Oh hey since you’re the person who likes Persona most that I know; this might be of interest to you.
Click Here for Update 33
: As soon as we enter the bank, we get met with a bunch of guards.
: “I had a feeling this would happen.”
: “Come at us!”
: “No no! Wait!”
: “She’s one of Kaneshiro’s customers.”
: “I’d like to speak with the bank president.”
: “That voice… it’s Kaneshiro!”
: “Yo, banks have presidents?”
: Well yeah, most banks are what’s called a C-corporation, which mandates that there be a president, among a few other things.
: “Yes, but not the political sorts - in theory.”
: There’s nothing in this main room apart from a bunch of ATMs depositing money - not even any items to steal.
: And here’s Kaneshiro’s shadow, which is just him but purple. I don’t know why he’s purple - in the anime, his shadow just has the moustache and the yellow eyes but isn’t purple.
: “It must be quite tough gathering so much money. I’d be willing to give you a loan, you know.”
: “You gonna call it off then?”
: “No - a loan. The interest rate is ten percent a day.”
: “Ten percent interest a day… um… uh… that means… one day is…”
: “It’s three hundred thousand yen.”
: “There’s no need to be alarmed. I have a more manageable option for people like you.”
: “That was your plan from the beginning, wasn’t it?”
: I like that he’s basically got the exact same expression on his face that Hitler did in Innocent Sin.
: “Please don’t underestimate our intelligence network. My, what wonderful goods have come falling into my lap.”
: “Don’t be ridiculous!”
: “Young women are such great assets. They lack strength - be it social, physical, or mental. It’s as if they only exist to be devoured by the strong. That just might be the rule since the dawn of history.”
: This is where you can start to tell that the writers probably wound up just kind of gluing multiple drafts of the plot together to meet a deadline, same as Ni no Kuni 2.
: Originally, the bosses were supposed to be based on the seven deadly sins. This is why there’s seven dungeons in the base game, plus the final one.
: See if you can guess which sin Kaneshiro is supposed to represent.
: “You truly are despicable…”
: “You better be ready, Kaneshiro! We’re gonna snatch your Treasure from you!”
: “Don’t make me laugh, you petty thieves. My citadel has the highest security installed in it.”
: You’ll notice that the Sui-ki (the purple oni) isn’t here yet - instead, we’ve got two regular Oni to fight.
: In the base game, Oni were supposed to teach you about Technicals - they’re the first enemy we’ve run into that does not have a weakness. They resist Physical and Gun, but are neutral to everything else.
: So let’s play along with that. Joker goes first and freezes one. This opens the Oni up to physical damage, which Ryuji does for a technical… that I forgot to capture.
: The thing is, you ultimately don’t NEED technicals to efficiently defeat them. In fact, Ann hits harder without a technical than Ryuji did with one.
: This time, Yusuke freezes one and Joker follows up with Frei for a technical.
: Again, here’s the problem. That last hit Ann did was an Agilao. This is a regular Agi, and she’s still out-damaging the technical hits.
: Another two Oni. You can guess how this goes.
: Well yeah, that’s kind of how the whole Megami Tensei franchise up until Persona 1 worked, though you paid them in Magnetite instead of money.
: “Why did the security guards turn into monsters!? And what were those supernatural powers!? Could those have been the Personas you mentioned!?”
: Makoto somehow pulled off three interrobangs in three consecutive sentences. I didn’t think I’d ever see that outside of an Allanson game.
: “Does now really look like the time to be asking about that!? We need to retreat! Makoto, make sure you don’t get separated from us!”
: “Guys!”
: “Those would be my words. However, I do thank you for providing me with such wonderful goods. …It’s time you disappear.”
: “Managing a bank is tough as it is. So it’s my policy to kill clients who are more trouble than they’re worth. Having one impertinent brat disappear is enough to set an example in that other world.”
: “Please stop!”
: “Oh, I wouldn’t damage an asset like you. They’re dead men walking, but you’ll be just fine. Your sister is quite a beauty though. I’ll make sure to make her my personal slave.”
: Naturally it has to go right into a sex thing. I’m not sure that Hashino knows how to write any other kind of villain.
: “Once I get bored, I’ll just sell her off. Oh, poor Sis… she could’ve been successful, if only her younger sister wasn’t so dumb.”
: “My sister has nothing to do with this!”
: “Then you better start taking customers tomorrow. All you gotta do is endure it and do as you’re told.”
: So, have you guessed which deadly sin Kaneshiro is supposed to represent?
: “Endure it… do as I’m told…”
: “You’ll earn three million yen in no time. Although, your life and everything along with it will be a complete wreck by then! Gwahahahahahaha!”
: Kaneshiro is even more cartoonish than Kamoshida was.
: If it wasn’t already clear that Makoto is just a female Tatsuya, this should make it pretty clear. The design for Johanna (her Persona) is also pretty close to the Final Fantasy 13 motorcycle-Shiva design.
: Even Ryuji’s like “There’s no way someone could be so boring that their Persona is a motorcycle.”
: Naturally she also has to do the Akira motorcycle slide because I mean, why not? She’s already enough of a ripoff as-is.
: Oh, right. What sin Kaneshiro represents. The trophy for clearing the bank is called “Bank of Gluttony: Cleaned Out”.
NEW PERSONA: JOHANNA
Origin: Medieval European Fiction
Persona 5 Original
Fictional character likely created with the purpose of harming the image of the Catholic church. Supposedly a woman who disguised herself as a man in order to become the Pope, then died shortly after her gender was revealed.
: I should mention that Johanna has been proven to be entirely fictional in almost the exact same way the majority of the Dragonball Z movies were determined to be non-canon: basically, there’s concrete evidence of there being a pope that wasn’t her at all the times she was supposedly active within the church. She wasn’t even an Antipope, because even those have been accounted for.
: Anyway, she’s kind of an all-rounder Persona who has a little bit of everything: she specializes in Nuclear damage but also has support skills, buffs, debuffs, and even physical skills. What stops her from being this game’s Naoto (who learned a lot of high-tier spells but not the damage modifiers for them) is that she does get Nuke Boost and Nuke Amp at higher levels.
: I have her open with Makajama, which inflicts Persona 5’s equivalent of Silence, blocking anyone affected by it from using spells or physical skills.
: Joker then inflicts a metric shitload of damage with Matador.
: I was so sure I was going to get Makoto’s finisher screen on this first fight.
: Unfortunately, no.
: “But how are we getting out?”
: “There’s only one exit, right?”
: “So, you’re totally the Fist of the Phantom Star now, huh.”
: “Do you want to get smacked?”
: This, by the way, is the only time you’ll ever actually see Makoto use her Persona as a mode of transportation. Everywhere else, she either walks or rides Morgana.
: “Daaamn…”
: “Okay, we have a path!”
: “That was no aikido - that was some hardcore ass whoopin’!”
: “I am SO not pissing her off… I feel like she’ll rip off my arm.”
: “She does exude that aura.”
: “…Oh, stop it! This is the most exhausted I’ve ever gotten these past few years. But… it felt pretty great.”
: “I never thought I’d become part of the Phantom Thieves I was after. Sis might faint if she found out.”
: “You mentioned her earlier.”
: “She’s a prosecutor for the district - and she’s investigating the Phantom Thieves.”
: “Wait, ain’t that bad!?”
: “No need to worry. A normal investigation would never lead them to a world like that. Then again, it must’ve been fate for this to happen…”
: “What do you mean?”
: “I can’t be like my sister. I had a feeling that there’d come a time when we wouldn’t see eye to eye anymore. I’m thankful to have a sister who works so hard, but… there are times I feel sorry for her too. And after hearing my Persona’s voice, I clearly understand how I feel now.”
: “It appears you’re not as reserved as you make yourself seem.”
: “I was just doing whatever the adults told me to.”
: The game is really, really trying its hardest to get you to like Makoto.
: “Sounds good to me! We’ve needed someone like that for a while now!”
: “I’d be honored if I can help out.”
: “We had way too much testosterone anyway, so I feel much better hav-”
: We have all the male party members already. Something tells me that if he could’ve gotten away with it without being accused of making a harem anime, Hashino would’ve made Yusuke and Ryuji female as well.
: God dammit I already did the Hotel Mario thing, and I know this because it was in my Youtube watch history when I looked it up.
: “So the Kaneshiro over here doesn’t know what happened inside the Palace.”
: “That’s right, but his Palace will be affected if the real Kaneshiro’s cognition changes. We can’t be lax.”
: “It seems it’d be best to avoid unnecessary contact with him until then.”
: “Three weeks left, huh…”
: “There’s that security system too.”
: “But if we pull this off, it’ll definitely be great!”
: “We’ll crush him like a fly. I’ll make him regret making me angry…”
: Funny she should say that.
: “Anyways, let’s begin our operation tomorrow!”
: “First, we need to secure a route to the Treasure like always.”
: “You guys are finally starting to get used to this.”
: “I’ll be waiting for the call to meet up.”
: Horny anime games about boats - 2. Horny anime games about motorcycles - 0. Checkmate, motorcycles.
: She’s right about one thing there.
: “Well, we were at odds with each other until just a little while ago… but Ryuji’s totally right. We need to work together to overcome this!”
: We spend the night crafting lockpicks for proficiency. I’m not sure how many locked chests there are in Kaneshiro’s palace, but we should have enough.
: By the way, this is where I’m really glad I didn’t use the “regular” 100% walkthrough, because as it turns out the regular 100% route does reload for bonus stats… and as you’ll see in a bit, I had enough of that shit by the time I finished recording for this update.
: “You know, I can turn into a car too, so it’s like… I feel a sense of familiarity?”
: “Uh, no. I’m supposed to be human! Well, motorcycles are nice too, but it can’t carry large numbers of people. I really am special after… all… huh?”
: “Carry…? No… take somewhere? Something just crossed my mind… it’s no use. I can’t remember at all…”
: “Eh. There’s nothing I can do about it if I can’t remember. I need to concentrate on Kaneshiro for now. Unlike you guys, Makoto’s clever, so we can expect great things from her.”
: “But Akira, you really do have something special.”
: This is why I don’t use Morgana. By the time he gets any useful abilities, we’ll have already maxed out Ryuji and Ann (even on this slower route) and probably be pretty close to maxing out Yusuke and Makoto.
: That’s kind of a problem with the way this game is designed: you get a couple of party members so late into the game that everyone else is maxed out and there’s not much of a reason to switch away from them.
: “I know! After we deal with Kaneshiro, I should consult her about Mementos too. I’m sure Makoto’s brain can-”
: How would she even - she’s never even been there!
: Joker having exactly the same reaction I would.
: “… We got Yusuke, and now Makoto… this guy has quite the luck… could there be some reason for it? Nah, that can’t be.”
: “Oh no, it isn’t a problem… I actually find it refreshing to be asked to the student council room. Although it’s somewhat nerve-wracking as well.”
: “…I think I’m a bit nervous myself. Anyway, um… I wanted to apologize. I’m… really sorry for everything.”
: “What do you mean…?”
: “You know how I blamed you for Kamoshida’s sexual harassment? Well, I wanted to apologize for that… I’ve honestly been meaning to this whole time.”
: “Takamaki-san…”
: “I realized later that Shiho was calling out for me… and I wasn’t there to help her… I didn’t want to admit my own guilt… so I took it out on you, Niijima-senpai. I’m… very sorry.”
: “In fact, I think the two of us are pretty similar.”
: “Huh…?”
: “I was unable to save anyone. Not Suzui-san, and not any of Kaneshiro’s victims. I kept telling myself I wasn’t at fault because I was simply following orders… but that was all a lie.”
: Makoto’s only… what, 70 years too late to use the Nuremberg defense?
: “It felt like I would be admitting my own worthlessness had I not shifted the blame off of myself. Fear of that worthlessness was probably why I acted so harshly toward you and your friends… I’m deeply sorry as well.”
: “Even…? chuckle You’re right… how about we leave this conversation in the past?”
: Funny, I always pictured Makoto as more of a Knuckles than a Sonic. They’ve got that same aesthetic going on.
: “Mm-hm! Oh, but… one more thing. You’re not worthless, Niijima-senpai. You were a bit reckless, but you’re the reason we found a way into Kaneshiro’s Palace. And you even obtained the power to change people’s hearts. You did that all yourself, Niijima-senpai.”
: “That way of thinking is very much like you, Takamaki-san. When you confronted me about Suzui-san, I realized how dishonest and small I was. You’re always very direct… that’s what helped me finally realize the error of my ways.”
: “It turns out I’m a little slow on the uptake at times. Hey… can I call you Ann?”
: This sentence makes no sense in English until you realize what she’s asking to do is talk to her like a friend would.
: “Um, yeah! I… I’m going to do the same, M-M-Makoto… rgh, that’s so embarrassing!”
: “How about we get something to eat before we go home for the night?”
: “Ooh, I know a place! There’s a crepe shop at Central Street that totally stuffs their crepes!”
: “Do you want to split one?”
: On this day, we get good RNG for some reason.
: We get a chalk dodge. This gives us three points to Charm, meaning that we’re now a full nine points beyond where we’re supposed to be.
: Today, we have a lot of shopping to do. I wound up doing it in a way that wasn’t totally optimal - one thing the game doesn’t tell you is that the flower shop there is only open at night. They kind of make it seem like a 24-7 thing.
: In addition to the flower shop, there’s also a bookstore in Shinjuku.
: Joker just goes “That’s okay, I’m not horny.” while Morgana reaches out to try and grab the latest volume of Busty Catgirls Monthly.
: The first book is unimportant - Flowerpedia just gives you more hints when working at the garden store in Shibuya, and I believe we’re done working there.
: What we’re here for is that second book, The Craft of Cinema. It… I believe doubles the amount of stat gains you get from watching DVDs and watching movies at the theater, and since we’re going to be doing a lot of both we want this now.
: We also wind up buying ABCs of Crafting, though I also grabbed Flowerpedia just in case that trophy for reading all the books is still in the game.
: As it turns out, by the way, you have to pay twice when going to a non-Shibuya, non-Aoyama destination: once when you go and a second time when you leave. If we stop by the crepe shop (which we saw during Ann’s confidant) Ann and Makoto are in fact there.
: “Oh, how about some pudding a la mode? I’ll give you my tip on the best way to enjoy it!”
: Joker already knows the best way to enjoy pudding. It’s with Yusuke.
: “Oh, Akira? Did you come here to eat some crepes too?”
: “Really? You guys sure love going places like this…”
: “I’ll be here spending time with Makoto today, so just let us know if we’re meeting up! We’ll head over as soon as we finish eating our crepes!”
: We also have to borrow a bootleg of 1990s TV drama ER, which I imagine is a lot like that Turkish version of The Sopranos I saw on my Twitter TL a few days ago.
: Unfortunately, today’s another Maruki day.
: “Or will it!? Today’s your lucky day! Please take a look at what’s on this table!”
: “I thought I’d get a surprise for you, since you’ve been kind enough to indulge me all this time. Go ahead, enjoy!”
: Unfortunately, we have to pick the “nice” answer because confidant points. Honestly, I feel like confidant points for dialog was just kind of a bad idea.
: “Go on, don’t be shy! I’ve got enough for seconds, too!”
: “Oh, I know. As long as we’re talking about cookies… they actually reminded me about this psychological experiment.”
: Fucker thinks he’s Professor Layton now.
: “The scientists prepared two containers, and put the same kind of cookies in both of them. In one container, they put only one cookie. But the other one was filled with cookies - ten of them.”
: “Which container’s cookies were marked as tasting better? Any guesses?”
: What he’s talking about is a 1975 study by Stephen Worchel, Jerry Lee, and Akanbi Adewole out of the University of Southern Maine. That study was significantly different than how Maruki describes it.
: In that study, the researchers ran three groups: one who got a jar with ten cookies, one that got a jar with two, and then a third group where they gave them ten cookies and then removed eight of them from the jar. I don’t know if there was a reason for this, but all 200 of the participants were women.
: In the actual study, this was… sort of true. The group that got the two-cookie jar rated the cookies higher than the group that got the ten-cookie jar. However, the third group - the one that got ten cookies and then had eight removed? They rated theirs the highest.
: “Correct. Easy to guess, huh? There’s something called the ‘law of scarcity’. It’s about what you’d imagine from the name: people are drawn to things that are more scarce.”
: “You can see this law in action just by observing how excited people get over limited-edition merchandise.”
: If you want a good story about Connecticut ruining everything, Wikipedia actually mentions this on the page for the law of scarcity. In 1983, the Connecticut Leather Company put out this line of dolls called Cabbage Patch Kids.
: Cabbage Patch Kids were the hottest toy of 1983 - everyone wanted one, and there wasn’t enough supply to go around. As a result, there were riots at stores. There’s first-hand accounts of it as well.
: By the way, the Connecticut Leather Company was the same company that made the Colecovision and Coleco Adam, both of which were contributors to the 80s video game crash. Like I said, Connecticut ruins everything.
: “Ahaha, I know, right? Don’t you think it’s really fascinating? In becoming aware of scarcity, we trigger our own desires, and cause a change in our cognition…”
: “Not only that - the effect spreads to our senses, and creates a subjective, observable difference in our reality. Basically, your perceptions can be changed by your cogition or preconceptions.”
: “It’s all below the conscious level, but it’s really incredible! Incidentally, now that you’ve heard that story… how do you feel about that idea? That your unconscious desires may have changed the taste of the cookie?”
: “That’s definitely not the usual response. But it’s one I can understand. It probably sounds like an exaggeration, but something about that seems so beautiful to me.”
: “Maybe the human heart can falter, or be unreliable sometimes… but if this experiment proves anything, it’s that even a simple preconception can be enough to bring someone more joy.”
: “For example, take that story I just told you… what if you’d eaten that one cookie, and it had been the best cookie of your life? Say I never revealed the trick behind it. That cookie would have remained more delicious than usual. It would have been a subjective truth of your reality.”
: See, I don’t know about that. I kind of had this way back in the mid-90s when I had an N64 but a lot of my friends had the PS1 - I remember seeing a friend’s older brother playing through Parasite Eve and being absolutely floored by it.
: I specifically remember him playing through the end sequence, and being like “What the hell there’s this crazy floating zombie lady? AND she can light people on fire just by being near them? Holy shit what is this game?”
