Colors Flying High - Let's Play Persona 5 Royal

[Timrod]

Click Here for Update 9

: You might notice from the header that this update takes place on 04/27/2016 when the last update was 04/20/2016. This is because the routing that the 100% guide uses leaves a 7-day gap due to a couple of major social stat bonuses we otherwise would miss out on.

: When we left the dungeon on 04/20, I grinded out just over 100k yen. This is far more money than the game expects us to have. I checked, and unfortunately I don’t have the saves from this point in my base game run, but I can tell you I had a lot less money than that. The entire party is level 13, putting them two levels above the boss.

: I’ll also briefly mention that the only reason I was able to grind like this was because of the replenishing gun ammo. There’s an encounter right outside the throne room that will always be two Angels and an Archangel.

: By using some creative moves (ie; having Joker purposely only shoot one Angel and then Baton Passing to Morgana or Ryuji to shoot the second one, then having them Baton Pass to Ann) you can pretty consistently get the last standing Angel to surrender.

: We then get somewhere between ~800 and ~1600 yen in addition to whatever money we get from killing the other Angel and the Archangel, as well as a load of EXP.

: The game gives us a log of everything we did in the dungeon once we leave… which is everything.

: Several days of stat raising, part-time jobs, a few confidant events, buying nasty drinks, almost permafucking, and making coffee later…

: “Couldn’t we have just sent one at the beginnin’ of all this?”

: “It’s not that simple. A Treasure won’t stay materialized forever. Once the impression is gone, the Treasure will disappear. I think it’ll last around a day at most.”

: This is kind of weird, but what we’re doing is sending the calling card today so that Kamoshida finds it tomorrow, and then going in to kill his shadow.

: “The hell…? That’s like no time at all… anyways, we can send a callin’ card right now, yeah? Let’s do it and steal that bastard’s heart!”

: “The Palace will go away once you take the Treasure. Make sure you’ve done everything you need to.”

: In another strange homage to Innocent Sin, we can’t go back to a dungeon once we’ve cleared it. There’s an equivalent to the Abandoned Factory if we need to fight the enemies again, but anything we haven’t gotten: the stealable vendor trash, will seeds, anything in chests will all be gone. Thankfully, we’ve gotten everything we could conceivably need, apart from that one locked chest I couldn’t open.

: “So we send the calling card in the morning.. and carry out the plan by the end of the day, right?”

: “Correct. The effect won’t last long. Are you worried?”

: “Heh. Waited too long.”

: “Perfect.”

: “So, who’s going to write the card?”

: “Leave it to me!”

: “Why?”

: “Why? Why wouldn’t it be me?!”

: “This is important. Are you sure you can handle the pressure?”

: “I must agree.”

: “I really wanna get him good! Lemme write it… c’mon, please?”

: “Yeah, I got this!”

: “Hey, are you sure about this? If they find out our identities, all this work will be for nothing..”

: “I know, I know!”

: “All right then! Tomorrow it is! You’d better not slack off on this.”

: The game gives you a tutorial on this, but the day you send the calling card for a dungeon is taken up ENTIRELY by sending the calling card. It used to be that it would take up the night time block too, but that was changed in Royal.

: This sounds like the worst-written magical girl show ever. I mean, it’s not like Eternal Punishment had a cast made up ENTIRELY of adults, or that Innocent Sin had two adult party members.

: The whole “all adults are shit” theme is going to be an ongoing thing. It sucks and I hate it. Let me just put things in perspective here: Persona 4 came out in 2008. People who were in high school then were adults by the time this game released in the west. Moreover, this game has an M rating.

: There’s a new crossword tonight. I wish they’d give you whatever letters you want so I could have done “BOOBIES” which I think we all know is the correct answer for any blank with seven spaces.

: Even though we have more points in Knowledge than I’m pretty sure we did in Guts or Charm, we’re still not at level 2 yet.

: I then spend our night crafting lockpicks. We got a load of crafting materials from the dungeon and they can’t be sold, so might as well.

: We get a special marker on the calendar with Ryuji’s logo on it.

: “…Wow.”

: “Not bad, eh? I looked up a bunch of similar stuff online for reference.”

: “Um, yeah.”

: “Your logo’s a little lacking too.”

: “Okay, y’know what? Th-that ain’t true!”

: “It got everyone excited, so it’s all good, yeah?”

: “…Look at that. A predictable reaction for someone who knows what we mean by distorted desires.”

: “I think it’s hittin’ him pretty hard.”

: “So, you’re playing dumb? Eh, it’s not a problem. You’ll be expelled soon enough anyway.”

: Persona 5 Royal is bought to you by grape jelly. Grape jelly, ideal for screens of all shapes and sizes.

