Click Here for Update 53
: “Futaba’s still asleep too… this won’t be good.”
: Look, Morgana, this is the franchise where people spent the better part of a month inside an isekai realm in the TV. That’s just how anime works.
: Speaking of which, when I was recording this, I listened a little harder than I normally do and I distinctly heard one of the characters say “isekai” when talking about the metaverse.
: “…Hey.”
: “Same as always. Today’s the day Wakaba passed. I do this every year… here, I’ve got a cup for you too.”
: “Futaba reminds me so much of her mother. She’s a smart girl. Doesn’t just go with the flow, either. Wakaba… your work and your kid were so fulfilling for you. Why’d you have to die so suddenly..?”
: “…That reminds me, you saw me talking to that prosecutor - I mean, that woman in a suit, right? I remember you were real bothered by it. She might come back, so I guess I should tell you about it.”
: Did Sojiro just predict the inevitable Sae cutscene that’ll happen tomorrow, since it’s the end of an arc?
: “That woman was trying to get information on Wakaba’s research out of me.”
: “That’s what we heard in the Palace.”
: “You don’t need to know what the research was about. Just know there was some trouble around it. Obviously, Wakaba got dragged into that as well.”
: “Now, they ruled her death a suicide.. but I’ve got my doubts.”
: “Doubts? Could she have been killed?”
: “Supposedly, there were people who wanted to take her research and use it for their own benefit.. don’t get me wrong though. I don’t have a lick of evidence.”
: “That’s why I haven’t told Futaba any of this. I don’t want to cause her any more trouble.”
: “It sounded like she had suspicions of her own based on what she said in the Palace.”
: This line might sound kind of stupid, and it’s because it’s a bad translation as far as I can tell. You can clearly hear Sojiro’s VA say “SOS” and I’m guessing the actual line is something like “Right before she died, she sent me an SOS”.
: “I brushed it off thinking it was a joke, but if I had just taken her seriously… that’s another reason I took Futaba in… redemption.”
: “She went through such horrible things. Those heartless adults just yelled at the poor girl… hey… how do you heal emotional scars?”
: Joker’s like “Well first, you go into a stupid dungeon that’s about twice as long as it needs to be, and then you fight a boss that you could beat by doing nothing.”
: “I agree. I’m waiting for it to happen, but… Futaba!?”
: “Huh?”
: “N-Never mind that.. how did you get here?”
: “Uh… I walked.”
: “…You’re okay!?”
: “Was that bad?”
: “Th-that’s not it! I’m just shocked to see you out of the house…”
: “Uh… I’m sorry I worried you.”
: “…Ha… It’s all right.”
: “By the way, what’s the date today?”
: “Eh? It’s uh… it’s the 21st.”
: I don’t know why they did one of these dialog transition things when it takes like two seconds to get to Sojiro’s house from the cafe. A simple load screen would’ve done it.
: “Hmph, ‘Medjed.’ Now, how do we cook them?”
: “Violent much?”
: “Hey, Futaba? We don’t have much time left. Are you sure you could do this!?”
: This is another example of how bad Morgana’s dialog was in the base game. It should be “Are you sure you can do this!?” but apparently they forgot to change that for Royal.
: “Th-the kitty talked!? Is this a dream? I’m going back to sleep…”
: I’m just imagining Joker going “He’s my magical pet. I’m a magical boy. It’s like being a magical girl only without the girl part.” and seeing if Futaba falls for it.
: Then again though.. isn’t that technically what Joker is? I mean, he does the whole outfit transformation and runs around casting spells and fighting a different monster each week.
: “…R-right.”
: “Now hurry it up!”
: “…Eh, I guess it doesn’t matter. Let’s get cracking!”
: “I don’t think she can hear me… talk about intense concentration. This place is so messy.. I’m surprised she can focus at all.”
: “Futaba? You should really clean your room a bit.”
: “…”
: “She’s not listening.. oh well. Just waiting around is boring. Let’s clean the place up.”
: “Well, Futaba? We’re done on our end. Are you finished yet?”
: “…”
: “She can’t hear a word I’m saying.. guess we’ll just have to keep waiting.”
: “Wh-what’s up? Something happened?”
: “It’s finished.”
: “Finished? What is?”
: “Ah, it’s so clean! Why!?”
: Futaba is a trash gremlin and we’ve just removed her natural habitat.