: Now, younger me could never have bought a PS1 - I was too young to have a job yet. In fact, older me has never been able to find a PS1 with a working disc drive and never had any success with the replacement drives. That’s why I have the PSP Go I used for the Persona 1 and Innocent Sin LPs.
: Under Maruki’s logic, I’d probably be one of those people who think Parasite Eve was the best game ever. In fact, I’ve never finished it, or even come close.
: “Right, I’m glad to hear you say that. Basically, what I wanted to say was… if this idea of preconception could be studied further, and actually applied to treating people… I feel like it could help a lot of people. Maybe even more than I could help through counseling.”
: “Then again, it relies so heavily on perspective. Some people might call it a lie, or see it as running from problems. Still, even if that’s true, I believe that method could save a lot of people.”
: “Oh, yikes! I’m so sorry! We wound up getting into an academic conversation after all… I really need to watch myself. Whenever I’m talking to you, somehow I always end up going back to my research.”
: “I truly am grateful for everything you’ve done. Not just because I can get your opinion on these things, either… it’s more like… it’s as if I’m talking to an old friend. Ah, but maybe that’s too personal. After all, this is for the sake of our deal, right? So we say, anyway.”
: I have no idea how well this ability works, but I’m confident it is something we will never see unless I run out of SP spamming Megidolaon at the final boss.
: “Now then, I’d better show you another way to mentally train yourself! What I’m going to teach you today is…”
: We know the drill by now. Extra five max SP for Joker.
: “It was supposed to be a chance for us to relax, but it ended up being another big academic discussion.”
: “You’re always so kind. You might be a better counselor than I am… I’ve always been like this. I get so hyperfocused on my research, I don’t notice anything else.”
: “Back when I was a student, people kept warning me about that… oops, there I go rambling again. Sorry, sorry. All right, see you soon.”
: The first thing I do is go back to Shinjuku and buy six Mega Fertilizer. This is why we didn’t feed the plant again even though we could’ve - because Mega Fertilizer is that much better. Six is all we’ll need in order to max out Kindness.
: Unfortunately, I kind of missed capturing a few lines because I had to reload this part until we got the extra points in Knowledge.
: As you can probably tell, it took me six reloads to get the points we needed to avoid a potential permafuck. Because there’s no stopping point, this meant dashboarding out of the game and restarting the entire thing.
: Yeah, I did, and we’re going to see her as soon as we’ve done Kaneshiro’s palace and grinded another fuckton of money. This is basically just an announcement that she’s available, so I’ll skip the rest of it.
: There’s also some throwaway dialog with Makoto where she asks us if we want to go to the Palace or not. We don’t.
: Here, we’ll get to see what the difference between “100%” and “All Confidant Events” is.
: I forgot to grab a shot of my actual choice. You could pick “Let’s have some tea” and still get 100% - this would basically be just like the time we had Kawakami over but did not rank up.
: However, if you pick the first option…
: We can choose where to go. Most confidants have a special non-rank up scene that happens if you bring them to a specific place without ranking up - and for many of them, that involves going to a place unlocked by a different confidant.
: In Ann’s case, her special cutscene happens in Harajuku.
: I should mention that the reason the other 100% route doesn’t do all of these is because some of them require a specific confidant rank (sometimes with more than one confidant), meaning you’d have to delay certain confidants and not go for 100% as quickly as possible.
: “But all the people are such a pain… what gives them the right to be here!?” Anyway, let’s get through quickly so we don’t get caught by the salespeople!"
: “In any case, there are so many different types of people here. It’s fun just watching them. People might think I’m weird if they see me staring at them alone… but I’m sure it’s fine as long as I’m with you.”
: Staring at random people was another Lisa Silverman thing.
: I remember when Persona had a writer who was only very horny for idols as opposed to being a total hack. They should’ve put a Legendary Weapons sidequest in this game and had Ann’s weapon be with Reiji.
: Conversation would be Reiji going “Why the fuck would I have a legendary whip, I only use gloves! This doesn’t even make any sense!” and then Ann discovering that someone stuck a legendary whip in Reiji’s back pocket.
: Also a scene where Ann meets Lisa and both of them simultaneously go “My own clone! Now both of us will be thirsty for a gay guy!”
: We also get some extra points for answering correctly in this scene that we wouldn’t get if we did the generic one.
: “I mean, things are half as fun if you don’t have anyone to share that fun with, right? I wonder what all these people are thinking about right now… some of them might even be sad beneath those happy exteriors, and we’d never even know…”
: “Hey, don’t you get fired up when you’re thinking about helping them out!? Oh, um… never mind. That’s not what we were talking about… oooh, that couple’s in a big fight! The girlfriend’s totally going for the knockout punch!”
: This also gets us the first decoration for Joker’s room. You get one from each confidant.
: We have the request from Ryuji to go spy on Yamauchi now - and we’re going to do it, but we have some other stuff to do first.
: We also have to feed the goddamn plant. I’m not forgetting this time.
: …Wait, what? We weren’t supposed to rank up Kindness for another week or so, and yet here it is. This means we’re also an indeterminate amount of points ahead on Kindness, and I have no idea how.
: I’m starting to wonder if this is an intentional typo by the guide author to stop people re-posting their guide… or if it’s a Gabriel Knight 3 scenario where the guide author missed some points.
: We can also put up the Rise poster we got by interacting with the shelf next to the plant… and then promptly take it down and toss it in the trash where it belongs.
: Accepting Ryuji’s request unlocks Tsukishima on the map.
: This entire segment is a kind of long conversation between two characters who don’t have official portraits, and since I’ve already done a couple of big screenshot dumps this update, I’m just going to do it in full text.
Yamauchi: “Mmm, I’ve had some experience. Back in my college days, we’d rent a yacht for the weekend and have massive parties. I must say though, the sake’s been tasting particularly sweet lately.”
Fellow Teacher: “No surprise there. Things have been much calmer without Kamoshida. Those were some real dark times for Shujin though, huh? But now that he’s gone, you finally get the chance you deserve, Yamauchi!”
Yamauchi: “Don’t flatter me, haha. He had his strengths, sure… but because of him, our volleyball team will be forever scarred. The only real option now is to abandon it completely. There has to be a way to bring Shujin back into the limelight though. That’s where I come in…”
: That’s been the UConn football program’s only option for years, but they keep throwing money at it hoping that some day, they’ll win a game.
Fellow Teacher: “You mean with the track team, right?”
Yamauchi: “The students who went through so much hardship under Kamoshida rise again with a caring new advisor… it’ll be the rebirth of a team that found themselves in the depths of despair. The public will love it. Despite my lack of track and field knowledge, I’ll form a tight bond with the students. I’ll be the protagonist of my very own tear-jerker…”
Yamauchi: “And of course all the praise for reviving them will go to me, their incredible, loving advisor. I’ll have to hire a great coach if I want to pull this off though.”
Fellow Teacher: “So you’re gonna pretend to coach them while someone else does all the legwork? Amazing, Yamauchi!”
Yamauchi: “Such stunning achievements will look great when it’s time to hand out bonuses… but I’m not gonna stop there either. I’ll publish books, give motivational speeches…”
Fellow Teacher: “What about all the troublemakers on the team? I’ve heard that Nakaoka kid is especially bad.”
Yamauchi: “Nakaoka? Oh, you mean the one who asked them to bring the pre-Kamoshida coach back? Don’t worry, I’ve already taken care of him… there’s this other boy on the team… Takeishi. Doesn’t really excel in much of anything. Well, I said I would make him the new captain if he could get rid of that troublemaker Nakaoka. I might’ve mentioned something about how Nakaoka was working with Kamoshida too… subtly, of course.”
Fellow Teacher: “And? What ended up happening?”
Yamauchi: “Apparently, Takeishi chased him away… the plan worked perfectly! And the best part is, not only are Takeishi’s parents loaded, but his mother’s the president of the PTA.”
Fellow Teacher: “I see… he’d make a great pawn!”
Yamauchi: “Perhaps, but a nothing like him could never captain a successful championship-winning team. He may have to have an unfortunate ‘accident’ at practice one day. But until then, he can show the others the value of obedience.”
: Well, that escalated quickly.
: “Yeah. This ain’t our problem, it’s the track team’s. So… they’re just gonna have to decide on their own.”
: “Y’know, track ain’t a team sport. At least, sprintin’ wasn’t. You’ve got teammates, sure… but you’re really just lookin’ out for your own time. That’s why I never thought about askin’ people for help or tryin’ to solve our problems together.”
: “But… I can’t ignore the stuff they’re goin’ through now. I mean, even though we had our own goals n’ shit… we were still runnin’ together. They suffered with me, gritted their teeth with me…”
: “…Honestly, I think it was only 'cause of them I was able to run at all. So I can’t just go and turn my back on 'em now, right? I know that ain’t the coolest thing to say, but it’s how I feel.”
: “Huh? …For real? Thanks, man!”
: This ability was added for Royal, and I believe it works even if Ryuji isn’t in the active party.
: “Anyways, I’m starvin’! Let’s eat some monja while we’re here. So far, all I’ve seen of this place is the goddamn toilet!”
: Why didn’t he just stay outside?
: “But goddamn it… Yamauchi! That dick! Just thinkin’ about him pisses me off! At this rate, the track team’s screwed. Yamauchi’s just gonna take advantage of them!”
: “But I also don’t wanna make a huge scene. I can’t let myself mess up their chance to start the team again… besides… I doubt those guys are gonna listen to anything I say.”
: “That’s true. I gotta have faith in them. Anyhow, at least we know the truth about him. We just gotta figure out our next move. That bastard Yamauchi, munchin’ on monja like he’s got us all figured out… he won’t get away with this!”
: Next time, we’ll be meeting Yusuke for his confidant, then establishing a new one with Ohya. We’ll also finally rank up to 7 with Dr. Femdom and spend all of our money.
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If they get that to run on the PSP I’d try it, if only to see what the original game was like. The PS1 versions of the early Persona games are vastly different from the PSP versions.
I would try to buy another PS1 and try the whole PSIO thing, but those are expensive (not that that’s ever stopped me before) and probably wouldn’t be compatible anyway.
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Every JRPG should have a motorcycle summon so I’m not complaining.
You’re confusing Hashino with me.
Can’t believe the Catholic Church is covering up the truth about Pope Joan The Pope Who Was A Motorcycle.
Also as hard as it is to give this game much credit I sort of like Makoto’s presentation as being the smart one who’s supposed to be a leader and an example being stuck and unable to help people, derided as useless, until she finally snaps under the strain.
Except she snaps for like two seconds because all our party members snap for two seconds and suddenly they’re back to normal again.
Click Here for Update 34
: I had the site eat my update… what is this, five times now?
: We have a seat on the train, so we get a free reading period. Today, we’ll be reading The Craft of Cinema. I’m not entirely sure why the guide starts The Gallant Rogue and then never finishes it. I actually looked, and there’s nothing that boosts the point you get from reading books, so it’s not like we’re waiting for that.
: In the span of one train ride, Morgana has gone from “Donnie Darko makes no sense” to “Donnie Darko is the peak of human achievement in cinema” and then back to “Donnie Darko makes no sense”.
: I was also wrong when I said that Craft of Cinema doubles stat gains from movies and DVDs. What it actually does is add a flat two extra points, so DVDs are now worth five points per session and movies at the theater are worth seven.
: "Speaking of rain, did you know the teru teru bozu was originally female? According to one theory, it came from a Chinese paper doll of a girl - the ‘Sao Ching Niang.’ "
: Teru Teru Bozu are little ghost-like dolls that kids hang up outside to wish for good weather. It seems like the association of the male gender is something that weakened over time, because when I image searched for them I found plenty that looked like girls, or cats, or in some cases catgirls.
: On a side note, you can apparently hang them upside-down to wish for rain, and now I’m just picturing Morgana making a catgirl one and hanging it upside-down in an attempt to call down an apocalyptic rain of catgirls.
: “When it came to Japan, it looked like a monk praying for sunny weather, and became male. In the history of the world, it’s not uncommon to twist people’s genders for politics or religion. Now then, Kurusu-kun, please look at this picture.”
: Here, we get an early look at Makoto’s tarot card. We can’t start her confidant until after Kaneshiro’s palace.
: Of course we know, she’s a motorcycle.
: “That’s correct. Pope Joan was a significant figure from the medieval ages. You’re quite the history buff. Joan - or Johanna as some historians argue - was the pope of Rome, even though women couldn’t be priests.”
: “As such, she was a legendary figure, sometimes thought of as an anti-church symbol. According to the legends, Joan was a cross-dressing girl brought from Athens to Rome.”
: “Praised throughout the city for her wisdom, she was chosen by the people as pope. However, when it was discovered that she was a woman, she was stoned to death.”
: “This incident was regarded a taboo by the church. As a result, Joan was stricken from the history books.”
: It’s time to see Yusuke’s new painting.
: In public, he calls it “Shadow the Hedgehog Performing a Spindash”. In private though, I think we all know he calls it “My Boyfriend’s Colors”.
: “I would like your honest opinion… if you would.”
: “…Hmph, as it should be. I do not paint for the sake of others’ comprehension. Regardless, this is how I choose to interpret the idea of ‘desire’. It is a foul charm held deep within the abyss of the heart.”
: Joker looks at him with an eyebrow raised and goes “Really? That’s what you think of when you think of desire? That, and nothing else?” and Yusuke starts sweating profusely.
: “To be honest, I believe my ability to capture desire so elegantly is all due to our Mementos foray. I have grown to understand the intricacies of the heart in a way I had once thought impossible…”
: “Akira, I intend on submitting this piece to an upcoming public art exhibition. Nobody has seen the abyss of the heart in such a raw manner before… the discourse will be fascinating.”
: “More importantly, it shall be the spark that revitalizes my slumbering career!”
: “Indeed. I expect you to accompany me for the moment it is finally revealed to the general public. Hm, I’m sure this will be a most sensational experience for those who choose to undergo it.”
: “A raw, unbridled look into the depths of the human psyche… and I was the one who was able to bring it to life, all thanks to your assistance. You have my sincerest gratitude.”
: “Hm… I deeply anticipate the public reaction at the exhibition. But for now, I should be going. My apologies for disturbing you.”
: “I was even able to come up with a new interpretation, thanks to your help. I’m on a roll right now. I shall keep up this momentum and apply it to the Phantom Thieves as well!”
: “No, I can guide us to even further greatness! Hah… your very presence amplifies my ambition. What a strange fellow you are.”
: There was a Persona 5 thread on /v/ (4chan’s videogame board) a few days ago that I saw where someone went “Yusuke was maybe a nudge from being a full-on gay romance route” and I’m like “Wow, even they can see it.”
: “I can hardly wait to hear back about the public exhibition, so I can share the joy with you. I will contact you again later. Expect good news!”
: Joker, professional IM troll.
: “That article… do you think the reporter we met at Crossroads could have written it?”
: “Just as I thought. The author is listed as Ichiko Ohya. …I see. This article might end up being useful for us.”
: “If the Palace ruler sees it and his cognition of the Phantom Thieves changes… hey, Akira. We’d be missing out if we didn’t use this to our advantage.”
: “If we have her paint us in a positive light, public opinion of us will change for the better! You should go try and get her to write some more articles about the Phantom Thieves!”
: Before we do that, there’s a TV quiz we have to do for knowledge points.
: How would you even… you can’t even talk! You don’t even have hands!
: I think Morgana assumes he’s still in Innocent Sin, where he can get Ohya to spread a rumor that he can just kinda Strong Bad his way around objects.
: On the way there, we run into everyone’s least favorite offensive stereotype.
: Don’t worry, it’s perfectly okay for them to be horny for Akechi. He just turned 18 on June 2nd.
: “Hey, where’s my glass…? Didn’t I order a refill? How much did I drink today? What time is it? Ah, who cares. …Wait, I care.”
: “She’s so drunk that she hasn’t even noticed you’re here. If we have her write articles, it’ll have an effect on the Metaverse. We might be able to use her if we do it right. Should we try forming a deal with Ohya?”
: “Keep in mind that she’s drunk. Now, do a good job negotiating, okay?”
: “So… what’s up? Got anything new on the Phantom Thieves? Or maybe… you’re just falling in love with me, hm?”
: “For real? You came all this way just to tell me? Thank god… my publisher just assigned me to be the beat reporter for the Phantom Thieves. Man…this will reaaally help me out.”
: “Oh, don’t be such a killjoy. These kids nowadays know about things we adults don’t have access to. Besides, what’s most important is that I now have a reliable third-party source for my stories.”
: “So, what do you want from me this time? Information about someone? Cold hard cash?”
: What he needs is for her to spread a rumor that the grocery store in Yongen-Jaya has a Legendary Katana for sale.
: “Now I can take it easy… maybe I’ll take a little vacation, with all my free time.”
: “What do you want? Just tell me. Last time it was info on Kaneshiro, right? The office has been abuzz lately… I think it’s Kaneshiro related. Something’s fishy…”
: And then Lala pulls out a plate of spaghetti topped with kusaya.
: “…Support the Phantom Thieves? But I see what’s going on here. A hardcore Phantom Thieves fanboy, huh…?”
: “A vacation? Oh, I was just kidding. I’m conducting a private investigation during my off hours. No one at work knows about it.”
: “Hey, how 'bout we do this… you supply me with info on the Phantom Thieves… and I’ll write articles based on what you tell me about them. You know, the Phantom Thieves who you love oh-so-much.”
: Joker then spends the entire night trying to explain the John Persona / John Persona duality.
: “…All right then. It’s a deal. I can create a lot of positive PR for the Phantom Thieves, so be sure to give me some good scoops.”
: “Oh, don’t tell anyone about this, okay? I don’t want people to know my source is a high schooler. Okay, Lala-chaaan! Time to celebrate our agreement! Bring out my bottle! And two glasses, please…!”
: “C’mon! Please…? …Whoa, her silence is golden. Fine, fine FINE! I won’t make the high schooler drink! Ugh, I gotta use the bathroom…”
: I like to think that Joker hears alcohol and opens his jacket to reveal a “Be Gay, Do Crimes” shirt underneath, and then Lala opens her kimono to reveal a “Be Gay, No Crimes” shirt in response.
