skill lists prior to said events happening (Yukari is actually one of the bigger beneficiaries of this change, coincidentally enough). Fifthly, in FES/Portable you had no control over your party members' final skill list. FES/Portable automatically replaces weaker skills with their stronger variants, or replaces similar skills with what it considers to be better. Reload gives you full control over your party's skill lists, allowing you to keep "weaker" skills if you so desire (This doesn't matter much for Yukari, but it does matter for characters who learn Boost/Amp passives). Finally, Theurgy and Characteristics give additional considerations to be made when selecting someone to use in your party, as these attributes can wildly affect how good a specific character is in a given role.

Onto Yukari herself, Yukari got quite the glow-up in the transition to Reload. While she's still not one of my personal favorites to use, I never find myself yearning for someone else in her spot quite as often as I do in FES and Portable. While Yukari is still a fairly fragile character, she can now throw out much better damage with the addition of Theurgy, in addition to the damage formulas in Reload generally just allowing her to reach bigger numbers than she could in FES/Portable. She's also picked up some decent secondary skills to make her less singular in usage, with ailment options in Pulinpa and Poison Mist (the only the former is really all that useful most of the time) and better ailment curing options with things like Amrita Shower. Akihiko's debuffs have been spread among the party, with Yukari picking up the Sukunda line, which isn't great but can occasionally spare you some damage if your dodge luck is good. Yukari also breaks into her better healing options sooner in the early game, making Media not quite as useless as it is for her in FES/Portable, though her late game healing advancement is functionally pretty similar to how it used to be. Yukari also picks up Wind Amp at the end of her skill line, though to be honest it's so late in the game that even if you use Yukari the entire time, she's not liable to pick it up until the final block of Tartarus. I wouldn't rate it in relation to her damage potential for most of the game at all.

All said, Yukari is much more versatile and powerful in Reload, but that is also true for basically every other party member so she still has competition for her niche as team healer. In particular, the second dedicated healer of the game has hands down one of the most broken skills in the game, and Yukari's unique attributes in comparison to said character don't really stack. While Yukari does possess ailment healing that nobody else does, Reload unfortunately undercuts this attribute by expanding the shop stock of Aohige Pharmacy greatly, with multi-target status cures for every type of ailment in the game simply being sold. Having a good stock of those items invalidates the need for Amrita Shower entirely, especially since those can be used by everyone. Even past that, Club Escapade now sells an accessory that flatly makes you immune to all ailments. While it is expensive, having at least one on your fastest character and having them chuck a status cure item practically makes your entire team immune to ailments. Yukari's damage is good, but it's also not the best by any stretch and mostly gets by on the fact her Theurgy is very spammable for reasons we'll cover soon. Pulinpa is great early on, but falls off once you break into the big damage skills, and Poison Mist is just kind of bad. While Akihiko can't debuff-bot anymore, another character we'll get later picks up the ability to do so by the end of the game, also invalidating Yukari's Masukunda access. All that said though, she's way more usable in Reload and it's important to keep in mind that all these things I've mentioned don't become a major factor until the late-game. For most of the game, you really can't go wrong bringing Yukari, and she has a number of attributes described below that make her incredibly helpful until those factors come into play.

Characteristic and Theurgy

Once we get to spend time with Yukari at night, we can unlock her Characteristic. Yukari has one of the better ones in the game. After completing 3 night time hang out events of a single type (Yukari has DVDs and Cooking), Yukari will unlock the characteristic Healing Master. This characteristic halves the SP cost of Yukari's healing magic, both in and out of battle! This greatly extends Yukari's SP pool, as now her main function is vastly cheaper. Even better than that, completing an additional 3 hang outs for DVDs or Cooking upgrades it to Healing Apex which makes the reduction 75%! This is such a huge discount it borders on letting Yukari heal the party for free. Certainly, you'd need to be getting your ass beat constantly to ever have a chance of her running out of SP via healing. This ability to self-sustain is fantastically useful and is one of Yukari's big draws, as the other dedicated healer of the game has much less SP to work with and can easily run dry.

As for her Theurgy, Yukari's personality trait is unsurprisingly tied to healing. When healing someone, Yukari's Theurgy gauge charges up about an extra 20% (Only in battle though). With the gain she'll get naturally as her turn comes around, Yukari can get her Theurgy within a matter of 4 turns, or less if you can mix in One Mores and Shifts. This makes Yukari a pretty excellent damage dealer early on, as her Theurgy is among the strongest of the single-targeting ones and she has the means to spam it in longer fights. Like other aspects of Yukari, this does wane in impressiveness as others pick up damage dealing options that are as good or better, but luckily Yukari has another strong supporting option at her disposal through Theurgy! Every non-Protagonist party member has two Theurgies, with the second being unlocked via the story event that originally unlocked the rest of their skills in FES/Portable. These second Theurgies are varying degrees of powerful, and while Yukari's isn't the best by my estimation, it is interesting for team building. Let's go over her Theurgies in more detail.

Cyclone Arrow: Yukari's default Theurgy. It is a single target wind skill that pierces wind resistance. All non-almighty Theurgies bypass the corresponding resistance of their target save for the obviously beneficial weakness type, so I'll likely not bother to specify that going forward. Funnily enough, Cyclone Arrow actually has the same base power modifier as the standard Garudyne skill, but Theurgy skills use a character's ST and MA in equal measure to determine the final damage, so Yukari has functionally 50% more MA when using Cyclone Arrow. This is a good example of how Yukari is fantastic in the early game. It's going to be a long while before we have access to Garudyne, and having a skill that is even stronger than it and bypasses resistances is a huge boon for her. Additionally, it charges super quick so Yukari can easily lay out big numbers on a fairly regular basis on longer fights. With some wind boosting gear and properly timing your buffs, Yukari can easily outmatch anyone for single target damage for at least half the game. Cyclone Arrow definitely falls off late game as everyone gets access to better skills, but it's still not a bad thing to throw out when it comes up, especially if you're kitting Yukari for damage. If you want her to stick to support though,

Tranquility: Yukari's second Theurgy. It has a simple but beautiful effect. This skill applies the Concentrate (Aka Mind Charge) buff to the entire team. Now Mind Charge sucks massively in FES/Portable as it is a flat 2X multiplier to the next attack spell you cast, not really making it any better than casting the spell twice and it's often worse due to variance in damage rolls. Reload buffed the skill up to a 2.3X multiplier, meaning it's worth your time to actually up it. Even if that wasn't the case, having one person give up a turn to double the damage of everyone on the team is much more economical than having someone sacrifice a turn only to double their own damage. The main drawback of this skill is that... well in Reload physical attackers tend to do much better when it comes to big numbers. Most of the best damage dealers in the game use physical attacks, so slapping them with Concentrate obviously is of minimal benefit. That said, most characters do have some kind of powerful Magic based option at their disposal, so it's not impossible for this skill to be useful for people you wouldn't expect it to be. Certainly, Mitsuru and Akihiko like seeing this skill come out as it massively ramps up their own Theurgies. You have to build around this one, but you can have some pretty impressive burst turns roll around if you use it correctly.

In summation, Yukari got some key buffs in Reload that make her fantastic for the stages of the game where you have no choice but to use her, and she ends off being a not-spectacular but perfectly effective party member if you cater the team to her. Not my personal favorite, but it's definitely very fun to use her in a well built team.

Part 24 is out! After some miscellaneous clean up, another Full Moon operation commences. I've made reference to it in the past, but this is the point in the game where the Full Moon shadows not only become more complex than their PS2/PSP counterparts, they also become considerably tougher in all senses of the word. While the Tartarus bosses tend to be much easier in Reload, a lot of the Full Moon shadows can be surprisingly tricky and keep you on your toes just as much as the Tartarus bosses from FES/Portable do. Not that we can afford to completely underestimate them in FES or Portable, but I end up having much faster and cleaner clears of those fights than I do in Reload.

Extra Notes

In FES

-I do some quick and dirty fusion to prepare for the battles, settling on a Rakshasa as my preferred weapon of destruction for the bosses purely because he's a decent physical attacker who picks Getsu-ei due to our social link. If you gathered a bit more funds than I did, you can definitely turn around and fuse Rakshasa into something a bit more potent, though of course we're always going to be limited by our fusion level cap. Another worthwhile fusion to make is a High Pixie with Ice Boost if you can manage it, as she'll be powered up enough by our Priestess social link to learn Bufula, something both bosses can be hit with for good damage.

-Getsu-ei is a very situational skill, but at this stage of the game it can deal excellent damage for the Full Moon shadows. Later in the game, other physical skills will just be flatly superior to it regardless of the moon phase, so don't worry about always having it. Since I won't really have time to mention it elsewhere in FES or Portable, Zan-Ei is complete garbage. It's just not worthwhile to route your Tartarus excursions around it, being that it's only a decent single target attack when it has its New Moon bonus.

-Hierophant is fairly vanilla in this game, mostly just focusing on Yukari's Elec weakness, which you have no direct way to cover at this stage of the game. He's pretty weak on the whole though, so as long as you Tarunda him and keep up the pressure, he should go down pretty quick. Lovers is a bit more tricky, just due to the fact that if your Protag gets charmed you're at the mercy of the RNG for what happens after that. With the huge HP buffer I gave myself though, I was able to win pretty easily through conventional tactics.