: “Judging from Kamoshida’s response.. I’m sure we had an effect on his Palace!”

: “Does that mean the Treasure’s appeared!? We’ll be able to get it today, right?”

: “It’s not just ‘today’. It’s ONLY today. The impact of seeing a calling card doesn’t last long, and it cannot be repeated. This will be our once chance to steal the Treasure.”

: The quotes are probably around the wrong word but whatever.

: We are then automatically dumped outside of the palace. Thankfully, they did not change out the instrumental version of Life Will Change that plays instead of King, Queen and Slave.

: I really, really wanted to do a video of me running through the entire dungeon to get to the throne room. There’s just one problem - while the game despawns most of the enemies, it doesn’t despawn all of them.

: Yeah.. reassigned. Sure. Reassigned to the corpse pile, maybe.

: “Either way, we win as long as we can steal the Treasure! Let’s keep going!”

: “Man, it’s huge!”

: “What do you think!? It’s just as I said! Now we can steal it! Ahh.. this shine brings tears to my eyes…”

: “It kinda pisses me off. Why’s it so pretty? Isn’t this Kamoshida’s desires?”

: “T-Treasure…”

: “Uh, the cat’s actin’ awfully excited.”

: “What’s wrong? Is something..”

: This is the one moment I don’t hate Morgana, because the Japanese VA does hilarious cat noises.

: If this was Lupin III, Kamoshida would step out right now and go “I saw this coming, so I replaced the crown with a crown-shaped cat food dispenser that I then dipped in catnip!” because that’s just kind of how Lupin III (at least, Red Jacket) was.

: “All right, that’s enough, you stupid cat!”

: “Oh, um, yeah.. forgive me for displaying such an insolent sight in front of a lady…”

: “You were completely out of character too. What was that about?”

: “I couldn’t stop it either.. to think I’d be drawn to human desires this much.. doesn’t that prove I’m human!?”

: “How should we know!?”

: “A-Anyway, you guys need to carry it!”

: “All you do is bark orders.. still, that was easier than I thought! I thought for sure there’d be some insane trap or something.”

: “His Palace will disappear if we take this back, right? And Kamoshida will change too…”

: “…That should be the case.”

: “Good. Now’s our chance then.”

: “To think it’d go so well.. I’ve even found three Persona-users in the process.. my judgement was correct. I made the right choice in making a deal with you!”

: “Nyahaha!”

: And.. here’s Kamoshida.

: Shadow Kamoshida spikes a volleyball at the giant crown, which causes it to roll off into the distance.

: We’ve now entered the Anime Realm, where Kamoshida can do dumbass ninja flips for no reason. I mean, I guess Joker can too so it kinda balances out.

: Wait a second.. why does he have two crowns? I get that’s an actual thing some medieval lords did, but still. You’d think it’d be more secure on him than in a vault.

: “That rat bastard… that’s how he sees me, isn’t it!?”

: No shit! How have you not figured this out already!?

: “Yo, pervert. Were you waitin’ to ambush us?”

: “I just made it easy to find you. I’ll dispose of you myself. Right here, right now.”

: “That’s our line, you sexually-harrassin’ d-bag!”

: “What a selfish misunderstanding…”

: Just take this line in. Take in how awkward it is.

: “People around me were the ones who kept it a secret. Adults who want to share in my accomplishments, students who have the drive to become winners.. they willingly protect me so that we all may profit from it.”

: What is this guy, Dracula? Should someone call Richter Belmont?

: “Profit!?”

: “There are too many imbeciles who don’t understand that! Including naive brats like you and that girl who tried to kill herself!”

: This actually is fairly good, if still slightly awkward, writing.

: “Drop the attitude, you mediocre peasant! There is no wrong in using my gifts for my gain! I’m a cut above all other humans!”

: Seriously this sounds like Atlus found the guy who localized Symphony of the Night and asked him to write Kamoshida.

: “Above? You mean beneath. You’re a goddamn demon obsessed with your sick desires!”

: Meet Kamoshida’s true form: Asmodeus. Honestly, this would’ve been a lot better if it was like the earlier games where people just had evil Personas.

: Unlike pretty much every other Persona boss fight, Shadow Kamoshida/Asmodeus is a very scripted puzzle fight. It was changed A LOT from how it was in the base game. I watched a video of it (because it’s been so long since I did it myself) and realized I was wrong on one thing.

: In the original version, you actually had closer to 100 bullets. The way it worked was that each character had exactly three full attacks worth of ammo - so Ann had 36 bullets, Morgana had 15, Joker had 21 and Ryuji had 12. You could only fire 1/3 of your total ammo count at once, though.