: One thing I’m not going to show to conserve space is that you get points to Charm when visiting Ohya in the same way you get Guts while visiting Dr. Femdom.
: “Lala-chaaaan!? Where’d you gooo? Hey! Lala-chaaaan! C’mon, where are you!?”
: I don’t know how it is that the game treats Lala so well but has offensive stereotypes at the same time.
: We get another cutscene with Ryuji where he tells us to go to the palace. We won’t be doing that just yet, because we need to break the game in half first.
: Instead, we’ll do a confidant event with Ann.
: “And you know what she did? Laughed! She couldn’t stop talking about how tough she thought Mika sounded. Honestly though… it was kinda refreshing. I’m not even mad anymore.”
: “I guess you really just need someone to laugh at you if you want to feel better.”
: “I mean, they always say laughter’s the best medicine, right? I’ve seen the truth of that saying firsthand… but anyway, even though I’m trying to strengthen my heart, Shiho’s the real strong one here.”
: “So I agreed without thinking much of it, but it ended up being… pretty overwhelming.”
: “Yeah… she was dripping with sweat, teeth clenched… she was clearly in a lot of pain. Apparently, she can’t even move her feet. She said it feels like her legs are filled with sand… but she dragged them along, legs swollen with blood…”
: You know what would’ve been interesting? If we’d actually gotten to see this instead of just having Ann tell us about it.
: “I wanted to just make her stop… by the time it was all over, she was in tears. It was really tough on her… she said she just wanted to give up.”
: The overuse of ellipses we saw in Persona 1 and 2 is really starting to make a comeback here, and not even to connect thoughts between dialog boxes.
: “And that’s why she asked me to come… to keep her motivated. The whole time she was complaining about things in ways she normally never would… but even with that… she finished her session…”
: “I…I don’t know why I’m crying… I didn’t have to go through that… is it because I’m weak?”
: “Then why… can’t I stop crying…? You know, even through all that pain, I thought Shiho was so cool… beautiful, even. Despite all her complaining… she still tried really hard.”
: “Strength is more than just not getting fazed… it’s the power to fight through adversity. So I was thinking, and um… what can I do to help Shiho?”
: “My strength…? …Yeah, I’ll do just that. I’m gonna give it my all! You know Akira, being with you really helps me see things clearly. What I should do, the true meaning of strength… well… thank you for that.”
: And now we have two people with Harisen Recovery.
: “Ugh, my nose is all runny… wh-what are you looking at me like that for? Pretty girls get runny noses too, you know!”
: “I feel better now that I got to talk to you about everything. I’m going to try my best to help Shiho out… in my own way. Maybe our relationship won’t ever be exactly the way it was before…”
: “But now that I saw her crying, I know I’ll find something I can do for her!”
: “Thanks! I can’t let her leave me behind. Watch me. One day, I’ll be cool and strong - just like Shiho!”
: We have another Kawakami event tonight, and this is the last one we’ll be doing before we go to the dungeon.
: “You listened to… my secret. I’ve been feeling more at ease since then.”
: I’ve never been able to tell anyone about it, so… I figured I should actually do some housekeeping today, to say thanks…"
: yawn “Sorry… I need to take a break…”
: “I’m so touched to hear that you care for my well-being, Master… ugh… I’m at my limit. Sooo exhausted…”
: Cough Cough “I’m beat… I can’t stop coughing…”
: “Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks…”
: “I mean, there’s nothing left for me to hide from you, so the truth comes out, you know? Now that I think about it… I’m glad you’re the one who found out about me being a maid.”
: “Are YOU going to be all right in this dusty room? And have you been eating well? You need to eat fresh vegetables, and none of that instant stuff.”
: Joker looks at her and goes “So wait, what do you mean by that? Horny? There’s no way eating ramen makes you-”
: And then the camera cuts to Morgana sitting atop a throne of noodles heating water on the portable stove.
: “I guess I should get more sleep. I feel all achy… Takase-kun’s guardians said they need more money, so… I had my boss give me more shifts. I had to beg him for them, but…”
: “Oh, it’s fine! Nothing you should worry about. I feel more at ease, now that I have someone who knows about what I’m going through. …I’m talking about you.”
: This ability is kinda meh, and if you were a trophy hunter in the original game could lock you out of getting the trophy for crafting every item.
: “Uh-oh, time’s up… cough cough I have to get to my next job, so I’m going to head out. Thank you for using our service…”
: “So I guess it’s a good thing I splurged at the doctor’s. I finally got some cough medicine that works.”
: “Hey, you gotta do some cleaning and ventilating on your own even when I’m gone, okay? If you neglect stuff like that, it makes you more likely to get sick.”
: “Who, me? I mean, I’m tired, but that’s nothing new… wait a minute, we’re supposed to be talking about you! Don’t change the subject.”
: “Oh, but if you do get sick, I’ll look after you aaanytime! So please don’t forget to request me! 
”
: “Urgh. I finally get rid of the cough, and now I get these headaches and shivers… times like these are why we invented energy drinks… I just gotta chug one and push through!”
: Today’s the day we begin the process of breaking the game in half.
: “That voice… hey! Wasn’t that Kawakami on the PA? There’s no way that announcement was real… it must have been the signal!”
: I’m not entirely sure how Ushimaru wouldn’t recognize Kawakami’s voice, but whatever.
: The guide has us read ABCs of Crafting, and I’m not entirely sure why. It might be a holdover from the base game’s 100% route.
: In the base game, you wanted this book because it doubles the bonus from Proficiency when determining how many items you can craft.
: What you could do is use this to mass-craft an item called Reserve Ammo, which is not in Royal. Reserve Ammo fully refilled the party’s ammo count, which could be used with this one confidant ability that allowed you to spend a certain percentage of the party’s ammo (something like 15% at max rank) to instantly knock every enemy in a fight down.
: That ability was HEAVILY nerfed in Royal - it now only works three times per day at max rank.
: “Tell everyone to meet at the hideout. Let’s discuss our next move.”
: “Nyahaha… curious, eh? Well, I’ve come up with a super cool idea. Lady Ann will surely swoon for me if I-”
: “Sorry for the wait. So, what’s up, Morgana?”
: “You were talking about… me?”
: “Now that we’ve all gained some experience in battle, I think it’d be good for us to work on our finishers.”
: Joker wants an acrobatic knife dance with Yusuke where they hug at the end.
: “Our finishers? Yeah, I guess if we’re going to keep fighting, we ought to do it with style.”
: “Right? Right!? So, I came up with just the idea… it’s maybe my best one yet! And we can definitely pull it off if you play a part in it, Lady Ann!”
: “Me? Well, okay - what do you need me to do?”
: What he had in mind is called a Showtime Attack. They’re special finishing moves that use a combination of two party members (only one has to actually be in the active party) to do what’s basically a cinematic takedown.
: Showtimes have a number of things that can trigger them, which include:
- A party member is baton passed to
- A party member falls below 50% HP
- A party member dies
- A party member recovers from a status effect, knockdown, or is revived
- Joker is knocked down
- Joker is at critically low (something like 10% or less) HP
- An enemy is downed or becomes critically injured
- An enemy is afflicted with a status debuff (rare)
- A party member is given a status buff (rare)
: There are eight Showtime attacks, and each one is time-gated. The wiki claims we should have the second one (between Ryuji and Makoto) but we don’t. Unfortunately, Joker does not get one with Yusuke - the only two he gets are with Kasumi and a second party member and both only unlock past where the base game ends.
: If you decide to look them up on your own, know that the Joker/Kasumi and Joker/??? ones are massive spoilers for the new content in Royal and will reveal what Kasumi’s entire deal is.
: Each Showtime attack has a name which is different between the US and Japanese versions, but I don’t think the name ever actually shows up in-game.
: This one is called “Gun With the Wind” in the US version, and “Phantom Suit and Machine Gun” in the Japanese version. The latter is a reference to an 80s Japanese action movie called “Sailor Suit and Machine Gun”.
: Personally, I call it “What if Ann was horny for Morgana?”
: KILL IT WITH FIRE
: Showtime attacks do a metric shitload of Almighty damage, based entirely on the level of the two characters participating.
: “Really?”
: “So, is that a no?”
: “Well, it’s not that I don’t want to… it’s more like, isn’t your idea sorta impossible? Even in the Metaverse?”
: I love that Joker has just been carrying that star in his pocket for what, a month?
: “Huh? What was that?”
: And here’s our third showtime attack, which is between Ryuji and Yusuke. Yusuke also has one with Ann.
: “Things would get interesting if my sister ever found out…”
: “There’s no time to be getting sentimental here.”
: “Yes, I understand. I do have one request about all of this though. Can you teach me how to be a phantom thief? Like… about the Metaverse, for example.”
: “Simply put, that world is formed of a person’s cognition. There, you can change people’s hearts.”
: “Yeah, I’ve gathered that much just from going there once. But the method of transportation still eludes me… I mean, it’s a smartphone navigation app…”
: “You only need a name, a location, and a distortion. After the first entry, the Palace is bookmarked.”
: “You really just make it sound like an ordinary app… aren’t there any dangers associated with it?”
: “Don’t worry 'bout that! We’ve already been a bunch of times and -”
: “That’s not what I mean. It’s a navigation app, right? Couldn’t someone easily access our history on the server?”
: I like that she’s worried about this, but not about the whole Phan-site thing.
: “I…”
: “Now she’s catchin’ me off guard too…”
: “And we don’t know where it came from, right? It showed up on my phone without any input from me… do you know anything about it, Akira-kun?”
: “What…?”
: “… I don’t fully understand, but I don’t think we have to worrya bout people accessing our data. From what I can tell, this app is incredibly special. It wasn’t made by any ordinary means.”
: “True… an app that allows you to enter another world isn’t exactly commonplace. Well, Sis doesn’t know who the Phantom Thieves are, so I suppose our information is safe for now.”
: “We’re still learning things ourselves. I hope your sharp wit can help us with that.”
: “Thank you. I’ll do my best.”
: This is what’s on Joker’s “Be Gay, Do Crimes” shirt. I mean, he’s even posing for it.
: Oh man, this picture. So this picture leaked in Japan I think before the base game even came out, and people were in a fucking UPROAR about it because they thought you had to save Makoto from an abusive relationship, but also that Joker wouldn’t be her first and only boyfriend.
: Our last pre-dungeon visit is to Dr. Femdom, so that we can start breaking the game.
: “Oh, are you going home already? If you have some time, why don’t you stay and enjoy an apple? It’s a gift from one of my elderly patients. She gave me a lot…”
: “…Chief Oyamada.”
: “He’s a part-time staffer. I’m having him handle some miscellaneous tasks for me. So, do you have some business with me?”
: “…Bronchitis, you say? Well, I had no intention of taking her from you. I certainly didn’t encourage her to visit my clinic.”
: “…You’re right.”
: “Heh… don’t worry about it.”
: “Don’t lie to me…! She should still have some time! She was slowly recovering… her condition couldn’t have deteriorated that quickly!”
: “No, no no… but she’s all I’ve been working toward, all this time… curing her was my only… there’s no way…”
: And now we know what her actual deal is. Can you guess what her Mementos request is?
: “…What have I been doing all this time? What was even the point…?”
: “…Yeah, you’re right. I feel better now… thanks for your help, my little guinea pig…”
: And there we have it. We have almost no reason to progress further with Dr. Femdom. This is all we need. Discount reduces the prices of everything in Tae’s shop by half.
: “Ugh. I wish I hadn’t shown you that side of me…”
: Joker just goes “I can never take your femdom seriously again.”
: “Hehe. You are? …Well, I suppose it’s fine. As long as it’s you. Go on home for today. We will continue this another time.”
: And now we’ve officially begun the process of breaking the game. SP Adhesive 3 restores 7 SP per turn, meaning that all of the single-target first tier spells are basically free to cast. From now on, everyone in the main party will be using one of these.
: I then head to Iwai’s and spend the rest of our money on guns and armor. I also got new melee weapons for everyone in order to boost damage on technicals.
: I didn’t get a shot of it during the first day (it’s kind of hard to get a shot of it without it being obscured by the menus) but Makoto uses revolvers as her gun of choice. They do a bit more damage than Joker’s pistols but have a lower ammo count and are less accurate.
: Finally, to round out the night, we have another generic non-rank-up event with Kawakami.
: Next time, we’ll go into Kaneshiro’s palace, cheese the game for loads of money, and try to level to 26 (not 29) to match the red shadows.
On the one hand I do love the old school manga style cut-in. On my other four mutant hands, I’ve got black market super soakers to hose Morgana down.
“No, Makoto’s an S”…is what someone, somehow didn’t say in response.
I think it’s because Lala is basically a Magical Negro / gypsy fortuneteller / etc.
Credit where it is due; this cutscene, like all the others, is extremely good. I also strongly love this design. She’s a Kamen Rider and it rules.
This might seem like a swerve but Gluttony isn’t necessarily about food. It is about excess. Greed is “you have something I want” and Gluttony is “I want more and more”, and he does seem to fit the latter; also purple is a colour associated with Gluttony, which would explain the face.
The thing here is less that his logic is flawed, and more that you learned to see above the noise. There can never be a moment in time where that specific cookie can be eaten again, to reveal it was just a regular cookie. You can have similar cookies, but you’ll never replicate that one. Meanwhile with Parasite Eve, you can easily go back and see it exactly as it was, but as a different, grown person. You can see how your initial experience with it influenced the seeming quality of it all.
LE DIABLE! The Devil himself! A card representing extraordinary efforts- often in the realms of violence and raw force. Typically considered a fairly evil card, in so far as these cards can be evil. It can also represent obsession with material things, a fitting friend when going against the Glutton. There isn’t really much to say about this one, it’s right up there with Tower as a “is that good?” card. If it shows up, expect some bad stuff.
Artwise, this is basically a perfect rendition of the Marsielle tarot Devil. Upper body of a human woman, lower half of a goat man, with branch like horns and tangled hair, with two fawn like demons in her binding. Standing, not sitting, for this Devil can see the fullness of things. There’s basically no changes for this to make it fit P5’s style, it just works as is!
What’s funny is that the two Devil Arcanas from the past two games are some of my favorites. They’re quite well written, and are pretty fun. I wonder if this media personality obsessed with getting the scoop, no matter what, will be a good Devil for us…
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Update 35
: This entire recording session was fucking cursed. First, the site ate my last update like five times. Then I got halfway through the dungeon and realized I permafucked. Now, I realized that on my re-recording run I forgot to open my screenshot tool.
: It’s Sunday, so the first thing we want to do, as usual, is grip and sip. What happened was that on my first recording run, I went to the dungeon and forgot to buy new equipment… and on the second run, I forgot to grip and sip.
: “You were all using code names, weren’t you?”
: “You’re quite perceptive.”
: “This time’s a hard one… maybe somethin’ like ‘Shoulder Pads’ ?”
: “Why in the world did you focus on that?”
: “I refuse to be called that.”
: “What about ‘Rider’?”
: “Sounds too much like a smuggler. Next.”
: “Fixer?”
: “I’m not a mastermind though. Next. Won’t you give me something better to work with?”
: Funny he says that, because we do get an Empress-arcana as a party member.
: “You got anything, Joker?”
: Unfortunately, I picked “Witch” on the recording where I forgot my screenshot tool. If you do, Yusuke agrees with you.
: “Do you want to be smacked?”
: “Guys, she’s clearly a ‘Queen’.”
: “That’s it!”
: “Queen… it has a nice ring to it. I like it. Let’s go with that. Now then, could you explain to me the strategy for this mission?”
: God dammit now she’s trying to be Donte from the shitty Ninja Theory “Devil May Cry” game.
: “…Strategy?”
: Makoto reminds me of this one lady at work who spearheaded a weekly “training program”. She sends out an email every Monday, including holidays, with a link to an online training course.
: Every week, without fail, the training course consists of a button that reads “PRESS THIS BUTTON FOR COURSE CREDIT” and nothing else.
: “Uhh… we pretty much look around the area, I provide navigation when needed, and then…”
: “If we run into Shadows, we beat the shit outta 'em!”
: “Very well then. I feel like I’ll be useful for sure. It seems my role is to be the brain of this team. I’ll analyze Mona’s information and give out orders. Any objections?”
: Joker gives Makoto a thumbs-down because of his highly complex relationship with Makoto’s brilliant military mind. Later, he has a breakdown because Makoto won’t authorize use of the Varia Suit to get through a lava pit.
: “N-None, Queen!”
: “I bet Skull’s definitely the type that’ll be under a girl’s thumb.”
: “Mona, will you begin navigating us?”
: “Y-Yes, Queen!”
: “Him too, it seems.”
: “Apparently we are acknowledged as customers who can be extorted.”
: “…That’s fine. We can take advantage of his negligence.”
: “Though I will say, it’s a little scary every time.”
: We actually have to examine the front door to proceed, even though we can clearly see it in the last shot.
: “It seems as though they didn’t want to leave that gaping hole…”
: “But… we can’t get in now…”
: “Sorry… I… think I might have taken it a little too far…”
: “C’mon, it’s not a big deal. Plus it was super cool, Queen!”
: “Th-thanks…”
: “The details are no longer important. Let us search for a new infiltration point, Joker.”
: “Wait. I can feel a draft coming from underneath the statue… doesn’t this seem strange to you, Joker?”
: “Why don’t we check it out?”
: “Let’s head inside… after we’re adequately prepared, of course.”
: The new entrance drops us off just to the right of the reception area, where we were last time.
: There’s a tutorial here for Showtime Attacks, which I already covered in the last update. Let’s just move on.
: The first area is now full of enemies, and they’re kind of annoying to sneak up on due to the long corridors of benches.
: In the original recording run, where I permafucked, we got a fight with the new Treasure Demon as our first encounter.
: The new Treasure Demon is weak to Psychic damage, so I just take advantage of that.
: The Queen’s Necklace was an actual piece of jewelry that was commissioned by Louis XV of France for a lover, but wasn’t finished before he died of smallpox.
: Ultimately, it got used by a con woman who convinced a high-ranking cardinal to buy it in the name of Marie Antoinette, and was one of the contributing factors to Marie Antoinette’s execution even though she never had anything to do with it.
