Colors Flying High - Let's Play Persona 5 Royal

[Timrod]

Click Here for Update 14

: “Just do as I told you.”

: “Look for a post with a full name in it.”

: “I already said there’s no info on any big shots. Don’t you remember? But man, people actually go put someone’s real name on here. That’s some scary shit..”

: " ‘He won’t listen to what I say…’ no wait, there’s no name on this one."

: " ‘Someone’s bad-mouthin’ me in online chat rooms’… this one’s got a name."

: “Ignore those. Aren’t there any posts about more serious trouble?”

: “It says he’s a teller at City Hall.”

: “A government worker’s stalkin’ someone?”

: “That should be a suitable target. All right, now get the Meta-Nav ready.”

: “We’re just gonna jump right into a Palace? Fine by me!”

: “Hey, what happened to all that talk of unanimous decision? What do you think we should do, Akira?”

: But it’s too late. Akira is already halfway across the station looking for a hot dog.

: “We need a name and a place, right? So the name is…”

: "Actually, we don’t need a location this time. Just enter exactly what I say. The keyword is… ‘Mementos.’ "

: Mementos, the freshmaker.

: “Huh? What’re you tryin’ to pull?”

: “Just listen to me. It should work.. I think.”

: “Geez, that again? Uh… “M-e-m-e-n-t-o-s” was it?”

: “Just as I thought!”

: Really? Air? Not say, the moon… or sunshine… or broken glass? I never took Ann for a fan of King Crimson.

: “Is this that Nakanohara guy’s Palace?”

: “That’s half right, but half wrong. This is a type of Palace, but it’s different from the normal ones. Come on, let’s head down. The Shadows here lurk underground.”

: “I don’t quite understand why. It maybe because they’re drawn to something.”

: “Underground? How are we going to get there?”

: Ann’s heard of King Crimson, but never Going Under Ground? She really is Lisa Silverman in disguise.

: “How? You use it every day on your way to school. Follow me!”

: Welcome to the Cancer Subway, AKA Mementos. This is Persona 5’s Abandoned Factory, only it’s actually used for story content. It’s actually closer to Tartarus (the Persona 3 one, not the Snow Queen one).

: “Wait, our clothes changed!?”

: “The Shadows know we’re here?”

: “Since the moment we stepped in.”

: “You should’ve told us!”

: “We’re still safe right here. I’ve come to investigate a number of times. Shadows never come up to this floor.”

: “But it’s a different story once you go down. This place is simply teeming with them.”

: “More importantly, what is this Mementos!? It’s about time you start explaining.”

: “Mementos is.. everyone’s Palace.”

: “Huh? Whaddya mean, ‘everyone’s’?”

: “A Palace as grand as the previous castle only forms when a person’s wishes are extremely distorted. So, instead of many individual Palaces, the general public has one gigantic shared Palace.”

: This is more or less a dark version of how the collective unconsciousness works in Jung.

: “Now that you mention it, this place feels a bit different from Kamoshida’s Palace.”

: “When you say shared, you mean they’re all put together? Even though they’re just strangers?”

: “So what you’re saying is… using this place, we can change the hearts of people who don’t even have a Palace?”

: “Correct! The steps to do so are slightly different, though.”

: “But this place looks pretty huge. Are we gonna be able to get around just by walkin’?”

: “It seems the time has finally come…”

: There is no way this isn’t someone’s fetish.

: “A car…!?”

: “No way!”

: “This comes from the way cognition materalizes in the Metaverse, plus a bit of extra training. It’s not dissimilar to how you guys transform.”

: “You turnin’ into a car is totally different than our clothes changin’!”

: In Japan, maybe. This is a direct reference to this scene from My Neighbor Totoro. I saw it as a kid, but only because my dad’s hobby was rummaging around CD and VHS racks in the 90s.

:

: “Why a bus though?”

: He looks more like a van than a bus.

: “Wait, why didn’t you do this at the castle!?”

: “I would have if I could! But that castle was cramped, there were tons of stairs, and no way this fits on top of a chandelier!”

: “Why are you all just sitting back there? I’m a car, remember? I’m not going anywhere unless someone drives me.”

: “You can’t drive yourself!?”

: “Do you know how to drive?”

: Akira just looks at her and goes “We live in the Tokyo metropolitan region. There are trains that go literally everywhere. What is this, the United States?”

: “That’s a bit worrying, but I’ll let you handle it. I don’t even have that experience to lean on.”