: In this form, the only attack Asmodeus will use is Volleyball Assault, which I’m almost positive was nerfed in Royal. In the original game, it hit 1 to 3 times. In Royal, I believe they lowered the chances of it hitting more than once to like a tenth of what they were, and the chances of it hitting three times to virtually zero.

: That’s one of the things I saw people complain about actually, was that this game was HEAVILY de-fanged from how it was.

: I blew all my ammo at the start, which was kind of a mistake but didn’t matter. Once Kamoshida takes enough damage, he uses Libido Boost.

: This causes him to take one of the pairs of disembodied legs from the chalice and eat it. Libido Boost regains 100% of Asmodeus’s HP.

: This was also in the original game.

: At this point, Asmodeus uses “Lustful Slurp”, which boosts his attack for the rest of the fight. Yes, that’s Anne’s clone in the wine glass.

: And from this point on, the only thing he’s going to be doing is using Golden Knife to hit Morgana for a shitload of physical damage. I could’ve made Morgana guard but he has both Diarama and Media to heal with.

: According to the wiki, they boosted the HP of the chalice from 500 to 900 in Royal… but the chalice went down WAY too fast for it to be 900 HP. I only used physical attacks on it.

: With the chalice down, we get a Hold Up on Asmodeus.

: “I always saw you as a condescending hotshot, but right now.. you’re just a pathetic loser.”

: “We came all this way to steal that! Will you just give up and hand it over?”

: “You still have the energy to say things like that!? Then we’re going to up our game as well!”

: “I’m the king! If not, then who is!? How dare you keep defying me.. looks like I gotta bring out the big guns!”

: “Slaves! Bring over you-know-what!”

: “Time for my killshot from when I was active and rockin’ it! Killshot as in.. I’ll make the kill! What’s the holdup? Where’s my ball!?”

: Introducing the new phase to Kamoshida’s boss fight. This was mostly done to make it feel like less of a cop-out. I’ll explain what happens in the base game shortly.

: “Too slow, Mishima! Worthless chump!”

: “M-Mishima!?”

: “Wait, what!? Why’s he here?”

: The writers really expected that we wouldn’t understand the whole “Kamoshida can make clones of people” thing even though Mishima is introduced as “Cognitive Yuuki Mishima”.

: “Calm down! That’s only Kamoshida’s cognitive version of him! It’s not the real Mishima!”

: Gold Medal Spike hits like a goddamn nuke. In the base game, he was scripted to get two of these off if you did everything right.

: Meet Kamoshida’s version of Shiho. I believe she existed in the game files for the original game but went unused.

: “Dammit, even Suzui too! You’ve gone too far, you piece of shit!”

: I have a feeling they cut this from the original game because they were afraid people would think that attacking the fake Shiho would be a permafuck down the line or something. They explain that no, it’s not the real one AGAIN (I cut it) before Ryuji’s line here.

: You know your game has issues when you have to explain this shit like six times because people are that paranoid of a permafuck.

: “What do we do?”

: It actually doesn’t matter what we answer. Allow me to explain. You can stop the second killshot either by doing around 300 damage to Asmodeus or killing Shiho. Shiho is weak to everything to the point where just about anything will kill her in three hits. This is where you want to use your guns if you have them.

: By the way, did I mention I grinded Kodama up enough that it can use Psi? Psychic is a new damage type in Persona 5, probably replacing Gravity since Nuclear is back in as a thing.

: Now, as soon as I saw this my brain immediately went places. Let’s say hypothetically that Atlus put in another stage of the fight where Kamoshida jams Fake Ann and Fake Shiho together in a manner much like the fusion dance in Dragonball Z.

: Would the resulting monstrosity have three ponytails? Would they just up that to nine for the whole nine-tailed fox thing? Would it be one giant ponytail with a number of sub-ponytails like that seven-branched sword they used as the base for Morion Blade in Dark Souls 3?

: What I’m saying is that Akira Toriyama is a coward for not addressing these issues.

: “Kamoshida, I’ll never forgive you!”

: “Sorry, Suzui… I swear we’ll beat that bastard’s ass!”

: “We won’t get anywhere with brute force..”

: We can send any of our party members, but Ann will mention that she thinks Kamoshida can smell her. Ryuji is going to be the one to bring Kamoshida down. In the original game, it cuts right to this before the second killshot and you just keep beating on Kamoshida for a few turns before the person you sent takes him out.

: I’d like to point out that in the tutorial for this, their party is level 9 - that’s pretty much where you’d be in the base game. We’re way overgrinded.

: The rest of this fight is basically just doing attacks against Kamoshida as Ryuji slowly climbs his way up to the balcony. You’re not going to kill Kamoshida during this time unless you’re on a second playthrough.