: “We cleaned it. Anyway, is it true? Did you really take care of Medjed?”
: “I handled them, and someone else handled my room! I don’t understand, but this is good!”
: It’s going to take her ages to gather enough trash to rebuild her nest.
: “Hey, Futaba! What’s wrong!?”
: “Well, it looks like it’s been taken care of. I guess we should get home and sleep too…”
: “We should be in the clear now, right…? I don’t know - maybe it’d be better if we just stayed in today.”
: Five points to Guts. If I could have gotten a luck reading, I would have… even though we’ll be maxing out Guts by the end of the month.
: “Yo, you look tired.”
: “We’ve made ourselves at home.”
: I looked up to see if Japan actually has an anti-doxxing law, and I don’t think they do. At least, if they do, I couldn’t immediately find it.
: “Aren’t these the guys people have been up in arms about?”
: “What’re you all smirking about?”
: “Well stop it. You’re gonna drive away all my customers.”
: “But there ain’t any customers.”
: “Can it… my customers are on summer vacation too.”
: I feel like this is more or less the same response Sony had to people who bought the PS3 at launch. “But there ain’t any games!” “Can it… we’ve got Talladega Nights on Blu-Ray.”
: “Oh crap, I just realized our break’s almost over!”
: “There are still ten days left.”
: “I wanna go somewhere, but we can’t just leave Futaba-chan alone.”
: “Some things still concern me too, like that ‘research’…”
: “Good morning.”
: Get used to seeing Futaba hiding behind people. This is something they’ll continue into Strikers.
: “It seems she’s cautious of us..”
: “Hey, why don’t we go upstairs? If any customers come, she’ll be even more afraid.”
: “Why don’t you go with them, Futaba? Have fun. It’s about time my regulars show up anyway, so I don’t want you guys loitering around my store.”
: I’m surprised Hideki Kamiya isn’t busy blocking people on Twitter or making another character action game that inevitably won’t review well.
: Just in case you had any kind of questions about what kind of villain Shido is, he’s a generic Metal Gear villain.
: “Sorry, I wasn’t listening.”
: “And Medjed was in turn defeated by her real-world hacking abilities? This does correlate to the facts as we know them.. if he’s telling the truth, then Wakaba Isshiki didn’t commit suicide…”
: “Did a third party target her life with the goal of destroying her research? Wakaba’s death was two years ago… that also coincides with when the incidents started occurring…”
: …And you never thought those two incidents might be connected in any way?
: “Does this other Metaverse user that Madarame and Kaneshiro mentioned… really exist? Earlier, I briefly mentioned about those psychotic breakdown incidents that have alarmed the public.”
: “All of a sudden, people will lose consciousness or become violent… a situation as incomprehensible as that can’t be explained away as ‘troubled social conditions’.”
: “The method involved always muddled the explication, but your story has virtually confirmed its viability. Although, I wouldn’t have expected a new criminal to come to light from your testimony…”
: I’m just picturing Joker banging his head on the desk. It only took her what, two dungeons to figure this out?
: “What did your group think of this other Metaverse user?”
: “How self-centered of you. The Phantom Thieves tamper with people’s hearts without asking consent. How is that different?”
: “Well… no matter how you thought of them, there can be no doubting your resolve. Are those incidents because of you or someone else? Either way, I will get to the bottom of this.”
: Don’t worry, the game won’t just let us figure this out on our own or anything. It’ll bash us over the fucking head with who the killer is by the time we reach the next dungeon… assuming you haven’t already figured it out.
: “You should know who he is… considering what happened. Your testimony regarding this incident will be serious. I’m sure you understand why.”
: “Answer my next question carefully. What did you do to this Okumura?”
: “That means our enemies aren’t limited to Shadows.”
: “I thought the other people were just victims, like the slaves at the castle or the walking ATMs.”
: “Even though they seem to be alive, they’re only part of the backdrop… the environment. In other words, the Palace ruler determines the form and strength of their cognitions.”
: “I would have loved to ask Futaba’s mother how far along she was with her research…”
: Maybe if they had her research, they could make Makoto less of a camera hog.
: “Research, huh… she was lookin’ into that cognitive psience stuff, yeah?”
: “If we put together all the information we’ve gathered up to this point.. abuse of cognitive psience can lead to death, and it may even relate to the psychotic breakdown incidents.”
