: “Er… yes. Masao should be detained in the prison cells, Jihei. But we can’t access that section without a key. What to do…?”
: “They might have left it somewhere. Let’s see if we can find it.”
: The key is in a locker behind the desk, because this is Persona and not Resident Evil.
: The first floor of the police station is about as straightforward as the hospital was: there’s one clearly correct path and a bunch of dead ends you can see coming thanks to the minimap. Not that I’m complaining: we’ll see a lot of the egregious SMT 1 style bullshit map design in other places.
: The egregious SMT 1 bullshit difficulty, however, is largely still in place. The police station sucks for several reasons. First, we have the weakest Personas in the game. Second, we’ve only got three party members. Third, the enemies here are slightly higher level than we are.
: To make things worse, the guns you start with do nowhere near enough damage to actually kill anything. The game basically expects that you’re going to be spamming magic like crazy. The bird monsters are a new demon type called Ba, and the green gremlin-looking thing is a Leprechaun. Unfortunately, we’re too low-level to negotiate with them.
: I then game overed trying to leave the police station to heal, because I left guns on auto and fought a Preta (which we could kill in one hit at this point) and Pretas reflect gun damage.
: Another random encounter with some new enemies: the Ghost in front and the Ukobach to its right. Again, we can’t really do much with these apart from kill them, though Ukobach is particularly annoying because it likes to spam a group accuracy down move. Most of these random encounters are long and boring, to the point where I eventually set animations to “skip” mode just to cut down on how much time I spend in them.
: All of this constant spell spamming makes our party’s Personas rank up pretty quickly. I realized now that I never explained how rank works, so here it is. In Persona 1, Personas do not level up. Instead, they “rank up” a maximum of 8 times. Each rank up adds some stats and gives them a new spell. How fast they rank up is determined by their “affinity” stat - which means you always want high affinity as a lot of personas start out without any damage spells.
: Afancs are another very common enemy in the police station, and they are the worst thing we could possibly be fighting. They’re weak to ice, but have a skill called Water Wall that makes them absorb ice damage. This basically takes Maki out of the fight, though they’re weak to her handgun. They also resist wind, which makes Seimen Kongou borderline useless.
: The first floor is mostly just a loop around that save room across from where we came in.
: Upstairs, we run into what I believe is the last type of zombie enemy: the Zombie Cop. Like all zombies, they’re immune to gun damage, but Zombie Cops are extremely weak to most elemental attacks. Nanjo can actually be useful for once and instantly kill them with Hama, which in this game does light damage and has the added side effect of instantly killing undead enemies.
: The second floor is a little less straightforward. As soon as we leave the stairs, there’s two paths to take - that third one is a clear dead end.
: The left side is another dead end, but at least we know where the stairs are now.
: The right side has a save room at the midway point, and then leads us right to the stairs. Like the hospital, we basically just did a loop to get to the other side of the 1st floor.
: This time, all we have to do is walk right up to the door to the prison cells.
: “You won’t get away with this!”
: “We should play nice for now and.. huh?”
: “Huh? Hidehiko’s here too!”: “Hah. A cage suits this monkey.”: “Nanjo, you dickweed! What took you guys!? Wait a sec.. Maki?”: “Hey, it’s you guys. Ohh.. I get it… you missed me that much, huh?”: “Hey, Hidehiko? Why were you gonna play nice with us?”: “Urgh…”: “Most likely, he mistook us for someone else. Fortunately, we’re on your side. Isn’t that good to hear, Hidehiko?”: “But tell me.. why are you here, too? We thought only Masao had been detained.”
: “So I came here looking for some, but I ended up getting caught with Mark!”: “Shuddup, Hidehiko! Just… shut up!”: “Maki, why’re you here? It must’ve been a long trip. Are you feelin’ okay?”: The manga beats you over the head with it almost immediately, but Mark is definitely attracted to Maki.
: “C’mon, Masao, why’re you joking around like that? I’m totally fine!”: “S-so I see.. Okay, then. Anyways --”
: “Look, Baldy, this is goin’ too damn far, even for a joke. I haven’t done anything!”
: “Wait… something’s wrong! Masao, they’re–”
: “You too, eh, Hidehiko? But why him, of all people..?”: “Alright, lemme explain it to you. Listen up…”
: Brown is a goddamn space cadet.