: I say it was an actual piece of jewelry because what happened is that the con woman hired a lookalike to pretend to be Marie Antoinette in order to get the necklace from the cardinal, and then took it apart and sold the diamonds it was made of on the black market, so the necklace no longer exists.
: It was also the subject of an Arsene Lupin story.
: In the second fight, we run into a Nekomata and have Akechi’s ability proc. Thankfully, we have Ame no Uzume with Mazio and a passive that cuts the cost of Mazio from ten SP to five.
Returning Persona: Nekomata
Origin: Japan
First Appearance: Megami Tensei I (NES)
Yokai born from extraordinarily long-lived cats with various supernatural abilities. Sometimes portrayed with a split tail.
: Nekomata is basically just here to be fusion fuel, and not even particularly good fusion fuel at that. The one thing I find really amusing is that one of the criteria in mythology for a cat becoming a nekomata is “reaching a certain size” in which case I absolutely want to see a Garfield nekomata.
: We also get a Thieves Den thing for negotiations.
: With that room cleared, we can go down the hallway to unexplored territory. Just in case you’re wondering, you can’t go back into the room behind the counter - it’s blocked off.
: “Hm, but that elevator is lacking a control panel.”
: “They probably control it from a security room. It’s a simple, but effective measure of screening.”
: “That must mean they really don’t want anyone going down there…”
: High Pixie here is weak to both Nuclear and Gun. In the base game, there was a good reason to use Makoto here due to the whole “guns have limited ammo” bit. Here though? Not so much.
: I do grab one, but only out of habit. They’re Fool arcana and don’t really have any great skills… nor are they really a mythological figure so much as they were a palette-swap in the older games that just kind of persisted.
: I swear there’s like a million random encounters in this area. Anyway, we have an Orobas surrender to us.
New Persona: Orobas
Origin: Ars Goetia
First Appearance: Megami Tensei II (Kyuuyaku ver. only)
Prince of Hell who gives conjurers perfect information about past, present, or future. Apparently incapable of lying. Can also bestow honors and protect from temptation by demons.
: Orobas is another kind of useless fusion fuel Persona. I suppose if you fused him and got Marakunda that might be worth it, but I’d rather have the single-target version, given that 24 SP is a very steep cost.
: Before we move on, there’s actually a treasure chest by the reception area with a Portable Battery in it, which gives you a higher chance of inflicting Shock. It’s garbage.
: The elevator is on our right, and as you can see on the map there’s a bunch of stuff on the left we haven’t explored.
: The left side just has a small office area with a couple treasure items, and this door, which leads to a chest.
: We need to go up those stairs.
: There’s a dog shadow here that is going to allow me to show off the greatest weapon in the John Persona arsenal.
: See how the text there is red? That’s Yoshida’s ability, which gets you a significantly larger amount of money when it activates.
: By the way, dog shadows will always be an Orthrus, which are a pain in the ass to negotiate with.
: We may have already gotten a full Shiki-Ouji’s worth of money from a random encounter… but that’s not enough. To take things over the top, we will need to employ the greatest weapon in the John Persona arsenal.
: Yoshida gives you a second ability that allows you to ask for money a second time… or actually, as many times as you want. What happens is that the demon either gives you more money (which will always be identical to the first amount they gave you) or they get pissed off and start fighting again, summoning more demons if they can.
: That’s three times.
: On the fourth, he gets angry… only Ann uses her ability to simply cancel his attack.
: He then summons a second High Pixie, which I kill before holding him up again. I initially thought that you got more money depending on how many enemies were on the field, but that’s not the case: I’ve gotten drops of 7,000 yen from a single enemy and half that from a big group.
: You’re starting to get the idea. Now, you might ask “If the demon summons other demons when you fail to get more money, can you do this in an endless loop since you now have regenerating SP?” and the answer is yes, yes you can.
: Unfortunately, this isn’t the best fight to do this in because of how weak the High Pixies are. If you leave them alive for a bit they’ll eventually heal the Orthrus, but the Orthrus has a couple of very high-damage attacks (including one that can potentially instakill) and I didn’t want to game over.
: Yes. Money will never be a problem again… at least, not until we finish Caroline and Justine’s confidant. Then it will be a problem.
: There’s a room off to the side here, but it’s locked. Instead…
: We want to climb up here.
: We get a mini-boss fight against four Orobas. The reason they’re not named is because this footage is from my third recording where I didn’t get any Personas and just ran through.
: Unfortunately, Yusuke only hits three of them, so Joker has to follow up with a regular Bufu.
: “This appears to be some kind of monitoring room. I hope we can find clues in here…”
: “I’d bet that’s where the Treasure is…”
: “Unless we can obtain another map, we won’t know for certain…”
: “It would probably make sense to head there first…”
: “Shall we go on that elevator we found earlier then?”
: “That should be our last resort. First, let’s see if there is anywhere to use this keycard.”
: Personally, I preferred Melty Donut Dough Again Frosting Code, the updated 2010 re-release.
: Naturally, we need the keycard to leave the room.
: To the left is a giant metal gate we can open from this side.
: It leads back to the start of the palace. The reason there’s so many shortcuts is because Kaneshiro’s palace only has something like four save rooms.
: Instead, let’s go back to that locked door we passed by.
: “Yeah, it has to be the one they’re controlling externally. So this is right above it…”
: “So what, this is the control room or something? What’s the point of comin’ here?”
: “Perceptive as usual, Joker. We should be able to ride on top of the elevator.”
: “I see. We sneak atop it, then wait for it to move on its own.”
: “It does sound like that plan will take us further down.”
: The way they set this up is kinda dumb, because instead of going with the “service hatch on top of the elevator” they go with, uh…
: A magic vent in the side of the wall that has no reason to be there and lines up perfectly with the top of the elevator. Makes sense.
: Instead, we come out atop a replica of the cathedral rafters from Dark Souls 1. There’s nothing special to them - you just jump down to the floor below.
: “Is that Kaneshiro…!?”
: “It looks like some rats have infested this place! Under no circumstances let them further down! Strengthen security as much as you can! Understood?”
: “It seems painfully obvious where the Treasure is now…”
: “But the map from earlier doesn’t show that much… I wonder if there’s another one somewhere.”
: “In any case, heading down should be the best move. Let’s keep our eyes out for a map while we explore!”
: There’s a save room here, which makes sense from a gameplay perspective but not really from a plot one. Unlike the other palaces we’ve been to, where they used the excuse of “it’s places where the palace owner doesn’t have total control”, Kaneshiro’s palace isn’t based on a real building the way Kaneshiro’s and Madarame’s were.
: Let’s just go down the other hallway.
: Cameras add 10% to the security level if they spot you. I believe they’ll also alert any shadows who are close enough.
: “Joker, can’t you use your observation skills to see the camera’s range? Make sure it doesn’t catch sight of us!”
: Wait, what’s that blue glowing thing?
: “The word ‘camera’ is written on it.”
: “Oh, this must be for the surveillance cameras! Let’s destroy it, Joker!”
: Most of the cameras in the palace can be turned off, and it’s usually mandatory to do so. I think you can skip one of the power boxes if you really want to, but it’s on the way to an objective anyway.
: At the end of the camera hallway, there’s a door. Let’s just open it.
: This is a new thing for Royal, where they outright tell you that Oni has no weaknesses and must be hit with a Technical to be knocked down.
: This is a nice addition actually, given that I got through the entire base game without even knowing technicals existed - I assumed that Oni was like the demons in the mainline SMT games who are from demon families that cannot be negotiated with and must be fused to use.
: So anyway, I went to the other LP to check if this was in the base game and I just somehow forgot about it, but it’s not. What I found is that the guy who did the LP of the base game was… not very good at it and I think that’s part of the reason he hates this game so much.
: Seriously, he grinded to level 26 (we’re at like, 23-24 at this point) before even going through the first room. Now, I will admit that the base game was slightly harder than Royal is… but the thing is, the demons in Kaneshiro’s Palace were barely touched. The only difference is that they added a single new demon (replacing a level 12 Angel) and changed Orobas’s weakness from Bless to Ice so that Yusuke wasn’t a liability here.
: Kaneshiro’s Palace is a step up difficulty-wise. The enemies hit hard and some of them can oneshot Joker or use extra press turns from hitting the party members to kill him before he can move. In fact, I game overed at two different points in this palace, but one of them was absolutely my fault.
: Oni has a skill called Rampage that does multiple physical hits at random, and can do a lot of damage to one person if you get bad RNG.
: There’s a staircase here, but it’s blocked off by a pair of security cameras that will trigger a barrier behind them if they’re set off. You can see the barrier in the background - it looks just like the one in Madarame’s palace.
: There’s another way we can go, and on that route we meet Black Ooze, another kind of generic demon that doesn’t really have a mythological background. Black Ooze was added to this dungeon’s enemy list in Royal.
: We also have Akechi’s ability kick in to let us know it’s weak to Electricity. Let me just post their stat thing, since I grabbed one as a Persona and promptly tossed it for something better.
: Black Ooze is here solely as a means to counter Oni, if for some reason you don’t have a Persona capable of using status effects and decided to remove all the status skills on your party members.
: If we go out the other exit from the room with the stairs, there’s a hallway with more security cameras in it. This one you can honestly bypass fairly easily - there’s a room off to the left of where I am here that shuts them off.
: The guard you could see in the last screenshot gives us our first Disaster Shadow in the form of Nekomata. High Pixie can also be a Disaster Shadow.
: It was here (on my first run) that I discovered how Disaster Shadows are actually meant to work. What happens is that they still drop an item even if you kill them in a way that does not give them a chance to explode - such as an All-Out that ends the fight.
: The idea is that if you knock all the enemies down and get an All-Out, the Disaster Shadow will explode on any enemies remaining for damage roughly equivalent to what the All-Out did to it, which is usually going to be a guaranteed kill.
: The Disaster Shadows here mostly drop Black items.
: The room at the end of the hall here has a power box that shuts off the staircase cameras, allowing us to proceed.
: There’s also a small side room near the switch that has a Black Rock in it. I remember having way more of these by the end of my base game run than I could ever possibly use.
: I also stop by the other camera switch on the way back. Not really much of a reason to at this point, but I figured I’d show it just in case.
: Here’s the top of the stairs from earlier.
: “According to the map, we should be able to head down from here…”
: “Hm? Everyone, quiet down! I hear someone talking!”
: “Hmm? Keys? What’re those Shadows talkin’ about?”
: “I wasn’t able to pick up everything they said. If only we could get closer…”
: “There are Shadows in there. It’s probably too dangerous to get any closer right now…”
: “I’m curious about the conversation they were having, but there’s nothing we can do about it at the moment. For now, let’s just focus on finding a way down.”
: There’s also a locked chest near the switch we just broke.
: It’s got a good mace for Ryuji, but we’re not using him.
: This is down below where the cameras are.
: “According to the map, there’s a great deal more beyond here…”
: “Then this is not a vault, but a partition of sorts. The terminals there must be how you open it.”
: “B-But both of them have keyholes.”
: “Meaning we’ll need two keys to get beyond this area…”
: “For real? Ugh… it’s such a pain in the ass how secure this place is.”
: “It would seem that’s correct. This may lead further down, just as Kaneshiro had mentioned.”
: “Hey, perhaps the key that those Shadows were talking about goes here.”
: “Hmm, that sounds likely to me… all right! Let’s go back to that room!”
: “Hold up - don’t forget about them security cameras.”
: “Good point. They’re a pain, but we should deactivate the security cameras first.”
: We’re going to head right first, because…
: There’s a red shadow up here, so let’s take care of that first. From what I’ve noticed, red shadows are a lot less common than they were in Kamoshida or Madarame’s palaces.
: The red shadows are Take-Minakata, who is far less useful than Shiki-Ouji. He is the only enemy in this dungeon who truly got nerfed in Royal: in the base game, he was level 29 and had higher stats.
: I’m not entirely sure why they nerfed him - from what I remember, there weren’t all that many of him even in the base game’s version of Kaneshiro’s Palace.
: What’s also weird is that at level 29, Take-Minakata was five levels higher than the second-highest level enemy in the dungeon. Shiki-Ouji is six levels higher than the second-highest enemy in Madarame’s palace.
: Normally, he’s weak only to Psychic, but Ann managed to burn him. This is probably why you want Makoto if you have Ann, because burn opens the enemy up to both Nuclear and Wind.
: The reason I’m not doing as much damage is because this was my third recording and I didn’t bother to stop for new Personas. We’ll switch back to the save I used for my second (lost) recording soon.
: Just like Shiki-Ouji, Take-Minakata is a “tough guy” who won’t negotiate unless he is critically low on HP… not that there’s much of a point to doing that. Doing the Greatest Weapon in the John Persona Arsenal technique on groups of regular enemies is a much more efficient way to farm money.
: Take-Minakata does not fuck around. If he gets a lucky shock off, he can and will follow up with a technical on his next turn. This didn’t happen on my canon recording and I’ll explain why once we pass the vault door.
: Okay so, uh… does that mean the armor is sooty, or does it mean that only sooty men can wear it? Or was it made by sooty men and that’s why it’s called that? I have questions.
: There’s a locked door here you can open to make a shortcut back to the main room, useful in case you want to come back and pick up a Take-Minakata later. We probably will at some point - I’m doing that thing where I record like 3/4 of the dungeon and do the writing and then go back and finish it again.
: Oh, right. Kaneshiro doesn’t have an unused Will Seed cutscene the way Kamoshida and Madarame did. As far as I know, Atlus cut the idea after recording those two.
: I also didn’t know this, but Kaneshiro’s original Japanese voiceactor died right after the base game released. His name was Kazunari Tanaka and he died of an unspecified illness in October 2016. Atlus completely replaced all of his voice lines in Royal.
: This was one of two voiceactor deaths related to this game. Miyu Matsuki, who voices the fortune teller we met in Shinjuku, died in October 2015 of lymphoma. Her voicelines were also replaced in Royal.
: Honestly, I think Persona as a franchise has some horrible death curse associated with it.
: Before we leave, there’s a very sneaky chest up on a… I’m not even sure what you’d call it, it’s just kind of this platform that exists for no apparent reason.
: You can get to it by jumping up here and then jumping across and going through the tiny vent that also seems to serve no identifiable purpose.
: Having a source of psychic damage for knockdowns is nice, even if we only have three of them. They’re a good backup in case Joker gets stunned or silenced.
: The other side leads up some stairs to a hallway with a dog and some cameras.
: There’s another optional power room at the end.
: In addition to turning off the cameras in the hall we just ran through, it also turns off the cameras on the other side of the wall.
: There’s a card reader we can use to open a shortcut back to where the save room is. This is helpful for farming once you’ve cleared the dungeon out.
: The next three rooms are just kind of there to be there. You go into the first one, jump through a vent in the wall to the next one, and go down to the bottom.
: Like the other side, there’s a shortcut back to the main room.
: During the fight with the shadow in here, I got Maruki’s “Flow” ability to activate. This raises Joker’s attack by an insane amount - I was doing 300+ damage with single spells.
: We can open this door to go back to the main area.
: “Wait… you think they’re talkin’ about those two keys!?”
: “Hm, just as expected… those are highly likely to be what opens the partition.”
: “What’re we gonna do then? Beat 'em up and take the keys?”
: “Really, Skull? Just look at 'em. They’re not your average Shadows. Anyone in charge of such important keys must be extremely strong.”
: This is where the rumor thing from P2 should have made a comeback, and you could argue that they’re “really strong” or “probably not that strong” and the fight would change based on your choice.
: “And there’s two of them; dealing with both of them would be tough. Plus, they could go and sound the alarm…”
: Funny she says that, because we’ll actually wind up fighting both of those shadows (plus a third one) at the same time as a miniboss in the next area.
: “They don’t really look like they’re goin’ anywhere, though…”
: “…Then why don’t we split them up and beat them individually?”
: “And how will we do that?”
: By using the dumbest fucking idea that shouldn’t work.
: “Remember that monitoring room upstairs - the room we got the map in? There was some communication equipment there as well. We can use that to lure one away.”
: I didn’t want to pick the second one because on the canon run, I had two Personas that absolutely fucking devastated them.
: “I agree. It sounds a lot safer than fighting them both at the same time!”
: “Okay, let’s leave this part to our resident intellectual!”
: I don’t know why no one has suggested just, I dunno, shooting them through the door. Especially given that the door has holes big enough to fit a gun through.
: “Thanks! So, first we need to head to the monitoring room!”
: The game then offers to simply warp us right to the communications room. We’ve already picked up everything, so there’s no reason not to do it (especially given that it’ll warp us back here afterward).
: After playing SMT 1 I’m surprised they didn’t make you walk back to the communications room only every other floor tile is now a damage floor.
: Why the hell would this work? Why would they not just send both guys just to be sure?
: Wait a second… is this Loss?
: Meet Fuu-Ki. He’ll show up as a normal enemy later in the dungeon. We will definitely want him because he’s a Star arcana Persona, but also because his moveset is… surprisingly good.
: He hits pretty hard, but that’s only because I was too lazy to look up the weakness chart. He’s very weak to lightning.
: “Oooh, he had a key!”
: “Guess that went pretty well, huh?”
: “That means there should only be one Shadow in the security room! Let’s snatch the other key from it while we can!”
: The game offers to warp us right back there.
: Sui-Ki promptly gets his ass handed to him, even on this run.
: “Perfect, we’ve now obtained both keys!”
: “Oh, just one moment! Doesn’t this map have a little more information than our own?”
: “Maybe it can tell us what the bank is like further down.”
: “This map seems to indicate that the area beyond the partition is rather large as well…”
: We’re about halfway through the dungeon right now. The vault door is kind of a natural stopping point if you’re not going for 100%… but we are.
: “I’m sure security will keep getting more intense from here onward too. We need to be careful.”
: “On three! One, two…!”
: Something tells me that had Final Fantasy 7 Remake come out before this game, this would be a minigame.
: “This took some time, but we managed to force it open.”
: You would think this would be a confidant point thing, but it’s not.
: “Yes, I agree. The cooperation of our whole team is what helped us through this particular ordeal.”
: “So he took all of this from the weak…”
: “…He’s going to pay for this.”