: I have to wonder if at some point, this was intended to be the first Persona game to feature non-Japanese characters.

: Look at the steering wheel. It’s on the left side, but Japanese cars (as in, the ones sold in Japan) all have the wheel on the right side because they drive on the left side of the road.

: “You’re prolly more skilled than I am too.”

: “All right then, we’ll leave the driving to you!”

: Certainly not anyone’s weird fetish, no sir.

: “Uh, is that purrin’ I hear? What a creepy-ass car!”

: See? Ryuji knows.

: “Don’t underestimate my meowtary engine. We’re going full throttle! It’s time to fly!”

: I have no idea what “meowtary” is supposed to be a pun of.

: So here’s a place where P5’s localization is kind of weird. In the English release, the nine areas of Mementos (eight in the original game) are all named after the Qliphoth. The Japanese version just named them after what the Qliphoth represents.

: The Qliphoth is a thing from the Kabbalah. I can’t really describe them properly, but as far as I understand it you have this thing called the Tree of Life (or “Sephirot”) that represents some weird metaphysical bullshit about how God reveals itself to people.

: The Qliphoth represent evil and are like shells that cover the Sephirot but are also a “dark tree” of evil or something. Honestly, you can pretty safely put this in the same category as Jung and his jangly key man bullshit.

: A lot of writers use the Qliphoth or Sephirot when they need dumb fantasy names. As you can probably guess, Sephiroth in Final Fantasy 7 is named after it. Lobotomy Corporation is a relatively recent game that uses it heavily, as does Devil May Cry 5.

: “Yeah, I guess it’d be strange driving on the tracks like this in the real world. Anyway, Nakanohara’s somewhere in here, right?”

: “Most likely in a segment of his own creation. Don’t worry, it won’t be the size of a Palace. Our next step is to find an entrance to that segment.”

: “And what’s this entrance gonna look like?”

: “I have no idea, but strong distortions should be a pretty obvious visual clue.”

: “So we just gotta go wanderin’ around for it then? What a goddamn pain in the ass.”

: Mementos differs from regular dungeons in two ways. First, we’re playing as the Morgana-van, so there’s no stealth. Second, there’s no security level so we can’t be thrown out if we get spotted.

: Right away, we run into the exclusive demon for the first area: Slime. If you’ll recall, we fused one of these back when I was grinding in Kamoshida’s Palace but then fused it away for Kodama.

: Slimes suck. They’re strong against physical and gun and weak only to fire and wind. This more or less mirrors their resistances in Shin Megami Tensei 1, except in that game they were outright immune to guns.

: I had Ryuji use Zio just because, and it shocked one of the slimes. This allows us to “technical” with Morgana by using his gun, knocking the slime down just as if we’d used fire or wind on it.

: If you try to negotiate with a shocked or frozen enemy, this happens. It doesn’t fail the negotiation, but keep in mind that if all your enemies are incapacitated you won’t be able to negotiate with them.

: I grab one just so we can fuse it away later. Might as well.

: Mementos also has little boxes you can run over with Morgana to get items.

: The dungeons here are always procedurally generated, and sometimes have item rooms. The problem is that one of the boxes is locked (and will never have anything good in it) and the other just has the same “dirty armor” we’re going to sell as soon as a certain area opens up.

: Because we levelled way over where we should be, Ann has Maragi and can wipe out Slimes in one go. Maragi is kind of useless unless you’re in the very specific circumstance of having more than two enemies weak to fire - otherwise, it’s cheaper to just use two regular Agis at 8 SP instead of 10.

: Most of the encounters here are garbage - they’re Pixies, Pyro Jacks and Mandrakes which give us virtually nothing at this point in terms of EXP. I go right for the goal without grinding too much, because unlike Kamoshida’s Palace, we can’t get past Slimes without using SP.

: “That seems to be Nakanohara’s Shadow.”

: “Lemme see. Some front desk guy at City hall became a stalker, right?”

: “I don’t know how much evil he’s done, but we have to do something if he’s bothering other people.”

: “All right, we’ll go talk to him.”

: “Are you that stalker!? Haven’t you ever stopped to consider how your ex feels?”

: “You can’t treat someone like shit just 'cause they did it to you! What a load of crap..”

: “We’re gonna change the hearts of all the bastards like you!”

: “…Madarame? The hell’s this guy goin’ on about?”

: Nakanohara’s shadow is an Obariyon. Obariyon just kinda dances and is another Mementos-exclusive demon.