: At this point, Kamoshida goes into a “dejected” state where he loses all of his defense. This fight was pretty easy even in the base game, mostly because I think Atlus realized how limited your ability to grind was.

: Our party hits level 14, which is higher level than a good number of the enemies in the next dungeon.

: “What’s wrong? Not running away?”

: “Why don’t you run? Aren’t you a great athlete?”

: “It’s always been like this… all those goddamn hyenas forcing their expectations on me! I’m doing all this for them! What’s wrong about demanding a reward for that!?”

: “Now you’re makin’ excuses? We’ll do something about that distorted heart of yours.”

: “Hrrrgh…”

: “Scared?”

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: “What will you do? Will you jump? Or would you rather die here?”

Honestly, it would’ve been great if Kamoshida’s shadow committed suicide just to avoid having to confess all the shit he did. Would’ve been a good callback to Innocent Sin.

: This honestly doesn’t work. If Kamoshida wasn’t cartoonishly evil, it would work, but it doesn’t. This is like the fucking rat in Ni no Kuni 2 all over again. “Hey I killed your dad, not for any reason, just because someone told me I was physically capable of doing so” and then everything is immediately forgiven.

: This entire scene sucks and I hate it. There’s a lot of ways they could’ve made it work - if Kamoshida wasn’t so over the top and there really was a question of whether it was worth killing him to make a point.

: I would love to see this scene with the Persona 2 cast. There’d probably be a four-way competition between Baofu, Ulala, Tatsuya and Eikichi to see who could kill him first and shout “DIE!” in response.

: My cat does this all the fucking time and I hate it because it inevitably winds up with me getting my shoulders clawed. I had a lady at work ask if I was in an accident or something once because of how many cuts I had.

: I don’t get why Atlus didn’t re-do these cutscenes because a lot of them look kinda low quality.

: Same energy. I suppose you could say that Morgana really is just Cat-shihara.

: This entire thing is so off-model it hurts. Usually, when a studio releases an anime on Blu-Ray, they improve the quality significantly because they’re not restricted to a TV schedule.

: “…It’s true! We can’t go there anymore.”

: “What about the Treasure!?”

: “…A medal? Wait, where’d that crown go?”

: “What’s goin’ on?”

: “It means, that was the source of Kamoshida’s desires. To him, this medal is worth as much as that crown we saw in the Palace.”

: “An Olympic medal.. so, that perv kept clingin’ to his past glory and couldn’t let it go…”

: “But.. this means that Kamoshida’s heart might have changed, right?”

: “…Probably.”

: “Our expulsion’s on the line here!”

: “This is the first successful example for me, too. However, there’s no doubt that this has affected Kamoshida’s personality quite a lot.”

: I should mention I watched this scene in English to refresh my memory on the original fight, and Morgana’s English VA SUCKS. I don’t know who they are, but they sound bored as fuck at all times.

: “The entire Palace disappeared, after all.”

: “Ugh, I feel all antsy! Ain’t there a way to check now?”

: “Right…”

: “Come on, why the gloomy faces? Be happy! We completed this with great success, you know.”

: “We just don’t know if everything’s okay yet..”

: “I’m pretty sure it’ll be fine. Remember how Kamoshida’s Shadow said that he’s returning to his self in reality?”

: “Still… he did seem to regain his conscience somewhat before he disappeared.”

: “There are definitely those who have been saved thanks to what you’ve done.”

: “Yeah…”

: “Anyways, I guess we gotta wait. It all boils down to what’s gonna happen to Kamoshida… or if we’re gettin’ expelled for real…”

: “…Right. C’mon, let’s go home.”

: I don’t know why they give you a second tutorial on this, but you can’t leave Leblanc after doing a dungeon or fighting a boss.

: “Lady Ann sure is sharp! I’m impressed. Basically, the Treasure changes the shape of things. Once that’s gone, that power no longer works.”

: This kind of doesn’t make any sense given that no one else changed out of their thief outfit. It would’ve been cool if they’d done something like Kingdom Hearts where the party’s outfits change in each dungeon.

: “Though the real reason I changed so quickly back then was because I’m so incredibly skilled! How’s that? Isn’t that amazing!?”

: I had already called what Morgana’s deal was by about the middle of the first dungeon and was completely unsurprised when I was right.

: I actually forgot to capture how we spent our night action, so I’ll just tack it on to the beginning of next update. It’s nothing important - basically, Joker and Morgana spent their night watching reruns of The X-Files.

: By the way, total yen count: 144,945. Somehow, I don’t think we’re going to have too many money problems on this run.

: Only one new song for this update, but it’s a big one. Each boss gets their own theme, and Kamoshida’s is probably the best one.