-Speaking of tactics, we get the Full Assault tactic! This is the main tactic you'll be setting your damage dealers to going forward, as it heavily discourages them from doing anything that isn't going to result in damage (with one unfortunate exception regarding some pretty junky skills that get learned later). If you want to use Mitsuru, definitely lock her into this tactic for the foreseeable future.

In Portable

-I splurge a little and use my accumulated Onyx to upgrade some of the Personae I had, Hua Po and Ares being the ones I go with. Now Hua Po I invested only a little into, since she's not going to be a long term fixture of my stock. As far as the primary elemental magics go, there are very particular Personae you want to focus on when it comes to feeding them stat boosters. Ares on the other hand, I'll probably just farm up more Onyx when I have the chance and continue bolstering his ST. This isn't worth doing in FES because a Persona is stuck with the skills it has forever once created, and it's not worth doing in Reload due to the way stat boosters were retooled plus the revamped skill card system, but in Portable I can just skill card anything a physical attacker could want on to Ares and be fine. We've just hit the level to fuse something that will pop out a Gale Slash card for us to customize him with, and I just need a Resist Wind card from the Antique Shop to patch out his sole weakness. So yeah, we'll be seeing a lot of Ares going forward just because I realized on the fly I could make a decent physical sweeper out of him.

-Hang onto some Amethyst and pick up some Cadenzas in this version. I foolishly gave up all my Amethyst to maximize Ares' ST, which wasn't the best move I could have made. Cadenza will be the best multi-target healing we'll have for quite some time, so always be sure to have a few on hand for tough fights.

-Going forward in P3P, I'll be using the all ladies team as my go to just cause that seems like it'd be fun. This is about the worst team combo in the game for reasons we'll get into later, but it'll make things interesting at least. Mitsuru wasn't used at all last Tartarus excursion, so she mostly just sat around in the fights and acted as a punching bag. At least she can use items in this version, which is a way characters can cover for their deficiencies when their primary function isn't worth much.

-Hierophant in this version has a much bigger emphasis on hitting your party with Fear. Between that and Yukari's Elec weakness creating problems, it's best to just have Yukari guard the entire fight and then Me Patra Gem the party when Fear gets applied to everyone. Lovers is about the same in this version of the game, with the main thing to worry about being that they get One More off of Maragion now if Mitsuru is in the party.

In Reload

-The Aohige Pharmacy has multi-target healing items on sale, and they're quite a bit better than Media, if pricey. If you have the spare money, these are definitely a good pick up, as its healing support anyone can use.

-Hierophant has been retooled into a Light caster while still retaining his emphasis on the Fear status that he had in Portable. We currently can't buy Me Patra gem replicas in this version of the game, but thankfully it seems like his party-wide Fear attack is programmed to always miss the Protag, so it's just a lost round of combat with having to use single target cures. At least we don't have to worry about Yukari's elec weakness in this version!

-Lovers is much more dangerous in this version, with AOE charm skills and their fire magic dealing considerably more damage. I brought Mitsuru just as a fun way to challenge myself, but I may have gotten more than I bargained for as she proved to be a huge liability in this fight, even if she could bolster our damage with Rakunda and lay out some big numbers of her own. Make sure you have a good supply of charm cures for this fight, and definitely bring Junpei over Mitsuru instead!

-You'll notice with both the bosses, they got a serious durability bump in Reload. Going forward, every boss will have way more HP than they do in FES and Portable, so if you have a poorly constructed offense you'll definitely be slogging through these fights for awhile! Fortunately, we're at the stage of the game where I can start cooking up some serious bruisers for the Protag's Personae and we're just about to get access to an avenue for pumping up our party members' damage, so I should be able to beat the succeeding Full Moon bosses a bit more quickly than I did in this video.

Supplemental: Junpei Iori Reload



"Heh heh, Perfecto!

Skills

Power Slash: Starts With
Agi: Level 4
Bash: Level 6
Rakukaja: Level 9
Vacuum Slash: Level 13
Counter: Level 16
Assault Dive: Level 18
Maragi: Level 22
Torrent Shot: Level 25
Agilao: Level 29
Counterstrike: Level 33
Fire Break: Level 36
Blade of Fury: Level 40
Shift Boost: Level 44
Gigantic Fist: Level 47
Marakukaja: Level 51
Deathbound: Level 54
High Counter: Level 57
Vile Assault: Level 60
Agidyne: Level 64
Regenerate 3: Level 67
Brave Blade: Level 71
Vorpal Blade: Level 75

Hoo boy. Junpei was already one of my favorite party members in the original games due to his reliability and ease of use, but Reload cranks him up to the stratosphere and makes him legitimately great. The funny thing is, just looking at his skill list, Junpei only got very minor changes, most notably picking up Vacuum Slash (AKA Gale Slash) at level 13, while getting a smattering of variably useful new skills. Shift Boost is whatever while Vile Assault is pretty great. Junpei's unique Spring of Life passive has been phased out and replaced with the inferior Regenerate 3 while Marakukaja is pushed back a little bit. So what makes Junpei so great? Well the most basic thing is mechanical updates. Physical attacks are much more potent across the entire game in Reload, and having access to a fairly strong AoE in Vacuum Slash really brings Junpei to the forefront in damage with his sky high ST. What's more, he gains new utility in the Shift mechanic allowing him to use his Fire skills to pass his turn off and still retains his decent utility in being a go-to buffer for the party's defense. Unlike FES and Portable, he also maintains the ability to cover all physical types as he isn't forced into phasing out Torrent Shot and actually picks up a very good upgrade for it in Vile Assault. Once Junpei has that skill, there's basically never any reason to do an All-Out Attack on a single target ever again as the 50% bonus that skill gets against downed enemies plus Junpei's own exemplary ST results in way more damage.

While there are other physical specialists who join the party, Junpei's own unique traits and frankly outright dominance in the role means that he's never really in serious competition with them. Junpei has all the skills a physical attacker could want and the stats to back that skill list up, meaning there's basically never a wrong time to have him. Rarely will you ever come across enemies that no-sell all physical types, and Junpei has options later on to circumvent that problem should it arise. It's not at all difficult to have Junpei locked in the party the whole game and it would likely make the goings much easier as he breaks into his better skills faster when reaping all that EXP. But everything I've mentioned so far merely places Junpei at very good. What really takes him over the top is

Characteristic and Theurgy

You can spend time at night either Gardening or Reading with Junpei when the opportunities arise, and after 3 hang outs for a specific activity Junpei will unlock the Critical Boost characteristic. This characteristic is amazing, giving a flatly additive 5% bonus to Junpei's crit rate (Excellent for his newly acquired Vacuum Slash!) AND it boosts his critical damage by an extra 1.2X multiplier! So Junpei crits more often now and for bigger damage, fantastic! Should you fulfill the next 3 hangouts, Critical Boost upgrades to Critical Amp, giving an additive 10% bonus to Junpei's crit rate and an additional 1.4X damage multiplier. Fun fact, if you combine this with the similarly named Critical Rate Amp passive and the Apt Pupil passive, Junpei's base crit rate before running any critical calculations will be 50%! Given that Junpei already gravitates towards high crit physical moves and he has the highest ST stat in the game even before adding in incenses, it's hard to overstate just how busted this characteristic is. It's the big reason why the other physical attackers have a hard time keeping pace with Junpei, they just don't get the same kind of free bonus that he does.

Moving onto Theurgy, guess what Junpei's condition for building extra gauge is? When Junpei lands a crit, he gets a nice big boost to his Theurgy gauge, just a bit behind what Yukari usually gets. Now early on, this isn't too great since it'll be awhile before he can break into his true crit-god final form, but late game he'll be able to pop off with his Theurgy just as, if not more often than Yukari since he can get multiple crits per turn if you stick to single target attacks with One More. As for Junpei's Theurgies themselves, he does quite well here!

Hack n' Blast: Anyone else have a really bad time with misreading this as "Hades Blast"? Anyway, Hack n' Blast is pretty stellar as far as first Theurgies go. It is a single target slash skill with a, you guessed it, boosted crit rate. Its base power is the second highest of the default Theurgies in the game (Which is something of a technicality, it is otherwise the strongest) and it's actually stronger or equal to a handful of Second Theurgies! Like Junpei's crit focus in general, it might not seem super impressive early on, but once Junpei comes online it moves into position as one of the most dominant attacks in the game. With enough damage multipliers stacked, Hack n' Blast has by far the easiest time hitting 4 figure damage against enemies even if you haven't already downed them, and it can easily secure a One More for Junpei to lay out even more hurt in situations where no one else could hope to get the same. As a Single Target Skill, it's not always a perfect solution to all life's problems, but most noteworthy fights in the game do have you against one opponent so the situations where you'd feel that way are slim pickings. And even then, it's a consistent way to just delete one target, so it still has plenty value there.

Blaze of Life: Now this is a weird one. This is a single target Fire skill that heals Junpei to full when used. Its power value is nearly double that of Hack n' Blast, but as a Fire based skill it goes against Junpei's main focus and cannot score a crit. It's important to reiterate that Theurgies use your ST and MA in equal measure to determine their final damage, so this being a Fire skill does not run afoul of Junpei's normal stat distribution. On its own, this skill is of somewhat questionable use, but there is an interesting alternative Junpei build you could use to take advantage of this. By stacking equipment that gives Fire Boost and Fire Amp to Junpei, you can really ratchet up the damage this skill deals. Fuuka's upgraded Oracle can give the entire party Charge+Concentrate, so it's not impossible to have Junpei do some like fire off a Charged Brave Blade, down the enemy, and then nail them with a boosted up Concentrated Blaze of Life for gonzo damage. The big problem with this is that Junpei really wants to stack up on the crit boosting equipment to get more consistency out of his Characteristic, and unfortunately this is mutually exclusive with Fire Boost+Fire Amp. What's more, those skills really do nothing for Junpei outside of Blaze of Life since his MA is normally so low. Funneling MA incenses into Junpei can offset this quite a bit, but really I think you should just focus on gearing towards crits and treat this Theurgy as an occasional novelty when you're already winning a fight convincingly. Oh and the full heal just kind of a silly perk that has story significance we're a long way off from.