: Obariyon is weak to Electric, but since only Ryuji has that right now I just open with Psy to see how much damage it does.

: As luck would have it, Ryuji’s ability procs and he auto-crits for an immediate knockdown.

: This pretty much erases half of the boss’s HP after the All-Out Attack. Ryuji goes next, uses Zio for a knockdown, and then we do another All-Out and the boss is dead.

: Under ordinary circumstances, this would be enough EXP to level up. We’re so overgrinded at this point that no one gets a level off it.

: “Hold on, are you talkin’ about that guy you mentioned earlier… Madarame?”

: “So some selfish bastard was making you suffer too.. still, you shouldn’t have dragged an unrelated woman into this mess.”

: “Change.. Madarame’s heart?”

: “Hm? What’s that shinin’ thing?”

: “It’s the bud of a Treasure. Had we left it, it very well may have blossomed into a Palace. Joker, this will make a perfect reward!”

: I didn’t bother to check what the Attachment Pearl does, and I’m probably going to just sell it. We should, if I remember right, have Tae’s accessories available before the second dungeon and once we have those, they’re not coming off.

: If there’s one thing that Persona 5 improves on over Persona 4, it’s that all the sidequests take place in Mementos as opposed to having to hunt down materials from previously visited dungeons after the fact.

: “So Nakanohara had a change of heart, right?”

: I mean, unless this is like Bravely Default where Morgana is actually having us kill people.

: “Most likely.”

: “But how are we supposed to know if we succeeded?”

: “The lady posted the dude’s name online. If he really does change, she’ll prolly comment again.”

: “Hm, you do have a point.”

: “Either way, trainin’ against Shadows down here’s the best! It’s great prep for our next target!”

: “It’s also nice to be able to give courage to the people who post their problems online.”

: “On top of that, we can sell whatever treasure we get for some cold, hard cash!”

: “All right, we did it!”

: “Hold on. There’s somewhere I want to show you guys before we leave. Don’t worry, it won’t take long.”

: “There’s something I’d like to check in an area further down. That platform we saw earlier should be the way down. Let’s head there first.”

: “Wait, you’ve been here before, right? Don’t you got like, a map or something?”

: “That would hold no meaning in this place. The layout changes every time you enter.”

: “Wait, so our path changes too!?”

: I went and fought some Slimes to level up the party to 15. This will allow us to enter the next dungeon with as much SP as we can reasonably have. To get an idea of just how overlevelled we are, the highest level enemies in the next dungeon who are not red shadows (the way Berith was in Kamoshida’s) are level 15. We could probably beat the next boss without fighting anything.

: For context, this is the platform that goes down to the next level. I found it earlier, so the dialog’s a little bit different.

: “Of course they are. We’re in the subway, you know.”

: “Yeah, but I thought this was a Palace!”

: “Then maybe this is how the public views this place? I don’t know.”

: “People go through this darkness… every day?”

: “Forget that! You sure we’re cool runnin’ around on these tracks!?”

: “It should be fine as long as we’re not on the same ones.. I think. I’m no train expert.”

: Totally legit, I’m sure. Anyway, this is getting kind of long, so I’m gonna cut some unimportant stuff. This entire segment is mostly a glorified tutorial anyway.

: “See? It’s just as I thought!”

: “What do you mean?”

: “That wall wouldn’t budge when I came here by myself before. But it’d be weird for the deepest part of Mementos to be some normal place like this, wouldn’t it?”

: “So you were thinkin’ there’s gotta be more?”

: “Yeah! Now that Kamoshida’s Palace is gone and people are actually starting to talk about us.. I knew something had to have changed down here!”

: “How deep is it? Should we try going further down?”

: “Let’s not. That’s not why we’re here today, remember?”

: The next part of Mementos actually opens on 5/9 - but we won’t be coming back here until the end of the month.

: “A person!? In Mementos!?”

: We’ve already met Jose previously, so I’m going to skip a lot of this and just explain what it is he does.

: Royal added two new items to Mementos - flowers and stamps. Flowers, like the one you see here, can be traded to Jose for a number of healing items. He can also sell you Will Seeds if you missed any.

: Jose can turn the crystals you get from collecting sets of Will Seeds into rings, which honestly we probably won’t use due to how good Tae’s accessories are. His final function is that he’s basically the Cheat Shop from the later Disgaea games. You can trade him tickets to make the enemies in Mementos drop more EXP, more items, and more money.

: The fact that he’s a young boy dressed primarily in white who drives a car that he runs a shop out of makes it pretty obvious that Jose was heavily inspired by Emil from NieR.