: We’re in another two-staircase situation, but the one on the right is totally pointless, as indicated by the door being white instead of yellow. You can’t even unlock it - on my lost recording, I got on the other side.
: “Hm!? Wait, Joker! Hide!”
: Basically, you can just run right through these cameras without giving a single fuck provided that your security level is low enough since there’s no way to turn them off.
: “It might be a surveillance system that switches between multiple cameras for efficient coverage…”
: “That just means we gotta pass by when it’s not recordin’, yeah?”
: “That should work… but there are guards to watch out for too. We should proceed with caution!”
: For the most part, you can just jump between cover to avoid the cameras.
: The second half of the dungeon has new enemies, and one of those is Leanan Sidhe here. On my second run (which we’ll be catching up to in a bit) I fused one of these as soon as I got a Queen’s Necklace. Since we’re here, let’s talk a little about the Personas I fused on the canon run.
New Persona: Leanan Sidhe
Origin: Ireland
First Appearance: Soul Hackers
Irish fairies who seek out human lovers and give them inspiration, usually resulting in madness and/or death for the artist.
: By herself, Leanan Sidhe is pretty good: she’s got Psio and Marin Karin is actually pretty okay… though as far as I know it can fuck with the Greatest Weapon in the John Persona Arsenal because brainwashed enemies don’t trigger Yoshida’s abilities.
: Man, a Persona game where Marin Karin is actually useful. Never thought I’d see the day.
: The real reason I wanted Leanan Sidhe, though, is because we can fuse her with the Kodama we’ve had sitting around in the party (which, strangely enough, none of the fusion calculators list as a valid fusion but I swear I did it) to get Feng Huang.
New Persona: Feng Huang
Origin: China
First Appearance: Shin Megami Tensei I
Mythological king of birds in Chinese mythology. Originally divided into a male (Feng) and female (Huang) gender, but now exists as a feminine counterpart to the Chinese dragon. Often confused with both Suzaku and the Phoenix, both of which are distinct mythological figures. Persona 4, Persona 5 and Royal incorrectly translate this Persona’s name as “Phoenix”.
: The reason that people can tell the translation is off, by the way, is that Joker will shout “Ho-oh!” when he summons it if you’re using the Japanese voices. “Ho-oh” is the Japanese name for Feng Huang… though you’ve probably heard that name if you’ve ever played Pokemon Gold or Silver. The encyclopedia entry for it in P5 and Royal is also a dead giveaway.
: To the best of my knowledge, Feng Huang is the only mythological figure to be both a Persona and a Pokemon under the same name.
: Anyway, Feng Huang fucking RULES. It starts with Atomic Bloodline, reducing the cost of Freila to 4 SP… in addition to learning Nuke Boost for even more Nuclear damage. In the base game, you could trade him in for a Nuke Boost card, but unfortunately that was removed in Royal.
: Oh, and of course we also need it because it’s the first available Faith Persona and we don’t want to permafuck.
: There’s a door we could go through, but also a vent.
: To get the Will Seed, we want to face away from where the Will Seed room is.
: This would’ve been way cooler if they had Joker just kick his way through the doors from the grappling hook.
: There’s another route you can use to find a second grapple point.
: Just like the other “Black” items, the Black Kogatana isn’t a weapon by itself, but a trade-in item for returning Personas.
: Oni are now a regular enemy, and here’s where I want to show why All-Outing a Disaster Shadow is the best way to deal with them.
: We get an All-Out, which kills both High Pixies easily but doesn’t kill the Oni.
: That does though.
: You might notice that there’s red areas behind us on the map. This is because going through the vents effectively bypasses a couple of hallways. There’s nothing really in those, so they’re safe to skip.
: There’s another lock at the top.
: Right after this hallway, we’ll be going back to the canon save file.
: Here we have Yaksini, who I didn’t grab even on the canon file because they’re kind of a pain to negotiate with.
: Yaksini is kind of useless anyway. They have one useful skill - “Attack Master” (formerly Auto-Tarukaja) which gives you an attack buff at the start of every battle. Unfortunately, they don’t learn that until level 23 - meaning you’re either grinding with a Persona that only knows physical skills or waiting until October to be able to level one up automatically from fusion… at which point there are other options.
: Yaksini is also very weak to nuclear.
: And now we get Makoto’s finisher screen.
: The elevator leads into this long hallway with nothing interesting in it.
: And now it’s time for us to rejoin the canon file.
New Persona: Nigi Mitama
Origin: Japan
First Appearance: Devil Summoner
Aspect of the human soul that represents calmness and functionality. Opposite of Ara Mitama.
: Nigi Mitama is garbage for a reason I only discovered after I fused it. First, Relief Bloodline only works in combat. If you heal out of combat, you pay the full SP cost.
: I’m also pretty sure that Divine Grace only works in combat. The only reason I fused it is because I had a Queen’s Necklace to get rid of and my Persona roster was full… and because we still need a Councillor Persona for Maruki.
Returning Persona: Orthrus
Origin: Greece
First Appearance: Megami Tensei I
Two-headed dog born from the titans Typhon and Echidna. Brother to Cerberus (but not Pascal the Dog), the Sphinx, and the Chimera. Belonged to the titan Geryon, and was slain by Heracles during his labors.
: Orthrus is basically set up to be an enemy, and his skill set as a Persona is kind of questionable.
: “Y-You bastards… how did you get this far!? What about my security!?”
: “Sorry, that shit was a piece of cake for us!”
: “…Well, I wouldn’t say it was that simple…”
: And now, not even ten minutes after fighting Sui-Ki and Fuu-Ki separately, we fight them plus a Kin-Ki in the same battle.
: Joker knocks down the Fuu-Ki and Baton Passes to Makoto, who wipes out nearly half of Sui-Ki’s HP in one go. Kin-Ki is also very weak to Psychic but I couldn’t change Personas due to the “one change per turn” rule.
: Instead, I have Ann light the Kin-Ki on fire.
: Then Makoto gets bullshitted to death. This is not the first time this happens in this dungeon, nor will it be the last. Giving enemies the ability to technical was kind of a mistake because it potentially allows any enemy to pull a Mot and bullshit their way into six or seven press turns at a time if they get lucky.
: Sui-Ki down, and Kin-Ki at low HP.
: Fuu-Ki gets a faceful of lead, and dies from the Showtime.
: And then Yusuke finishes off the Kin-Ki with a physical attack.
: “Grrr, he took off while we were busy fightin’…”
: This is what the rest of this dungeon is going to be - finding bits of this substitution cypher and using it to open doors.
: “The pages afterward have been torn out as well. Could it be a code of some sort?”
: I should mention that Kaneshiro’s Palace is one of two dungeons that were the source of a lot of complaints about the base game. There were some changes made, which you’ll see coming up.
: “If we’re not gonna figure this shit out now, we should just keep goin’ forward, yeah?”
: “Considering Kaneshiro’s reaction, this elevator should lead us to the innermost part of the bank. If so, it’ll be the most secure area as well. Let’s make sure we’re ready for whatever awaits!”
: I did a little bit of grinding here because Joker was very close to level 26, and I wanted to hit that in order to get a Take-Minakata.
: This is what Harisen Recovery looks like - Ann pulls out a giant paper fan and hits Joker with it.
: I’ll log Oni (and Yaksini) at the end of the update, since they were only in the party long enough for me to add them to the compendium. That’s one thing I re-learned in this dungeon: if you negotiate with a demon but don’t actually add them to your party (ie; because your party was full and you chose to not take them) you don’t get them in the compendium.
: This is what happens if you try and negotiate with a brainwashed enemy. I can only assume Oni is a cultured Elly and/or Yukiko fan.
: The options even change, which is kind of amusing. The only downside is that you can’t ask for more money, and this also won’t work on enemies that are weak to Psychic because being hit by a weakness clears Brainwashed.
: With that, I immediately went back out to the Velvet Room, because there were even more Personas I wanted to fuse. This is a mistake because of something we unlock after we’re done here.
New Persona: Take-Minakata
Origin: Japan
First Appearance: Shin Megami Tensei I
Son of Okuninushi who lost his arms in a sumo battle with Take-Mikazuchi. Fled to Suwa, where he became the guardian god of Lake Suwa.
: Take-Minakata is pretty good. He covers the total lack of lightning damage I had, plus he eventually learns Elec Boost. The only downside is that he’s Hanged, and we don’t need that until after the next dungeon when we can get better options.
New Persona: Isis
Origin: Egypt
First Appearance: Majin Tensei I (SNES)
Egyptian mother goddess. Sister of (and also wife to) Osiris, mother of Horus. Associated with nature and magic.
: We need Isis for one reason and one reason alone: the fact that she’s a Priestess persona.
: I could’ve just summoned Apsaras, but there wasn’t much of a point when I could have a half-decent Bless-element Persona.
: Just to get it out of the way, there’s one other Persona I fused while still in the dungeon.
New Persona: Clotho
Origin: Greece
First Appearance: Nocturne
One of the three Fates, daughter of Nyx and Erebus. Spins the thread of life and is responsible for determining when things are born.
: Clotho is another Persona I fused for one reason: we need a Fortune Persona to not permafuck and there are no better options. If you’re playing online and have the DLC, you can fuse Ariadne at 30, but she’s only marginally better.
: “Wh-what the hell!? Are these all vaults!? How messed up is this guy!?”
: “We’re supposed to check all of these for the Treasure!?”
: And then Persona 5 was Payday 2.
: “Hold on, this distinct shape… could it be…”
: “What’s the matter?”
: “If my prediction is correct, we won’t need to check every single one of these small vaults.”
: “For real!?”
: “That is, I hope. I’ll explain why once I’ve confirmed my theory.”
: “I seriously hope so too…”
: “PIN…? So is this gonna open one of the vaults?”
: “Hm, there’s something written above the number pad on here. ‘RICH’… this is disgusting. How obsessed can one man be with money?”
: “Wait, there might be something more than that! Do you think this is connected to that journal…?”
: I am getting serious Bioshock Infinite “Wait a minute, that card!” vibes here.
: “See? It has all of the letters in the word ‘RICH’!”
: The strange thing is that they have Yusuke repeat the whole cypher before you get a chance to do it, but they don’t just… show it on the screen while you’re entering it.
: “What the!? The whole vault moved!?”
: “So my deduction may be correct…”
: I wish actual ATMs had the ability to play custom voice clips when you enter your PIN, because I’d set mine to four minutes of silence followed by a voice going “Hey! I’m a magic ATM! Gimme some coffee and I’ll give you money! Just pour it right on me, it’ll work!”
: “That voice… it’s Kaneshiro! Is he watching us!?”
: “That doesn’t seem to be the case. It sounds more like the voice of his heart… I guess all he really thinks about is money, after all.”
: “So he blackmails people outta their savings and that’s still not enough? What a douche…”
: “More importantly, the message in the journal was the PIN code!”
: “Yes, it seems so… but I doubt it will be that easy from this point forward. The rest of the pages were torn out of the journal. Who knows what clues they may hold…”
: “Well, let’s not get pessimistic. We should look around and try to find some other clues. Time to head further in and find those PINs!”
: I love how they only put in one save room for the entire first half of this dungeon, and then there’s two right next to each other.
: For reference, there are zero enemies between the last save room and this one - in fact, I don’t think it’s even possible for the enemies on the stairs to see you so long as you stay on the lowest level.
: One thing I wanted to point out is that unlike the save rooms in the other palaces, the ones in Kaneshiro’s don’t have that effect where they fade into what the room actually looks like, because this building doesn’t actually exist.
: The first part of this area is a loop with a bunch of cameras in it.
: Fortunately, the switch for them is right across from the place we need to go.
: Here, we meet the final new enemy of this dungeon: Rakshasha.
: Fortunately, I gave Isis a regular Kouha (tier 1 bless, single-target) and use that to exploit Rakshasha’s weakness to Bless. They’re also weak to Wind, so if you fuse Fuu-Ki you can use him to wipe these out.
Returning Persona: Rakshasha
Origin: India
First Appearance: Megami Tensei II
Wicked spirits in Hindu and Buddhist mythology that feed on human flesh. Known for possessing humans. Capable of shapeshifting and magic.
: Rakshasha is another trash-sona I promptly returned to get a Regenerate 1 card.
: “We may have found the controls we’ve been looking for. Anything we can do here?”
: “Oh, look! The shutter’s gone! We can keep going now!”
: “Man, he seems really worked up…”
: “He must truly not want us gaining access to this ‘Golden Pig’.”
: “Well, pretty sure that one there’s the one he mentioned. Pretty suspicious, if you ask me.”
: “Hm? There’s a note here… it says ‘P=I’.”
: “…The hell’s that supposed to mean?”
: “Wait, the edge of it is torn. Maybe it came from Kaneshiro’s journal?”
: “Oh, so it’s the continuation of the code we found in there! This should be useful!”
: There’s a second code lock down the hall, but we can’t open it yet. The combination is the same every time, and I already over-wrote my save file so I don’t know if you can just open them if you know the combination.
: There’s a chest in an alcove down the stairs from the code lock (marked by the ! on the minimap) with a Model Gun in it.
: The Model Gun is an item that allows you to return certain Personas for guns, but most of the ones that can do that are at or near the end game.
: There’s a little staircase loop that has the second pig we need in it.
: There’s a lot of samey “This must be a clue!” dialog so I’m just gonna cut it.
: I feel like Atlus missed the opportunity to have a dumb Squaresoft thing where you could enter 1930 for “PEAR”, which would give you an unripened pear you could then bring to a different machine and enter “0119” for RIPE to ripen the pear, and then you have to feed the pear to something at the end of the game for Makoto’s ultimate weapon.
: “All right, it worked!”
: “Tch… this isn’t anywhere near your quota for this month. Don’t gimme your excuses. Just go reap every last penny!”
: “This voice again…”
: “I’ll make you understand if you don’t get it… people who can’t earn money are worthless to me!”
: “He’s completely distorted…”
: “It looks like he really believes money is more important than human life… what a pitiful man.”
: “Yeah… let’s finish this qucik. The door’s prolly opened up, so we should head back and check it out.”
: The game asks us if we want to warp back to the start of the vault area, but I didn’t because there was one door I wanted to check.
: All this door does is act as a shortcut between the first room and where the last pig is. It’s meant to be a way to get back to the code input thing from the pig, but because I had already cleared this area out I just walked back the long way.
: “Oooh, it’s open!”
: “This is the second one… I wonder how many more there are…”
: Just like before, we have another sub-area to go through in order to progress.
: This room has barriers all over it. One side is completely impassable.
: The other has a dog.
: Anyway, the solution to this room is to jump up on these shelves full of money.
: At the top is a switch.
: This area introduces a new stealable in the form of these suitcases. It’s a nice touch.
: There’s a locked chest up here we can get with a Golden Vest in it. It’s a slight upgrade for Makoto.
: You can kind of see the path we have to take on the minimap, but notice that golden door up there.
: “Hmm… and there’s also this weird pig. Maybe we should do some recoinassance first.”
: I don’t remember these being in the base game, but they let you skip parts of the vault area by paying.
: “I get that employees would have to show their keycards, but…”
: “They gotta pay too!? And that definitely ain’t cheap!”
: “So, Kaneshiro even views his own employees as exploitable resources.”
: “…I’m sure it’ll make him a little money, but I doubt it’ll amount to anything substantial.”
: “What should we do? I don’t think we should have to pay Kaneshiro…”
: This door can actually be opened from the other side. There’s another one in the next area that can’t be, at least as far as I know.
: We’ve seen this before - another hallway full of cameras.
: I feel like they could’ve cut a lot from this dungeon without really making it any less difficult.
: After a quick stop to grind money, I keep going.
: There’s a pig surrounded by cameras. Notice, however, that there’s nothing for a barrier to come out of. So what do we do?
: Simple, we just walk right through and take it. It’s like, a 20% penalty to security level that we’re going to erase the next time we get into a fight.
: Eventually, we come to the other side of the golden door. This place is pretty much a straight hallway.
: Joker’s just like “Hugs? I can do that.” and then proceeds to embrace Yusuke.
: I would post the “You don’t even know English” thing but technically they’re all speaking Japanese.
: “So we’ll need to transpose this one into numbers too. I hope we can do it with the hints we have…”
: Before you can even attempt it, the game repeats basically the same dialog again… even if you already have all the information you need to solve it.
: I should mention that I’m skipping the unlocking animation, but it plays in full every time you solve one of these.
: “Great, it looks like the vault opened up even more now.”
: “Well then, we should keep-”
: “This isn’t enough… I need to have a huge presence!”
: “What now?”
: “I’m done having other people walk all over me… it’s my turn now…”
: “He is beyond redemption… it seems he cares not for those he tramples upon himself.”
: “Every step we take is strengthening my resolve. Let’s push onward.”
: Instead of taking the warp out, I decided to bust down the gold door, just to see what would happen.
: There’s really no point to doing this.
: “Check it out! This one’s open for us now too!”
: “This movement… there can be no doubt.”
: “Hm? Did you notice something?”
: “Wh-what do you mean…? Can you explain that a little more?”
: Specifically, it’s a giant disc-detainer lock with six discs, but the last two are false discs that don’t actually work.
: “The cylinder is the mechanism that judges if a key is the proper shape. If you use the correct key and all the discs align, the lock opens.”
: “Now that you mention it, while the walls rotate, the path forward has remained facing the same way…”
: “So you’re saying the whole floor is just one giant lock…?”
: “That’s right. All the smaller vaults in here aren’t important. There has to be an area further in, locked away by the room itself.”
: “And that’s where the Treasure’s gotta be! Sweet, let’s get goin’!”
: Of course, it’s not quite that simple.
: This is Khumbanda. Normally, he’s a mid-40s trash Persona.
: The wiki claims he’s weak to Nuke and not Bless. They’re wrong.
: This is when I went out and fused Clotho, and also did some minor Persona shuffling to get everything in order.
: “I guess that’s why the Shadow was protecting it?”
: “Hm, it doesn’t seem to require any keys, but there are buttons on the left and right of the box…”
: “There must be a reason that thing was guarding it. Let’s try and figure out why.”
: Anyway, there’s two control panels, one way goes to progress, but we’re not doing that yet.
