: I swear they made this specific moment in the cutscene so people would make memes out of it.
: There’s going to be a bit of a blur on these next few shots. That’s because the screen is shaking and there’s a loud rumbling noise in the background. There’s also a new piece of music:
: I apologize if I spoiled the cutscene a few seconds in advance, but whatever.
: Nanjo seems awfully brave for a guy who seems to need a butler to take care of everything for him.
: You might think we’re exiting the hospital, but as the top-left indicates, this is the second floor of the hospital.
: Apart from Yamaoka, this is extremely similar to the hospital sequence in Shin Megami Tensei 1, which is also full of zombies. Also, Yamaoka appears to be dead. What is it with me and LPing games where a character gets introduced and dies not even five minutes later? Looking at you, Ni no Kuni 2. At least Nanjo doesn’t have a goddamn breakdown.
: I’m also kind of surprised that none of the zombies are trying to eat him yet.
: “Y… Yamaoka…?”
: “Yamaoka! You bastards… how DARE you?”
: We’ve now entered our first battle, and with it we get Persona 1’s main battle theme:
: The lyrics to A Lone Prayer might as well be gibberish, given that they sound like words completely different from what they actually are. There’s a few places out there with the lyrics and most of them are wrong, but the ones on the Megami Tensei wikia are (probably) correct.
: “How the hell are we supposed to fight somethin’ that’s already dead?”
: We’ve got Personas now, though we’re not actually in control of the game yet: this is just to show off the fact that we’ve got them.
: Seimen Kongou is probably the least garbage starting persona in that he only has one weakness out of the common elements (that being Electric), but his skills aren’t great.
: Ogun is absolute trash in this game, which is remarkable given that he’s actually a mid to high tier demon when he’s in the mainline SMT games. With a weakness to most of the common elements, his only saving grace is that he can learn gravity skills… by which point we’ll have traded him in for something better.
: Similarly, Vesta drains fire (meaing she heals from it) but is EXTREMELY weak to almost everything else.
: Aizen Myouou is easily the worst starting persona of them all. He’s 2x weak to every form of physical damage, and has pretty trash elemental resistances.
: For that tutorial battle, everyone not only gets a free persona rank up, but also gains a level. You’ll notice that we’re distributing stats like the mainline SMT games. This is because Persona 1 splits stats into two groups: physical (which comes from your character) and magic (which comes from your persona’s stats). We’re mostly going to be focusing on Agility and Dexterity with our MC.
: “Right, Yamaoka?”
: “You’re a fine Japanese man… and a man must stand on his own someday. It seems that this… will be the last service I can provide for you.”
: I apologize for not using the portraits for this, but the site is fucking with the alignment on my images. I tried to work on this last night and it wouldn’t even let me upload anything. I’m thinking of just taking this to SA.
: "Of course… of course I will. When that time comes, you’ll see. So until then – "
: “Yamaoka? Hey…! Answer me… I’m begging you… Yamaoka!”
: “Nanjo…”
: Thank god I just remembered the soft hyphen thing. Having to type ALT+255 between every line of dialogue is going to kill me.
: “Let him alone. Hey, Jihei… could you hear their voices? That thing said it was me.”
: “I heard it too. Think it was that whole Persona thing?”
: “It said it would lend us power, so I doubt it’s hostile. If we’re lucky, maybe it’ll listen to what we tell it.”
: “That’s how it felt to me, too. I have a bad feeling about this. Let’s go.”
: There’s a bit more optional dialogue and if this editor ever unfucks itself I’ll go back and add it in. We’re now in Mikage Hospital’s second floor, and random encounters are go.
: Doesn’t take long before we get one, either.
: Here’s our first actual encounter, against three Zombie Boys and three Zombie Girls. They’re largely identical stat-wise. You’ll notice that we have a couple of options. Let’s do the Undertale thing and talk our way out of this fight, just so I can show what happens.
: As in the mainline SMT games, each enemy is part of a “family”. They also have their own personality traits. Unlike SMT, negotiations in this game are not random. Each of our party members has four negotiation options.
: You’ll also notice that there’s a moon tracker and a mood tracker in the top-right and top-left, respectively. Doing certain actions in negotiation will add to one of the moods and cause it to start filling up the square. Each demon has a particular action or set of actions it likes, so there’s a correct answer for each one. Filling the square entirely gets you… something.
: Getting the “Happy” or “Scared” bars all the way up will usually cause the enemy to either give you something, which can be a bit of EXP (which does not count toward Persona levels), an item, or money. In this case, only Jay gets that 73 EXP. It is very, very hard to keep all of your characters in the same place EXP-wise. In my opinion, this beats the hell out of having every demon ask you for booze.
