Mark Danced Crazy - Let's Play Shin Megami Tensei: Persona

[LaZodiac]

Look the SMT series is one that basically just fucks you at every opportunity.

We take dungeon 2 era Mabufudyne and we ram ice cubes down their corporate throats.

[CommanderKeene]

Aram Jabbari, former CEO of Atlus USA, is famously quoted as saying “we get off on your tears.”

Well, turnabout is fair play, bitch. Make this game beg for mercy.

[Timrod]

: The thread has spoken, and we’re abusing Airgetlam. This turned out to be both a blessing and a curse.

: “Hey, didn’t Masao say he drew this? It’s really good! He’s pretty talented.”
: “Hold on a moment. You… came here often, yes?”
: “Hell yeah! This place is like a studio for my buds in the Tailors.”
: “So you used this place as a hideout… and never noticed SEBEC’s involvement?”
: “Shuddup! It’s like, you know, how stuff under your head is hard to notice!”
: “That’s ‘under your nose,’ you dunce!”
: Mark is about to become the bane of my existence. You’ll see why.
: “Ahahaha! C’mon, that’s enough… let’s find the entrance.”

: “Yuka!? What happened to the school? What happened to Yuko and everyone? Did you run away by yourself!?”
: “How should I know!? Like I have any idea what’s going on…”
: “Calm down, Maki. The school most likely vanished due to the Deva System’s effects.”
: “In which case, our best course of action is to make Kandori undo it.”
: “I’m coming with you! if I stay here, I’ll be totally hosed!”

: If we hadn’t gone through all the bullshit to get Reiji, and we hadn’t taken Brown for some reason, Ayase would force herself into the party at this point. Given that she sucks and I hate her, this would be a bad thing.

: We definitely do not want her, and it’s actually a really good thing we don’t take her or Brown. I’ll explain as soon as we get into the building.

: “Well, fine, assholes! Go to hell!”
: It just sucks that you have to take Ayase during the Snow Queen quest.
: “I feel kinda sorry for Yuka…”

: The card reader is right up these stairs, which are admittedly kind of hard to notice.

: “Huh! Man, so that’s where it was!”
: “What’s the matter?”
: “Jihei found the machine we’re supposed to use the card on. C’mon, let’s give it a try.”
: “Wait. We don’t know what will happen. Let’s think this through–”
: “Man, whatever. C’mon, fork it over.”

: It’s hard to see, but what happens is that a section of the ground opens up and then the elevator appears and extends the guard rails, because SEBEC isn’t trying very hard not to be Umbrella Corp.
: “Huh, so this is what it’s like inside. Isn’t this exciting!?”
: “Masao! Are you TRYING to kill me!?”
: “Hahahaha, sorry, man. (Tch… guess he won’t go down that easy…)”

: “Yeah, yeah, I got it.”
: “Well then, Jihei, let’s go.”

: Here we are at the Underground Passage.

: The enemies in the entry area are mostly the same as the ones on the street or in the police station. A single Mabufudyne will wipe them out. This, however, is where I started regretting not grinding enough to get Mark a new Persona.

: Most of the walls down here are made of giant shipping containers with the SEBEC logo on them. This area is far more maze-like than the police station or the hospital were. I should mention that SEBEC apparently stands for “Saeki Electronics & Biological & Energy Corporation”, which is basically a fancy way of saying Umbrella.

: The left route from the entry corridor puts us at a save room, and the right is a dead end.

: So anyway, here’s why Mark quickly became the bane of my existence. By this point, the MC has Mabufudyne and Nanjo has Mabufu (a lower-tier equivalent of Mabufudyne that also hits all enemies) so both of them have multi-target damage spells. Maki has Garu (single-target wind) and Agi (single-target fire). Mark has… two physical skills that can’t hit shit, and Gry, which almost nothing is weak to on top of his magic stat being trash because of his starter Persona.

: This problem is compounded by the fact that I’ve been dumping all of Jihei’s stat points into Agility, because moving fast in this game is how you pump out damage. At this point, Jihei gets almost two actions to everyone else’s one. Mark, on the other hand, is by far the slowest party member. Since EXP is split up by how much damage each character did and how many last hits they got, Mark is usually going to be behind unless I purposely set shit up for him.

: Here’s a new enemy, Fuji Musume. They’re one of the reasons I’m very glad we got Mabufudyne: they have 75% resistance against all types of magic… and also reflect gun damage. Airgetlam gives zero fucks about this because Mabufudyne does so much damage that it can kill them in two hits. I grab one of their spell cards… which is also going to be a problem as we move on.

: Just north of the save room is a weird red blip on the map. I wonder what that could be?

: I’m not even sure what this lever does, but I pulled it anyway. So anyway, spell cards. The problem is that negotiations are based off the level of the character who finishes the negotiation. This means that if we need Mark or Maki (Nanjo is doing pretty okay comparatively) to talk to a demon, we’re in trouble because their Persona Level is way lower than Jihei’s is - and this is without using Mabufudyne to end fights.

: There’s a second switch a bit north of the first one, which I also pull because why not?

: The stairs going up are a bit to the south and west of where we pulled that second switch.

: On the way there, however, we run into another new enemy type: Nightmares. Any enemy with the “Night” designator is going to suck because they absorb magic. As in all of it. These guys were absolute dicks in SMT 1, where they’d spam Shibaboo at you to inflict bind and could potentially end your game if you got unlucky. In this game, they merely spam you with debuffs that stop you from using physical attacks, which are their only weakness.

: Fortunately, Maki is just high enough level at this point to negotiate with them. Also, you’ve got it wrong there: Ayase’s the ho, Maki’s just dumb.

: We’re now in the SEBEC building proper, so I’m going to post a map I didn’t find until I had already gone all over the place.

[Image Credit: http://kouryakutsushin.com/persona/ ]
: We came in on 1F, where the pink kanji are.

: And naturally, we run into one of the most annoying enemy types in the building. Meet the Secret Police, who in the PS1 Japanese version were outright stated to be the U.S. Secret Service… because of course America always has to be the enemy in any SMT game. While they don’t have any listed resistances, they seem to take way less damage from everything than demons do.

: They also managed to gun down Maki before I could spam enough Mabufudynes to finish them off. This is why I am very thankful we got that.

: We also run into the Gremlin, which is apparently what the prison warden was. I grab their spell card as well.

: Anyway, of the three rooms we saw on the minimap, one is a save room. The second is Trish’s Spring, which is a source of healing. Trish is basically a running joke in the early Persona series: she charges something like double or triple what the healer in the mall does. She’s also pointless, because…

: The other room is the General Store, run by what I can only assume is a much younger Frank Reynolds during his days at the nitwit school. We had a massive load of money, so I bought a bunch of cheap Medicines and Chewing Souls (SP recovery) and a single Emergency Exit.

: Just up ahead is the elevator. Most guides recommend simply skipping the first four floors unless you really want the items inside… and somehow I managed to explore them and not find the items during recording. So instead, let me talk about the progress we made and also how I had to grind during the time I was floundering around during recording.

: A common encounter here are these Moh Shuvuu and the basic Angel - and given how when I ran SMT1 I was in constant want of angels I figured I’d try to get one. Here’s where Maki being slow sucks: she’s only level 13 here, and she’s also the only person who can negotiate with either one of these demons.

: I’m going to cut out some 40 minutes of me bumbling around the other four floors. Once we reach the 5th floor, there’s a staircase that we can use to access the other half of the building.

: That first door on the right is a Velvet Room, which I took because I figured that Mark needed a new Persona even if it wasn’t the best one he could have.

: I decided on fusing Mokosh. Mokosh kinda sucks, especially given that her Agility is abysmal, but her stats are overall higher and she has good elemental coverage: Gry is gravity damage, Zio is electric with a chance to shock (which I think this game only makes enemies slower) and Zan is Force damage. I’m not going to do a Personalog thing for Mokosh simply because she has no official artwork: this and one of the shitty Devil Kids games are the only things she’s ever been in. She’s a minor Slavic goddess associated with weaving.

: And of course we have a fusion accident. Fusion accidents are usually a good (or at least okay) thing, but in this case…

: They reduced all of Mokosh’s stats by 5, rendering her somehow worse than Mark’s starting Persona despite being a full 10 levels higher. Fortunately, I already have a Quetzalcoatl fused for when Mark hits 17.

: More new enemies: Pyro Jack in the front and Cockatrices in the back. I’m grabbing spell cards left and right.

: There are also Agents, who are just Secret Police with slightly better stats and also a hat.

: And Nue, who I wasn’t able to grab a card from because I kept screwing up the negotiation somehow.

: Finally, there was this sequence, with Yakuza… who are apparently demons now. So how do we negotiate with them?

: We simply have Mark gaze longingly into their eyes until they give us a spell card.

: So now that I had the map, I wanted to go back and get the items I knew were on the earlier floors. This room on 2F is right next to the elevator.

: The sprites are a little blurry (blame the PSP’s output) but there’s three items in this room. Can YOU find them? I sure as hell couldn’t.

: The answer is that they’re in lockers hidden along this wall.

: The first room here has a couple of Spectra Vests, a Glock 26 for Maki, and a Shot Shells ammo item. Guns are pretty useless in this game and the Spectra Vests are only a mild improvement over what we’ve already got.

: This is the second room on the second floor, which has nothing good in it - there’s a Scorpion Whip for Ayase (who we don’t have) and a totem item called a Flame Shawl that would allow us to fuse a specific Persona that’s already completely obsolete. By the time I reached the end of this recording, the party was pretty overlevelled. This pattern pretty much repeats itself, except for one room on… I think the fourth floor?

: Welcome to the third most dickish mechanic in Persona 1: trapped chests. These are a holdover from the early SMT games, and the worst part is that some of them have items in them. Fortunately, the traps are fairly minor: they hit for a bit of damage or a status effect or something.

: The scientist in this room also confirms that the SEBEC building is not normally a non-Euclidean shitfest, it’s the DEVA system doing it.

: The only other room that’s of any importance item-wise is on floor five, which has a Mossberg shotgun for Mark and some more Shot Shells, which boost gun damage pretty high over the 9mm Parabellums we started with but still not enough that we want to use anything but spells for damage.

: Back in the Velvet Room on the back side of the fourth floor, I fused a Fuutai for Maki and a Quetzalcoatl for Mark. Most guides recommend putting Quetzalcoatl on Nanjo, but he’s honestly kind of a garbage Persona in this game. Unfortunately, I can’t do a Personalog thing for Fuutai because he’s so obscure that people on the Megami Tensei wiki can’t agree where he’s even from, apart from somewhere vaguely Chinese. In any case, Fuutai only shows up in Persona 1.

: Quetzalcoatl is honestly kind of a trash Persona: he’s weak to every single element type across the board and also still really slow. The only reason we even want him is because he’s got better stats than Mark’s starting Persona.

: Jihei levelled up to 20 just outside of the Velvet Room, and has his Agility halfway maxed. This makes him not only the fastest person in the party by far, but also gives him the highest defense.

: The stairs down to the back side of the third floor are pretty much right next to where you enter the back side of the fourth floor from.

: At this point, I was running or negotiating my way out of combat just because I’d had enough. Encounters were only giving a tiny fraction of the EXP we’d need to level at this point.

: You can probably guess what these three rooms are, but they’re a save point, a heal point, and a general store respectively. We had so much money that I was able to max out on recovery items and still had over a hundred thousand yen left over.

: So now that we’re on the bottom floor again, what do we do? We get to go through a carbon copy of this staircase four times to go back up to the top floor. As much as Atlus was trying to make Persona 1 a game that didn’t hate you for playing it the way the SNES games did, I feel like they didn’t entirely succeed.

: I screencapped it somewhere, but there’s a scientist in the building who will mention a fifth St. Hermelin student getting into the building.

: If you’ve read any of the Persona 1 manga, you probably know that the manga reveals Kandori WAY earlier than this: he actually shows up before the protagonist even gets to Mikage Hospital.
: “I see you haven’t changed, Kandori. You’re like an ass in a lion’s skin.”
: “Pushing your luck, aren’t you? Does President Saeki know about this?”
: “My, my. The young master of the Nanjo group. No, the old man knows nothing.”
: “But this is preposterous… your mother would spank you if she knew you had stooped to breaking and entering. Or is that your senile butler’s job?”
: “Silence! You… don’t think I’ll easily forgive this!”
: “Yo, quit grandstandin’, man. You’re gonna pay for what you did!”
: I feel like Kandori really should just give up here, given that he’s surrounded by anime teenagers with Jojo powers.
: “This guy’s… Kandori?”