: “There are Shadows here as well, perhaps they are protecting something.”
: “That one seems pretty tough… we’ll have to make sure we’re good and ready.”
: Oh no. That’s not…
: It is. It’s Cerberus, though I doubt this one is Pascal the Dog. He opens with Vajra Blast, which fucking HURTS.
: That’s the only attack he gets off the entire fight. Cerberus is weak to Ice, meaning we can use both Nigi Mitama and Yusuke to get two All-Outs per turn.
: On Makoto’s turn, I have her use… I forget which spell it is… to make Cerberus forgetful. Forgetful is this game’s equivalent of silence, and Cerberus will ONLY use skills to attack - meaning he’ll just waste his turn as long as it’s on him.
: The will seed is right behind him.
: The Crystal of Gluttony is useless.
: One more area of kicking power boxes and we’re done.
: “Not to worry - we just need to deal with the power to the bars like we did before.”
: “Based on how this looks, we’re going to have to find a bunch of power boxes…”
: There’s a bunch of stealables at ground level, but at this point we don’t really need to care about those. This is where I wound up getting bullshitted to death, but I didn’t capture that.
: One of the boxes we need is in the corner here.
: We can then grapple up to the top of the shelves and access the rest of the room.
: You can see both of the remaining boxes up here. This one disables the cameras.
: In the middle is this locked box, which I think in the base game had a gun for Makoto, but in Royal just has a Bead Chain.
: I knew it! Ohio was the real villain all along!
: “So we’re getting into calculations now… good grief.”
: There’s a platform we can’t reach that just has a couple of stealables on it, and the weird thing (from a design perspective) is that you’re not likely to find where that vent leads until after you have the last clue and can warp back to the main area.
: “Daaamn! This is nuts…!”
: “Safes everywhere… Kaneshiro must have gained an obscene amount of money. Though, walking around the Palace, I don’t see anything that he seems to have spent it on…”
: I feel like the game has a hard time making the distinction between the shadow and the actual character. We saw Kaneshiro give some random hostess $30,000, so chances are the real Kaneshiro is spending it.
: “Perhaps all he wants to do with it is hoard it… now’s not the time for this discussion, though. Let’s keep going.”
: “Hey, look at that!”
: “And isn’t that the power for the bars?”
: “Oh. You’re right - we can’t go this way. I guess we’ll just have to look for a different path.”
: There’s another gold door down the hall from the barrier. Unlike the other one, I don’t think you can open this one from the other side because it’s a one-way trip.
: There’s two camera boxes you can break in here, and honestly this whole dungeon has been kind of repetitive ever since they introduced that mechanic.
: At about the 3/4 mark through this hallway is a spot you can jump up to get a chest with three Luck Incense in it. Unfortunately, incense is nowhere near as good in this game as it was in Persona 1 and Innocent Sin.
: This is because your character’s stats are now derived entirely from their Persona, and since we change Personas frequently there’s no reason to use this on any of them.
: On the way down, I get ambushed by an Orthrus and two High Pixies - what I want to point out is that when Joker is in the “surrounded” formation, he can shoot enemies behind him without moving.
: And that’s level 28. Unfortunately, all of the Personas at level 28 are kinda trash. At this point, we are now in or past negotiation range for all of the enemies in the next dungeon except the red shadows.
: We probably wouldn’t have hit 28 except that because I got bullshitted to death, I had to re-do this entire area. Getting a game over keeps all of your EXP and money but resets chests and objectives.
: Another hallway full of cameras, because we haven’t had enough of that yet.
: The last code machine is down here, along with the vent that takes you to that platform in the other room we couldn’t reach.
: To get into where the pig is, there’s a room right across from the code machine with these safes that magically open when we get close.
: “Ugh, it’s like, algebra or something! I’m getting confused…”
: “Panther… this is really just simple addition…”
: Kicking the box opens up a grappling hook point on the other side from where the barrier is.
: All it does is bring you up to a chest with an SP restoring item in it.
: One round trip across the entire room later…
: Gonna cut some repeat dialogue here.
: And now we have access to where the Treasure is. Dungeon complete, apart from the fact that I still want to farm money a bit.
: “Again?”
: “This… this is the fruit of all my hard labor!”
: “He thinks robbin’ people is something to celebrate? Tha guy needs to get his brain checked…”
: Says the kid who technically robbed two people and celebrated it both times.
: “With this much, I will be invincible! Omnipotent! I’ve changed… I’m no longer the person I used to be…”
: “The person he used to be…? What could have happened to make him so distorted?”
: “I don’t know, but no matter what kind of past he had, his actions are unforgivable.”
: “That’s right. Now, if my deductions are accurate, that should’ve been the final mechanism.”
: “All right then. Let’s head back and check out the vault! We know where it is, so going back should be easy.”
: “You’re like some kinda prophet, Queen…”
: “It’s mostly thanks to that notebook. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for that. More importantly, did you hear all those things Shadow Kaneshiro was saying?”
: “Oh yeah, I was wondering about that! Didn’t he seem kinda… insecure or something?”
: “Exactly. He kept bringing up how rich and powerful he wants to be.”
: “So if he’s insecure about that shit… he thinks he’s really just some poor weakling, huh?”
: “Maybe by thinking he was going to be a strong, wealthy man, he convinced himself it was true.”
: “I wonder… well, we will discover the truth for ourselves when we change his heart. Let us hurry, Joker.”
: “I don’t see anything.”
: “Once we get this far, we need this callin’ card thing.”
: “A calling card… I see… making the target believe that the Treasure is in danger will cause it to materialize. That’s quite a bold trick.”
: “Huh? She understood?”
: Ann wants to be the smart girl.
: “Joker, we’ll defer to you regarding its timing.”
: The good news is I won’t have to do a cut, because we send the card out tomorrow and then do the boss on 06/27.
: “In the end, that Kaneshiro bastard only showed his stupid face once…”
: “That doesn’t matter. As long as we steal the Treasure, we’ll change his heart.”
: I actually did grind more. I had about 400,000 yen by the end of the dungeon, but I wanted to get at least half a million to make sure we’re covered on expenses.
: While we’ve already done pretty much the single largest expense we’ll have (that being the SP adhesives) we still need to pay 100,000 yen to start the confidant with the fortune teller. We’ll also be spending somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 yen a day on confidants.
: Actually, I calculated it out. We need a BARE MINIMUM of 200,000 yen just to not permafuck. That amount would be higher if we hadn’t bought the Famicom from the recycling store already.
: One fun thing I discovered while grinding is that High Pixies basically can’t hurt you. Their AI seems to always cast Dormina to put people to sleep and then never follows up, so you can just use them to take a nap for SP.
: On the way out, the Velvet Room door starts glowing red and we get a tutorial. I’m going to do my own instead because I think my way shows it off better.
: The red lighting signifies a fusion alarm, which is a new mechanic added for Royal. Allow me to explain how it works while I fuse a disgustingly overpowered Persona with it.
: During a Fusion Alarm, several things happen. One of them is that the reward for returning a Persona is improved - skills will either get upgraded to the next tier or made into a “ma” version (as an example, Take-Minakata usually returns a Zionga card but under a Fusion Alarm returns a Mazionga card).
: I should mention that the Treasure Demons all have unique accessories which also improve under an alarm.
: We had a low-level Angel sitting around, and I had reached level 29 while grinding, which opens up the third Justice Persona. I fuse the Angel we had with a Regent and go for an Archangel.
: Fusion Alarms increase the stats of any Personas you fuse, as well as opening up more slots to inherit abilities and potentially upgrading some of your skills.
Returning Persona: Archangel
Origin: Abrahamic Mythology
First Appearance: Shin Megami Tensei I
Angels who serve as the ministers and messengers between the Judeo-Christian God and mankind.
: Archangel gets a pretty significant stat boost.
: Dazzler and Magaru both flash red, meaning they’ll potentially change. If the fusion isn’t an accident, you can choose whether or not to change. I said yes.
: Dazzler gets upgraded to Nocturnal Flash, which attempts to inflict Dizzy on all enemies. Magaru gets upgraded to Garula.
: You’ll notice that Archangel is now marked in yellow. This means that if we use him to fuse something else, there is a near-100% chance for a fusion accident. If an accident doesn’t occur, you instead get a stat boost.
: I’m pretty sure the alarm will cancel if you leave to save, so let’s just do it and see what happens.
: Principality is a rock fucking solid Persona. It gets half SP cost on Bless spells and learns Bless Boost, which both increases Bless damage and also the chances that the Hama spell line instakills.
: Just like in Persona 1 and 2, the “skip” prompt disappears if you get an accident.
: The guillotine blade sparks and skids to a halt.
: We get an Eligor instead, which at first I was kind of pissed off about. Just wait for it.
: During an accident, all the skills change and… oh shit. That’s Agidyne and Garudyne. We’re not supposed to be able to get those for… quite a while.
: Getting an accident will cause Caroline to kick you out. So now we’ve got two amazing skills stuck on a trash-sona. What do we do about this?
: Well… it just so happens that if you fuse Eligor and Incubus, you get Principality. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
Returning Persona: Principality
Origin: Abrahamic Mythology
First Appearance: Shin Megami Tensei II
Angels tasked with overseeing groups of people and bestowing blessings upon them. Associated with the Sephirah Netzach.
: By itself, Principality is a solid Bless-element Persona. With these skills? This thing is going to murder the hell out of Kaneshiro.
: See that? That was a Rakshasha. We have now broken the game in two. I did get a second fusion alarm (they occur randomly after winning a battle) but it didn’t go as planned and I had to spend a bunch of money to re-summon stuff.
: You might ask if I saved that Eligor to the compendium, and the answer is yes, so I can use it to fuse some even more disgusting stuff down the line. The next time we get a fusion alarm, my goal is to get Megidolaon around level 34.
: We leave the palace with 580,000 yen. Considering we haven’t sold any of the treasure items and still have a Mementos visit before the next dungeon, we should be more than fine.
: I check the TV shopping thing and buy this. It gives you two Black Rocks (useless) and a Black Robe (yes.)
: We spend the night crafting, because we need Proficiency 4 to get the final Technical upgrade. Not that we need it.
: The game acknowledges that I have broken it by giving me the extra two points.
: Next time, we’re going to send the calling card and introduce Kaneshiro to our new angel friend.
God dammit why didn’t I think of that.
This is why we have to keep Morgana out of the party, because they need all hands on deck to deal with Morgana every time they use a Showtime Attack.
One thing I should probably mention from the last update: apparently, I just got really lucky with that fusion accident I had.
[Image Credit: https://twitter.com/virtuoustyrfing/status/1353216203473342464]
You can kind of get completely boned with skills. As far as I’m aware, this isn’t something that person intentionally set up - so just make sure to save before you do anything with a fusion alarm.
[Image Credit: https://twitter.com/Keymaster333/status/1353374992415657985]
This one was posted in the same thread, and… actually, I probably would’ve taken this because Life Aid (regens 8% SP AND HP per turn) is fucking amazing. I don’t think it stacks with the SP adhesive, but 8% SP (as opposed to a flat 7) is nothing to laugh at. That’s potentially a free -dyne or ma-dyne spell at higher levels with the right trait setup.
Anyway, the next time I get a fusion alarm I know what I’m doing. If I can get Life Aid on the same Persona as the Agidyne and Garudyne we got, and potentially get Megidolaon…
Yes. It’s also algebra.
It makes sense to replace the fortuneteller’s VA, since she would need new lines for the confidant phonecalls, but does Kaneshiro have any new lines? If not, that’s kind of strange.
Kaneshiro actually does - he has a new phase to his boss fight which makes it even more tedious than it used to be. I’m almost done covering that in the new update.
The reason they had to replace the VA for Chihaya (the fortuneteller) surprisingly has nothing to do with the confidant phone calls. Most confidant events aren’t voiceacted at all. They usually play generic VO clips over the text.
No the reason they had to replace Chihaya’s VA is that Royal adds two new fully-voiced events, those being Valentine’s Day and White Day. Because Chihaya is a potential romance option, she has to be there, and that’s why they had to get a new VA.
Click Here for Update 36
: “No, I was up very early, shooting a news show. I have much more work in television because of the Phantom Thieves.”
: “I have permission from my school, but it’s still tough to do both. …Ah, I can’t keep complaining. Well, let’s both do our best today.”
: She acts like it’s abnormal for it to be hot and humid in the middle of summer.
: "Oh yeah. In Japan, when the rainy season ends, we say that it ‘opens.’ "
: “But in English, it’s more common to hear people say the rainy season ‘comes to a close’. Be careful! Expressions for the weather are totally different depending on what country you’re in.”
: “Now then… Mr. Kurusu! Which of these animals is involved in an English idiom about the weather?”
: I have to wonder if questions like this are there to make up for all the ones in Persona 4 that no English speaker would be likely to know.
: “That’s right! Raining cats and dogs. ‘Raining cats and dogs’ means it’s pouring rain. The strongest theory for its origin is that the sound of rain resembles that of dogs and cats fighting.”
: “Some other European languages describe bad weather as ‘dog’s weather’ too. Additionally, in Norwegian they say it’s raining witches, and in Polish they say it’s raining frogs.”
: “Each country has its own way of describing heavy rain - and its own metaphorical substitute falling from the sky.”
: “Oh yeah, over here they say that when a cat washes its face, it rains. I clean my face every day because I like being clean, and lemme tell you, that’s a load of bull.”
: “Oh, uh, but I’m not a cat, of course.”
: The Showtime attack with Ryuji and Makoto unlocks I believe the day you send the calling card for Kaneshiro, so you won’t ever have it for the dungeon itself.
: In hindsight, I probably should’ve just made my own schedule for 100% because then I could have screenshots of this ready to go, but that’s what Youtube is for.
: All of the videos I could find of it had spoilers, so I’m not going to link a video of it.
: “Ah- Hey, Makoto!”
: “Hm? Is something wrong?”
: “Nah, nah, it’s nothin’…”
: “Well, it definitely doesn’t seem like it’s ‘nothin’ to you…”
: “Uh, so… I’ve been doin’ a little thinkin’, and… how do I put it… I guess I was thinkin’ about comin’ up with a new move - like a special tag-team move, kinda thing.”
: “So, I got this idea while playin’ a video game, and… it’s a move that’s gonna need your help…”
: “My help?”
: “Know what? Never mind. I just saw something like it in the game and thought it looked cool… when I try to say it out loud, it seems too insane…”
: “Insane, huh? So, in other words, you may have come across a special attack that outclasses any of our previous moves?”
: “I wha…?”
: “Why don’t you tell me your idea? By the way you described it, it must be a pretty good one.”
: “Uh, alright… just… don’t get mad at me, okay?”
: “I… see…”
: “Heh, so stupid, right!? Yeah, I was just jokin’! Haha… please forget what I said.”
: “…That could work.”
: “Yeah, that could work - wait, what?”
: “But, if we’re going to do this, we’ll have to push ourselves harder than ever before. Think you can keep up?”
: “Yes, ma’am! We’re gonna show 'em the real meaning of pain!”
: “We should probably get going now, though. I wouldn’t want to make everyone else wait.”
: “Yeah!”
: “I would agree, but it will not be an easy task this time.”
: “Yeah, nobody actually knows him…”
: “There’s so goddamn much I wanna write on the calling card too…”
: “Oh, Akira! So get this, I was talking with Makoto earlier and we came up with this insane move!”
: “Well… it’s a bit difficult to explain with words alone…”
: “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything! Alright, so the plan is…”
: Ryuji and Makoto’s Showtime is one of the few that has a similar name in both versions. The English name is “Max Moxie” while the Japanese one is “Mad Mix”. Did anyone tell Atlus that Mad Max wasn’t a spaghetti western?
: And before anyone says Mad Max was technically a western, it wasn’t a spaghetti western.
: In the English dub, Ryuji goes “Get ready for the Fist of the Phantom Star!” I’m not sure if that reference persists in the Japanese voiceacting, because all the people who recorded this on Youtube are tasteless cretins who prefer the dub.
: So like… was her elbowing him part of his plan?
: It’s hard to see in stills, but she’s doing the whole Fist of the North Star thing.
: So like, okay, which parts of that did Ryuji actually plan?
: This is probably my least favorite out of all the Showtime attacks, by the way. They should’ve done something based on The Fast and The Furious and had both of them on motorcycles.
: “So it’s just like how it reacted with Lady Ann and I last time? It doesn’t react at all at other times, though… I don’t get how this thing works.”
: “Instead of granting wishes, maybe it just offers a bit of support…? As long as it benefits us in some way, I’m happy.”
: “Then let’s give it a try when there’s an opportunity. Make sure to match my timing, okay?”
: “Yes, ma’am!”
: Today, all we’re doing is sending the calling card.
: “Now the question is, how do we deliver the calling card to him?”
: “Yeah, we don’t know where he lives…”
: “Hm? Why not use the same method as before?”
: There’s a couple of Personas that turn into some pretty good armor that opens up after the Kaneshiro arc is done, so I’ll be using that Black Robe to save some money.
: We spend the night crafting again. I’m reasonably sure we have enough lockpicks to last us the rest of the game, so I just make some useless stuff.
: “Hm? Read it.”
: “I said, read it!”
: I’m just imagining Kaneshiro meeting Joker in the boss arena and it doing the Yakuza thing where it explains what family he’s from, and all he sees is “John Persona Family Patriarch - A Division of the John Persona Clan - John Persona”
: I’m also not sure if it’s a coincidence or not, but the Yakuza games often use the title “Menacing Man” for any subquest-related enemies.
: “What of it?”
: What’s funny is that the game goes into the whole idea of Kaneshiro being a dead man even if John Persona doesn’t kill him - if he confesses he’s probably going to die in prison. Hell, if Yakuza 7 is anything like reality there’s a chance his patriarch would kill him even if he didn’t confess because of the dumb shit he was pulling.
: “Don’t waste your time worrying about this useless shit. Just keep quiet for now.”
: “Grr… all of you, bring me your earnings! If you don’t surpass your quota… I’ll kill you.”
: “Hey, we’re leaving.”
: “A good idea, no? Given the theatrical nature of this one, Kaneshiro must surely have been contacted about it.”
: “You truly are the brains of this Phantom Thieves operation! Ryuji, you should follow her example!”