: Yukino is better equipped to handle the Zombie Girls, so let’s let her handle this.
: As you can see, some demons have unique dialogue when negotiated with.
: I honestly want to see Atlus remake Shin Megami Tensei 1 in VR, so that every time one of those stupid 80s zombies asks me if I’m a devil buster I can just pull my machinegun and blast them in the face.
: As you can see, the problem with negotiating is that we get no experience out of it. Typically, you want to keep negotiations to a minimum unless you’re doing it to recruit.
: There are a bunch of rooms we can go into in the transformed hospital. A lot of them just contain save points: Atlus added a bunch of them in the PSP version, mostly in rooms that were empty on the PS1… except for where it’d matter, like in the Snow Queen quest.
: We just picked up some equipment, so let’s take a look at what we’ve got.
: Yukino has the best weapon of anyone, as it hits all enemies in a pretty large radius.
: Mark also has an axe he’s apparently been carrying around this entire time.
: Nanjo and Jihei both have the same equipment: basically nothing. This might seem bad, but due to the way Persona 1 handles physical damage it’s actually not.
: Just down the hall from the room we were in, I got into another random battle. Because we were still in the New Moon phase, the Pixie in the back decided to try and reason with us right off the bat. Persona 1 is sort of like the mainline SMT games in that moon phases effect negotiations: New Moons make demons more likely to talk to you, while Full Moons make it harder (but not impossible) to negotiate.
: That thing in the middle is a Poltergeist, which is really annoying due to it exploding when it gets low on HP. The explosion hits everyone for a pretty high amount of damage.
: To get back out of the hospital, we have to first head back up to the third floor, because for some reason the part of the second floor that we were on doesn’t have access to ground level. See that pink thing on the minimap? That’s a save point.
: Here’s another encounter that I hit on the stairs with a new enemy: a Slime. If you’ve played any of the SMT games, you’ll know that Slimes are not usually something you can negotiate with due to their membership in the Foul family.
: I tried to recruit it, but wound up making it angry. If the demon asks for health, it’s usually better to just kill them.
: If you screw up a negotiation, there’s a good chance the demon will give you a status debuff that stops you from negotiating for a few turns.
: On the third floor, we pretty quickly pass the hallway where the party was when the earthquake hit.
: I also got Nanjo to bribe a Poltergeist with a Life Stone, a low-level healing item that demons will sometimes give you in negotiations. We got one off that pack of female zombies that Yukino dealt with a bit ago. Unlike the later games, successfully negotiating only gets you a spell card, not an equippable persona.
: We can only hold 12 spell cards, and some are far more important than others. I’m not going to do a Persona log thing like I did for the starter personas because we haven’t actually acquired Poltergeist yet and probably won’t, because just about all he’s good for is fusion fuel.
: Oh, right. Remember how I said Persona 1 has a strange way of treating physical damage? If you look at the top row of resistances, you’ll see 12 different boxes. Each weapon type in this game has a resistance specifically for it, so you can get into strange situations where an enemy is completely immune to rifle bullets but not to bullets fired from an SMG even though that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
: Just like in the cutscene, the ICU is gone. I think this is how you found out if you were playing the PS1 version.
: On the way out of that hallway, we get attacked by some Zombie Nurses. They’re basically slightly stronger versions of the zombies we’ve already fought. I grabbed a spell card off them, but I don’t even remember if you can use them as a persona or not.
: Just down the hall from the dead end is the 3F Nurse’s room, which has some useless items (more QQ Helmets and a Dis-Poison, which cures poison) in it. Most of the enemies in this area drop QQ Helmets and I think by this point we had more than enough to outfit everyone.
: Finally, we reach the stairs going down to the part of the second floor we can use to actually exit the hospital.
: We have another random encounter shortly after getting off the stairs - a Preta, a demon that’s been around since SMT 1. Naturally, we make friends with it in the only way we know how.
: Since I forgot to mention it earlier, recruiting a demon to the party requires raising their “Eager” emotion until it fills the box. This may not always be possible depending on who is in your party.
: This update’s getting a bit long, so we’ll just save here (this is a save room) and continue on to the first floor and the rest of the main game route next time. Hopefully next time the editor will stop being garbage.
: Once you reach the first floor, it’s pretty much a straight shot to where we entered the hospital from.
: “Oh, my! There are demons here too?”
: “You’re all safe? Oh, I’m so glad…”
: “I tried to stop her, but of course she doesn’t listen. Talk about trouble…”
: “What’s wrong, Yuka?”
: Here we are at the police station, which is a dungeon in and of itself.
: “We should play nice for now and… huh?”
: “My, my. The young master of the Nanjo group. No, the old man knows nothing.”
: “All right, don’t let a single one of them escape!”