Like I said, Junpei is just great in this game. If damage dealing is the only factor we're considering, he may very well just be the best party member in the game. Critical Amp takes him beyond the pale, and in general he just has some of the best distributed stats in the game. He's a great damage dealer, he's very durable, and he even has a decent team support ability! I could very easily keep Junpei locked in the party for the whole game, but I'll rotate him out to keep things fresh and interesting. If effectiveness was all I cared about though, Junpei would always be one of my first picks in Reload.

We've wrapped up Arqa and 2 full moons, so I think it's time for another compilation and breakdown of the bosses we have seen thus far! Fights are getting a fair deal more complex at this stage of the game, but in turn we're also getting a wider array of options to combat them with. We're transitioning into Persona 3's mid-game, and this is probably my favorite section of the game in terms of battle strategy. Early game fights tend to only have one real solution to them that often involves some level of RNG in the execution (at least on the Hard modes), while late game fights simply cannot stand up to the numerous powerful options you have at your disposal, leading to repetitive dominant strategies a lot of the time. The mid-game has a lot of fun and variable options with tough fights that make it fun to explore the different ways you can approach things and still come out on top. One other thing to note is that at this point in Reload, the bosses get a serious durability bump so even though a lot of the fights can be easier, they can take a lot longer due to there being a lot more HP to chew through. We're really going to want to start hyper-optimizing our team going forward if we want to spend less than an eternity on these fights! Onto the rankings.

Will 'o Wisp Raven+Lightning Eagles<FES Crying Tables=Portable Crying Tables<Heretic Magus, Grievous Tables, Slaughter Twins Disturbing Dice

It'll be awhile before the Tartarus bosses become interesting in Reload again, and usually it's tied to content that simply didn't exist in FES/Portable. There's really not much to say about the Will o' Wisp Raven and the Lightning Eagles, just blast em with their weaknesses and go with your strongest option when they're downed. I play this fight pretty sloppy, it ultimately would be much better to Shift to Junpei when they're down to uncork a Vacuum Slash, but these guys don't hit hard enough for it to be super critical that you play cleanly. Note that I did all of the Tartarus fights for the third full moon cycle sans Akihiko, so I had an extra challenge to contend with there, but it only mattered for a couple of the fights. Not that the Crying Tables are that much better, but they do hit hard enough that an unfortunate turn order can result in a perilous fight. I had a tougher time in FES, but that was purely because I had Jack Frost instead of Yomotsu-Shikome. With her in play, we can blast off with some decently powerful ice skills and then just delay the turn order until we can finish with a strong All-Out Attack. The fight is short enough in Portable that you can do something similar with the dizzy status. Since we don't have anyone directly weak to these guys, it's one of the simpler Tartarus bosses we've had to deal with. Fortunately, Reload makes things interesting by slotting in some additional bosses with a gimmick: Continuous boss floors with no chance for a break! Now the Heretic Magus and Grievous Tables are essentially just a remixed Crying Tables fight, so there's not much to say there beyond needing more elemental coverage. The Slaughter Twins and Disturbing Dice, on the other hand, can really ruin your day if they land unfortunate crits. This is where Akihiko's absence hurt the most, but thankfully Junpei's Vacuum Slash came in clutch and I avoided any serious disasters when the Protag got critted. Just a quick sneak peak of Junpei's Full potential!

Clairvoyant Relic<<<<<<Portable Change Relic<FES Change Relic

The Clairvoyant Relic is a pure puzzle boss. It does the same thing in the same order every single time, meaning once you realize that the fight is essentially unlosable. It is very slow and boring, though it's kind of cool the first time you fight it if you figure out what it's doing. The Change Relic on the other hand is a doozy. These single tough enemy bosses are among the most notorious of the Tartarus bosses featured in FES and Portable, and Change Relic is good preview as to why. Obnoxious ailment skills, durable as all get out, and devastating magic. You need to come into this fight with some counters prepared or you're going to have a miserable time. Portable is easier for a couple reasons, one being the fact you're almost guaranteed to have a slight level advantage coming into this fight, and the other being that Junpei can simply hole up with his guard and provide some extra assistance with All-Out Attacks. Junpei is far too much of a liability in FES and will more than likely spend most of the fight on his ass, so it just isn't worth bringing him. Another problem we have is that Cadenza can easily fail us due to the low EN of the Personae we use it with, leaving the protagonist extremely vulnerable. Fortunately, applying Tarunda and making sure I had something sturdier equipped the turn it expires made the fight a perilous, but relatively manageable affair. The more crits you get, the faster this fight will move along, and I got a decent number of them on the successful attempt.

FES Emperor & Empress<Portable Emperor & Empress< Reload Emperor & Empress

Once again, Reload has the much more difficult Full Moon bosses, which will be the trend for all but one Full Moon operation (and the reason for that is a bad one). If you know the trick in FES and Portable, you can easily win on the first round like I did. Emperor is weak to all magic save light and dark while Empress is vulnerable to all physical types. You can easily cook them with All Out Attacks on the first turn, making this the easiest fight in the game. Should the fight go on long enough, they'll swap their weaknesses but you're not liable to ever see that once you figure out what's going on. The only reason I rated Portable higher is that we don't have Enhancers at this point, so I can't secure the gonzo All Out Attack damage I got in FES. Reload makes this fight way more complicated, with the Emperor and Empress only having one weakness while nullifying everything else, and they switch these around more regularly. All Out Attacks are also complete ass in Reload, so they're of less help to us here. This is quite an effective tutorial for the uses of Fuuka in this version, and the bosses themselves can hit quite hard. Definitely make sure to have your debuffs lined up, not using Akihiko at all up to this point made the fight much harder than it would be for most people.

FES Golden Beetles<Servant Tower+Enslaved Cupids & Lascivious Lady+Profligate Gigas<Portable Golden Beetles

I played FES Golden Beetles way safer than I needed to. With the better equipment at our disposal and all the Auto-Tarukaja we had applied, I could have easily won this fight on the first action. I was likely getting it mixed up with Portable, which more than doubles the health of each Beetle and we need to apply the dizzy status judiciously to keep too many of the beetles from attacking us at once. One thing you can do if you have the items for it is use Dekaja rocks. The beetles will always re-up their Tarukaja if they don't have it in effect, and you can use that as another means to get them to waste turns. Now that we have Theurgy in Reload, the next few Tartarus bosses can be trivialized by just unloading them in rapid succession. The Servant Tower and his cupids gave me a little trouble due to sloppy play, but Lascivious Lady and her Hulk Hogoons didn't stand a chance.

Fleetfooted Cavalry<FES Intrepid Knight<Portable Intrepid Knight

Fleetfooted Cavalry lasts a bit longer than Lascivious Lady, but with the debuffs in play and Theurgy ripping through huge chunks of his health, he never really stood a chance. It is cool to feel this powerful! You might think it's weird I rated Portable Intrepid Knight as harder than FES Intrepid Knight since the latter was the much longer and more involved fight. Make no mistake, my win over the Portable Knight had a huge stroke of luck in inflicting Rage on him torpedoing his defense. If that hadn't happened (and I have no idea how consistent it is) I'd have a very arduous battle ahead of me. Had I remembered to stock up on Cadenza, we still have a very limited supply of it compared to endless supply we have in FES and this guy would have burned through all of it. But I got lucky and Enraged him, making the whole thing a matter of course. I had a lot of fun with the FES fight, it was cool to come up with some specific counterplay revolving around the tools I had, and I think mixing Dodge Wind with Cadenza was a cool game plan. The best part was that it wasn't a straight guarantee, and I did have to keep myself focused on what I was doing to make sure no disasters happened. Cool fight, one of the best ones in the game so far!

FES Hierophant<Portable Hierophant<Reload Hierophant

I actually consider these fights to be pretty close in difficulty, but if I had to say which was the hardest I probably would order them like that. FES Hierophant doesn't really do anything too fancy, he exploits an obvious weakness and otherwise launches out wimpy physical attacks. Tarunda makes the fight a lock. Portable spices things up by adding AoE fear to his arsenal... but now you can also buy Me Patra gems and completely no-sell it. You're going to be having Yukari guard to cover her weakness anyway, so she'll also dodge the Fear and be in position to purge it from the party. Reload Hierophant no longer has Elec, and has the poor fortune to be using Light when one of my strongest Personae is immune to it, so I was in an even better position defensively compared to the massive HP I had in FES. The AoE fear is a bit more of a problem here since we can't just buy an AoE cure to counteract it, but since the protagonist usually dodges it anyway it ultimately just amounts to a turn of lost damage. As is the norm, Hierophant is a lot sturdier in Reload, and there's only so much at this stage of the game I can do to make these fights go faster. All things consider, I think I did pretty well!