: “All right, don’t let a single one of them escape!”

: “What a surprise. I didn’t expect that you’d be Persona-users as well.”
: “What!? Don’t tell me… you too!?”

: And just like that, we’re forced to eat a Maragi before we can even move. It does about 25 damage to everyone.
: “Takeda, I leave this to you. You can handle a few children, mm?”
: “You’re going nowhere!”
: “Oh no you don’t! Damn kids, you’re not taking one step outta here!”

: Here’s our boss battle: Takeda plus four Agents. This won’t be a problem - we’ve got Mabufudyne.

: There’s just one little problem. Takeda is weak to ice: he takes 2x damage from it… but as far as I can tell he’s got some kind of weird evasion bonus against multi-target spells. Still, ~75 damage to the Agents isn’t bad.

: Maki manages to pop Takeda with a Bufula (the second-tier ice spell behind Bufudyne) for about 90 damage. There’s only one minor problem…

: Takeda starts focusing on Maki hard, and I forgot that because she has Fuutai equipped, we have no healer.

: She then dies before I can switch back to Ame no Uzume and start healing. This wasn’t a big deal because I found a Revive Bead off a random encounter and got her back up.

: Takeda’s weird protection against multi-target spells seems to wear off as soon as the Agents die, so now we can hit him with Mabufudyne for 140-150 damage. Takeda does have a Persona, by the way, but it’s never mentioned what it is.

: We’re overlevelled at this point, but that’s a good thing for one reason: we still haven’t recruited Reiji yet. Reiji will join the party at Jihei’s level - and Jihei is already level 21.

: This means we could, in fact, fuse the most stupidly broken Persona in this game. I’ll do that next time we can hit a Velvet Room.

: “There’s no sign he used the door. There must be another way out!”
: “…That’s Kandori, huh…? Where have I…?”
: “Hm? Wassup, Maki? You look all down.”

: Before we find the hidden way out of here, we want to stop at this door-looking thing, which has a sword for Nanjo.

: The button is behind the desk, because of course it is.

: Next time, we’ll find the DEVA system and fuse a broken-ass Persona that I may or may not actually wind up using.

(Edit)

: I realized I forgot to link to the music, because that was something I wanted to talk about and then just forgot about. The SEBEC building actually has two different themes: one that was in the original PS1 release and a second one that was done for the PSP remake.

: I’m not entirely sure why they replaced the music. Some people theorize that it had to do with re-branding Persona 1 for an audience that was used to the later game, while others think it’s because Atlus did it out of respect for the original composer, who apparently died in 2002. In any case, most people seem to like the PS1 version better and it’s kind of a wonder to me that no one has made a hack that restores the original soundtrack to the PSP release.

: Then you’ve got this one, which plays during the fight with Takeda. Bloody Destiny is another replacement song, and the reason for this one is more obvious: the PS1 version used what was basically a remix of Shin Megami Tensei II’s boss fight theme. Like A Lone Prayer and the overworld theme, Bloody Destiny has incomprehensible lyrics.

[CommanderKeene]

Yeah, one of the reasons that I dislike actually playing P1 is that exp is tied to either the amount of damage you deal or the number of enemies you kill, which means that even with moderate investment in Agility Jay will be far and away the best party member due to getting more exp than everyone else. Mark ends up the lowest-leveled, because he’s slow as a rock and has terrible starting attacks. IME playing this game though, Maki was better off than Nanjo, but maybe that’s just the way the dice fell or something.

[Timrod]

It’s definitely tied to damage, which is why Jihei has such a huge advantage: having Mabufudyne that early caused him to become the party’s number one damage dealer by a mile. The gap narrows a bit in the next update because I tried to avoid a lot of the more annoying fights, but at least Mark gets to be useful.

[Timrod]

: Welcome back to Persona 1. After we kick Takeda’s ass, we get put in a tiny corridor with an elevator that goes to the basement. I honestly would’ve covered this last update, but I assumed there was another shitfest of a dungeon beyond this point.

: The hallway down here has a save room and then a warehouse area with some items in it. Two of the chests are trapped, and it’s kind of hilarious because…

: You can use the medicine to more than heal the damage from the two boxes. There’s nothing great in them apart from a Turquoise, which works very similar to the way it did in Shin Megami Tensei 1. You can trade gems in for items, fuse them to get stat boosting incenses, or use them in Persona fusion to boost certain kinds of Personas.

: Mark has a strange premonition in this room. We’ll see if that comes true or not.

: Going out the back of the warehouse brings us to a hallway on the other side. Interestingly, Atlus went and made a different walking sound for walking on metal floors.

: There’s a lab with some scientists in it who don’t have much interesting to say, and then a hallway leading East.

: Oh boy, a dark room! Remember how everyone loved those in the SNES SMT games? At least with this game, Atlus was nice enough to automap the route you’ve taken through it - something they took away in the later SMT games.

: There’s also a new enemy type in this area, which I grab a card from.

: Persona 1 doesn’t have voiceacting, but I read absolutely everything Dr. Nicholai says in Otacon/Huey’s voice.

: “Preposterous. It’s the rest of mankind that must atone. What I’ve done here is nothing more than to facilitate that process.”

: “I won’t allow anyone to stand in my way. Not even a child. Judgment will come regardless. It’s only a question of sooner, or later.”
: “You’re not goin’ anywhere, mister!”
: “Ah… I had a feeling you’d come. So you beat Takeda? He always was useless.”
: “Your time has come, Kandori!”
: “Loud noises from young children… I don’t have time for you. I have matters to attend to… come, Dr. Nicholai.”

: I can’t tell if Kandori is supposed to be holding Dr. Nicholai at gunpoint, and this is kind of why I wish they’d remake Persona 1 with actual graphics as opposed to whatever this trash is. Seriously, the SNES games had better quality sprites.

: “Wait!”
: “So this is the Deva System. What are Kandori’s plans for this?”
: “This machine… I… where do I know this thing from?”
RUMBLING

: What we’re about to do is not going to make any sense, given that if we just left the goddamn giant nuke machine alone Kandori would die, and I don’t think you can really come back from being half blasted into your component atoms anyway.

: “Let’s save him! There’s no need for the old guy to die just 'cause of Kandori!”
: “We’ll smack down Kandori ourselves! What’s what we came for, isn’t it!?”
: “Wait! The old man must have invented the system. He’s taking responsibility… we should respect his wishes. We don’t even know how to stop the machine.”
: Yeah we do, it’s the button labelled “THOR’S HAMMER” with the big nuclear trefoil on it.
: “Jihei! Here, this’ll stop the machine! The blue button increases the output… but the red button is the emergency stop! If you push it, we can save him!”
: I really don’t understand why they think they can save Nicholai from being torn apart when he’s already being torn apart, but whatever. Stupidity is kind of par for the course for Atlus protagonists.
: “Maki…? Where did you learn that!?”
: “I don’t know how I know, I just know! Jihei! Hurry!”

: “We can catch Kandori anytime. This man needs our help!”
: “I’ve had enough! I don’t want any more deaths… no one wants to die, right?”

: Even though the correct thing to do would have been to press the blue button the second Kandori got in the machine, we have to press the red button because Persona hates both Chaos and Neutral.

: Meet the worst character in the game. No, seriously.
: “Heh… Heheh… hahaha! I refuse to die! Now… take me to your world!”
: “Whoa! Wh-what the!?”

: “Maki! A-are you okay?”
: “…Nggh…Ma…sao?”
: “Ungh… where am I…? Oh, Jihei. You’re all right. Looks like everyone’s unhurt. We certainly have the devil’s luck.”

: “Oh… where am I? Ah, Jihei. Are you hurt anywhere?”

: “Owww… my hip…”

: "Y-Yes! We’re alive, Jay! Go me! I’m the luckiest!’

: “…Urrrgh. Oww! I’ve had it! I’m going home! Like, why is this happening to me!?”

: If you have a fifth party member who isn’t Reiji, they’ll say something instead of Mark.

: “…This is our school’s gym. But it’s the one from six months ago…”

: “Hey… is this the gym!? But it’s the old one from six months ago…”

: “Hey, uh… this is the gym, right? Didn’t they tear this one down six months ago…?”

: “I get it… we’ve gone back…”
: “Gone back? To six months ago!? C’mon, Maki, snap out of it!”
: “You mean a time slip? That’s rather different than what your mother said.”
: “I’ve told you before, I don’t have a real mom. I never thought the stuff Yosuke was saying was… actually true…”

: “No way! Th-that’s impossible! Yosuke!”
: “H-Hey, Maki!”

: “Could this “Yosuke” be Yosuke Naito? As I recall, he went missing along with Chisato Kasai roughly two months ago.”

: Everyone else pretty much says the exact same thing, so I’m not going to bother making you read it three times.

: “…That dolt. I can’t believe she took off on her own at a time like this. Come, Jihei. We’d better go after Maki.”

: Future Timrod here. The script doesn’t tell me what the deal with this part is, but I’m 99% sure it only happens if you have a fifth party member at this point. If it did happen in this run, I totally missed it. It’s technically optional dialogue, however I’m counting it as alt. party member dialogue because it doesn’t happen on this route.

: “…Jihei. Don’t you think Maki is acting oddly for an amnesia victim? Is this really six months ago? That girl did come here looking for Maki… but Maki was hospitalized six months ago as well.”

: “A time slip… do you think it’s true, Jihei? Something tells me that isn’t the case here.”

: I don’t know why, but I feel like this is meant to be a reference to The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, which most people remember from the 2006 anime movie, but which was written in the early 80s and had a live-action TV version made in 1994, two years before this game released in Japan. Something tells me Elly’s probably read it.

: “Is this place really our school? Doesn’t it look like somewhere else? Oh, duh! It’s all a dream! Of course! Hahaha…”

: " ‘Time Strip’? Is that what they’re calling it now? Aww, this sucks! Am I behind the times on the latest trends?"

: I honestly feel like if we just dropped Nanjo and Mark from the party entirely, there wouldn’t be much of a difference.

: The gym leads back to the incinerator where we left the school on our way to the police station. This is part of why I hate the girl in black, because they don’t even try to hide the dumbass plot twist with her. Seriously, once you learn what it is you’ll understand why I think the SEBEC route is not well-written.

: Future Timrod update: the SEBEC route is actually well-written, it’s just that pretty much everything up to near the end of the game is kind of dull.

: Everything else in the school is pretty much just the way we left it. There’s two optional cutscenes here, and I wound up hitting both of them looking for where the hell we’re supposed to go.

: “Oooh, it’s Nurse Natsumi!”

: “Ah, Ms. Saeko. It feels as though we haven’t seen you in a while.”
: “…”
: “She’s… she’s all depressed!”
: Well, that’s certainly strange. There’s going to be a lot of inconsistencies between the past and the present, and this is one of them. The other is in the principal’s office, just down the hall.

: This is, in fact, the first time you can meet the principal. I actually wandered into her office looking for the teacher’s lounge when we were still doing all the Reiji bullshit, and it’s empty at the start of the game. Said bullshit is about to pay off real soon, by the way.
: “No, that’s not in. But who’s this girl in black you mentioned…?”
: God dammit Nanjo, it’s the one you just ran into who teleported you into the past and is also blatantly Maki’s shadow. This is starting to feel like the start of Persona 4 with how dense everyone is.

: Gee, it’s almost like someone stole his heart. You know, if you put a mask on Jihei you’d basically have Joker.
: “Whoa… there are demons over here, too?”

: “Wh-what the hell!? Why’s Hamya being so nice to us? U-um… we gotta go!”

: I don’t know how you’re supposed to find this out other than trial and error, but the place we want to go is classroom 2-5. On a side note, you definitely want to make sure you save before you do this.

: “I didn’t think I’d see people from the original world here!”
: Wait… what?

: “What? Oh, don’t tell me… are you Yosuke Naito? The guy who went missing?”
: “Yeah, that’s me! About two months ago, Chisato… she and I wandered into this world. I’m from the same place you are!”
: “You said ‘this world’. Then this isn’t the past, but another dimension, or another world, yes?”
: “Yeah, I thought it was the past too, at first. Everything here is exactly the same as it was a year ago. Some things are weird, though… the police station turned into a forest, and the hospital is a castle…”
: “And Maki there was just like you see her. Yeah… it was practically a paradise, until last month.”