: “Considering the ‘cognitive’ aspect, I sense a strong connection between it and the Metaverse.”
: “On top of that, the research might have been stolen and used by someone else.”
: “You mean those guys that showed Futaba-chan the fake suicide note.”
: “If that is the case, those people are unforgivable.”
: I don’t understand what the point of showing Futaba the suicide note was in the first place.
: “Hey, Futaba. Is there anything else you can remember?”
: “That smell…”
: “C’mon, no fair…”
: “Hey, can I snag a bite?”
: “Why don’t we take a short break?”
: Here’s something I forgot to do up until now. If you count the lines of dialog each character has in this scene, Makoto has twice as much (or more) than everyone else.
: The same thing is true for pretty much any scene Makoto is in - she will ALWAYS have more lines than anyone else.
: “Even if Futaba is a genius, could she really crush an international hacker organization that easily?”
: “The one who taunted the Phantom Thieves was a guy in Japan. I knew the Medjed members in Japan weren’t anything special, so I wasn’t worried.”
: “How do you know that?”
: You’ll notice that nowhere in this cutscene does it explain who the person hijacking the Medjed name was, or why they wanted to target the Phantom Thieves to begin with… and knowing who it is makes the plot make that much less sense.
: In the game, you don’t learn who it is until it’s just randomly blurted out in the middle of the second to last dungeon. The anime takes a different approach and shows the person straight out, so I’ll explain it now.
: The answer is that the fake Medjed is a nameless president of an IT company working with Organization XIII the random shadowy cabal of people the SIU Director is on the phone with all the time.
: What I don’t get though is how exactly the random IT guy would follow through with the whole “I’m going to crash the economy” thing when presumably all of his money is in Japan.
: “Yep. It was only me at first, back when I was referred to as the hacker of justice. But since I stayed anonymous, a bunch of guys from all over the world started using the name.”
: “And those were the ones committing cybercrimes.”
: “It was a hassle to expose all of them, so I just left them be.”
: “Uhhh.. so Futaba was the true Medjed, and we were freakin’ out over some weak-ass dipshits? You should’ve told us from the start, Futaba.”
: “I discarded the Medjed name a while ago. I’m Alibaba now.”
: “Futaba, what do you want to do now? Since you know our secret, we’d like you to join our team.”
: " 'Kay. "
: “Just like that?”
: “This may even ensure our investigation of Mementos goes along smoothly.”
: “Well.. I guess.”
: “Well, Futaba’s real amazin’! She’s gonna be a big help for us, huh?”
: “Say, Futaba. How did you find out about us?”
: Makoto is one of those people from back when I still did MMOs who treated joining a guild like a job interview.
: “Secret.”
: “Where did you learn to hack?”
: “Private.”
: “When did you obtain the Nav?”
: “I refuse to answer.”
: “At the very least, we need to be able to communicate normally with her.”
: “What should we do?”
: “How?”
: “First, we’ll need to help her open up to us. If we each spend an entire day with her, maybe she’ll get more used to being around us.”
: “I see. We do have the time, thanks to summer vacation.”
: “We can begin tomorrow.”
: We’re going to have over a week of very long cutscenes coming up. For readability purposes, I’ll probably split them up more.
: “Let’s go to the beach! There’ll be tonsa people there, plus we got totally dried out in that desert.”
: “That’s a great idea! I forgot I hadn’t gone to the beach yet!”
: “Uh, excuse me..?”
: “I’ll come by tomorrow. See you then.”
: “Let me help as well. I don’t have anything planned.”
: “Thanks. We can set a schedule with everyone else depending on when they’re free.”
: “Okay!”
: “How can I stay calm about this!?”
: “I understand how you feel.”
: “Thanks to the incident with those hackers, people are calling us incompetent. And on top of that, the Phantom Thieves are claiming justice is on their side. Don’t make me laugh.”
: “Medjed was dealt with by either the Phantom Thieves themselves, or some avid supporter. There are no tracks whatsoever, so they must be quite skilled…”
: “Either way, the general public recognizes the Phantom Thieves as the subjugating party.”
: “They’re gaining support and influence much faster than we could have anticipated..”
: “It is indeed an abnormal situation. I’m beginning to suspect mass manipulation of some kind.. it’s even possible that a powerful person is behind them, plotting the psychotic breakdowns.”