FES Lovers<Portable Lovers<Reload Lovers

FES Lovers was a complete joke, I brought the ideal team to completely stomp it and it never even charmed anyone once. Portable had the millstone of Mitsuru to contend with, but otherwise was a similar affair that wrapped up even faster due to my overpowered Ares. The only reason I rate it harder it because of the potential for stray crits, which creates a huge chance for you being randomly screwed over if the FemC gets nailed. Reload Lovers was an unmitigated disaster. Not only is she even more bulky than Hierophant (with a mid-battle heal too!), Mitsuru's fire weakness created a huge headache. I could have saved 5 minutes by bringing Junpei instead, but I thought it'd be narratively appropriate to leave him behind. That's what I get for playing in character! Sexy Dance is also a brutal thing to have to deal with at this stage of the game, though thankfully the big attack that follows it up does at least purge the Charm from anyone afflicted. I definitely could have done this cleaner, but even then it's still a much more harrowing fight than the older versions.

Not a real update (though I'll probably be writing up the Akihiko Reload post later tonight), but I did have a handful of gameplay things relevant to Reload that I though were worth sharing. I recently found a guide on the Steam community page for Reload that has helpfully compiled the nitty-gritty under-the-hood aspects of Persona 3 Reload's damage calculations and other battle mechanics. Some of these also apply to FES/Portable and run counter to some of the things I thought I knew, so I wanted to highlight some of the cooler ones! We haven't had too many mechanics posts relating to Reload specifically, so this should be a fun change of pace.

-Passive Damage Modifiers in Persona 3 are multiplicative rather than additive. I had always assumed that passives such as Ice Boost and Ice Amp were flatly additive with each other (e.g. 25%+50% gets you a 75% bonus to Ice Damage), but they actually stack multiplicatively meaning it's 1.25X1.5=1.875. It's easy to miss this in FES since there's only one singular Persona in the game that can throw in an extra multiplier to increase magic damage (and the only physical boosting passives are Weapon Masteries) and the difference between 1.75X and 1.875X is fairly negligible, but Reload introduces a ton of additional passives that increase damage even further. This is handy to know because it means passive damage bonuses have the opposite of diminishing returns: the more you stack the more effective they become! Reload actually has a cap on how many multipliers you can stack to keep things from getting too crazy, though it's a ridiculously high cap. If the amount of passive damage bonuses you have exceeds 5X, the final bonus will be sanded down to 5X. That's still a ridiculous amount of bonus damage if you can achieve it.

-Only the Protagonist's weapon is considered when determining the damage of an All-Out Attack in Persona 3 Reload. The only effect Party Members have is their presence. Specifically, the base attack power of an All-Out Attack is half the attack power of the Protagonist's equipped weapon. Party members could all be rocking 1 power weapons and it would not reduce the damage of the All-Out Attack at all, nor would it matter if they had 450 weapons. This goes a long way for explaining why All-Out Attacks suck balls in Persona 3 Reload, and presumably the same system was used in Persona 5 because they were similarly terrible there as well. This means party members have literally no reason to care about their weapons outside of the ability they convey. As for the Protagonist, if you're trying to trigger as many Shuffle Times as possible for farming purposes, you'll want to keep a high attack power weapon on hand to maximize your All-Out Attack damage.

-Crit rate bonuses flatly add to the chance of a crit happening, with the exception of the Apt Pupil skill which doubles your base crit rate after it's been determined. Your basic crit rate is (LU+50)/(Enemy LU+50) with the result multiplied by the crit modifier of the attack/skill (which defaults to 3 if the skill or attack does not have a crit modifier) and then the final number is rounded down. So say Junpei has 27 LU and is attacking an enemy that has 10 LU with Vacuum Slash which has a crit mod of 8. The result of this would be about 10.27, which is rounded down to a base crit rate of 10%. Say Junpei had an accessory that conveyed the Apt Pupil skill, his base crit rate would then become 20. If he has his unique Critical Amp passive as well as the Crit Rate Amp Passive (which add 10 and 15 to the base crit rate after Apt Pupil is applied respectively), Junpei would have a cool 45% chance of scoring a critical hit! Most late game skills have crit rate mods in the range of 15-20, so any crit focused character can have more than a coin flip's chance of scoring as crit when geared up properly. I believe it also works this way in FES/Portable, but again you have less avenues for stacking this many passive buffs together in those games. Note that the Rebellion and Revolution skills actually provide distinct crit rate buffs and can be stacked with each other.

-Sukukaja has a hidden secondary effect: It increases the odds that multi-hit skills will hit the maximum number of times. Sukunda also does the reverse and lowers the odds of multi-hit skills hitting for more than their minimum, though obviously that is unhelpful for your offense. (Might be worth keeping in mind for enemies that makes heavy use of multi-hit skills though) I'm pretty sure this is not a thing in FES/Portable. It may have been a thing in Persona 5, but multi-hit skills were unreal levels of broken to begin with in that game so it hardly matters anyway. This is one of those things that now that I know it, it's probably going to change the way I play the game later on down the line. For instance, any skill that hits 1-2 times normally only has a 50% chance of landing 2 hits on the target. With Sukukaja in effect, these odds are a much better 70.7% chance, which obviously is much more damage on average. This is good to know for skills like Akasha Arts, which deal phenomenal damage if they hit twice, but less than technically weaker skills if they only hit once. Skills that have high hit ranges like Tempest Slash with 1-4 hits will average 3 hits per use with Sukukaja in play, making them much more consistent than they are normally. There are several party members that enjoy this bonus, and it'll be fun to play around with it once they are available. Here's the table with all the odds depending on if Sukunda/Sukukaja are or are not in play:



Knowing all this now, I'm super eager to progress in the game and really start cooking up some powerful team comps. I've been waiting for this!

Supplemental: Akihiko Sanada Reload



"Doesn't look like we'll be needing a 10-count!"

Skills

Dia, Sonic Punch, Zio and Mazio: Starts With
Tarunda: Level 15
Shock Boost: Level 17
Sukukaja: Level 21
Diarama: Level 24
Zionga: Level 28
Elec Boost: Level 32
Elec Break: Leel 35
Gigantic Fist: Level 39
Mazionga: Level 42
Matarunda: Level 46
Masukukaja: Level 50
Ziodyne: Level 54
Diarahan: Level 58
Evade Ice: Level 62
Maziodyne: Level 67
God's Hand: Level 72
Elec Amp: Level 75

The first and most obvious difference with Akihiko in Reload is that he is no longer the de-facto debuff bot (Though he does keep Tarunda, which if there was one debuff I had to choose for him to keep that would absolutely be it). In exchange, he picks up the semi-useful ability to (Ma)Sukukaja the party and Fist Mastery is subbed out for more potent Strike skills. Another decent pick up is Evade Ice, which synergizes nicely with his readily available access to Sukukaja. Shock Boost isn't too good with elec magic on its own, but it does have its uses later. Beyond that, Akihiko is very similar to how he is in FES and Portable... and that's kind of his big problem. Akihiko has ST and MA in equal measure, but characters like Yukari and Junpei have been significantly beefed up in their offensive prowess. Characters who join later have also received considerable buffs making Akihiko seems less like a jack-of-all trades and more like a master of none. Akihiko's lack of a clear specialization makes him pretty undesirable to work into a party as someone will always be better than him in a specific area, and with a party size of 4 it's very easy to have a specialist for every area in the group. I was not at all a big fan of Akihiko in Reload...

...at first. While I still think he's pretty lousy early on, Akihiko is very much a late bloomer in Reload. His unique traits make him extremely powerful in the end game, and his ability to flex onto a variety of roles in tense situations can allow him to diffuse some serious problems at a moment's notice. While he does have some flaws such as weak Theurgies and sub-par team support, he can be a very reliable damage dealer with the right team comps. It's hard to explain why without getting into his Reload-exclusive mechanics, so

Characteristic and Theurgy

On certain evenings, you can spend time with Akihiko either watching DVDs or Cooking. After participating in either of those activities with him 3 times, Akihiko will gain the Buff Boost Characteristic. This passive increases the effect of buffs applied to Akihiko by an additional 1.1X times. All buffs boost their relevant stat by 1.4X, so with Buff Boost in effect Tarukaja would boost Akihiko's damage by 1.54X. Not too sizable a boost, especially in the early game. Where this Characteristic starts cooking is when you complete all 6 hang outs, at which point if upgrades to Buff Amp which increases the effectiveness of buffs by 1.3X! For those who don't want to bust out a calculator, that means that buffs increase their relevant stat by a factor of 1.84X once Buff Amp comes into play. If you convert that into a percentage, that means Akihiko goes from getting a 40% bonus to an 84% bonus from buffs, more than double the effect! That is actually pretty significant, and since buffs are the cornerstone of good strategy in Persona games, this is a powerful unique trait for Akihiko to have. This is the big reason Akihiko is a late bloomer. Buff Amp takes time to unlock, but once it does, it provides ever increasing benefit to Akihiko as he breaks into higher skills. Other characters may be capable of more damage than Akihiko still, but remember that Akihiko gets insane levels of extra defense from Rakukaja and absurd evasion from Sukukaja (especially when paired with Evade Ice). This makes Akihiko a very dependable anchor for the team, and he can put in great work with Elec Boost+Amp Ziodyne and God's Hand.