: “Y’know I’m the one who went postin’ it everywhere, right!? I even had to get all dressed up so they wouldn’t notice me!”
: “Come now, we don’t have time for idle chitchat. Let us get moving.”
: “We’re going up against a truly horrible criminal this time…”
: But Ryuji, Mara isn’t in this game! At least, not in his usual form.
: “Makoto! You remember how all this works?”
: Oh, right. I’ve been playing this game called Enchanted Arms recently (I’m probably going to do an LP of it) and the main character is a dumbass to the point of being completely non-functional.
: That game also has a party member named Makoto (who is a campy gay guy) and the main character’s English VA pronounces his name like “Mac-otto”. I can’t tell if it’s on purpose or not, because the other VAs can pronounce it just fine.
: It is absolutely canon that Ryuji pronounces Makoto’s name this way. I refuse to believe it isn’t.
: “Once we steal the Treasure, the Palace will crumble and the Palace ruler’s heart will change.”
: Why they’re still telling me this when I’ve already seen it twice, I have no idea.
: “Wow, you got that quick! I think Ryuji’s still struggling to comprehend it all…”
: Just to show how pointless the last save point is, I started from before the elevator and ran all the way down here.
: “He was waitin’ for us!”
: You can actually dick around the boss arena if you want - for some reason, the game doesn’t just proceed right to the boss fight.
: “A safe!? This wasn’t here the last time we came! He changed the entire room so quickly… tch, I guess this Palace isn’t a bank for nothing.”
: The room hasn’t actually changed, apart from the back wall.
: “I’m surprised you made it here alive. It seems you are quite lucky.”
: “Lucky? Don’t be ridiculous.”
: “We’re gonna change your heart and make you confess everything you’ve done. That’ll save all those people who’re suffering 'cause of your shitty actions.”
: “Even the police’re strugglin’ to deal with you, so this’ll make the public believe in us too!”
: “Those in power work the ones below them to the bone for money. Such is the hierarchy of the world. Just accept your fate as a source of my wealth!”
: “We’ll never agree to that!”
: “And hierarchy? You have to be out of your mind.”
: “Still! Don’t you think you’re getting back at the wrong people?”
: “What a pitiful man.”
: “It doesn’t matter whether you’re clean or dirty! Only the clever come out on top! The strong and the smart devour the weak. That is the natural order of things.”
: Kaneshiro is clearly on Team Chaos, since this is almost word-for-word the way the Gaians describe their plan in SMT 1.
: “You damn brats who think you know the world through the shit you read online will make perfect prey.”
: “Hmph. He is utterly hopeless.”
: “It’s always the fools who get tricked! Fools who have to pay for their foolishness. And if those fools don’t learn, well they have to suck it up and stay as plain, stupid fools!”
: What is he, Franziska von Karma?
: “Will you just shut it already!?”
: “I guess there’s not much point saying anything to you fools! This is where my gracious lecture ends. Now then, I hope you’re ready to work as slaves here for the rest of your lives.”
: “That’s outrageous!”
: Kaneshiro starts bulging at the seams, which is kind of unnecessary given what his demon form is.
: I don’t quite understand why the goons run away when they’re constructs made by Kaneshiro’s brain, but whatever.
: Meet Bael, which is just Kaneshiro in a dumbass halloween costume.
: I like that they just mirrored the textures on the goon’s jacket so the text is backwards. Not that I’m blaming them, given this is an asset that’s in all of what, two cutscenes?
: That thing looks a lot like the time machine from the end of Earthbound.
: That cutscene was way longer than it needed to be. Welcome to the Kaneshiro fight, which was utter bullshit in the base game unless you understood the gimmick… which I kind of just ignored.
: Basically, you get a turn or two of Piggytron just sitting still and not doing anything. It’s got some pretty high magic resistance, so even Principality doesn’t do a whole lot.
: I did this fight wrong on purpose because we’re so overlevelled and I wanted to see if I could do it. Ordinarily, you wouldn’t want to bring Yusuke because Missile Party is a full-party fire attack… which Yusuke is weak to.
: If he downs anyone, Kaneshiro will then follow up with Ocular Vulcan, which spreads out a number of weaker Gun-type hits among the party. We’re so overpowered that there’s no reason to give a shit.
: This attack was the bullshit one. When you get this message, you’re supposed to change targets to Kaneshiro himself - doing enough damage will knock him off the pig and give you time to hit it.
: Instead, I just keep nuking it.
: After one turn of spinning, if you haven’t knocked Kaneshiro off, he uses March of the Pigs. March of the Pigs was a guaranteed instakill in the base game on anything that wasn’t a New Game Plus file, even through guard.
: Needless to say, the damage on it was reduced significantly for Royal, specifically because a lot of people got hit by this assuming they could guard it and didn’t know about targeting Kaneshiro himself.
: I was planning on dying just to show it off, but then I didn’t and was just like “Fuck it, I’m just gonna do this in one take”.
: At this point, I just put Joker on heals (he can bring the party to full from near-empty in two Mediaramas) and had everyone else continue nuking the pig.
: The pattern repeats from there as long as you haven’t knocked Kaneshiro off his pig - he’ll use Super VIP Form, charge, and then use March of the Pigs.
: The base game did this too… even though you had to have figured out the gimmick in order to get this far. Naturally, we’re not going to be throwing any items because fuck engaging with game mechanics.
: If you do choose to try it, you get a choice of three items and there’s a chance that Kaneshiro stops his attack.
: The problem is that the only items that work are ones you probably don’t want to throw away: things like Beads, Bead Chains, and SP restoratives.
: Basically, the only difference between doing the fight correctly and what I’m doing is that doing it correctly would take longer because we’d spend a full turn attacking Kaneshiro every three turns.
: In the base game, the fight was over when you took out Piggytron, but the developers decided that wasn’t tedious enough.
: In this form, Kaneshiro will do nothing but spam Lullaby every time his turn comes up.
: He and his bodyguards will then follow up with Technicals.
: The game does a very bad job explaining this, but basically, the “Bodyguard for Hire” (the big fly with the shields) will step in and take any damage Kaneshiro would take. The other one doesn’t do anything.
: Both of the flies resist everything, except one absorbs Curse and one absorbs Bless.
: This is about the worst way you could possibly go about doing this. Trust me, I tried it. I spent four or so turns doing nothing but using Dormina and other sleep moves on the bodyguard… and none of them landed.
: I did manage to sleep the other fly, but it just wakes up after a few turns.
: Here’s a much, much better strategy. Have everyone just use damage spells on the bodyguard and technical whenever possible. This way you’re at least doing damage to it and not wasting your turn trying to put status effects on it.
: Now, here’s where you can tell this fight was just intended to be pure tedium.
: At half health, Kaneshiro will use Make it Rain.
: This does a shit-ton of damage, but Joker completely evades it. From what I’ve read, it’s scripted to be unable to actually kill anyone.
: The next turn, he’ll use it again, only this time a single coin falls down and does nothing.
: If the other fly is still alive, it’ll leave at this point.
: Even though Kaneshiro stops fighting back once he runs out of money, you still have to kill him, because I’m not sure Atlus learned anything from the base game.
: In fact, now I’m kind of interested in seeing the changes they supposedly made to the fifth dungeon. The fifth dungeon was a lot of backtracking and the boss was a source of a lot of complaints.
: It wasn’t until after the fight that I realized there’s probably a better strategy: have Ann use Fire Break (which removes fire resistance) on the bodyguard so she does full damage.
: “I’m not gonna let anyone have it… this is my money…”
: “You stole it all from innocent people!”
: “Fine. I’ll call off the debt…”
: “Fine? You’re still soundin’ pretty condescendin’.”
: “You’re right… I’m a poor, ugly idiot… how am I supposed to live a normal life like this?”
: “It’s all because of our society! Weak people can’t lead a happy life, no matter what they do! I’m a victim too, you know!? Yeah, none of this is my fault!”
: “The more you talk, the more pathetic you sound.”
: “I just wanted a place where I could belong! You get that, don’t you!?”
: “Bullshit! All you did was surround yourself with people you could use, solely for some easy money!”
: “And you think you’re the only one who’s gotta deal with bein’ labeled? Me… and all these other guys… we’re all fightin’ against that!”
: “But don’t worry. You’ll finally have a place where you belong. Somewhere you can make amends, for the rest of your life.”
: “We’re gonna do somethin’ about that distorted heart of yours. Free of charge.”
: “I’m glad you understand. Now hurry up and return to the real Kaneshiro.”
: It sounds like there should be a line between Ryuji and Yusuke, but there isn’t. I checked both my recording and a couple others.
: “Seriously? You guys don’t have any tact. Especially with that incredible power… these Palaces could net you loads of cash! You could do whatever you wanted to people’s hearts!”
: “We’re not like you!”
: “Where do you find meaning in that naive sense of justice? You know, there’s already someone out there taking full advantage of what Palaces have to offer…”
: “What?”
: I kinda wish he’d say something we don’t already know.
: “Is that… the same person Madarame’s Shadow spoke of?”
: “Spill it! Who’re you talkin’ about!?”
: It should already be pretty obvious who it is. I knew going in because the game had been heavily spoiled pre-release, but even not knowing it should be pretty obvious.
: “Don’t even bother. You are nothing compared to them… better be careful… a chance encounter with them could prove fatal…”
: “We can think about that later! Grab the Treasure - there’s no time!”
: “In that case, we should take that large one… wait, what!?”
: “T-Treasure…”
: “What’s gotten into him!?”
: Joker immediately reaches for his air horn, and motions to everyone else that they should just forego the van and run away.
: In the Gay Joker Edition of the game, Joker does one of those slow-motion dives and blasts Morgana with a fire hose before he can reach Ann.
: “You shouldn’t throw animals, dammit!”
: “Enough, already! Let’s get it in, everyone! Hurry!”
: How they had enough time to load all those giant gold bars (which would probably need to be moved with industrial equipment) is beyond me.
: “Owww…”
: “I think I cracked my ass…”
: “Ann, are you all right!? Is yours cracked as well?”
: “Of course not!”
: “Isn’t it supposed to be though?”
: “Urgh, that’s not what I meant! More importantly, it’s dangerous for us to just charge out like that!”
: “Ack! Everyone’s staring at us!”
: RIP Morgana, killed by his own hubris.
: “That briefcase…”
: “It appears to have been the cause of Morgana’s demise…”
: “That’s not what I meant! Isn’t that Kaneshiro’s…”
: “You mean his Treasure!?”
: Joker looks at everyone and asks if anyone wants to say a few words. No one does.
: “How about at karaoke?”
: “We’d have security cameras to worry about there.”
: “Oh, I got the perfect place.”
: “That’s right!”
: “I was just in the mood for some coffee too.”
: “And we need to fix Morgana up!”
: “So… warm…”
: When I recorded this, I had no idea why Morgana was crying and then realized that it’s because Ann is applying antiseptic in the background.
: “A rotary lock, hm?”
: “…I knew it.”
: “How did you get that?”
: “I simply memorized the combination. I saw him open and close it so many times, after all.”
: This part I don’t quite get. She was on the floor for most of the initial confrontation, and Kaneshiro had the lock on the briefcase facing away from her.
: “W-Well that’s… scary. But amazin’ too!”
: “Urghhh, that burns… hey, hurry up and open it!”
: “H-How much is this?!”
: “I believe one stack is one million yen… hm?”
: “One, two, three… uhhh, there’s thirty of them in here!?”
: “You have to think bigger than that…”
: Let’s be real here, if Morgana got any of that money it’d be in Ann’s pocket within a day. Either that or spent at some kind of hostess club that allows animals.
: “Not to bring down the excited mood… but does this look like money to you?”
: If I wasn’t doing that thing where I name all the boss updates after what demon the boss is, I would have named this one “300,000 Bison Dollars”.
: “F-For real!?”
: “I guess this represents… how everything he did was an act to make himself seem tough?”
: I know writers who let their readers come their own conclusions regarding the plot, and they’re all cowards. Actually, wait, no I don’t.
: “Noooooooo!”
: “Well hey, at least it feels like we totes busted this case, right?”
: “What do you mean? Is busting a case good or bad?”
: “Both!”
: “Snrk… chuckle Ahahahaha! To think the reward for the Phantom Thieves is feeling they ‘totes busted’ the case… ahhh… how funny!”
: “Hold on a second. Even though the contents were nothing more than trash, the case itself is quite nice.”
: “All right then, let’s sell it! Glad we got that sorted!”
: “By the way Morgana, have any of your memories returned?”
: “No, not at all…”
: You know, I’m not sure what would be weirder - a world where Morgana hits his head and starts going after women of his own species, or one where he continues to thirst for human women.
: “Something like that. He does remember searching for Treasures though.”
: “Hm. I hope your memories return soon then. So… what happens next?”
: “First, we wait for Kaneshiro to have his change of heart.”
: “It’s gonna be big this time. People’re gonna make a huge deal out of it, for sure.”
: “Hey, you know what Kaneshiro said at the end there? About that ‘criminal’ using the Metaverse…”
: “Yes, I was bothered by that as well.”
: “No point mullin’ over it now. Let’s wait and see how Kaneshiro’s change of heart goes first. We should prolly just lay low for a while.”
: We’ve actually seen the last of Kaneshiro. Unlike Kamoshida or Madarame, Kaneshiro doesn’t have a breakdown scene.
: They’re talking about Kaneshiro, and I’m not sure “phishing” is how I’d describe what he was doing.
: “All we need to do now is let the results come rolling in. We did great today though! Public opinion of us should skyrocket after this!”
: Tonight, we’ll be watching ICU.
: Joker went from “Man, this daytime TV drama is kind of stupid” to “Man, this daytime TV drama is kind of stupid… but the lighting is okay.”
: “Same with Kamoshida, and Madarame too. They hurt and exploited others just to satisfy their desires… still, there were people around them who noticed their terrible deeds, weren’t there?”
: “I wonder why they turned a blind eye… why doesn’t anyone help?”
: “So it’s because they don’t have the courage. Humans are so weak. Humans… hey, do you think I’ll really be able to become a human?”
: No, because you’re merely 90% post-Persona 4 recycled content as opposed to outright being Teddie.
: “When I touched the Treasure… some memories came back. I tried to force myself to forget, but… I really may not be human…”
: “Talk about a lukewarm response. Now that I think about it, I gotta be human. I am the core of the Phantom Thieves, after all!”
: We get an ability that I will never be using. I think the only time I ever had Joker use a melee attack in the base game (once I got the SP adhesives, anyway) was against the one enemy I know of that’s actually weak to physical damage.
: “You’ve defeated the repulsive fiend of gluttony this time. chuckle Well done. I am glad to see you have devoted yourself to your rehabilitation.”
: “You are not worthy of such kind words, inmate… I suggest you treasure them.”
: “Do you recall the whispers about that strange man?”
: “Even a chicken could remember something so important! Don’t sound so cocky about it!”
: I’ve been playing through 13 Sentinels Aegis Rim recently, and it kind of sucks coming from a game where I could get invested in the plot (even if it uses way too many cliffhangers for my liking) back to this crap.
: 13 Sentinels more or less has the opposite problem P5 does: the story is pretty good, but the actual gameplay parts consist of “Set up the guy with the railgun, have him kill everything, you can’t lose”.
: Unfortunately, I can’t LP it because someone else (actually, the guy who is doing the other LP of Royal) took it.
: Not that I’d necessarily want to, because I have about 30% story completion and already know more or less what the entire story is.
: “This is about the cases of those people who shut down, is it not?”
: “Indeed… I speak of another with powers similar to yours. If you are to complete your rehabilitation, you may encounter him eventually… yet another thing for me to look forward to.”
: “It would be greatly troubling if you were to not strengthen your abilities. I shall grant you an ability befitting of your newfound growth. Consider it a gift.”
: This is going to be useful for when we finally get around to doing Caroline and Justine’s confidant.
: I might do a couple ranks of it soon, because it opens up a couple of Personas you can’t otherwise get. The problem is that most of the abilities their confidant gets you aren’t useful until the end of the game.
: Next time, we’ll be back to doing confidants again. The “More Like Yusu-gay” updates will begin soon after that. I may need to delay just a little bit (doing 2 days instead of 3 at one point) to give Eligap enough time to finish the Rank 5 cutscene.
So I’m not clear on how much control everyone had over their Phantom Thief costume. Is Makoto in on the joke or do we need that weird guy explaining meme with Makoto and Ryuji going, “SO THERE WAS A NUCLEAR WAR IN 199X AND EVERYTHING’S A WASTELAND AND THERE’S THIS DUDE NAMED KENSHIRO AND HE’S THE LAST PERSON THAT KNOWS THIS MARTIAL ART CALLED HOKUTO SHINKEN AND HE CAN LIKE PUNCH PEOPLE’S PRESSURE POINTS AND MAKE THEIR HEAD EXPLODE AND SEE HIS OLD RIVAL KIDNAPPED HIS GIRLFRIEND AND…”
There’s a couple of voice lines in Mementos that randomly pop up (which haven’t yet in this run, but I remember seeing in the base game) that explain that. The party has no control over their outfits. In fact, there was a bit of a controversy over the base game because Ann has a couple of Mementos-only voice lines where she says she doesn’t like her costume.
One thing I kind of wish they had done was change the costumes up when you reach a high enough confidant rank.
I gotta say, when this LP started I didn’t anticipate that “fat guy dancing around on a giant piggy bank” would be a boss in this game. But ok atlus you do you ig
The Three Stages of Ann’s Costume:
- Wow the Catsuit is a Bit Much Don’t You Think?
- Actually the Bright Red is Nice I’m Kinda Into This
- wait why is she wearing huge rubber gloves
Summary
: What I love about this scene is that there’s absolutely no reason Makoto couldn’t have just used the group IM thing instead of calling.
: I mean, they’re already going the “tell, don’t show” route with Kaneshiro, as we’ll see briefly.
: “There’s something I feel I should let you know. Kaneshiro contacted me.”
: “Kaneshiro!?”
: “He said he’s calling off our debt. It seems he’s disposed of all the photographs as well. And, um… my sister and her team have taken him into custody.”
: “What!?”
: “It appears they did not want him to… disappear, if you know what I mean.”