: “Who in the hell was that?”

: “If he’s studying humans, does that mean he isn’t one? I mean, he just seemed like some nice kid.”

: “Well, he didn’t feel like a Shadow.. I wouldn’t say he’s dangerous, at least, for now.”

: The star is a special item to Royal. It’s part of a new combat mechanic that rarely turns up and isn’t really that important. We can’t even use it until June at earliest.

: “A star?”

: “So what about it did you want to show us?”

: “Our wishes!?”

: Clearly, Jose is part of the God Hand or whatever it’s called and the star is a Behelit. I haven’t read Berserk since before they got on the boat for like ten years.

: “Nice to think that…”

: “Seriously…”

: “Hey, wait!”

: “Welp, there he goes. A star, huh? He said it’d grant our wishes or somethin’…”

: “I highly doubt something like that would actually happen, even in Mementos. Well, I guess you can at least try making a wish.”

: Akira’s just sitting there thinking “It’s like they’re perfect for each other.”

: “…Nothing’s happening.”

: “Was Skull’s wish too petty?”

: “You’re one to talk!”

: “Hm. I guess things don’t just happen that easily. But we can’t just throw the thing away… hold onto it for now.”

: “Oh, and what was that wall thing we saw at the end?”

: “I’m not entirely sure, but that wall must’ve been there for a reason. If Mementos is the public’s Palace though.. it might be affected by the general public’s belief in us.”

: “Why do you know so much about it, Morgana?”

: “My memories are a little foggy in that regard… however, I need to know what lies in the depths of Mementos, no matter what.”

: “No matter what?”

: “Mementos is not just everyone’s Palace, it’s the source of all Palaces. It used to be that Palaces like Kamoshida’s with one ruler simply didn’t exist.”

: “So, if we can do something about the greatest cause of distortions, I’m certain my appearance will…”

: Morgana clearly hasn’t heard of, I dunno, thousands of years of recorded human history involving monarchies.

: “I see.. so that’s why you came pokin’ your nose around with us.”

: And now the cat’s tsundere. Just what I needed.

: “I’ll.. be relying on you guys.”

: “By the way, Morgana… are you a boy? Or might you be a girl?”

: Morgana is male, despite both his name and his code name being feminine.

: “That is a possibility!”

: The thing is, they could’ve done a lot with this, but they just don’t. Is he non-binary, and that’s why he uses feminine names? Is there some other reason for it, like Morgana not understanding the concept of gender because he’s beyond it, the way the androids in NieR Automata were? They never really explain it.

: “I wish I could deny it, but.. I just can’t be sure.”

: “Why not!? In any case, of course I’m male! I mean, I…”

: “…What is it?”

: “No.. it’s nothing. We’re done talking about that!”

: “Anyway, we now know that we can perform minor changes of heart in Mementos. If we come across any other eye-catching leads, it may be worth dealing with them for a bit of combat practice.”

: “There weren’t really any other outstanding ones though.”

: “I bet we’ll get tons of 'em if we can change someone famous and make the Phantom Thieves well-known. The big fish are our main targets after all.”

: But wait.. who’s this mysterious guy that looks like Jun?

: “Is that Ryuji? Did he mention anything about Mementos? If there’s anything you want to know, I can tell you.”

: Oh, right. I mentioned earlier that Madarame is actually just a painter and not a traditional Japanese artist. There are apparently hints in the code for the original game that at one point, he was intended to be and was changed for some reason without changing any of the dialog about him.

: We spend the night studying. I’m not entirely sure why, because we don’t reach Knowledge 3 until after exams are over.

: I was going to cut the update off here, but we can fit in one more day. It’s a short one, plus we have a bunch of confidant scenes and exams coming up.

: Joker wakes up to Mishima messaging him, even though I don’t think we ever exchanged phone numbers.

: Oh, right. I mentioned earlier that Mishima’s different than every other confidant in the game in that his confidant will rank up every time you visit him. The reason is that he’s basically the fox from Persona 4 - he will automatically rank up after you do certain sidequests in Mementos.

: “Oops, hah, sorry about that. I uh, haven’t been getting a lot of sleep lately. I’ve been staying up managing the Phan-Site all night, every night. I think it’s called.. PR?”

: “The Phantom Thieves Aficionado Website! Phan-Site for short.”

: “You need a catchy name if you want people to notice you. This is all a bit of P-Thieves propaganda!”