The fun keeps going with Akihiko's Theurgy, which increases in relation to him being buffed. The game words this very confusingly, but Akihiko's bonus charge condition is very straight forward. He gains extra gauge when a buff is applied to him, as well as gaining extra gauge when he begins a turn with a buff in effect. This is a very easy condition to fulfill, so it's one of the weaker charge effects in the game. Still, Akihiko tends to get his Theurgy around every 6-7 turns, so he can fire it off at least a couple times in a protracted battle, particularly once you get access to Multi-targeting buffs and can more easily boost up the party. The more problematic thing with Akihiko's Theurgy is, funnily enough, the Theurgies themselves which are quite weak.

Lightning Spike: This is notable for being the only multi-targeting Theurgy you have access to starting out aside from Jack Brothers. Lightning Spike hits all enemies for Elec damage with a 20% base chance of shock being inflicted, which sadly is actually double the chance that most normal Elec skills have. That all sounds pretty good, but the big problem with this Theurgy? It is absurdly weak. It has the same base power as Zionga, though keep in mind the Theurgy damage formula makes that power value go a lot further than Zionga can. This is one of the boons of Akihiko having near equal ST and MA as it gives his Theurgies a bit more punching power than they'd have otherwise. Starting out though, it's not hard to see this attack as underwhelming since it doesn't really notch impressive numbers until Akihiko has Elec Boost and Buff Boost/Amp in play. Still, it's pretty good for Strong Shadow encounters or Tartarus mob bosses. Just keep in mind it'll come across as pretty weak starting out.

Electric Onslaught: This attack is a single target Elec skill that carries a ludicrous 80% chance of inflicting shock. Shock boost increases the chance of Shock landing by 50% after running the base chance calculation, so Electric Onslaught is basically guaranteed Shock on anything not heavily resistant to or outright immune to that status. Pretty cool, though once again it has to contend with being fairly weak compared to other Theurgies. Its base power is only double that of Lightning Spike, which actually puts it below a few tier 1 Theurgies in raw punching power. That's not that big of a deal though because by the time you get this, you'll more than likely have Buff Amp online plus Elec Boost to further bolster the damage. Now most big boss battles will carry the requisite immunity to Shock in Reload, but there are many less important boss battles that do not have the luxury of Shock immunity, and Electric Onslaught can be used to set up some serious wombo-combos in those cases. It doesn't quite satisfy that part of my brain that lights up when big numbers fly on screen, but Akihiko can use it pretty regularly with the decent rate his Theurgy charges at.

Now I still think Akihiko is pretty bad in the early game. His damage is just too low and his support abilities outside of Tarunda are just too underwhelming. Junpei brings more physical damage to the table, Yukari and especially Mitsuru bring way more magic damage to the table, Yukari brings better (and cheaper!) healing and there are several party members who have yet to join who can supplant Akihiko's more unique traits while also being much more versatile. Buff Amp is what really swings things for Akihiko, getting double the effect out of buffs is just insanely good, and stacking Elec Boost+Amp and having God's Hand in the end game gives him very reliable and respectable damage. I won't use him too much once I have the option to drop him most likely, but fortunately Reload introduces a way for us to immediately get him caught up with the rest of the party on levels once he gets the better parts of his kit unlocked.

We cleared another full moon, so it's time once again to see the version of Persona 3 that started it all! Beginning gameplay in about 15 minutes.



Interesting Things I Learned This Stream!

-The early game Personae stock is a like a weird uncanny valley version of what I'm used to. Slime doesn't exist and Legion is level 12 (Very interestingly with a skill list almost identical to FES/Portable making him much stronger relative to when he's available as an actual Persona), Rakshasa also does not exist and instead Valkyrie picks up Getsu-ei as her final skill while Titan is level 21. High Pixie doesn't exist either and Sarasvati is a much lower level at 18 instead of the 27 she's at in FES/Portable.

-You can cap your social stats ridiculously fast in this version of the game, which is kind of shocking considering the lack of the Arcade. In the span of the third moon cycle, I capped both Charm and Courage, and Academics is way ahead of where I'm at in FES/Portable due to the ability to get a free boost every day off the Offertory box. I don't know if I'll be able to hit Rank 5 Academics before the Summer exams, but I will definitely have Academics capped way sooner than when it'll cap in any other version of the game.

-Many of the social links develop much more slowly in this game. Not only do we regularly need to accept phone calls and give good answers on dates to keep Social Links moving along quickly, some social links just go slow with no possibility of making them go faster. In particular, Emperor is one of the slowest links in this version as it regularly has meetings that yield no points but still have a point requirement to get another rank up. Emperor also progresses at the same speed no matter what since you can't schedule dates for it and having a matching Persona never gives you enough extra points to clear rank up thresholds. Not once will you ever need a Emperor Persona to keep the Emperor social link moving at its fastest possible rate.

-Related to the previous point, because we so frequently need to lock down Sunday for dates, there has been basically no chance to use Tanaka's Amazing Commodities thus far. Links like Hermit are also pretty slow going as we've seldom had free days to give any attention to it.

-The relative difficulty of this game has been pretty interesting so far. While enemies don't hit nearly as hard as they do in FES Hard and especially Portable Maniac, my equipment options are decidedly crappier in this version of the game and I've had less tools to work with, resulting in some interesting on the fly improvisations. I was able to eke out a Level 19 win against the Intrepid Knight due to an interesting double acquisition of Wind Break through a random skill change and a Magic Mirror in a rare chest. Pretty cool, but I'm definitely feeling the weaker All-Out Attacks. Auto Team Buffs are going to be critical in this version of the game!

-Elizabeth occasionally gives quests to secure vendor trash items in this version, in this case she gave us a quest to procure a Shadow Shard. She also gave it to us a Full Moon cycle before we can actually reach the relevant floor for it... for some reason. Incidentally, the Scrub Brush she gives was shuffled around to a different request since this request was axed for FES. The vendor trash items can still be found in FES and Portable though.

-Requests in general are less of a scheduling concern, as the only time sensitive ones are the Tartarus specific ones in this version. A lot of the rewards are still the same as they are in FES, which is relatively more useful here due to our lacking of Weapon Fusion and Be Blue V not selling nearly as many accessories.

-Speaking of, the HP and SP boosting accessories are also new additions from FES. Low HP has been something of a concern across multiple fights so far, so things with high EN are much more valuable in this version of the game.

-Since we can't fuse weapons and equipment RNG is much less reliable, in addition to less equipment just being handed out by Elizabeth, Officer Kurosawa actually provides a pretty useful service in this version by just selling you crap. What a concept!

-Gems seem to be both rarer and much more erratically distributed in this version. I wasn't able to get anything new from the Antique Shop at all after an hour and a half of Tartarus gameplay, which is rather unfortunate. There's still some very useful things there, in spite of the lesser stock compared to FES.

-We've already hit the point where there is legitimately nothing to do at night sometimes. We seldom need to go to Tartarus, Charm and Courage are capped and we can study regardless of what we do, the Arcade does nothing, I haven't unlocked Tanaka in this version yet, so on and so forth. Mutatsu is available Thurs-Sun but that link will wrap up in a hurry so there will be many nights as early as August where I just immediately check the sign in sheet and go to sleep over doing anything.

Supplemental: Mitsuru Kirijo Reload



"C'est Magnifique!"

Skills

Bufu, Mabufu, Rakunda and Marin Karin: Starts With
Bufula: Level 21
Eerie Sound: Level 24
Fatal End: Level 27
Spirit Drain: Level 30
Ice Break: Level 33
Tentarafoo: Level 35
Mabufula: Level 38
Ice Boost: Level 41
Neuro Slash: Level 44
Freeze Boost: Level 51
Concentrate: Level 55
Marakunda: Level 59
Ailment Boost: Level 63
Mabufudyne: Level 67
Diamond Dust: Level 73

Mitsuru is like Akihiko and got fairly minor changes in the transition to Reload, though the changes Mitsuru did get are more in line with outright buffs when it comes to her core kit. Her single target healing has been jettisoned (no skin off my nose, personally) and in exchange she's become much more potent in debuffing the opposition via status ailments as well as having Rakunda to beef up your outgoing damage. While Mitsuru had ailment skills in older versions of the game, they were notoriously unreliable and tended to be dead slots in her skill list, as well just not being a huge focus of her kit. Not only are ailments better in this game, Mitsuru gets much better options with them such as the extremely useful Eerie Sound and decently useful Neuro Slash (Which can inflict Panic). Even early on, Marin Karin is a pretty solid crowd control option. She also picks up Ailment Boost late game to make these skills even more consistent, as well as Freeze Boost which is great because the Freeze status has been heavily buffed in this game. One notable omission is Ice Amp, but that's a little misleading: Mitsuru's ultimate weapon conveys the Ice Amp ability so she's liable to have unrestricted access to it around the same time Akihiko and Yukari get their Amp abilities. The rebranded Mind Charge, Concentrate, is also actually worth using in this game as it boosts your next attack by 2.3X rather than 2X and Diamond Dust (AKA Nifelheim) is a pretty solid pick up considering it has nearly triple the power of Bufudyne.

All in all, it seems like Mitsuru got some serious love in the transition to Reload and she looks very impressive on paper. But how good is she really? Mitsuru is definitely great during exploration, she has excellent damage against the mobs of Shadows and her ailments give her great crowd control. But in big boss battles her ailment skills are essentially bricks in her load out (Which is quite bad since Full Moon bosses are considerably more badass in Reload) and her big damage option doesn't come online until very late in the game much like Yukari. What's more, Mitsuru is not the only character to be the recipient of some serious buffs and the other characters who have been retooled arguably get even stronger boons in Reload than Mitsuru. Ultimately the big thing Mitsuru has to contend with is the party size of 4. She has high MA fueling excellent Ice damage, but other characters can match her in raw output. What Mitsuru brings to the table beyond pure damage in boss battles is... a little gimmicky to say the least.