: “I don’t think he really gets it… oh well.”: “Anyways, I’m comin’ too, Jihei. I’d be nervous for you guys if you were out on your own.”: “We could say the same about you. You should leave the security card in Jihei’s care, Masao.”: “Alright… here’s the security card, man. Better not lose that thing..”
: We’re not going to let Brown join, because doing that would stop Reiji from joining. This means we’re going to be stuck with four people for a while, which will make the game a little bit harder.
: The game really wants us to bring Brown along just to get the fifth party member, but if we don’t get Reiji we won’t see him at all.
: Just like SMT, the game makes us walk all the way back. Unlike the early SMT games, Traport isn’t a thing in Persona 1 as far as I know. There’s an item you can buy (at the cost of 10,000 yen, which is around 9 battles worth of cash) to instantly escape, but that’s about a quarter of our on-hand cash at this point.
: The real reason we want to not grind here is because of how bad the starter personas are. At rank 4, Seimen Kongou only knows a couple of status spells, which are not nearly as good in this game as they were in SMT 1 where charming a boss was basically a win condition.
: Maki gets Dia, the lowest-level healing spell. She also gets Posumudi, which is useless because I don’t think there are even any enemies at this point capable of poisoning us. Rapid Fire is hot garbage.
: Nanjo gets Hama and Fist of Fury, a physical skill (which costs SP and not HP in this game). Candy Voice is some status effect trash that I don’t use.
: Mark’s Persona is easily the worst skill-wise, because it only has physical skills and their range is godawful. Of all the characters, he’s the most likely to spend turns defending because he can’t do anything else until we get him a better Persona.
: Mark’s gun of choice is a combat shotgun, which is good in that it hits all enemies in range but also bad because of its attack pattern and low damage.
: My first thought was to go back to the Alaya Shrine to heal, since it’s free. However..
: There’s been some major changes to the map. St. Hermelin is no longer in existence - that’s because it’s currently busy being the setting for the Snow Queen quest. Maki will also refuse to let us go back to Alaya Shrine, so our only choice at this point is to push forward to the Abandoned Factory and SEBEC HQ.
: The good news, and the game never actually tells us this, is that we can now visit the Velvet Room. Naturally, this also means..
: Sadly, though, it’s unlikely that they’ll continue to use Poem for Everyone’s Souls in the inevitable Persona 6, as Igor’s Japanese VA died several years ago and Atlus will probably replace him with a different character. : Unlike the later installments, Personas in this game have to be equipped twice. The first time adds them to a character’s Persona list, and the second time actually equips them as the active Persona. One major upgrade over SMT is the addition of Guided Fusion mode. : This is Normal Fusion mode, which tells us which Spell Cards we have will fuse. Unlike the later games, we don’t fuse Personas but instead fuse Spell Cards. There’s also no Compendium to re-summon a lost Persona.
: Persona 1 simplifies a lot of things over the mainline SMT games. Fusing two demons of the same family (Grave with Grave for instance) used to produce an elemental that could then be fused with another demon to get a demon one tier higher. P1 got rid of that. I’m not entirely sure what all the arrows mean, but I’ll look them up at some point.
: Guided Fusion mode works in reverse, telling us what Personas we can make using the cards we have. At this point, I think the main character was Persona Level 10, so there wasn’t much I could make. So I did a little grinding and made this. Interestingly enough, the main character in the Persona 1 manga actually uses Airgetlam at one point so even though there’s no official artwork for him in P1, I can still make a Personalog entry. : Airgetlam is a pretty solid early-game Persona. His resists are much better than Seimen Kongou’s, as are his stats. Earth damage isn’t really better than Wind, but it’s still damage. : For Maki, I went ahead and made Ame no Uzume, who isn’t all that much better than her starting Persona except she has better skills.. : Also, those fucking resistances! Ame no Uzume gives no fucks about magic, and is weak to three out of the eight physical damage types. The only thing to worry about is Curse, but by the time that shows up we’ll have moved on. : Nanjo doesn’t have any really great options for a few more levels, so I got him a Jack Frost because even that’s less bad than his starting Persona.
You might notice that I didn’t get Mark one: that’s because Mark doesn’t really get any Personas with good or best affinity until Level 17. Next time, we’ll go to the Abandoned Factory and start busting up SEBEC.