: “Basically, there’s no point to taking down bad guys if nobody’s gonna know about it.”

: Can you already tell that Mishima is in this for all the wrong reasons?

: “That’s why I’ve started a blog for posts from people you guys saved, while filtering out the haters. We need the Phantom Thieves to be seen in the proper light if we want to make the name popular, right?”

: “Though actually, I really wanna know how you punish people. Don’t worry, I’m not gonna ask. It wouldn’t be any fun if you just up and told me.”

: “After all, the Phantom Thieves have a reputation for being secretive!”

: I don’t know why they couldn’t have just put in a variable for the name you give to the group and used it here, other than that maybe they wanted to stop things like those people who play through Ocarina of Time and name Link “My Ass” because it makes a lot of the dialog funny.

: “I..I wish I could be more like you guys somehow. But I’ll still be here to draw attention to the stuff you do! You can leave that part to me!”

: “I’m gonna use my Phan-Site to promote the Phantom Thieves, and weed out any negative comments. Your popularity is gonna be at my mercy.. or uh, my fingertips.”

: “It’s like I’ll be your strategic image management representative, so to speak.”

: “Hehe.. just you wait. I’m gonna do everything I can to make sure that title’s more than just for show.”

: yaaawn “I’ve gotta say though, managing the Phantom Thieves’ reputation is tiring work.”

: “The forum gets all sorts of weird posts, including tons of things unrelated to reforming society. It’d defeat the purpose of the site if the tirth of the Phantom Thieves was buried among all that garbage.”

: “Oh, but you don’t need to worry. I’ll sort through all the trash. Speaking of which, I’ve actually already found some worthwhile info about our very own school.”

: “Our quest to boost your popularity can start close to home!”

: From this point on, we can take Mishima’s sidequests. There’s usually two or three per month and all of them are basically the same - dive into Mementos, fight a mini-boss, and then report back.

: “I might be overworking myself, though.. man, I’m exhausted. I think I’d fall asleep on the spot if I wasn’t talking to you.”

: “I should head home… see you later.”

: Mishima has phone calls too, which makes no sense because of how his confidant works.

: “I was checking the Phan-Site earlier, and I found a bunch of hater comments about the Phantom Thieves!”

: Yeah, but you find hater comments about everything. I remember a few months ago when someone from GooseCanyon (the group that is now fan-subbing Game Center CX) posted on /vr/ and people said dumb shit at them.

: These are the people who took over when the original SA team got real jobs, and are now the only source of GCCX subs. They do pretty good work.

: “It got me so mad, I’m not even sleepy anymore. At this point, I might as well pull an all-nighter fighting back!”

: “Huh? What, you’re worried about my health? Aw, thanks! Now I’m even more motivated!”

: Things no teenager has ever actually said.

: Yeah sure, let’s study and.. OH FUCK IT’S SUNDAY AND WE HAVEN’T GRIPPED AND SIPPED!

: Akira rushes out of the cafe, bursts through the doors to the underground tunnel like it’s fucking Loss and buys his cupful of extremely overpriced nasty green shit five minutes before close. All aojiru is nasty by default, so this is probably like that one scene in Spongebob with the hot sauce.

: The aojiru is so horrible that the only way Akira can ever remove the taste from his mouth is copious amounts of beef. This is a special night at the beef bowl place.

: Now, I can tell you for sure that I had to reload this when it happened in the base game because I wasn’t ready for it. Thankfully, I take screenshots as I play so I was saved from a permafuck. This actually happens again in the next update.

: After getting every order correct due to instinctively pressing my screenshot hotkey at every line of dialogue, we get what we really came here for.

: “Can’t you ask your manager to hire more people? You were extremely busy… employees becoming overworked is becoming a real problem in the workplace. That’s concerning…”

: “Hm, I should remember this. I’ll leave my payment here. Thank you for the food.”

: We’ll need to meet Yoshida twice more: once on 05/18, and once on 05/26 to actually start his confidant. Like Mishima, you never need a matching Persona for him because every time you talk to him, you rank up. He doesn’t have any real sidequests though.

: Yakiniku Day is a kind of bullshit holiday put forth by a trade association for Japanese barbecue restaurants. It’s based on a kanji pun and happens on August 29th.

: We get paid more than usual. I’m going to spend some of this on an experiment to see if I can get ahead on a certain upcoming confidant. We’ll see how I do that next time, when I avoid a permafuck with Ann thanks to screenshots, fuse a new Persona just because and take Joker’s mid-terms.