: “Seriously? We thought you ran off with Chisato, but you were in another world?”
: “I want to say that’s completely nuts, but then again we’re in the same boat.”

: “This is fantastic! Oh, how marvelous! It’s just like in a novel!”

: Yeah, that last one was definitely a Girl Who Leapt Through Time reference.

: “Is this for real? Aww… I had plans for this weekend! What’re you gonna do about it, Jihei!?”

: “What!? Then how are we supposed to get back!? Sheesh…”

: “It’s hard to believe, but it isn’t out of the question for the Deva System…”
: “Yeah, I can see that… I didn’t think you’d bring back this world’s Maki, though.”
: “Whoa, whoa, whoa! You’re saying… Maki really is Maki, but not the one we know?”

: “I see… no wonder your words and actions seemed amiss…”
: “I was dozing off in class, and when I woke up I was in another world.”
: A world of twenty, twenty thousand girls? And milk, and rectangles, joint optometrist, the man with the golden eye…eyeball? God dammit this is going to turn into YIIK all over again.
: “I didn’t figure it out until much later.”

: “Couldn’t you have at least said something, uh…”
: “I’m sorry, I really am. But if I did mention it, would you have believed me?”
: Nah, I mean, everyone only had a dream involving a guy in a mask who gave them a Jojo stand and then watched as demons subsequently invaded Japan for the fourth time. Nobody would ever believe that.
: “I just thought if we beat Kandori, both worlds would go back to normal… that’s why I figured I’d wait until it was all over to tell you…”

: “There’s no mistaking that voice… it’s that girl! Did she say she removed the exits!? If demons show up now, we’ll be slaughtered!”
: “Dammit… I gotta go!”
: “Wait, Yosuke, don’t strain yourself! Everyone… give me a hand! We have to do something!”

: “Huh? My wounds? Oh… the last tiem that little girl was here, she kicked my ass. Man, talk about pathetic!”

: “Don’t let your guard down just because she’s a kid. She has strange powers…”

: “What sort of relationship does that girl have with Kandori? There’s just too little data to draw a useful conclusion…”

: “There’s no use sitting around and worrying over this! We gotta take action and find a way back home.”

: “A girl who controls demons… sounds like a Devil Summoner to me…”

: Elly is making a blatant reference to Atlus’s last game, SMT Devil Summoner on the Saturn. Unfortunately, it’s never been translated, though there is an LP of it on the archive. Persona 1 is actually a huge leap in game design over Devil Summoner, which had things like teleporter mazes that you had to walk through backwards.

: “Oh man, you think there really is a way to go back?”

: “Jihei! You better find a way back!”

: Weirdly enough, there’s also a line in the script here for Reiji… who we haven’t even met yet. I think this is for if you come back to this room after recruiting him - which we’ll do momentarily.

: “Kandori’s kid, maybe? I hate to think of that bastard having kids…”

: Oh boy, some gameplay after only like thirty minutes of solid cutscene!

: The school is now as fucked up as the SEBEC building was, and is in fact a teleporter maze now. This is less dickish than SMT 1 because in SMT 1, there’d also be damage floors everywhere and missable items.

: Right away, we get into a random encounter with… oh fuck. That’s not good. The two things in the back are Rusalkas, which have been a mainstay since SMT 1.

: There’s also Gandharva, a series mainstay along with his wife, Apsaras. In fact, this entire encounter contains nothing but demons who are in almost every game in the series. However, the real worrisome thing here is right in the front and center: Lilim. Remember how I said we were going to fuse a bullshit overpowered Persona? SHE’S IT. While we don’t need Demon Lilim to make Persona Lilim, she’s bad news. Let me just get the Personalog entry out of the way so you can understand why. We also can’t negotiate with her because only Maki can do that and Maki isn’t high enough level.

: Future Timrod update: You’re going to see me say this a lot, that we can’t negotiate with something because we aren’t a high enough level. At some point, I realize that negotiations are based off of the average level of the party rather than the level of the person negotiating.

: Not only does Lilim absorb all elements except for Expel and Miracle (both extremely rare to see) but she also reflects all status effects. Many people consider using Lilim to be cheesing the game, because it is entirely possible to make it through the game with just her. Needless to say, we will be fusing her immediately. Her stats as an enemy are slightly lower. The only problem is that her spells are expensive at 21 SP and she also doesn’t learn any really good moves. We can fix that.

: It’s better to negotiate your way out of any Lilim fights, because right now our physical attacks (which are Lilim’s only weakness) don’t do enough damage.

: I had to grind just a little bit to get Jihei’s persona level to 21. Another reason Lilim is so overpowered is that you can actually fuse her using only cards from Mikage Hospital.

: We had a couple of enemies drop stones, which automatically add a skill to a fused Persona. We could use Mamagna (earth damage) but we want to use Maragi (fire damage) because most of the enemies we’re going to run into in the school are going to be weak to fire.

: I also wanted to fuse a new Persona for Mark, so I made him one of these without knowing that he canonically gets one in the manga. Personalog time!

: You know, Gozu-Tennoh has a really impressive resume but I bet he still can’t get HR to look at it. Strangely, he was nerfed from the PS1 release - the lower MAtk number and higher SP cost were added in the PSP version. The important thing here is Toxic Sting, which does a metric assload of Tech damage (as opposed to Rush damage, the other damage type used for most physical Persona skills). The only bad part about him is that in Persona 1, Megido is nuclear damage rather than being non-elemental.

: Gozu-Tennoh also allows us to destroy Lilim: it hits for some 500 damage against her and is enough for an instant kill (the 112 you see there was layered on like four other hits for 100+ damage).

: After a quick stop at the Velvet Room (it’s the one on the right edge of the screen, the other room behind us is the nurse’s office) we can get going on this godawful teleporter maze.

: You’ll notice that there are doors on the north wall here that don’t seem to go anywhere. That’s because these are teleporters. The teleporter maze here is mercifully simple: there’s only four rooms of it and it’s pretty straightforward. Either of these doors on the minimap will work.

: The second floor has a different set of encounters. Most of the ones with Lilim are on the first floor, strangely enough. These thing are Yomotsu Shikome, which I grab a card from.

: There’s also these Dribblers, who are basketballs possessed by ghosts. Dribblers are extremely weak to fire.

: There’s admittedly not much of a point grabbing all these spell cards, because most of them can only fuse into Personas way above our fusion limit. I do it anyway just because.

: Going up the left side from the first teleporter exit reveals a bunch of dead ends and a room I didn’t bother checking out because I was pretty sure it’d just teleport me back out.

: Instead, we want to go to the east and all the way around to a staircase.

: Up the stairs is an encounter with a Stephen King reference, because of course there is. The third and fourth teleporter areas have a lot of encounters like this with single enemies way above our level. They’re not hard to take down, but we can’t negotiate with them. Carrie in particular is shit because she’s highly resistant to everything but one particular type of damage we don’t have yet - that being getting punched. I wonder who could do that?

: There’s also the Anatomy, which is another high-HP damage sponge. Unlike Carrie, he’s very weak to fire but has a pretty high magic defense.

: Once we’re up the stairs, we can immediately see which way is the wrong way. We want to go south, then… west I think?

: Anyway, we eventually arrive at this classroom. This classroom is deceiving: if we were to continue walking down the hallway, we’d fall into a pit and have to climb back up from the previous floor. Instead, we want to go inside, because inside…

: I’d like to imagine that Girl Under Attack is her actual name.

: Maki Bogard.

: "Yo, man! It’s dangerous! Step back!’
: “W-wait… are you… are you Reiji!?”

: You can probably guess what’s going to happen next. I’ll get the Personalog ready.

: As a side effect, we also get a free level up!

: “What? Then you can all…”
: “That seems to be the case. By the way, you appear to be the real Reiji.”
: “What’s that mean?”

: “This place isn’t your world. I don’t know how else to explain it.”
: “Kandori sent us here, to an alternate world. I take it you met the same fate. That scientist mentioned a young man sent through a dimensional rift… you, I presume? So why are you here, safe and sound? Why are you pursuing Kandori?”
: “…As I was drifting through a vast, empty space, a kid in white appeared… when I came to, I was here. That’s all… you don’t need to know the rest.”
: “A child wearing white?”
: “C’mon, drop the hotshot act. We’re gonna smack Kandori around and find a way back. You should come. I bet your mom’s worried about you.”

: “It’s decided, then! Nice to meet you, Reiji! I’m Maki Sonomura!”
: “…”
: “What, is something on my face? Oh, I get it! You were admiring me. Well, I am pretty cute! It’s only natural.”

: If we already have a fifth party member, this scene ends very differently.

: “Shut up! I got no reason to join your little crew. I’m playing this my way.”

: "What’s with that attitude!? Guess that’ll teach me to be worried about you! Fine. Do what you want. Like I give a damn if you wind up dead, idiot.

: “What’s with this guy? All I do is bring up his mom and he goes nuclear.”

: You haven’t seen it yet (or maybe you have) but not having Reiji makes a few scenes late in the game feel way less satisfying. It’s pretty clear that Reiji was meant to be the fifth party member.

: “Stop it, Masao! It’s useless… he’s got that look in his eyes. I’m sure Kandori hurt something precious to him, just like us…”

: “Something precious…?”

: That’s for if you have Elly. This next one is for Brown, which happens right after Mark’s last line.

: “Alright, no more questions! Everyone has things they hate to talk about, right?”

: “Are you ill, Hidehiko? That’s rather considerate, coming from you. You seem to be a man sensitive to others prying into his past, yes?”

: “Wh… what? Straight shooters like me are pretty rare, y’know? I wouldn’t be surprised if they named me as a national treasure someday!”

: “Perhaps I spoke too soon… Shall we be going, Jihei?”

: “Nanjo!? What’s up with that? See if you ever get to talk to a national treasure!”

: Finally, Ayase’s version.

: “Huuuuh? Is that what’s wrong with him? I thought he was just antisocial…”

: “Friends, maybe… or it could be his hopes for the future.”

: “Hopes for the future? Psh… Who cares about the future? I wanna have fun right now! What a dweeb…”

: I know this section is getting long, but there’s also a scene AFTER this that isn’t in Reiji’s route.

: “Reiji said a child wearing white rescued him, right? Could that have been Mai…? I’ve seen her several times, but she’s a very mysterious girl…”

: “Huh? Whaddaya mean, what’s got me so pissed off? Shuddup, dude!”

: “Leave him be. We’re after the same man, so we’re sure to see one another again. He can do what he wants so long as he doesn’t get in our way.”

: Just when you thought it was over, there’s also a bunch of optional lines that only happen if you haven’t recruited Reiji. When I first did this update, I said the game’s writing sucked. It’s really more that Reiji’s route is very minimalistic up until you get him, where the other fifth party members have plenty of dialogue the entire time. I still think Reiji’s route is the best, but there were definitely better ways they could’ve gone about doing it.

: “You’re asking me why Reiji is after Kandori? Mm… we’ll find out eventually. For now, it’s enough that our goals dovetail.”

: “Do you have someone precious to you?”

: If you answer no…

: “I see… I’m sorry to ask such an odd question, then.”

: But if you answer yes (as you should, because Elly is the best girl and for Jihei to wind up with anyone else would be objectively wrong, much like picking any girl that is not Yukiko in Persona 4):

: “I see… you’re like me, then…”

: “You must have stuff you’re hiding too, right?”

: “See? See? Am I right or am I right? That’s just how people are?” (This is for answering yes)

: "That’s a joke, right? Was our friendship that shallow…? (This is for answering no)

: "It’s no use worrying about what might happen, don’t you think, Jihei?

: “Thought so! You and me, like, think alike.”

: “…What!? That’s stupid! Stupid, stupid, stupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupid!”

: Ayase thinks she’s Anarchy Panty but she’s not.

: I went ahead and modified the formation so as to maximize damage output. Maki is far back because her bow and spells can hit pretty much anything. Reiji takes Nanjo’s spot up front because he’s basically Nanjo or Mark but better. Mark is only up front because most of his skills are short-range and also because he sucks.

: Once we exit out the other side of the classroom, there’s more new enemies.

: Nekomata is pretty generic, just like in the SNES games. Slightly weak to guns, but other than that not really notable.