Characteristic and Theurgy

On certain evenings, you can either Cook or Read with Mitsuru. After completing 3 instances of either activity, Mitsuru learns the Ailment Burst Characteristic. This is a pretty unique passive compared to others, as its not something that solely benefits Mitsuru. This passive instead gives the entire party a flat 7% bonus (additive!) to their crit rate when attacking an enemy afflicted with an ailment (and it has to be a status ailment specifically, Rakunda and other stat debuffs do not trigger this). A good chunk of ailments in this game (and most of the ones Mitsuru can inflict) already boost crit chances when inflicted, so when paired with a character's base crit rate this can push critical chance from very high to guaranteed, albeit usually only when Distress is the ailment in play. After completing all 6 hang outs, this passive upgrades to Ailment Surge which increases the boost to 15%. Now it's actually very easy to make use of this ability in random battle for a variety of reasons later in the game, and Junpei in particular can absolutely tee off with this in play. But like Mitsuru's ailment skills in general, it tends to be junk in major boss fights, which is a huge shame. Also unless a character is already specializing towards crits, the boost still manages to be too minor most the time to really be a serious consideration, to say nothing of how it's completely useless to those focusing on magic damage instead.

Moving onto her Theurgy, Mitsuru gains additional charge whenever she inflicts an ailment (unsurprising) but also whenever she casts a debuff on something. This is obviously a concession so that Mitsuru has some form of generating extra Theurgy charge in fights where the opponents completely no-sell ailments, and it gives a decent amount of extra charge for it. If you plan on using Mitsuru consistently, it's a good idea to have her be the designated caster of Rakunda precisely because of this trait, to say nothing else of how Rakunda is just a good idea because it amps up your damage tremendously anyway. But what about her Theurgies themselves?

Blizzard Edge: A single target Ice skill that has an 80% chance of Freeze (essentially guaranteed on anything not immune to it!). The skill is pretty cracked in the early game, no pun intended. Its power value is comparable to Akihiko's Electric Onslaught and it has basically the same effect but with Freeze. Electric Onslaught doesn't become available until October in-game, which is quite a ways off at the time of writing this post. Once Mitsuru can work in Ice Boost, it really takes off in damage, and Freeze Boost+Ailment Boost makes the Freeze chance even more of a lock. Mitsuru also has high MA with decent ST, so she actually has quite a bit of raw muscle backing this skill as well. It falls off hard late game though. Stronger Theurgies become available for everyone else (or they simply get better options for making use of their own) while Mitsuru has what is ultimately one of the weaker Theurgies in the game when you line them all up. What's more, Mitsuru is the only party member to get a Tier 4 elemental skill, and its power is so high that it often outdamages Blizzard Edge in spite of the unique damage formula for Theurgies allowing Blizzard Edge to punch well beyond its coded power value. Diamond Dust also has a 60% freeze chance, so with the previously mentioned passives it's not that far off from Blizzard Edge in its secondary effect. Blizzard Edge does have the benefit of not needing Ice Break to be set up in order to work on everything, but that's a relatively minor perk when Mitsuru is very set up heavy character to begin with anyway. This wouldn't be so bad if not for Mitsuru's second Theurgy being a bit of a disappointment.

Blade of Execution: A single target Almighty skill that also inflicts the Debilitate debuff to its target (Tarunda, Rakunda and Sukunda all in one). This skill has several problems. The first is that being an Almighty skill is pointless when Theurgies pierce resistances anyway (Yes I know some enemies have Almighty resistance but that rarely comes up). It's also actively detrimental since Mitsuru does not learn any passives that would boost its damage, and accessories that could bring it up are rarer and less effective than the equivalent ice boosting equipment. With Ice Boost and Amp in play, Blizzard Edge will be flatly stronger than this skill, despite the base power value of Blade of Execution being nearly double. The ability to inflict Debilitate sounds good... but this Theurgy unlocks so late in the game (towards the end of November) that by the time it does, the Protagonist can already obtain Debilitate via Persona fusion while another party member won't be that far off from adding it to their own arsenal. This isn't to say it's a bad skill, per se, it's just that Mitsuru can get more out of just simply Concentrating a Diamond Dust than wasting time with this skill. Every now and again you might have an off turn for her where you can cast this for the heck of it to extend a previously applied Debilitate, but I don't find that to be a serious justification for using this skill.

From a party building perspective, Mitsuru is just about the polar opposite of Akihiko fittingly enough. Akihiko is really bad in the early game while becoming an excellent boss battler in the late game, while Mitsuru is excellent in damage and utility early on while struggling to contribute in boss fights during the late game with most of her combat ability being focused towards random encounters. Revving up to fire off a Concentrated Blizzard Edge/Diamond Dust is cool and all, but when Junpei can notch similar damage numbers by just fishing for crits every turn while also having decent party support like Marakukaja, it can make Mitsuru seem underwhelming in comparison. Don't get me wrong though, Mitsuru is very fun to use and she's consistently great when the only thing you're doing is ascending Tartarus. Ailment Burst/Surge just so happens to synergize very well with the aforementioned Junpei, and the two of them can team up to run roughshod on nearly any standard encounter you come across. When it comes to boss battles though, Mitsuru is just as much of a one trick pony as she was in FES and Portable, and that actually does kind of hurt her when so many other characters have picked up new tricks that make them amazing for boss battles. Everyone in this game is perfectly usable though, and you can get by with just about any team. Mitsuru will likely see plenty of use, certainly more than Akihiko early on, since we can very easily catch up anyone who's fallen behind to sub in for her when the tougher boss battles roll around.

Part 25 is out! Once again we are inundated with a barrage of new things popping up in Reload, though I could have done the Elizabeth Date sooner had I spent more time farming in Tartarus. I value my time a bit more than that though, so we're getting a massive cutscene dump in this video instead! Yukari decides to stir things up and we get one of the longest cutscenes we've had in a while where the main character sits there like a bump on a log the whole time. Beyond that, we're coming up to a point in the game where we are going to have a large number of days where we are denied freedom. This will move us along the calendar faster but also of course limit our daytime activities. I'll probably wait until I finish up the next video to compile the FES and Portable repeat-social links as we haven't quite gotten a weeks worth of activity yet. In other news, we also get into the point where the Hanged Man social link gets kind of weird and uncomfortable, which is no small feat considering the odd nature of the link to begin with. Definitely think this social link could have used a rewrite in Reload, Maiko's parents come off as some of the most unsympathetic characters in the game (especially her dad).

Extra Notes

In FES and Portable

-Not much to say here, just don't forget to advance the hungry cat sidequest like I did, or it'll be a long while before you can finish it since we have a bunch of days coming up where we don't get to explore the Bay Area at all. It can be especially easy to forget it in Portable since we're not locked out of school social links and thus have no reason to leave Gekkoukan High.

-On a slightly more trivial note, the school CD request got us access to a weapon type that we don't currently have the character for, the Bus Stop Sign being an Axe type weapon. Obviously not a big deal in this version since the MC can use it just fine, but this is the one time where Portable swapped out the reward simply because it'll be two in-game months before it is even usable.

In Reload

-As mentioned previously, you can complete a lot of the milestone requests in Tartarus to get access to the Elizabeth date sooner than I did here. I didn't really feel that was necessary though since it's a ton of boring grinding on floors you outlevel massively for a negligible reward at this stage of the game. There are deadlines for the Elizabeth dates, in spite of what the game implies, but they stretch out much later than their deadlines in FES/Portable.

-We kick off Nozomi's social link in this video, which is far sooner than when we'll start it in FES (which isn't until December). Despite being a student, Nozomi is technically an out-of-school link, so he can be interacted with during times like exam lead up where you normally can't interact with your peers. Don't quote me on this, but if I recall correctly from my first playthrough, Nozomi disappears for the Summer if you don't initiate his link before the break, but will be there as normal if you do start it. This is actually a bit weird, because Nozomi is always chilling in the mall no matter what in FES. The Moon social link has been reassigned in the FemC's story, and will be maxed out both earlier and much quicker for a variety of reasons we'll get to when it comes up. While we're on the topic, it is a bit unfortunate we won't be tackling Nozomi's link for awhile in FES since Moon Personae convey the Crit Rate Up ability in weapon fusion, and not getting level ups from the Moon link certainly sets them back compared to other weapon fusion types.

-We make our first use of the Shady URL Salesman. Right now most of the stuff this guy sells is single use junk intended for Elizabeth's requests, but note more expensive URLs like the Security Site Note. These offer us unique upgrades that help us out when exploring Tartarus.

-One thing to note for the team study sessions is that they aren't actually any more effective than a Quiz Game or Prodigy Platter, with the exception of the session the day before an exam. Still, they're sources of more team banter, which is always appreciated so it's worth it to do them anyway.