: Yusuke and Futaba going at each other is going to be an ongoing thing.
: It seems like Morgana really doesn’t like his job being taken by Futaba. That certainly won’t become a major plot point.
: “Training Futaba’s going to be a lot of work - more than stealing someone’s heart.”
: “…Why is he of all people getting excited about this? Well, the news really did draw a lot of attention. I can’t wait to see what happens.”
: There’s a couple of things we can do tonight. First, we can get what is presumably a severed hand from Sakai for a Melon Pan, which we got from the Ginza station gate a few updates ago.
: Those people on Gamefaqs were apparently wrong. It’s 50,000 yen.
: “You’re really lucky! Now you can afford some sushi for me, right?”
: Now that we’ve recouped some of the money we’ve been dumping on Chihaya these past few weeks, let’s go see Hifumi.
: “…The digital version of the weekly magazine. My father’s deteriorating health, and that he’s bedridden… the fact that my mother primarily supports us.. they even reported that my mother works at a night club…”
: “Which is.. not untrue.. but was it really necessary for them to write about all this? Capitalizing on a family’s private matters is just cruel..”
: “My family’s troubles have nothing to do with my skills as a shogi player… my mother was furious when she read the article. She said it’ll hurt her career, and that she’ll never forgive whoever wrote it.”
: Ain’t gonna forgive! Hifumi even looks like a more detailed Pipimi.
: “My father didn’t say anything… he just sat there listening to her. But he looked troubled… my mother told me that we’d be able to easily quell these rumors if I were to become more famous.”
: “So now she’s even more insistent on having me do more TV and magazine interviews than before…”
: “…Yes. Although I can’t express that to my mother. She’s so happy for me. I always believed that if I worked hard as a shogi player, I’d be able to support us.. but I never expected such a destructive article would be written about me and my family.”
: “Honestly, nothing good will come from being treated like an idol. People say I’m all looks and no skills. They’re annoyed that I’m in the press all the time.”
: “Terrible things have been said about me, suggesting I would do anything to become popular… I’m even starting to be shunned in the shogi world. That’s why my senior acted that way toward me.”
: “My father used to practice with me from his sickbed, but his illness has made that impossible. Maybe I should stop playing shogi and just get a job… that way, my family won’t get hurt again…”
: I am very disappointed that there’s no ‘maybe you should try getting a job’ option.
: “Do what I love…? I love shogi… I don’t want to quit.”
: “At the end of the day, I love shogi. I’d never be able to give it up. I was just confused because of that article and how my senior treated me..”
: “However, I think I can see my next move.. thanks to you. You’re helping me realize a lot about myself, outside of shogi.”
: “…Let’s return to the church and play a match. That article has left me somewhat irritated. I’m going to use my secret move: the Eternal Abyss Yagura Gate, and turn the board into hell…”
: “…Well? Would you care to face me in a match?”
: “Thank you so much for accompanying me today. I needed the distraction. Trying to solve this on my own, I felt caught in a vicious cycle.. but you helped me find a new path.”
: “…You might make a fine priest yourself. Considering how good a listener you are, I mean.”
: “Really? I thought I felt a hidden potential brewing within you… you really are a strange individual. I was supposed to be your teacher, but somehow, the tables have turned. I’m the one learning from you.”
: “I would love to keep learning from you. Well then, if you’ll excuse me. I’ll see you at the church.”
: “It seems you freed the heart of a frenzied girl and saved her from her haunted past. chuckle Another step has been taken to rehabilitation.. you are progressing quite nicely.”
: "Our master bestows words of praise upon you! You’d better feel honored!’
: “By the by, more curious information has found its way to your ears. A scientist’s research… it seems that world may secretly be known after all.”
: “Furthermore, that very research has been stolen and is now used by those with malicious intent… I wonder how this will change the approach you take to your rehabilitation…”
: “Allow me to grant you a new power worthy of your current self. Though you have my aid, be sure not to let your guard down. Otherwise you may get swept off your feet..”
: In case you’re wondering, no, there was no ability at Rank 7 in the base game. I’m not sure why Igor says “new power” when you don’t get anything until Rank 8 (which will bring our total Persona slots to 12 and make it a fucking nightmare for me to find Lilim and Anzu).
: “We shall again in the near future.”
: Next time, we’ll have a series of long cutscenes with Futaba followed by confidant events at night.. for the foreseeable future.