: Bukimi, on the other hand, is this floor’s Lilim. They’re kind of hard to see because their true form is only revealed when they do one particular attack.

: Interestingly, they’re apparently a toilet ghost that manifests as a hand sticking out of a toilet and gives you toilet paper. They’re what that hand in the toilet man thing was based off of in Majora’s Mask.

: Bukimi has an attack like the Pretas did where they sacrifice themselves to cause massive fucking damage. How massive, you ask?

: Enough that I almost game overed after a single hit. Thankfully, Bukimi is flammable. I should mention that Lilim’s Maragi does more damage even to enemies not weak to fire than Airgetlam’s Mabufudyne did.

: “You better fix the school, or I’ll spank you 'til your butt swells up twice as big!”
: “No way, Jose! I don’t listen to anybody but my Daddy! Try and stop me, flatty!”
: “Flat --!? Oh, that does it! What a little brat!”
: “Cool it, Maki… she’s just a kid. You gotta have patience with --”
: Honestly, I feel like the SMT 1 and/or 2 protagonists would already have started pumping the little girl full of lead by this point.
: “Shuddup, monkeyboy! Ook ook, eek eek, it’s a monkeyboy!”
: “What did you call me, you spoiled brat!?”
: “Calm down, monkeyman.”
: “Nanjo, you jerk! You’re next!”

: And with that, the girl summons what is easily the worst boss in the game - not even because it’s hard, just because it sucks.

: “…You’d all better snap out of it, or it’ll be your funeral.”
: “Get them, Tesso!”

: Unlike a lot of the other enemies we’ve been fighting in the school (seriously, I want to know who thought ‘it’s a basketball only also a ghost’ was good enemy design), Tesso is an actual mythological figure - it’s a giant rat with metal teeth and claws that summons swarms of rats. Tesso also gets its own boss theme:

: Tesso represents the first major step-up in difficulty, though with Lilim it’s basically incapable of game overing you. It likes to spam Magry (group gravity damage) which is only really a problem for Nanjo and Maki. Reiji’s Persona resists it, and Lilim absorbs it.

: The star of the show here is actually Mark, because his Persona has a multi-hit physical attack that does Rush damage, one of the only things Tesso is actually weak to.

: When Tesso isn’t spamming Magry, it usually does a single-target gun attack that doesn’t really do a whole lot. I spent most of this fight on Auto with Jihei and Mark spamming Toxic Sting (multi-hit physical attack), Nanjo just kinda sitting there not doing a whole lot since his Persona does Nuclear damage and Tesso is immune, and Reiji using Eiha (single-target death damage) while Maki healed.

: “Daddy’s REAL strong! You guys won’t stand a chance!”
: “Hold it right there!”
: “Aww, she got away again!”
: “…Who is that girl…?”

: “Yosuke! Is everything all right!?”
: “Yeah! The school’s back to normal, thanks to you guys.”
: “Don’t worry about it.”
: “I really can’t thank you guys enough. By the way… I want you to meet someone. Would you mind coming with me?”
: “…Why?”
: “There’s a guy who’s helped me out since I came here. He actually believed me… he’s investigating the two worlds. Maybe he’s figured something out by now.”
: “Wow, I’m kinda surprised someone took you seriously. Who is this guy?”

: “Wanna go after him then, Reiji?”
: “…”

Next time, we’ll go see what’s changed in the Mikage-cho of this otherwordly hellscape, and hopefully put a bullet through Maki’s shadow.

[LaZodiac]

Atlus was nice enough to automap the route you’ve taken through it - something they took away in the later SMT games.

And this is why if anyone ever tells you to play Strange Journey, you pitch them into the sun.

You know between meeting Lucy, his persona actually having a unique design, and his dramatic personality, I think Reiji might be the only actual protagonist here beyond the MC.

[Timrod]

: Just a heads up, this update’s going to be short because the dungeon immediately after where this update is going to end is bad enough to rival some dungeons in SMT1.

: The library is on the third floor of St. Hermelin, a place where we largely had no reason to go before.

: Tsutomu is another one of those characters where we meet their alternate world counterpart but never meet the real one.
: “…Are you really Tsutomu? Dude… he’s talking like a normal person!”
: “Hm… the me on the other side must be an odd duck indeed. I’d like to meet him.”
: “Hmm. Then, visitors, let us get down to business.”
: Tsutomu is also one of those things where the character designer for P1 took a lot of really strange turns. He looks a lot more human and a lot less like a Gaian cultist in the manga.
: “We heard you’re investigating the two worlds. What are your thoughts thus far?”
: “The things in this world seem to be unrelated… but they are all connected by the strings of fate. The same holds true for the black door that suddenly appeared.”
: I think this might be some kind of localization error. What he’s talking about is the giant monolith looking thing that’s right behind him.
: “Only those who can draw on that strength may learn the truth. Unfortunately… that does not seem to be my role.”
: “Our coming here was inevitable. Which means… it’s on us to solve everything.”
: “I don’t know who spun the thread, but that’s a helpful way to think of it. Now, name this man you pursue who holds the string’s end.”

: There’s a very long pause between the two names. My guess is that it’s not intentional, but the result of changing the dialog boxes for English characters.
: “Hm. Exactly the name I expected. In truth, I knew beforehand that these incidents would occur… thanks to the prophecy of a certain monkey-suited gentleman at the shrine.”
: “Monkey-suited!? There’s nothing gentle about monkeys!”
: I really, really have no idea what any of that shit means. This whole thing feels like they never localized it properly.
: “Will someone shut this dumb ape up!?”
: “Look who’s talking, bib boy!”
: “…What a bunch of children.”

: “Shut up! Stop it, both of you!”

: “Haha! Ook ook!”

: “This ‘monkey-suited gentleman’ must be Mark’s uncle or something!”

: Tsutomu is, I believe, the only person to meet Philemon who does not subsequently get a Persona out of it. I don’t know why, because there’s a number of other very minor characters who do.

: We can also examine the door.

: “I’ve tried everything, but it won’t budge. Though if the threads of fate lead there, even this door must open.”

: It’s time to leave school and hit the streets of Mikage-cho once again. You’ll notice that there is now a giant stone wall cutting the city in half.

: The demons from St. Hermelin have now spilled onto the streets. Lilim and Maragi take care of them in short order. Unfortunately, Jihei is overlevelled at this point while Maki, Nanjo, and Mark are suffering due to having bad Personas and/or lacking area attacks. I kind of sort of fix this by the end of the update, but there’s still a major gap that makes it very hard for us to negotiate with certain demons.

: We can’t get to the Joy Street mall anymore, but we can get to the Mikage Sun Mall, which is largely the same as it was in the real world… apart from being a stand-in for the shops in the post-apocalyptic version of SMT1. Rosa Candida is now an armor shop.

: On the way out, we run into a new demon: the Archangel. Shin Megami Tensei 1 has taught me that the proper response to seeing an angel in the SMT universe is immediately shooting it before it can start going off about the thousand year kingdom of God. In this case, that’s also the correct response: Divine family demons are all immune to magic (they null it, but do not absorb it like Lilim does) and extremely weak to both physical and gun attacks.

: The Yin & Yan convenience store has turned into a fortress-like gun shop. This is supposed to be kind of a brick joke: there’s an NPC at the Yin & Yan in the real world (post demon outbreak) who will complain that they don’t sell guns.

: Guns are still kind of useless, because even enemies that are weak to them will probably take more damage from magic or from physical attacks. Maki becomes our best gunner. The Kotuteki bow is a drop from the Archangels, which I farmed for EXP because Maki’s bow attack hits multiple enemies - it hits 1 to 3 enemies and also inflicts Bind… meaning a more appropriate name would probably be the Shibabow.

: I don’t even bother buying a gun for Mark. He’s still too slow and even with the upgraded shotgun wouldn’t do enough damage to justify spending money on it.

: I haven’t shown Reiji off yet, so here he is. He uses fist weapons and shares the rifle gun type with Nanjo. The upgraded rifle barely has better stats and in most cases, Reiji has much better things to do than use a gun.

: Nanjo is easily the weakest character in the entire party at this point - he’s at roughly the same speed Mark is and we haven’t found a better weapon for him.

: I did buy a new gun for Jihei, but I forgot to take a picture of it. I also put everyone from Shot Shells to Flashbangs, which do more damage and also inflict Blind on hit. He has the highest defensive stats of anyone, and also has good sword/gun damage.

: After a bit of grinding, we can go right to the Alaya Shrine. The encounter rate around here is really high, so even just walking from the school to the shrine around the corner was like five random encounters.

: “But this world’s Tsutomu seemed reliable… what’s that?”

: “Could this be one of his traps? One false move and I’ll catch it and crush it.”

: “Oh! It’s that butterfly from when we found Maki’s mother collapsed here!”

: “What a pretty butterfly… what say we catch it and keep it as a pet?”

: “You’re into butterflies, Nanjo?”

: Looking back on this after finishing the LP, it’s kind of a plot hole that none of the alternate party members know who Philemon is, because they’ve all met him by this point.

: “No… I… feel faint…!”

: Oh boy, it’s old man white-on-white. I’ll subtitle all of his text again.

: “How are you friends?”

: “Just as you thought, this world is a counterfeit of your own.”

: “It is this world where Kandori’s ambitions lie.”

: “If you pursue him… you will eventually discover the nature of this world and how to return to your home world.”

: “Kandori has made his fortress on the east side of town where he is searching for something.”

: “Should it fall into his hands, there will be no tomorrow for either world.”

: “You must stop Kandori.”

: “The first step is to use the subway terminal to reach the east side of town. But, the gate has a guardian.”

: “Look for the Expel Mirror.”

: “Kandori… so he’s in this town, too.”

: “Kandori’s here, too? Aw man, I have, like, a really bad feeling about this!”

: “Kandori, huh? Even a total stud like me would rather not deal with that guy…”

: “He said there’s a demon in the subway. And this, uh… Exp… Expel…?”

: I think the idea here is that the word “Expel” is hard to pronounce in Japanese, but Nanjo can do it because he’s presumably better at English than Mark is.
: “Kandori evidently wasn’t satisfied with simply overtaking our town… but I’ll teach him that his brand of greed will be his ruin.”
: My favorite part about the writing in this game is that Kandori is Nanjo’s mortal enemy not because of the whole attempted murder thing, but because Nanjo met him at a party once and found him to be kind of an asshole.

: If we’d actually bothered to explore the town before it got infested by demons, we’d have found that the city’s historical society has the Expel Mirror on display. Before we do that though, I wanted to fuse some new Personas for Maki and Reiji, as both of them lack any kind of multi-target damage.

: Maki gets a Pyro Jack, simply because it’s in her level range and has Best affinity. As far as Personas go, Pyro Jack isn’t great - his Magic Atk is like 40 points under Lilim’s, and Lilim is level 21. What’s important is that he has a multi-target spell.

: Reiji gets Vidofnir, which is actually an amazing Persona for several reasons: it has no major weaknesses (as very few enemies do gun damage) and also learns Bright Judgement at Rank 7, in addition to Mabufu and Magarula (second-tier wind damage spell). It also has an incredibly high Agility, meaning that Reiji is easily the second fastest person in the party.

: The Historical Society is just north of the school, and is also one of the only places we can go due to the giant wall.

: “Wh-what in the world…?”

: “Yeeeeek! What IS this!?”

: “Woah… what is that!?”

: It’s really hard to make out, to the point where I didn’t see it when I was recording, but there’s a face in the orb thing hovering above the mirror.

: “What was that…!?”
: “It looked like a little girl’s face, but she was saying not to take ‘this’. Did she mean the Expel Mirror?”
: “Who gives a damn? We gotta have it, or else.”

: “Here, Jihei. We can fight the monster in the subway once we have this, right?”

: The subway tunnels are mercifully short, but are highly annoying due to the high random encounter rate (seriously, I feel like they ratcheted it up after the SEBEC building) and the fact that it’s a maze. There’s new music here, but I’m not going to link it just yet because it’s actually the theme for the dungeon after this one, and it’d give away what that dungeon is.

: The subway is where I first noticed that the whole level gap situation was only getting worse. Jihei is something like level 26, while Maki, Nanjo and Mark are in the 21-22 range. Reiji is around 25. This means we couldn’t successfully negotiate with anything.