Social Progress

We've officially hit the point of the game where our social stats really don't matter too much when it comes to scheduling. We've maxed out Charm and Courage already, and it'll be a very long while before Academics needs to be finished off. As such, I'm not going to bother highlighting the point increases to those stats going forward since just going as we have been means we'll max out our stuff in due time. Instead, I'll just be marking down our social link progress and I'll leave remarks if anything notable will come up from that. Sadly we won't be acing the second set of exams, though with a little clean up of the route I could probably fit that in easy enough in Reload on a replay. For FES, acing the first exam might be doable with more Quiz Game visits though the second exam doesn't seem realistic due to the ridiculously high point requirement for Rank 5. Portable can ace the first exam much more easily if a couple nights are dedicated to studying instead, though it's probably not worth it and acing the second exam would require almost single minded focus on the Academics stat which isn't a good idea for a max social link run.

In FES

Hierophant Link: Rank 9
Hanged Man Link: Rank 2
Tower Social Link: Rank 5

Maiko has been waiting for about two months for us and is delighted we finally remembered! We'll be getting a free bonus to the Hierophant social link in the near future that will let us max it out on the next time we go to hang out with Bunkichi and Mitsuko. The schedule I'm using sets aside time for a Summer event that isn't really necessary for max social links, so I may make some revisions to complete the Hierophant link sooner so it isn't just dangling out there. Mutatsu will be done before you even know it, despite a lot of time spent with him resulting in no rank up.

In Portable

Emperor Link: Rank 5
Hermit Link: Rank 4
Star Link: Rank 6
Tower Link: Rank 2
Hanged Man Link: Rank 5

In Reload

Hanged Man Link: Rank 6
Moon Link: Rank 1
Hierophant Link: Rank 4

It's going to be a long while yet before Nozomi gets maxed out, but initiating his link before the Summer starts is important since you'll have the opportunity to do so delayed heavily otherwise, as mentioned previously.

Part 26 is out! We hit a major story point as we get insight into how everyone in SEES is feeling at this moment in time and then transition into a post exam beach vacation. This is one of the more interesting ways that Persona 3 handles its plot in comparison to its successors in Persona 4 and 5. Very rarely in those games do you ever break from the main character's POV, and when it does happen it's either very brief or directly connected to an ongoing plot point. Perhaps because the original plot wasn't written with social links for every party member in mind, Persona 3 more regularly shows us what everyone else is doing and lets us know what their personal dramas are like. Not very realistic, sure, but it does give every party member their own bit of the spotlight and doesn't force their character development to coincide with the presence of the main character. I particularly like Junpei's character arc for this reason where he more often than not comes to major realizations as a result of his own reflection. Other interesting narrative points going on is that we hit a moment in the story where the FemC's storyline has a very clear divergence from what the MC is doing to better fit her perspective. There will be a couple moments like this throughout the main plot, and it's nice when the new protagonist yields story differences that aren't just scant line changes here and there.

Extra Notes

In FES

-Only one point I really wanted to bring up for FES: for the Exam I merely got a message saying I did well. In contrast, Portable and Reload got the "your pen won't stop moving!" result. I'm not sure if the latter means I got #1 in those games, but I do know for certain FES requires Academics 5 in order to ace this exam, so I know I got only top 10 in this version. The uncertainty makes the future exciting!

In Portable

-I haven't been duping cards to much up to this point, but we are starting to get some good ones that are worth having several copies of so we can make on-the-fly upgrades to our Personae. It's definitely not a bad idea to keep notes for when you need to pick up cards, the lack of any direct notification that your duped card is ready can make it easy to forget you even had a card queued up, which I have done multiple times through this LP.

-As mentioned previously, the beach trip is a pretty big story divergence point for the FemC because the nonsense the MC will be getting up to wouldn't fit for her quite as well. While we do get to the same conclusion of the vacation, we do get some fairly interesting overhauls to dialogue it takes us to get there, certainly far more than any other scene we've encountered up to this point.

In Reload

-Academics progress is going to slow down pretty heavily at this point in Reload. We will be swamped with nightly activities with our team going forward, and as we get deeper in the game more night Linked events will also begin to populate our schedule in addition to hang outs. We'll likely be seeing Academics cap out just about at the time we'll need it to do so in this version.

-There's quite a bit of freedom to the order you can tackle hang outs in, so don't feel pressured to pick a super optimal route through them all. For my money, it's smartest to just focus on the ones that give the biggest pay off in Tartarus. Junpei, Akihiko and Yukari all have extremely useful abilities, so it's ideal to hang out with them when given the choice of doing anything else. There's no rush to get the Tower and Devil links done (the latter always goes up when interacted with while the former is arguably better to leave for later so we can have a matching Persona for it), so I'll probably be playing pretty loose with what my schedule suggests for night time going forward.

-Don't forget about Elizabeth's request when you get to the beach! This is our only chance in the game to complete it, and you can permanently lose the ability to do so if you don't pick up the items she wants now.

Social Progress

In FES

Hermit Link: Rank 8
Hanged Man Link: Rank 3
Death Link: Rank 3 (Automatic, all versions)

Nothing specific to note here, but in all versions of the game the Death link skips Rank 2 and goes straight to 3. Handy, that gets us an extra level up when fusing Death Personae for just one cutscene!

In Portable

Hanged Man Link: Rank 6

Not much activity here, Yukari required our prayers in order to be our friend.

In Reload

Hanged Man Link: Rank 7
Hermit Link: Rank 9
Tower Link: Rank 4

Note that I could have hung out with Tanaka, but I'm not in a big rush to complete that link. It always goes up and we have oodles of time to get to it. Gardening with Junpei leads to a much bigger payoff than more Devil ranks for the immediate future, and Akihiko would also benefit a ton from focus if I can give it to him. There are 4 party members altogether (Akihiko, Junpei, Yukari and the next one we get conveniently enough) who benefit immensely from having their night time hang outs completed, so if I have the option to advance one of those storylines on a given night, that's going to be the play I go for going forward.

We've been getting buried in mandatory story cutscenes recently, and the next proper part will be no different! Luckily in between all the wordswordswords we've been able to get some light progression done on social links over the past 3 videos so now we have a Supplemental video to work with! Nothing too Earth shattering here though. Hierophant is just about ready to be tied off in FES and I'll have an opportunity in August to do so. Maiko's link has also finally been kicked off, and Mutatsu is halfway to completion already! The latter will still take about an in-game month or so to finish though, as the back half of his link develops quite slowly, even if you happened to have a Tower Persona. Nothing too exciting going on for the FemC, aside from Tanaka coming off as even sleazier than he already does for the MC. So considering that, I'll instead comment on something silly for FES you'd only think about if you were playing back a recording and editing it: for some reason the Social Link cutscenes in FES are very inconsistent about how they wrap up. Sometimes there's a fade to black with a couple text boxes coming up, sometimes the last text box will transition into a fade out and time will advance, and other times the game will idle on the screen after the last text box closes and then it will fade to black (or foggy blue I guess). Not sure why the scenes don't have any consistency on when they conclude like that, but it's been an amusing thing for me to notice.

Part 27 is out! Apologies for the delay in getting this part out, my schedule was pretty erratic the past week and it left me without much motivation or even free time to record and edit for Persona 3. Time to get back on track! Anyways, we're now onto a pure story section where we are railroaded through a vacation that goes by very quick. The perils of when a game is realistic. It's not without merit though, as we get a new party member at its conclusion!

For the first time in awhile, I don't really have any specific things to go over and we didn't have any social link progress, so instead I'll just ramble on about some miscellaneous points.

Just to reiterate one last time, don't forget to grab Elizabeth's request items at the beach! This is your only chance to do so, and that quest will remain permanently incomplete if you assume you'll have more chances for it.

We hit what's generally considered to be the nadir of Persona 3's story arc, Yakushima's Operation Babe Hunt which has been renamed to slightly less chauvinistic-sounding Operation Beach Fling in Reload. Junpei strong arms you and Akihiko into a Three Stooge's style pick up routine (honestly that might be unfair to the Stooges, they generally demonstrated more Game than this) and you get to bumble through cringe dialogue with disinterested women despite the fact it's possible to have multiple girlfriends at this point. FES also caps off with a fairly offensive punchline, so the main pro of this sequence is that it's all uphill from here. Funnily enough, the Portable sequence where you get to see Junpei and Akihiko flounder on their lonesome trims a lot of the fat and has generally better jokes, making for a more amusing sequence.

The FemC leaves with the girls in the morning, but sadly we don't get any additional scenes out of this particular divergence in the narrative, save for her meet up with Aigis having some notably different dialogue.

Portable also sees us pick up a new Social Link perk from the Fool Social Link! At Rank 5, the Fool link gives every party member the ability to dive in on a lethal blow for the protagonist and shield them, provided it was a single target one. Each party member can do this once per battle, potentially bailing you out 3 times. This actually isn't that useful, but it does come in handy against some bosses who use Insta kill attacks if you're lacking for the Homunculus item.

Finally just for some small things to note, I don't typically cut away for really little things that are different but kind of drag the video out if I include them. There are some minor things to note that I thought we're interesting here in particular though. For one thing, the FemC is denied the choice to hug Yukari, because I guess Aigis' introduction fulfilled the Sapphic undertones for this particular story section. The final beach scene in FES actually cuts after Ikutsuki tells Akihiko and the MC to join in on the fun, while the detail of Aigis blasting Junpei with a water canon and Junpei getting hit with an All-Out Attack was added in the PSP version. This is one of the few moments where Reload actually adds a bit of animation to a scene featured in an older version of the game. The PSP version though has a cute touch in having the dialogue choices be Attack and Relent like it is in battle, which I think is kind of a shame that Reload didn't retain that.