: Strangely enough, even though the party basically delivered Kaneshiro right into the shadowy conspiracy group that would probably off him anyway, he never dies.
: “His group was called a mafia, after all… I wouldn’t put silencing him past them.”
: “Does this mean we were successful in changing his heart?”
: “It’s hard to say for sure yet.”
: No, I’m sure the amoral yakuza who was exploiting minors for cash just went to the police and turned himself in for no particular reason at all.
: “I see… what about those psychotic breakdowns that Kaneshiro mentioned?”
: Wouldn’t you know!? Your sister is the DA in charge of investigating that!
: I really would like to see what this game would’ve been like if the writing wasn’t constantly repeating itself.
: I mentioned 13 Sentinels Aegis Rim in the last update and I imagine it’d be like that - I liked it up until it started getting dumb near the end, and then completely disengaged with the plot… kind of like what happened with this game.
: “True… that said, all we can do now is wait until Kaneshiro’s change of heart becomes clear to us. Thank you.”
: “A young woman wearing all brand clothing and an older man with gold accessories were arguing. Both were on their high horse, and even though they dressed fancily, it felt noveau riche.”
: “Speaking of, the Japanese words for ‘high horse’ and ‘nouveau riche’ both originated as shogi terms. A lot of people aren’t familiar with shogi, but it’s good to know a little bit about it.”
: “So, Kurusu-kun. Have you seen this piece before?”
: I had to look it up, but this is the Knight piece. Shogi is honestly one of those things that I’ve never cared enough about to get into.
: “That’s right. The lance and the silver general also have the kanji for ‘gold’ on the back. By the way, it’s said that the ‘to’ on the back of the pawn piece is a cursive form of ‘gold’.”
: Some shoji sets apparently replace the “to” character (と) with a different one (个) that’s more similar-looking to the kanji for “gold” (全).
: “If a knight crosses into enemy territory, for instance, they can promote - becoming as mobile as a gold general. A weak piece like a pawn can become gold if you get it to the enemy’s camp, hence ‘nouveau riche’.”
: Fun fact, this is how American football works. That’s why they cut to commercial after every touchdown, because the scoring player has to go get the “gold” kanji drawn on their back.
: “By the way, nouveau riche like to wear expensive clothes because of a desire to be acknowledged. Once humans fulfill the basic needs of clothing, food, and shelter, our next desire is recognition.”
: “That’s why people try to make themselves seem bigger by flaunting their power through money.”
: I mean, maybe. My next desire is something to keep me occupied from the lingering threat of boredom.
: Makoto’s confidant is now open. We will not be touching it this update - normally we would, but I need to buy Eligap some time.
: Instead, we’re going to do a confidant event with Kasumi.
: “Since our talk, I’ve been trying to think of things besides gymnastics that I’m really invested in… and I figured something out! It’s this!”
: “Yeah. I can cook! You really need to regulate your diet in gymnastics, so I’ve been making my own food a lot. And so! Since I also wanted to thank you, I made you bento!”
: “This is actually my first time cooking for someone else besides my family… but I figured this would definitely help me get my confidence back!”
: “I made this specifically with your body type in mind, and knowing how much you exercise… do you want it?”
: I’m just picturing Joker looking into the bag and going “Hey Morgana, does watching DVDs count as exercise?”
: “And it’s all yours! The chicken and eggs are to help you with fatigue. There are some beans in there, too, and it’s on brown rice.”
: “Weight control’s important for gymnasts, but we also need to make sure we’ve got energy and stamina too. So high-protein, low-fat is usually what we go for. We also need iron to maintain stamina, and vitamin B for energy.”
: “Wait… I’m getting all focused on the gymnastics part again… Well, anyway… let’s dig in!”
: “…Why do you look so skeptical, Kurusu-senpai? I guess it might look like a lot, but this is actually a little less than my usual. Don’t worry, I’ve done the math on the calories. I’ll burn all this off at practice.”
: “C’mon, Senpai! You’ll be done before you know it!”
: They keep re-using the whole “Girl who is laughably bad at cooking” thing and I don’t know why.
: “Kurusu-senpai? You okay? Your eyes are glazing over…”
: “You think so? I don’t think it’s that weird for an athlete. Heavy seasoning would probably be bad for you, so I went easy on it. Hmm. Was it too light? Excuse me…”
: No! Curry is overrated! That was the entire point of Disgaea 5… at least, I’m pretty sure it was because I’ve forgotten everything else about that game. It was pretty bad.
: “So I decided to go for maximum curry flavoring! U-um, sorry… were you not a fan of that flavor? Or, wait - maybe you prefer the super spicy ones!”
: “I’m so sorry! I did this all wrong… I’ll go get some kind of condiment to change the flavor! Once I fix it, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it more!”
: “Should I get mayonnaise? Soy sauce…? Maybe miso? Do you think Dr. Maruki will have some salt!?”
: “Oh, you’re right! I should just buy something new you can eat right now!”
: “Um, but… well, thank you! Now, we should really eat.”
: “Thank you for completely finishing your meal, Kurusu-senpai. I’m sorry it didn’t turn out perfectly… I came up with the idea of making bento, but I couldn’t decide on the flavor…”
: “Either way, I’m really sorry! I’m so embarrassed… I thought it was so great when I presented it to you, and now…”
: And that’s how Ni no Kuni 2 was born. Or YIIK.
: “Next time, I’ll ask you what you like before I try anything too crazy. I’ll go buy that super spicy ‘Megido-sauce’ for next time!”
: Megido Sauce, guaranteed to devil bust your tastebuds or your macca back.
: “Hee hee… it seems like you’re always helping me find my way forward, Senpai. If I didn’t have you, I’d let my failures get to me and end up in some big pessimistic spiral again.”
: “…Maybe this kind of confidence can help me figure out who I really am.”
: “Okay, now that we’ve gotten all our nutrients, it’s time for the next phase! I don’t mean to be too demanding, but I’m going to train you even harder than before! Make sure you keep up!”
: Joker immediately reaches for the air horn. He’s seen this before.
: When we get back, we get a notification that the next Caroline and Justine outing is open. We’re not doing that for another week or so.
: Hifumi Togo is this game’s best girl. She still doesn’t hold a candle to Elly or Yukiko.
: Unfortunately, we won’t be touching her confidant for some time. She is well worth doing even if you’re not going for 100% because you need her to fuse Lucifer.
: I mean, maybe in the real world, but in the SMT universe churches are for one thing and that’s devil busting the Messians before they can do the whole “Thousand Year Kingdom of God” nonsense.
: “Let’s ignore that idiot. Anyway, a shogi expert, huh? Striking an enemy with but a moment’s inspiration, skillfully strategizing toward victory…”
: “They said she’s at the church in Kanda, right? We should check it out when you have the time.”
: We have a couple of things to do tonight First, we can sell all this sooty armor, which is more than I remember picking up.
: The grab bag is available again, so I take one.
: The three Old Haori are upgrades for the male characters, so I go ahead and equip them. We’ll probably wind up buying new armor from Iwai anyway, but this will work when we go into Mementos next week.
: Sakai wants a Yakisoba Pan. We’ve been carrying one around for like three months. It’s probably still good.
: He gives us another Black Robe, which I might actually save for the late-game. I think there’s a few armor pieces near the end of the game that are better than the ones you can buy.
: Speaking of Iwai, let’s go sell all the vendor trash. That’ll bring us to 667,000 yen.
: Can you guess who the next target is going to be?
: This sounds like it was written by someone who has no idea how the internet works.
: If you hadn’t guessed by now, this spells it out. Anyway, we’re just going to call Kawakami, and…
: “That voice on the phone wasn’t Kawakami. Maybe you should ask for more details?”
: I’d just like to point out how little sense this scene makes. Joker is presumably calling the maid service’s number, and somehow reached the hospital from the maid service.
: “But thanks for coming all this way to visit me. Ugh, how could I collapse at a time like this? I really need to make some money… how am I going to make today’s payment…?”
: “You contacted the school…!?”
: Takase’s family would get a D- in Extortion 101.
: “I-I’m sorry…”
: “These are Takase-kun’s guardians, the ones I mentioned the other day. They took care of him…”
: Why do they keep using “the other day”? They could just have said “I told you about them” and it’d be enough.
: Seriously though I don’t understand how they supposedly did a once-over on the script between the base game and Royal and didn’t change some of this stuff.
: “He’s one of my students. He came to visit me…”
: “I’m sorry…”
: “Kurusu-kun…”
: I feel like Persona 5 takes place in some kind of bizarro world where extortion and blackmail are legal and everyone just kinda does it.
: “That’s not…”
: “…I understand. I will pay you… so…!”
: “I have to figure out a way to make more money… I guess transferring to our sister company is the only way…”
: This is one of the reasons I feel like the whole “there is a right answer to every choice” thing is kind of a bad idea.
: If you ask her about the sister company, the game spells it out for you: it’s prostitution even by Japanese legal standards.
: “Haha… I can’t believe I’m getting scolded by my student. Why…? Why are you so interested in helping me? I’m not worth it…”
: And then a doctor walks in and beckons Joker out of the room. “I’m sorry, son. The disease has progressed too far. We’re going to need to send her to Anime Containment.”
: “…Meow. …I’m so tired. All I really want is… a way to apologize to Takase-kun. So if his guardians demand money, then I just have to pay them…”
: “Sorry, I’m not quite back to a hundred percent yet, so my thoughts are all over the place.”
: “…I’m going to get some rest. I appreciate you coming to visit me today. …It made me really happy.”
: I remember the last time I was in a hospital - I was visiting someone, and right around this point I had the Ham Sandwich of Despair.
: The person I was visiting had wanted one, so I went down to this overpriced sandwich place in the lobby and got one, and when I brought it back up they told me they didn’t want it after all. They tell me to just eat it because they’re going to order dinner from the hospital.
: So there I am, in a hospital room, eating a ham sandwich. It doesn’t taste like anything, no matter how much mustard I put on it, because of the overpowering smell of the cleaning fluids the hospital uses. It is the Ham Sandwich of Despair.
: “…Visiting hours are over. Get home safe, okay…?”
: We start the 30th with Ann asking us to go to Mementos. We’re not doing that yet, because there’s still a few more requests we need to pick up - namely Kawakami’s.
: Instead, we’re going to to see our boyfriend.
: “It is on display as we speak. Would you like to come see it with me?”
: “Then let us head to the museum. To be honest, I have yet to actually go there myself. This should be quite lovely.”
: “Hm, I believe my piece truly stands out among the sea of art here. And yet, nobody has come to see it… perhaps they are so afraid of the truth held within that they dare not take a closer look.”
: Joker glares at the old people. No one hurts his boyfriend.
: “…There is no need to worry. I am not bothered in the slightest. That was nothing more than the drivel of unrefined commoners. I needn’t pay any attention to them.”
: “As long as those who are in the know understand my work, I will be happy.”
: “Look! A knowledgeable patron has arrived!”
: “I would like your opinion, sir… what are your thoughts on this piece?”
: If I was actually writing the More Like Yusu-Gay route, I’d probably have him say something like “You’ve clearly got something interesting to say here, but it’s like you’re afraid to really put yourself into it and say it.”
: Yusuke would have a thought here which would be something like, “Doesn’t he get it? I can’t! If I do that…”
: Then there’d be a flashback of Yusuke with Madarame, where Madarame has either realized himself that Yusuke is gay or Yusuke has told him directly.
: I’m not sure exactly how I’d write it, but it’d be something like Madarame telling him that he can’t be openly gay and an artist at the same time, “because that’s how this country is. Your pieces would never sell. People wouldn’t bother to look beyond you to your art.”
: The idea is that it’s something where he’s doing it to keep Yusuke under his thumb, but also has a grain of truth to it.
: “My work is… empty?”
: “…Indeed. But… why? I put my heart and soul into this piece, captured the very essence of desire… it was supposed to lay bare the reality of the world!”
: “Perhaps… perhaps he was right. It may be empty after all… these colors, these brush strokes… they do not convey the true meaning of desire, only my conception of it!”
: “I haven’t captured desire… desire has captured me! How could I have fooled myself into believing otherwise!?”
: “This grave mistake shall be the end for me!”
: “But, I… what is going to happen to me now? Without art, what will remain of my being!?”
: “Akira… you are correct. Surrendering myself to fate after only one failure would be very much unlike me. Still, being criticized by someone with such a keen eye is truly painful…”
: “But that is all the more reason I must break out of my slump. I must prove my ability to him…!”
: “I will start by painting. After that, I shall paint, beyond which I shall paint even more. That is the only way I will learn to capture the essence of emotion.”
: “After all, you can only accomplish so much in using logic to analyze the contents of the heart. …I hope you allow me to continue my skill card services as well, Akira. I shall conquer this!”
: “Now then, let us head home. I wish to start anew.”
: “That one gentleman’s critique made me fully realize what I’ve been lacking. Now my path is clear! I will simply keep on drawing. I’m going to have ten pieces finished up by end of today!”
: That last part isn’t a typo on my end, that’s exactly how it is in the screenshot. They forgot a “the”.
: “Hah! If anything, I should be doing more. I’ll do anything to escape this slump! With your support, I was able to pick myself up rather quickly today.”
: “I hope this doesn’t discourage you from joining me again. I will get past this. Sorry for taking up so much of your time. We’ll meet again soon.”
: It’s here I figure out how the touch pad confidant tracker thing works.
: All the tracker does is steer you toward a “recommended” confidant each day. Neither the reload-heavy 100% route nor the one I’m using do this one tonight.
: There’s also a crossword tonight.
: Tonight, we’ll be starting what’s either the most or the second-most important confidant in the game.
: “You can begin by telling me your name.”
: “Ah, Akira Kurusu-san. I see. Your name is quite lucky. That aside, what type of consultation can I interest you in today?”
: “Well, um… I use tarot cards to foretell the future.”
: As it so happens, I actually have a complete deck of tarot cards with the Persona 4/Golden faces on them, but I have no idea how you’re supposed to use them.
: “Now then, let’s start with an initial reading to test the waters of your fate. O divine power… bring forth this boy’s fortune!”
: “I see. There seems to be new wealth in your future. Your financial fortune is looking good today. This wealth of which I speak will come… from your house.”
: “Head home without detour, and precisely five thousand yen will await you there!”
: If someone wants to explain to me how it is you’re supposed to do… whatever it is she’s doing… I’ll do it with the P4 cards and post it in the thread. We’re going to be coming back here a lot.
: Anyway, this is a preview of Chihaya’s first ability: the money reading. Money readings cost 5000 yen and get you twice the money if you end a battle with an All-Out.
: This is one of the reasons that the Greatest Weapon in the Phantom Thieves Arsenal is a better technique than confusion farming - you can go directly to an All-Out from the negotiation screen and double any money gained that way.
: “As you should. Fate is absolute! But… what is this? How strange. Kurusu-san, the general flow of your future seems to indicate… ruin…? And an inmate, locked away in a lonely cell…”
: “You seem to be a good person, Kurusu-san… but are you perhaps mixed up with the wrong crowd? Beyond that… my…”
: This is foreshadowing to something we could have seen, but haven’t. It’s a reference to the game over cutscene that happens if you ignore the time limit for a Palace.
: Let’s just pretend I went and actually sat through several hours of going to sleep in a loop until I ran out the timer on Kaneshiro’s dungeon.
: I took these from a video on YouTube. They’re from the base game, which is why the font is different. I kind of wish they hadn’t changed it, because I started using it for the update banners and didn’t know they had changed it when I started making them.
: This cutscene is actually a gigantic plot hole for several reasons. I’ll give you the first one: this cutscene takes place in November. By this point, Joker should know who the person with the gun is.
: “I cannot offer advice to that end… Hm. If the divination is coming to me this clearly, the truth of it is simply undeniable.”
: “Now that I think about it, there may be way you can attempt to counteract your destiny.”
: Bring a Persona that’s immune to gun damage and then light the gunman on fire?
: Remember how I said we need 100,000 yen to unlock Chihaya? This is why.
: “I typically only recommend this to my more experienced customers, but your situation is too dire to ignore. You see, the stone itself is imbued with an aura of joy that will sap away all the horrible energy surrounding you.”
: Wasn’t this a Yakuza substory? I think it was.
: “All you need to do is keep it wrapped in cloth and be sure to recharge its power in moonlight every three days.”
: The worst part is that we have to take a second day to buy the crystal. We’re going to buy it anyway, but now we need to spend two time slots on it even though we already have enough money.
: “I-It’s legitimate, I promise! So… you really don’t want it? What a shame it will be to see the flames of youth snuffed out so soon…”
: “Well, come see me again if you change your mind. I really can help you, if you’d like.”
: “The chief seems strangely happy. I wonder what’s going on.”
: “Hey Akira, how’s your pocket money situation been looking?”
: I mean, we’re only carrying around $6,200 in cash.
: “Hahaha, you’re hopeless!”
: “What? Is this… five thousand yen!?”
: “I won some money from the lotto, so I don’t mind sharing my winnings.”
: There’s a lotto stand in Shibuya we could use, but I never did in the base game.
: “Don’t worry about the details. Or what, is that five thousand yen not enough for you? Anyway, make sure you close up the shop like always.”
: “Hey, so… does this mean that fortune teller was right?”
: “She even got the amount spot on! Maybe that Chihaya lady can seriously read into the future! Wait… this is bad! Didn’t she say you’re gonna die!?”
: “Come on, we need to go talk to her again and figure out what to do! …And maybe I can have her read my compatibility fortune with-”
: It’s zero percent.
: He’s finally learning to fear the hose.
: Next time, we’re going to start Makoto’s confidant, find out Kawakami’s secret, pay 100,000 yen for a magic crystal, and most importantly see the first part of the Gay Yusuke Route. I might even write something for it. Maybe.
: Eligap already has the next part mostly done, so this should be the only time I’ll need to stall for that.
The fact that all the pieces look the same makes it pretty opaque. Go is easier to learn, and also probably harder to play.
One day a girl will be bad at cooking and like meat in the same scene. This will cause a double event and the entire MegaTen universe will dissolve.
Churches are for coffee and donuts and seniors playing bingo, I’m pretty sure. Maybe they do other things in churches in Japan.