: Yato no Kami are basically cannon fodder for us: they resist physical and gun attacks but are weak to everything that isn’t Expel or Miracle damage.

: Cath Palug are… supposed to be giant Irish monster cats, but whatever. They’re weak to guns and neutral to most everything else.

: Finally there’s the Enku, which is an absolute shitfest to fight if you don’t have Reiji: they’re strong against everything that isn’t Fist-type damage and reflect guns.

: Trying to take the short route to the stairs reveals this dungeon’s gimmick: one-way floors. You can see the arrow on the minimap pointing which direction the floor goes.

: Most of this dungeon is just going down paths until you hit a one-way tile, and then going down the other paths that aren’t obviously dead ends until you find your way out. The subway is not a long or hard dungeon, just a very tedious one.

: Eventually we hit a giant hallway of one-way tiles, and find the final new demon in this area:

: Dark Elves are very, very weak to Nuclear damage, which we have a ton of.

: Past that corridor, we hit a save room and then the stairs down to B2F.

: They couldn’t even send Yog-Sothoth to fight us, they could only send Weenie Hut Jr. over here. This will be rectified once we hit the next dungeon, because this is what Atlus being nice looks like.

: “I knew it was gonna say that! Let’s do this, Jihei!”
: “Now’s not the time to bitch and moan. If we don’t beat this thing, we’ll never get our hands on that bastard!”

: “We must defeat it now!”

: “Are we really fighting this thing…? It’s so… nasty-looking…”

: “What a tasteless creature… and ugh, that horrible smell! Frickin’ gross!”

: In case you haven’t read Lovecraft, Yog-Sothoth is an eldritch god in the Cthulhu mythos. Lovecraft was also a massive racist, so it’s not hard to understand the other name there, which is another eldritch god. Yog-Sothoth Jr is most likely Atlus misinterpreting the fishmen from The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

: Weenie Hut Jr. is weak to pretty much everything that Personas at this level are going to have: he’s weak to Nuclear (Mark, Nanjo), weak to Sword damage (Reiji with Bres, as I think he was one level too low to equip Vidofnir) and weak to Tech damage (Jihei, but also Mark).

: The wiki is definitely wrong about how much HP this boss has. I’d put it somewhere in the 1500 range, while the wiki has it at over 3000. Also, let me just show you what I mean by how bad the level gap is:

: So, uh… the game now goes out of its way to name the girl in black. Her name is Aki.

: “Up ahead is where I live. If you go in there, I’ll never let you out!”
: “We’re still going in, you realize. We absolutely must defeat Kandori.”
: “I won’t let you! If you go in there, I’ll trap you inside!”
: “You dumb kid… we’re not gonna fall for the same trick twice! You better start behavin’, or we’ll really punish you!”
: I don’t think fucking the school up really counted as a ‘trick’, though why no one has just put a bullet through Aki is a goddamn mystery.
: “I’m not dumb! Watch, I came up with a really fun game! You’ll fight a cute girl in it… wait and see!”

: Not pictured: me having to go all the way through the other side of the subway, which is about as long as the western half was.

: This is the other side of Mikage-cho… where what appears to be a giant forest is blocking our way to whatever it is that’s taken over the SEBEC building. The best we can do for right now is go to Joy Street, which is now…

: A note of caution - once you go into the Black Market, you can’t leave. Aki isn’t fucking around, and the dungeon in the Black Market absolutely goddamn sucks. We’ll go in there in the next update.

: There’s some optional dialogue in the historical society I couldn’t really find a place for in the update itself, because the site had screwed up the spacing for everything when I first wrote it.

: “Kandori evidently wasn’t satisfied with simply overtaking our town… but I’ll teach him that his brand of greed will be his ruin.”

: “So, uh… he said there’s a monster in the subway, yeah? I… don’t really need to go to the east side. H-Haha… just kidding…”

: “That mirror must have been thought to have the power to ‘expel’ since ancient times. To ward off evil, in other words.”

: “Y’know, it’d be nice if this subway monster wasn’t too disgusting.”

: There’s also some once you’ve actually picked up the expel mirror.

: “So this is the Expel Mirror… it’s so fantastically mysterious!”

: “So this is the Expel Mirror? I wonder if I could get a look at my face in it. My skin’s been all dry…”

: “This thing’s the Expel Mirror? Huh. Let’s see if it reflects my face…”

[Timrod]

And this is why if anyone ever tells you to play Strange Journey, you pitch them into the sun.

You know between meeting Lucy, his persona actually having a unique design, and his dramatic personality, I think Reiji might be the only actual protagonist here beyond the MC.

I played… I think like half an hour of Strange Journey and didn’t really like it. The older SMT games really haven’t aged well, even with remakes and remasters and whatnot.

Honestly though, I agree that most of the characters on the SEBEC route kinda suck. I’m going to do an update shortly where I talk about the manga version of Persona 1, and one thing you notice is that the writers really struggle to keep characters relevant.

[Timrod]

Around the time I started the police station in the game, I looked up the manga version of Persona 1 because I wanted to know a little more about it. The manga ran from late 1996 to 2000, which is kind of surprising but makes sense because the Persona 2 duology wasn’t out until 1999.

One thing that’s immediately noticeable is that the character art is way better, but also way more anime. It also has some of what 4chan’s anime board (at least, back in 2008) would’ve called QUALITY - lots of shit is off-model for no reason, something that kind of plagued the Persona 4 and Persona 5 anime.

The manga tries really hard to fill in some of the holes - like how there was that sort of weird bit where it seemed like Elly and Brown had done the Persona game before. The manga just goes ahead and confirms it straight up.

They also try to make Nanjo less of an asshole, but fail miserably because Nanjo is the worst character in the game next to Ayase. At least Ayase has her own weapon type.

Also Elly is just Sailor Jupiter for some reason, and is incredibly annoying to read - the fan translators confirmed that the reason it’s like this is because anything she says in quotation marks she’s saying in English. Thankfully, she doesn’t show up all that much. I should “probably” do an “update” where I talk like that the entire time just to see how many readers I “lose”.

One thing I think the manga does badly is that they just kind of reveal shit way earlier than it is in the game. For reference, this is from the second chapter and happens immediately after the intro cutscene where everyone gets zapped - they’ve already shown Maki’s mom getting shot but also Kandori. This particular part isn’t too egregious, but they basically spoil the entire game by… I dunno, maybe a quarter of the way in, before the group raids the SEBEC building. By the sixth chapter you already know what the door in the library is, and why the alternate world exists.

There’s also a lot of filler content, like this scene where the fat kid grows a Persona out of his stomach that takes place between the police station and the SEBEC building. Toro here is actually in the game, but I believe you only meet him in the Snow Queen quest. That’s one issue the manga has - it tries to tie Snow Queen and the SEBEC route together.

Also, here’s an example of the quality issues. Gee, Naoya, you look kinda cool. I mean, at least canonically he’s fast at running which explains the 75+ agility stat.

I mentioned earlier that the writer kind of hates Mark and Nanjo as much as I do, and this just shows it. Rather than have it so that Mark and Brown get caught at the police station, the police station part is glossed over and instead Mark and Nanjo get captured trying to raid SEBEC. I should mention too that the “Saeki Electronics & Biological & Energy Corporation” thing comes from the manga - it’s never mentioned anywhere in the game, because SEBEC is actually supposed to be named after an Egyptian god by the name of Sebek.

The manga author also notes how close SEBEC is to just straight up being Umbrella Corp, though they also do this weird thing early on where they note a “mist” settling over Mikage-cho and have Elly even go so far as to ask if she’s in a Stephen King novel. If anything, I personally see Persona 1 more as a re-telling of the first Shin Megami Tensei game.

Anyway, that’s about all I wanted to say about the manga. If you want to read it, there’s a fan translation page at https://megatentranslations.tumblr.com/releases. We’re up to about Chapter 18, and Chapter 19 is where we’ll be next update.

I’m going to end with the fact that in the manga, they gloss over the police station so no one has a gun… except Maki, who just kinda has a gun.

[LaZodiac]

I do love that picture of Maki holding a gun and smiling. She’s not a great character but that is a great shot.

[Riley]

Guns in the Persona series just feels so off. Even the Evokers in 3 leave a weird taste. At least the mainline Megami Tensei games it feels more appropriate for an apocalyptic world feeling.

[SpammyV]

The monster namer must have really gotten confused if they named the fishman Yog-Sothoth Jr. when there IS a Yog-Sothoth Jr. in a different Lovecraft story.

Also for whatever reason the white-on-white Philemon subtitles keep making me think of Po’s speech in Kung Fu Panda 2, always cutting away to the emperor not being about to hear anything and going, “WHAT?”

[Timrod]

: As soon as we enter the Black Market, we pass the casino… and then a room with no sign or description.

: Most of the shops that were here in the real world are still here. We have to head to the Peace Diner to progress the story, but just like Ikebukuro in SMT 1, the prices are out of control.

: You might notice that both of the weapon shops we’ve been to only sell guns. This is actually a reference to SMT 1 - once the apocalypse hits in that game, you can’t buy swords anymore. A lot of these guns are upgrades, but at that price it’s just not worth it. Let’s head to the diner.

: “What’s this foreboding?”
: “This stale air… smells like the windows here haven’t been opened for a month.”

: Oh hey, it’s The Master. Where’s Torgo?

: We can go back to that door from earlier, and now we’re in Kama Palace. Kama Palace sucks. Kama Palace is SMT1 dungeon design at its worst. Let me just post the map, from the same Japanese site I found the SEBEC building map:

: The black numbered squares are holes that go from floor to floor. Basically, unless you have a map, this dungeon is pure trial and error. You’re going to want to go out and buy a couple of emergency exits unless you have a Persona with Traesto. If we want all the items, we have to make a minimum of three descents. Only two, I swear.

: For our first run, we need to skip the elevator (which you can see on the map I posted above) and instead go down a bunch of holes.

: I grabbed as many spell cards as I could - these are mostly enemies from the subway that the party (well, more like Mark, Maki, and Nanjo) were too low-level to negotiate with.

: Kama Palace fucking sucks. There’s a dungeon in the Snow Queen quest that is notoriously bad, but I’d say this is even worse. It’s long, it’s tedious, I’m sitting here rotating my automap to face the same way the Japanese map is so that I can tell which hole I have to go down. The whole thing is a fucking slog.

: Eventually, we fall down Hole #10 (on the map) and wind up at a treasure room.

: This room has probably the best treasures in the entire palace: two Beads (full HP restore), two Balm of Life (revive with full HP) and a Dexterity Incense that boosts Dexterity by one. I didn’t wind up using it on anyone, but if I do use it it’s going to most likely be on Mark or Maki to make them less bad.

: On my way out to cast Traesto (Nanjo still has Quetzalcoatl and that has Traesto) I ran into one of these fuckers. Teketekes are reverse-Lilims, being immune to physical and gun damage but severely weak to magic. Mark was actually racking up EXP because of Megido. Most things in Kama Palace are weak to Nuclear, and what Mark has is a fuckload of Nuclear damage. Teketeke apparently does not give a spell card, because I successfully negotiated with it using Jihei (who was P-level 26 at the time) and didn’t get a card out of it.

: Our next run was to B9F using a different set of holes to reach a treasure room that is also out of the way from where the route to the boss is.

: There were some new enemy types along the way - Haokah and Malphas. Haokah is pretty weak, except they can cast Shibaboo. If you’ve played any of the SNES SMT games, you know how bad Shibaboo is. Shibaboo inflicts Bind, which prevents you from moving. Thankfully, Shibaboo doesn’t last like eighty rounds of combat and persist through encounters in this one. Malphas has a charm spell, but that’s about all it has. Again, we can’t negotiate with them because people are too low level.

: More new enemies. Pairika has the same resistances Lilim does (absorbs magic, reflects status effects, weak to physical) and is generally really easy to deal with because they don’t have the annoying skills Lilim does.

: The best part is, the treasure room here is fucking pointless. What’s in it, you ask?

: Common fucking healing items that we could buy at any item store, that’s what. We still have some 90 chewing souls sitting around in our inventory. Traesto again, fuck this garbage. Thankfully, I remembered to save, because something very bad happens pretty soon that made me need to reset the game.

: This time, we take the elevator down, because the remaining treasure room with actual items in it is on the way to the boss.

: We actually take the elevator down to B4F, and then jump into hole number 5, and then hole number 9 on B5F.