Part 28 is out! With our beach vacation wrapped up, we have a brief return to normalcy in our academic life before being let loose into a proper Summer vacation... is what I would be saying if the Track team didn't just poach a week of daylight hours from us. Such is the life of someone who is extracurricularly active I suppose. ( I was a "go home club" type of student) Summer in general proves to be a fairly quick section of the game as we have numerous weeks that are already booked and most of our main activities (Social Links) are locked off due to school being out. We do have some links that we can pursue independent of school of course, but we'll also have a sort of sidequest coming up that will also eat into our linking time after the next Full Moon. Otherwise, we still have our evenings at least and this leads to a fantastic opportunity to develop our bonds with our teammates in Reload. We should be getting our first characteristic unlock in the next video, and it'll be looking up hill for the lucky recipient! (It'll be Junpei) FES has decidedly less going at this point, so this week proves to be a good time to work on our Tartarus exploration, which is currently on hold until close to the end of the Moon cycle in Portable and Reload.

Extra Notes

In FES

-With Aigis in our crew, the Sports Training week is as good a time as any to do our Tartarus exploration, so I designated Monday and Friday as the days to do it. We're doubling up on training! I'll likely do the write up for Aigis once we get to the actual videos for Tartarus and go more in depth on her abilities there, but just know for now that she's quite good at this stage of the game before diving off a cliff once you enter the mid-late game. My main goal for this series of expeditions is to reach Level 31 to fuse the Tower Persona Eligor, who will be quite handy for weapon fusion, and to get a good buffer of cash to invest in both compendium expenses and equipment upgrades for once. A whole slew of good accessories unlock around this time in FES, so it's good to keep them in mind and pick them up once you have the chance!

-Related to the previous point, if you enter this Moon cycle with more cash then I had, be sure to do any equipment shopping you may want to do BEFORE the Sports Training week begins. We are completely locked out of the equipment stores during it' duration since they are closed during the evening, meaning we'll be reliant on scouring Tartarus for any gear upgrades we may need (Excepting Weapon Fusion of course). Thankfully this is not an issue in Portable and Reload (as much as the equipment store is worth in Reload) as Officer Kurosawa is a pure desk jockey in these versions and is available at all hours.

-Additionally, definitely make sure to feed the cat before the training week begins since you won't get any chances for it during this week. It's actually worse if you fed the cat part of the way instead of forgetting to do it at all, since if you felt like shelling out the cancellation fee to clear out your quest log, that would restart the whole quest from the beginning!

-Because I've been practicing 3 different versions of a game that runs 60-90 hours, it was inevitable I'd mix up how certain things work across them. Sadly we do need to Ace our exams to get a reward from Mitsuru in FES, which means I'm lacking for some stat boosters, but that ultimately isn't a huge deal

In Portable

-We do Ace our exams in Portable and Reload, which does mean the threshold for doing so has been lowered. Very nice, as it is fairly difficult (if not impossible) to do this in FES without sacrificing Social Link time. For our Top placement in Portable, we get the additional prize of a Matarukaja skill card, which is phenomenal for this stage of the game. We won't be seeing anything with that skill until we reach around Level 40! I'd highly recommend duping this card at Naganaki Shrine once you have the option to do so.

-Before this Moon cycle is out, I'd also like to reach Level 31 for Eligor in this version as well. I'm less interested in his weapon fusion potential at this stage (though that will be important later) but I do need him to keep the Tower social link moving at the right pace. The FemC will soon be inundated with new hang out options at night time, and we want to have Mutatsu close to done and dusted by the time that happens.

-They're quite expensive, but at this stage of the game we have the option to buy the swimsuits of every SEES member, and in the grand RPG tradition they prove to be surprisingly effective armor! They have no abilities, but +80 defense is a pretty solid boost for quite some time. At 300k a pop, you definitely want to be selective about which ones you actually buy, and definitely wait for a Monday sale. It slashes 75k off the price tag! Once we pick up some cash, I'll probably invest in a couple of these for our more fragile party members.

-While Kurosawa has not yet expanded his stock, Aigis does have an indirect buff in this version of the game due to an accessory line being massively improved in Portable. Here's hoping the new inventory comes in soon!

In Reload

-For our top marks in Reload, we gain the additional prize of a Mega Master Band! This is +3 to all non-HP/SP stats, which is leagues ahead of our current accessory selection. Akihiko is probably the best user of it, but I plan on making heavy use of Aigis later on and she's lacking for an accessory altogether, so I decide to give it to her to give a little extra oomph to her capabilities in this version.

-I also start divvying out my Incenses since they're no good unused! My philosophy on how to use these varies depending on the Incense. For something like the Power and Magic Incenses, I'd like to give those to characters who are good but not great with the corresponding stat and would appreciate the extra boost. A Magic Incense on Yukari or Mitsuru would dole out a lesser relative boost, while Akihiko would enjoy a nice jump in damage potential with his Elec skills, so I give them to him. It'll especially pay off once he picks up the Elec Boost passive! Junpei already does just fine on ST and he'll be picking up his own big boost in the near future, so I feed the Power Incenses to Aigis who has relatively low ST for a physical focused character. Combined with a unique power she has, she can put that extra ST to really good effect! Something else you can do with Magic Incenses is actually feed them all to Junpei, which can bring his Theurgy into the stratosphere due to his already naturally high ST and high damage values for his Theurgies mixing well with the extra stat influx. I may do that later, but it's fairly useless to do right now so I pass on it. Guard Incenses on the other hand are pretty much just best used on the most fragile characters since they're the only ones who stand to benefit a huge amount from that extra defensive prowess. Yukari is the obvious choice for them due to her low HP on top of low EN, so unless you plan on hoarding them for a future party member (which any potential choices in this regard are much more naturally durable than Yukari and benefit less from these) it's advisable to give these to her unless you don't plan to use her at all. Speed Incenses are kind of the odd ones out since AG is definitely one of the less helpful stats and nobody benefits a huge amount from having more of it. I feed them into Aigis just for some light accuracy bonuses. The next most practical thing you can do with them is hoard them funnily enough, and thenfunnel them into characters who already have naturally high AG. The sooner they cap their AG, the sooner the stats points that would have gone into it from leveling up will be re-distributed into something potentially more useful.

-After months of major plot involvement but personal distance, we can now Social Link with Yukari in FES and Reload!... Just in time for school to let out and stalling the link out heavily. This does kind of relegate the Lovers Arcana to being rather bad for a good chunk of the game in FES and Reload, due to it being a lower tiered Arcana that has a link that develops super late. Regardless, we've finally passed the check for Max charm, so now Academics is the only thing left to polish off.

-Night time hang outs with SEES are going to become a much more regular thing in the future, and we will be seeing many of our nights going forward dedicated to them. I'm actually deviating pretty heavily from the schedule I'm using in this regard, as it was written with the focus of maximizing each link and hangout in a relatively evenly distributed manner. We have more than enough time in the game to max out the Tower and Devil links, so I can easily push those back and focus on hanging out with friends for more pronounced Tartarus benefits. In the event of multiple hangouts being available on a given night, I'm going to prioritize the ones that I feel give the better rewards. Certain hangouts will probably be finishing quite late in the game because of this, but that's not a big deal.

-We get Akihiko's next Linked Event as well, and get a fairly crappy reward for it, though it is at least a nice scene that gives some more spotlight to Akihiko's background. I kind of resent how amazing the reward is for Junpei's first linked event, it sets the precedent that these events are things you absolutely have to participate in or you miss out big time. Probably for the better that they aren't that way, but it does leave that sting of disappointment on the nights where you could have potentially done something more practical.

Social Progress

In FES

Magician Social Link: Rank 7
Lovers Social Link: Rank 1
Hermit Social Link: Rank 9
Tower Social Link: Rank 6
Devil Social Link: Rank 5

In Portable

Priestess Social Link: Rank 5
Lovers Social Link: Rank 8
Devil Social Link: Rank 7
Tower Social Link: Rank 6

In Reload

High Priestess Social Link: Rank 5
Lovers Social Link:: Rank 1
Devil Social Link: Rank 2
Tower Social Link: Rank 5
Akihiko's Linked Episodes: Rank 2
Junpei's Hang outs: Gardening 2/3 Reading 0/3
Aigis' Hang outs: Gardening 1/3 Reading 0/3
Yukari's Hang outs: Movies 1/3 Cooking 0/3
Fuuka's Hang Outs: Reading 1/3 Gardening 0/3
Mitsuru's Hang outs: Cooking 1/3 Reading 0/3

It's funny how close Mutatsu's link is across all versions. Despite the abundant amount of time available for it, it's also one of the easiest links to max out due to its regular availability and relatively low point requirements. Devil is also miles ahead in Portable due to it being available on Thursdays there, a much better night for it to be on than Saturday. I'll be tracking progress on team hang outs going forward so we know how we're doing there. Mitsuru's wasn't featured in this video but I may as well mark it off since I wasn't counting it back when it happened. It's worth noting that Junpei, Yukari, Akihiko and Aigis have by far the best rewards for pursuing their hang outs, so in the event they share any nights with others in SEES, they are going to be the ones I choose to spend time with. In the event that they share nights amongst themselves, Junpei=Aigis>Akihiko>Yukari. Fortunately, Junpei's final gardening event will be available within the next in-game week, so I can cap off that and not have to worry about it for the rest of the game. We'll get one more chance to Garden with Aigis before entering Tartarus for this Moon cycle, though sadly I don't think we'll be able to get her Characteristic in time for that expedition.