: This is the wrong way! Don’t take the C, kids!

: We get down to B7F on the correct side (the other side leads to a save room and Trish’s spring) and then something very bad happens.

: I actually forgot to capture it, because I was so pissed at the RNG, but here’s what happened. The harpy-looking monster in the back row here is called an Ocypete. They’re palette-swapped versions of a much more harmless demon called a Megaera.

: The main difference is that Megaeras have shit for HP and take 2x damage from all the common elements. Ocypete, on the other hand, is a piece of shit. They have Maragion (tier 2 AOE fire spell) and we have two people weak to it: Mark and Nanjo.

: So what happened? Well, notice how in these screens, Mark and Nanjo’s Personas are at Rank 1. I got into a fight with four Ocypetes, and got slammed trying to escape after a bad negotiation. Mark and Nanjo died… and then I found out that their Personas inherited a special ability that’s dependent on moon phase when they’re fused. What happens is that if they die, their Persona takes the hit for them and returns them to full HP… in exchange for the Persona de-ranking back to Rank 1. This shit was unacceptable, so I had to reset.

: Finally, after a fourth time down here, I got to the first treasure room on B8F.

: “What, Chisato Kasai’s? I thought they said she went missing.”
: “Wait… Chisato’s painting is here, and they’re saying it’s the Queen’s?”
: “But why? Does this mean… Chisato is being held captive by the Harem Queen?”
: If the portraits in this game weren’t so ultra-compressed, I’d probably do a Slowtaku edit because god dammit Maki how have you not already caught onto this shit?

: The manga foreshadows the fact that Chisato is the Harem Queen WAY earlier than this - I think it happens in like Chapter 7 and the actual Harem Queen fight is Chapter 19.

: There’s some items in here as well. I didn’t wind up using the Agility Incense, but if it’s going on anyone it’s probably going on Mark or Maki - Jihei was at well over 80 by the time I finished recording this.

: There’s another art gallery on the floor below, but we don’t want to touch any of those boxes. They’re all trapped with “heavy damage”, which takes off roughly half of Jihei’s HP.

: Finally, after over an hour of fucking around in Kama Palace, we reach the save point immediately before the boss.

: There’s also a final art gallery with a Luck Incense in it. I’m not entirely sure what Luck does in this game, since negotiations aren’t totally random the way they were on the SNES (where Luck was only a useful stat for the main character because no one else could negotiate). It probably raises critical chance, in which case I’ll just use it on Jihei.

: And here it is. The last door before the Harem Queen. Let’s just go in and get this over with.

: “Same to Jihei, and the rest of you, too. Welcome to my palace.”
: Gee, it sure is Persona 5 around here.
: “Ch…Chisato! It really was you…!?”
: “No…!”
: “…Knew it. Yo, Jihei, did Chisato always have that many moles? Didn’t she always used to brag about how clear her skin was?”
: “C’mon, Chisato! There’s an explanation for this, right? Is the real Queen threatening you?”
: I feel like Maki would fit right into Ni no Kuni 2. By which I mean she’s as dense and annoying as any of the characters in that game.
: “You’re not really the enemy… that’s a lie, isn’t it?”

: “An angel in black lent me a mirror that grants my every wish! All this… from my mirror.”
: “An angel in black… is that Aki!? Chisato, listen, she’s no angel! I mean, didn’t she kidnap you?”
: Given that most of the angels in the SMT universe have the sole goal of subjugating humanity into their slaves, Aki is probably an angel.
: “That’s what I thought at first. But that’s not how it went. She was looking for someone who could use the mirror… it happened to be me.”
: “…Okay. So you’re the Queen. Isn’t it about time to put an end to this? Let’s go back together! Yosuke’s hurt! He needs you, Chisato…”

: “…Y’know what, Maki? I don’t need Yosuke anymore. I didn’t really like him anyway.”
: I feel like that’s a line a lot of those Persona 4 yaoi doujin authors said when they saw Persona 5.
: “Huh? What did you just say?”
: “I don’t like Yosuke. In fact, I never did.”
: “That’s a lie! You always bragged about what a wonderful boyfriend he was…”
: By the way, dumb high school girls with dumb mid-90s TV show drama issues is an ongoing theme in this game.

: SOMEONE JUST FUCKING SHOOT HER ALREADY FOR THE LOVE OF FUCK NO ONE CARES THIS IS SOMEHOW WORSE THAN YIIK
: “In the beginning, you know, he liked you better. And I couldn’t allow that…”
: “I mean, I was the pretty one! I’m the one he should have gone for. So I made my move, and that feebleminded moron was powerless to resist.”
: “No… why would you joke like this?”
: “It’s no joke, Maki! It’s the truth! My art was better than yours, and you got all the attention!”
: I thought about it just now, and I realized that this entire segment of the game has no reason to exist. It’s not furthering the party’s goal of killing Kandori, and Chisato has already shown that she’s so basic that you can use her as a household cleaning agent.

: “So that’s why you stole Yosuke… and why you forced people to praise your artwork. …? Wait, Chisato. You should be aware that this isn’t the Maki you know.”
: “Shut up! This has nothing to do with you! Just stay out of this! You must’ve been howling with laughter, right Maki?”
: “I bet you made fun of me behind my back, wearing that innocent face of yours! Well, I won’t let you do it to me anymore! I’m much better than you now!”
: “Sure… thanks to the power that girl in black gave you. Right?”

: “Chisato… you hated me that much? I never knew…”

: I honestly could hear Richter Belmont (the original PS1 SOTN version, none of this PSP/X360 remake shit) saying this. “Your art is as empty as your soul! Mankind ill needs a queen such as you!”
: “You were so caught in the throes of envy over Maki, you never made a real effort.”
: “And this is where it brought you… forcibly enslaving people. You think this is you at your best? You’re a Queen with no clothes!”
: I bet he wishes she was naked because that’d probably be the first and only naked woman Nanjo would ever see. Anyway, we’ve got to be getting close to the boss fight… right?
: “You’re deluding yourself if you think their praise means anything. They only humor you out of terror!”
: “…Me? A Queen with no clothes?”
: “You heard him, Chisato! I can’t stand the way you hurt Maki because of your stupid complex! I’ll say this as many times as it takes, so listen up!”

: Can we be done with this? I feel like none of the Persona 4 shadow cutscenes went on this long without someone saying “that isn’t me!”
: "I think you need to have another look!

: You might ask why I bothered to make a dipshit meme image. Here’s why:

: What. WHAT. FUCK YOU, GAME! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOUR FUCKING BULLSHIT!

: I like to think of Kama Palace as the game designer behind the SNES games coming into the design room for Persona 1 and screaming “What the fuck is this shit? Where are all the damage floors? Why isn’t this a maze that takes hours to clear even with a map? Why aren’t we forcing the player to do it twice?”. Eventually, they got their way and that’s how SMT 3: Nocturne came to be.
: “Hey, yeah! I bet that Aki girl is controlling her!”
: “Mm… Chisato’s eyes were clear. To me, at least, they didn’t seem to be the eyes of one under someone’s control.”

: So if you’re playing through this game with savestates, you might think you did something wrong. You might think you needed to go inspect the paintings in the art galleries or something before trying to fight Chisato. Nope! This is completely intentional. You have to go through Kama Palace a minimum of twice. Before we go back in, there’s some things I wanted to do. I did quite a bit of grinding to get Jihei’s P-Level to 28, and also got Mark/Maki/Nanjo up a few levels to around 25.

: The first thing I did was go to the Velvet Room and fuse Macha for Jihei. Lilim is still completely overpowered (to the point where her stats are better despite her being level 21) but Nanjo was still using Quetzalcoatl so I gave Lilim to him.

: The first thing you’ll probably notice is that Macha is very weak to most of the common elements. This is a downside… but in exchange, we get access to Zanma and Mazanma, which do Blast damage. Very few enemies are capable of nulling Blast.

: I also used the money we got from doing multiple runs of Kama Palace to upgrade everyone’s guns. Jihei’s in particular is a fucking beast: its attack stat is 10 lower than the MP5 he was using before, but hits six times guaranteed.

: Not pictured: me running back through the entire dungeon to make it to the Harem Queen again. Thankfully, the game shows you which route you took to get there, so it’s much easier this time around.

: “Chisato!”
: “Ah, you’re back! Well, what did you think? Weren’t my paintings better!?”
: “Chisato… just end this already…”
: “I know now that your paintings are better. And… and your moles…”
: “Shut up! Don’t say things you don’t even mean! You probably think I deserve these moles!”

: You can’t see it here, and I don’t want to show the manga’s version of it, but I will give you the title of the painting: “The Gate to Paradise”. I should mention (and I’ll show it off at the end of the update) that the manga’s version of Kama Palace makes way more sense. It looks like Versailles on the inside, and rather than having to go through a bunch of shit trash garbage dungeon, the party gets captured and brought to the boss room.
: “My… my painting!”
: “Alright, Jihei. You saw my paintings in the gallery, right?”

: Again, so many opportunities where we could’ve put a bullet in her.
: “Maki’s painting is a million damn times better than yours!”
: “I don’t think I asked you, monkey!”

: So now we get to what the Harem Queen’s gimmick is.

: Mark, Nanjo, and Reiji are all turning to stone. I’d like to think that Reiji really wanted to just pop Chisato in the head with his gun, but since he has a rifle it’d be the hardest to do quickly.
: “Dammit! Even more moles! Turning them to stone was too nice… I should’ve made them suffer more!”
: “I’ll give you, and only you, one last chance, Jihei… which is better? My breathtaking painting, or Maki’s piece?”

: This is another one of those stupid “alignment” choices. We need to answer that Maki’s is better.

: However, there’s another thing this choice does. There’s actually two forms of the Harem Queen. The first happens if you say her painting is better. She’ll release the rest of the party, but has a slight stat boost and around twice as much HP. If you say that Maki’s is better, her stats are lower and her HP is cut in half… but you only get Maki and Jihei to fight her with. This is not going to be a problem.
: “I thought you would understand, Jihei, but I guess I was wrong. I’ll return this humiliation tenfold… you can turn to stone like the rest!”
: By the way, the manga makes this somehow more stupid by introducing the protagonist’s evil twin brother. I wish I was kidding, but I think even the manga artist realized how bad this shit is and was just making fun of it at that point.

: “Hey Queen, if you beat these guys up, I’ll fix your face back to normal!”
: “Really!? All right, I’ll do it! If that’s what Miss Angel wants, then the plan has changed. I’ll kill you all myself!”

: No matter which option you pick, the Harem Queen is a fucking joke. I took this first round using a bad formation (this is how the game puts you by default)…

: Before going into auto-battle and just having Maki and Jihei shoot her to death. The Queen’s only real attacks are a couple of spells and a physical attack that did a whopping 7 damage when she hit Jihei with it.

: That’s what you get for having your Persona be Goatse, you stupid bitch!

: “If you can’t win, I’m not gonna fix your face! Though I was never gonna do that anyway! Pbbbbt!”
: “Huh? Hey, wait… what do you mean!?”
: "Daddy called you a ‘ginnee pig’ and a ‘useless pon’! He said ‘even if Chisato loses, she’s not worth our trouble.’ "
: “So you can have fun staying that way as long as you live! Bye-bye!”

: “Chisato…! Just wait here for us. We’ll go catch that girl. And when we do, we’ll make her put your face back the way it was!”
: “Maki… you’re lying! Don’t feed me that crap! I know you think I deserve all this!”
: “I’m not lying, Chisato. I still like you… even now.”
: “You… like me…?”
: “Yep! You’re energetic, beautiful, fashionable, and self-possessed. I can tell what Yosuke sees in you.”
: “No! I’m… sure Yosuke still has a thing for you, Maki.”
: “…I’m sorry. I was so jealous of you, Maki. You say I’m self-possessed, but it’s just an act. The real me is helpless.”

: You know, Chisato has gotten more screen time than Reiji at this point. Also, she envied what? That Maki was dying of anime disease?
: “Chisato…”
: “Yosuke will hate me now. Then, you and him will…Yosuke…”
: “Oh… you’re so stubborn! Deep down, you really like Yosuke. But you don’t have to worry about me getting in the way. See…”
: Persona 1 definitely does not pass the Bechdel test.
: “Ack! What the…”

: “What happened to your face!? Did you get hurt!?”
: “No! Don’t look at me!”
: “Umm… what happened was, Aki put a curse on her, and…”
: “Maki! Are you trying to cover for me? No… not this time!”

: "I did terrible things… I was so cruel to Maki. This is my punishment!’
: “Chisato!”
: “I don’t deserve you, Yosuke! I’m a terrible person… even the face I was so proud of shows it.”
: “If people see you with me, they’ll laugh at you too. That’s why it’s okay if you want Maki instead! You always liked her, right?”
: “Yeah, I did like Maki… but that was in the past. I like you now, Chisato!”
: “Argh, listen to me…! This is so embarrassing! C’mon, let’s go.”
: “But… these moles will never come off, you know… you don’t care if your friends laugh at us?”
: Has it occurred to her that she could use the mirror to wish she didn’t have any moles?
: “Let 'em laugh! See if I care! You said you’re a bad person? Well, I’m no saint either. Don’t worry about it.”
: “Just be honest with me, like you were a second ago. I’m your boyfriend, Chisato… I don’t care what you look like, as long as you’re you.”

: I’d just like to say that the way the manga handled this was ALMOST better than the game. They were so goddamn close. Instead of the whole “love conquers all” bullshit, Chisato grabs a shard of the mirror (which the protagonist breaks) and slits her throat with it. That would have been a fucking perfect ending… except then Maki wishes so hard that she summons Tensen Nyannyan, a Persona whose level is so high that even Jihei’s too low to use it right now. Tensen Nyannyan then casts Samarecarm and saves Chisato, which pisses me off because god fuck. Way to make the death have an impact.
: “You’re right! This is wonderful… and I’m not talking about my face. I… always thought you still liked Maki, Yosuke.”
: Enough with the goddamn romance novel bullshit! Enough! Fuck! Fuck this game!

: “Whoa! Yosuke!? Hey… did your moles fall off, Chisato?”
: “Hrm… it seems things moved quickly while I wasn’t watching.”
: “Yosuke…? Hm. I see Chisato’s back to normal, too.”
: “I’m sorry, Maki… I was the one lying. Like you said, deep down, I like Yosuke.”
: “I’d hope you could forgive me… but I doubt it. I did want us to be friends again, though…”
: “Oh, come on! What’s to forgive?”

: “It seems Aki escaped… Chisato, do you know anything about a man named Kandori? He’s in league with Aki.”
: “I don’t know anyone named Kandori… but you know, that girl said that she lives in a castle.”
: “A castle? Say what?”
: “It’s not all that surprising. Though still a child, Aki’s powers are immense. Making a castle would be easy.”

: “Oh, I forgot to tell you, Chisato, but that Maki isn’t the Maki we know.”
: “Huh? …the real Maki is trapped inside the hospital. Is it right for me to be so blessed while Maki suffers?”
: “I’m sorry I was the cause of so much trouble for everyone. If I’d been a little more reliable, this wouldn’t have happened.”

: I like to think this is the developer apologizing for how much Kama Palace sucks. Speaking of sucks…

: Guess what? We get to walk all the way back to the start of the goddamn dungeon! Worse, I accidentally unequipped Quetzalcoatl while moving stuff around, so I couldn’t even use Traesto to escape.

: Thankfully, we still had that Emergency Exit I bought a bunch of updates ago. Next time, we’ll do something that hopefully sucks less than Kama Palace did.

: The manga does things a little differently - in the manga, the party isn’t aware of who the Harem Queen is right away because she wears a mask for no reason. The manga implies that Chisato isn’t aware of what the mirror is doing to her because it only shows her what she wants to see.

: This is the manga’s rendition of the boss room.

: And finally, Chisato as the Harem Queen. If that’s the best she can do, it’s no wonder Jihei was able to blast her down in like ten seconds.

[Timrod]

Guns in the Persona series just feels so off. Even the Evokers in 3 leave a weird taste. At least the mainline Megami Tensei games it feels more appropriate for an apocalyptic world feeling.

I think Persona 1 definitely has a different feel to it than the later games do: it’s a lot darker and also has a lot of weird body horror stuff in it (the Harem Queen as an example, but there’s some others) that are far more mainline SMT than what you’d see out of the later games. In fact, I was kind of surprised that they re-introduced guns (along with the Nuclear damage type, which left after Persona 2) in 5.

I do love that picture of Maki holding a gun and smiling. She’s not a great character but that is a great shot.

Maki in the manga is a bit more palatable - not much, but it’s at least clear that she’s a massive chuuni (and she knows it) rather than just another dipshit anime stereotype.

The monster namer must have really gotten confused if they named the fishman Yog-Sothoth Jr. when there IS a Yog-Sothoth Jr. in a different Lovecraft story.

Also for whatever reason the white-on-white Philemon subtitles keep making me think of Po’s speech in Kung Fu Panda 2, always cutting away to the emperor not being about to hear anything and going, “WHAT?”

I mean, at least it’s not as bad as Revelations: Persona where they had I think three different demons (Lilim was one of them) all named “Vixen”, because can’t have demons in a 90s game. I’m not entirely sure why they fixed it for Eternal Punishment, but my guess is because Revelations was a laughingstock even in 1996.

[LaZodiac]

once the apocalypse hits in that game, you can’t buy swords anymore.

This seems… so counter intuitive to how it’d actually be in real life. So weird.

What happens is that if they die, their Persona takes the hit for them and returns them to full HP… in exchange for the Persona de-ranking back to Rank 1. This shit was unacceptable, so I had to reset.

100% not your fault since this is a thing that should be shouted at you if you ever ended up getting it on a thing… but also good LORD that’s miserable an ability.

I feel like that’s a line a lot of those Persona 4 yaoi doujin authors said when they saw Persona 5.

I’m torn between my actual like, enjoyment of Brosuke as a character, and the fact that this is the funniest, most accurate thing I’ve ever heard you say.

[Timrod]

: While I was recording stuff for the main LP, I decided that I should probably do the pre-requisite grinding for the Snow Queen route, since we’re already about halfway through the SEBEC route at this point. I remembered this being real bad and taking hours upon hours when I played it the first time.

: Meet Naoya Toudou. Much like our friend Jihei, he is also a one-earringed high school boy with a Persona. Unlike Jihei, Naoya had to spend the first two hours of his game in Mikage Hospital.

: Specifically, at this part of Mikage Hospital, running back and forth in front of the doctor’s office.

: There’s two reasons we want to do this. First off, we NEED to be level 21 at a bare minimum before even considering going after the Snow Queen. Second, we want to do it here because of a couple of quirks of Persona 1 I’ve already show off: namely that any time a character leaves the party, they’ll automatically match the protagonist’s level when they return to the party and that the Persona awakening cutscenes (such as Elly’s in the hospital) give us exactly enough EXP to level up, regardless of what level we are.

: So anyway, the first half-hour or so is spent slowly and painfully having Seimen Kongou cast Garu on a single enemy at a time, until he eventually hits Rank 7 and learns Magaru, in which case you can wipe entire encounters with one press of the “auto” button. You’re probably going to want to go into the formation editor and specifically make an auto setup for this. The reason for that is…

: Pixies. Fuck Pixies. Pixies reflect wind, meaning that it’s likely Naoya will knock himself out if he casts Magaru while they’re around. The best thing to do is negotiate them away, because escape chances in this game are abysmal.

: This is Naoya at level 19. The EXP might not seem too bad, but this is from that six zombie encounter I posted above. All of the other random encounter types will give us FAR less experience, down to a minimum of around 50. This is why we want to hit 19 before even meeting Elly: because getting some 2700 experience from that cutscene is much better than getting 200 and having to grind out 2700 later.

: Eventually, we meet Elly and Naoya levels up to 20. You might realize this isn’t level 21, but that’s not a problem because we still have one more awakening cutscene: Brown’s. The reason this grinding is important, by the way, is that there are no random encounters in the hub area for the Snow Queen quest. If you haven’t grinded enough, you’re probably going to have to restart the game.

: Apart from being level 21, we also need two other things: around half a million yen and 19,000 casino coins. Ideally, we need to do this before we go to the Alaya Shrine for the first time.

: Even with all the encounters and selling the 37 QQ Helmets I picked up along the way, we’re still… several hundred thousand yen short. That’s fixable… I think. Maybe. We’ll see.

: So anyway, let’s tackle the casino coins next. Judgment 1999 is run by… apparently the Magypsies from Mother 3. Good to know they got another job.

: We need to spend 10,000 of our hard-earned yen buying around 100 casino coins. This can be done with less, but we want a bit of a buffer. Judgment 1999 has three games, but we only give a shit about two: Video Poker and Code Breaker.

: You might think that not being able to see the coin count is an emulator bug of some kind - it’s not. The PSP has a very bright screen and my capture card’s brightness settings were set too low.

: The rest of this is going to look like canned ass for a bit because I thought that there was some weird resolution problem. I’ve been playing the game in 4:3 to simulate a PS1, but the game runs at 16:9 on the PSP itself. I had to jack up the brightness a ton to even make the coin counter sort of visible. The game gives you a starting hand of 5 cards, you pick cards to keep and then get dealt up to 5 additional cards. Here, I got lucky and got a straight on my first hand.

: The reason everything is so blurry, by the way, is this is just how the PSP is when you put it in composite output mode. The component cables I have won’t work right for some reason, but it’s still blurry even with those. Anyway, after you win a hand you’re given a couple of options to increase your winnings. All the guides I’ve seen recommend picking High & Low.

: High & Low gives you a card and four face-down cards. Your goal is to try and find a card of a higher value - Joker always wins. Every time you do this, you double your winnings. Naturally, you can savestate your way through it, and I absolutely recommend doing so if you ever decide to do this yourself.

: Finally, there’s Code Breaker. Code Breaker is how you can grind a decent amount of money in the early-game, provided that you have the solver program someone made (which even then is not great). Unlike the other casino games, Code Breaker uses Metal Cards, which you can get as a drop off the zombies in the hospital.

: On a side note, I’m kind of amazed at how much Code Breaker looks like a Neo Geo game. Anyway, here’s how it works. First, you pick nine random numbers. The dickish part about this is that you have to use every number exactly once, but the game will accept your guess even if it’s not valid. Here, I just picked random numbers. You’ll notice that the first prize is a million casino coins. Your chances of winning that (without savestates) are approximately 1 in 8192.

: Each guess lowers the prize by a tier. Here, I got REALLY unlucky. The numbers in the “B” column indicate that you have the correct number in that row, but not in the right position. The “H” column indicates that you have the correct number and the correct position. This left us with… around 1600 solutions.

: Picking one of those at random gave me this, which is much better. The third prize is usually what the solver is going to get you, and that’s what we want. Divine Voices are a healing item that sell for 12,000 yen each, and you also get another Metal Card.

: With that, the solver gives us the right number - 924 156 837, and we win the third prize. The solver doesn’t always work this well - I’ve had it get down to like eight possible solutions after four tries, which can definitely happen if you’re unlucky enough.
: Anyway, my question for all of you is this. Does anyone care if I just put my save into an emulator and cheese the casino to get the 19,000 coins we need? I’ve done this on real hardware before, but it’s a pain in the ass.

• Cheese this shit, required casino grinding is bunk
• Don’t cheese ths shit

[LaZodiac]

Absolutely cheese it. This is one of those situations where the game is just bad and there’s no reason to suffer through this in order to get to the actual good bits.

[CommanderKeene]

Fuck terrible design decisions. The only thing worse than mandatory casino grinding is mandatory fishing minigames. This is a cheese% run.

[Timrod]

: Back in the SEBEC route where I haven’t spent like four hours grinding shit, we can head to where the hospital was. The trick to this (which I apparently failed to capture) is that you have to leave the Black Market heading North to get to the street that leads here.

: “Pbbbbbt! You can’t get in from here!”
: “If the one in the forest was here, yeah, but she’s too much of a scaredy cat. That’s how come no one can stop me and my Daddy!”

: I hope you’re ready for more padding, because we’re about to get a lot of that.
: “Ugh! Sheesh… she got away again.”
: “…”
: “Damn… it won’t even budge. Hey Nanjo, quit starin’ into space! Don’t you have a plan or somethin’?”
: “The girl placed something onto that pedestal. We won’t gain access without a key fitting this half-moon-shaped hollow.”

: “Judging by what she said, someone else must have it.”
: “Hey, open up right now!”
: “Urgh, another doohickey hunt?”
: I like Brown a lot.

: Yeah, I bet we’ll need three emblems and several card suite-shaped keys to get through that door.

: “Then let’s go back. We need to find whoever has that key.”
: “What!? We came all this way… and now we’re going BACK!? This is the worst!”
: “Uuugh… we have to go back? How about having the leader stay here to keep watch? No? Alright, fine…”

: Remember how we had to go all the way through the subway dungeon to get to this side of town? Guess what we get to do again!
: “Oh well. Guess we’ll go back… we gotta find whoever that brat was talking about.”
: “You better get out of the way. I’m going to destroy it.”
: “Whoa there, Reiji. This isn’t something you can just smash like that.”
: “You sure lose it when Kandori’s involved. Well, I’m not gonna ask. But man, you don’t have to carry whatever it is all by yourself.”
: “…”
: “Masao’s right, Reiji. We’re all in this together, after all.”

: Reiji really is just the Vincent Valentine of this game. Someday, when Atlus runs out of spinoff game ideas, I hope they make a Dirge of Cerberus clone with him in it.
: “Reiji! That’s not nice!”
: “It’s cool, Maki. Get disgusted or don’t, dude, but we have to go back together for now.”
: " 'Cause we’re all after the same thing. C’mon, Jihei, let’s go."
: I don’t know why, but this line reminds me of Knuckles in Tails Gets Trolled and now I’m picturing Mark hanging out with Knuckles and smoking Smart Weed ™.

: Out of curiosity, I went down to see if there was anything where the Abandoned Factory was. There’s nothing. However…

: We run into a new generation of beefed-up random encounters. These are among the most annoying in the game: Genkurou (up front) is extremely weak to gun damage. The only problem with that is that Carrie (middle row) reflects gun damage and you have no way of controlling which enemies your gun is going to target. Principality (in back) are just like the Archangels we fought previously and die very quickly to physical attacks.

: I’ll spare you seeing the subway again, but there’s some new and extremely dickish enemy encounters in here.

: First off are these little fuckers. Polisun have Mamagnara, the second-tier AOE earth spell. One thing I overlooked is that Mark’s Persona is extremely weak to Earth. This adds up to about a 1/4 chance each enemy turn that they cast Mamagnara and instantly kill Mark.

: Nozuchi here is a demon that underwent a major renovation between the time of Devil Summoner and Persona 1 and the more modern SMT/Persona games. It looks like this now:

: Weirdly, Nozuchi isn’t a Persona in this game, only a demon. He’s very weak to Jihei’s machine gun and that’s about it. I feel cheated that they only redesigned Nozuchi after this game because he’s about as close as you can get to having Gritty as a Persona. The reason he’s a snake, by the way, is that Nozuchi is another name for the Tsuchinoko.

: Finally, there’s these fuckers whose name I forget, but they also reflect gun.

: Anyway, after going back through the subway full of bullshit overpowered enemies, I decided I’d had enough of this shit and went to fuse some new Personas.

: The only problem is that all the Personas around our party’s level SUCK. Arianrhod is a perfect example: Mazan is a great starting move and it also learns Zionga and Zanma… but it has garbage stats and the same issues that Mark’s current Persona does.

: The same goes for Illuyanka - stats suck, has a 1.5x weakness to everything that isn’t physical, and only learns one decent spell. Poison Breath is kind of interesting because it does Nerve damage, but that’s not enough to save this thing from the junk heap.

: I did wind up fusing Aonbharr for Maki, simply because it sucks less than Pyro Jack. Look at that fucking Dexterity! Dexterity is the second best stat after Agility, and even its Agility isn’t that bad. The only thing that sucks is its low Magic Attack, but it starts with an AOE and also has Traesto. Eastern Impact isn’t half bad either, being effectively Mazanma but only hitting in an area as opposed to all enemies.

: I can’t do a Personalog for Aonbharr though as he has no official art. I also found no results when Googling his name that weren’t the Megami Tensei wiki, which states that he’s the horse of a Celtic sea god. His name means “Foam” in Celtic and he has the power to travel over anything. Basically he’s an equine ATV. My guess is you twist his ears like the throttle on a motorbike to make him go.

: “What a lonely forest… you’re not hurt, are you, Jihei? Hm? Why do I ask…? No particular reason… why? Did it sound like an odd question?”
: “It’s been a while since I saw this many trees in one place. Did you know this smell is called ozone?”
: There’s also different dialogue from Brown and Ayase if you talk to them coming back from the end of the update.
: “Hey Jihei, have you ever like, thought seriously about you future? I’ve… eh, never mind. Let’s not talk about that stuff… just forget it.”
: “That girl asked some pretty heavy stuff. I’m still kinda sorting it all out…”
: What’s Brown talking about? The worst part of this update. You’ll see.

: Here’s the Lost Forest, not to be confused with the Lost Woods, a wholly owned subsidiary of Nintendo. The Lost Forest only has one new gimmick, which isn’t even that bad but is slightly more annoying than when the same gimmick appeared in SMT1.

: The Lost Forest theme sounds a lot like the Hollow Forest bonus dungeon from P4 Golden and the winter music for P4 Golden in general, which makes sense given that they’re composed by the same person. My theory is that Shoji Meguro wanted to invoke unpleasant memories of Persona 1 in a dungeon associated with the absolute worst character Atlus has ever made, so that people who played this would realize that Marie is trash.

: There’s also some new enemies. It’s really impressive that Duergar are in this game, given that they originated in Charles Barkley: Shut Up and Jam Gaiden… which didn’t release for more than a decade after Persona 1. I swear, Atlus must have psychics working for them. Duergar are known for two things: mining and their love of Japanese culture. Charles Barkley brokered a peace agreement between them and Square-Enix-Goya in order to obtain the Shrekmono, a legendary Shrek-themed kimono made by the Duergar.

: There’s also Picollus, which is a blatant palette swap. These things helped me discover the fact that you’re locked from getting spell cards from any of the demons in the forest right now: Jihei can negotiate with these (or should be able to) but I kept getting the “Sorry you’re not high enough level” error when I tried to get a card off them.

: The Lost Forest’s gimmick, by the way, are spinners. Spinners are a holdover from Wizardry 1, where they were probably the largest source of people quitting that game. In this game, they dump you off one tile to the right of their position from where you stepped on them: you can see the footsteps coming from that save room on the minimap and going into the spinner.

: There’s only a handful of spinners in the Lost Forest, and I have to question why Atlus brought them back. In Wizardry, they only worked because you couldn’t tell that they were spinning you around. SMT1 made them even more trivial by making them not actually dump you anywhere - all you had to do was turn a few times and head to your intended destination. In this game, it means a few extra steps.

: Eligor. FUCK Eligor. This asshole was the bane of my existence in Persona 5. In this game, he’s a generic-ass enemy who is weak to Nuclear damage and Maki’s handgun for some reason. I edited the formation here to move Maki up so she can hit them with her gun.

: The entire Lost Forest is pretty boring design-wise, and I’ll let you in on a little secret as to why: we’ll be back here later. At the end, past a small spinner section, is a gingerbread house.

: “Hey, isn’t that the ghost who showed up at the Historical Society? Is she friends with that brat in black!?”

: “Hey now, don’t cry. Are you little Mai?”
: sniffle “Yes…”
: “Whoa! She has a half-moon shaped compact! It looks a lot like mine…”
: Because this game’s graphics suck, I’ll explain that Mai was the little ghost girl that appeared in the intro cutscene and zapped everyone. She’s also presumably the ghost that the SEBEC employees were seeing.
: “That must be the castle’s key. But who are these children…?”
: “Hey Mai, you know that girl Aki? Is she a friend of yours?”
: “No! She’s not my friend! She’s Mai…”

: “What!? What does that mean?”
: “I was lonely… that’s when Kandori came. Then she came out of me and left with Kandori. She knows Kandori isn’t our real Daddy…”
: Gee, Maki, how come your dad lets you have TWO shadows?
: “Hmm… So she’s a separate personality that split off… What is that compact?”
: “It’s my treasure. It grants wishes. I used it to make this town.”

: “Unbelievable… this small child was the creator of an entire world?”
: “Seriously!? Can I have that!?”
: “Wow! You’re like a magical girl. I could use one of those compacts myself!”
: I really, really wish we could’ve saved Reiji for the Snow Queen.

: “Yes. This little girl was this world’s creator.”
: “Can’t you use the compact to catch Aki and Kandori, or send everyone home?”
: Or make this game suck less?
: “No… Aki took half of it. I know she’s using the other half to do mean things… my wishes just get canceled out. That’s how come I’m hiding here.”
: This is the part I really don’t get. Aki can cancel Mai’s shit, but Mai can’t just do the same to Aki? I mean, I get that this is kind of an Akira ripoff and if the Kaneda (Mai in this case) has superpowers the same way the Tetsuo (Aki) does it kind of ruins the dynamic but still.
: “But we can’t get to Kandori without it. Can’t we borrow it for a while?”
: “No! You can’t! That’s what Kandori wants!”

: So uh, here’s where I spoil the game just a little bit and say that both routes in Persona 1 have two endings, a “good” and a “bad” ending. I won’t touch on what the Snow Queen route’s is (it’s equally dumb) but the SEBEC route’s ending choice is right here, and it’s super fucking dumb.

: Mai asks us a series of questions, which we need to answer like we’re a goddamn anime protagonist. I’ve highlighted the right answers.
: “Jihei is right. Hiding from your problems won’t solve them. You have to meet them head on!”
: sniffle “Why…?”

: We do it for everyone because we’re fucking Kamen Rider now.
: “Gaaaah! We don’t have time for this philosophical crap! We gotta go back to our world and save someone.”
: This is the exact line I was screaming the entire time I was recording the YIIK LP, only without the second part.
: “C’mon, please let us borrow that thing! From the looks of it, she’s…”
: “She’s already dead?”
: “H-Hell no! She’s alive for sure! Look, anyway…”

: If I was in this situation, right around here I’d be screaming “Life is pain! Make it rain!” and then just pull out the SMG and start blasting the roof.
: “Uh…”
: “…”
: “…”

: “Why…?”
: “What a yucky girl.”
: “…That’s one heavy question.”

: “What about you, mister? What are you living for?”

: That is the dumbest, most anime fuck line ever and I feel like saying it should put Jihei in the hospital with whatever dumbass anime disease Maki has.
: “Jihei is right. There is sweetness in life.”

: “I agree. It’s just as Jihei says. Life isn’t all pain. There are joys to be had during one’s life, too.”
: “Yeah, Jihei is prolly right. Life can be fun, y’know! It’s been a while since I thought about that kinda stuff, but life’s pretty good!”
: “Yeah, that’s right! Listen to this guy. There’s fun stuff in life, if you look for it. I don’t usually think about this stuff, but yeah, life is good sometimes!”

: “What a strange kid… it’s a tough question, but life isn’t so bad.”

: “Sweet! Thanks, Mai! Let’s wish right now for it to send us to Kandori!”
: Was he not paying attention?
: “You can’t. Only I can use it. And the castle is Aki’s home, so my wishes won’t work on it.”

: “Thank you! Let’s wish right away for it to take us to Kandori!”
: “Now you’re talking! So like, what should I wish for first?”
: “Woohoo! Alright, what should my first wish be?”
: If you’re using Ayase or Brown, Nanjo has an additional line as well.
: “Now’s not the time for selfishness, you simpleton. Have it take us to Kandori.”
: “What!? But I had so many wishes… this sucks!”
: “Aww… I had a bunch of wishes.”

: “Can I see that compact, Jihei? Wow… it’s only half of the whole thing, but it’s the same as mine. Though mine doesn’t have a mirror like this one.”
: “Well, wishes are supposed to be things you grant for yourself, after all. It would be boring if everything all went the way you wanted it to.”
: “…That was one hell of an answer.”
: “When I was little, I pretended the mirror in my house was magic. I’d make wishes to it too, like to become a beautiful girl everyone loved.”
: Elly really is this game’s Yukiko, by which I mean the only female character I don’t hate. Well, her and Yukino.
: “Man, this bites. I had a ton of wishes all lined up.”
: “Aww, but I wanted so much stuff! You’ll buy them for me, right Jihei?”
: I hate Ayase so very, very much.

: Oh boy, more backtracking! This isn’t getting old at all. Anyway, what if instead of being as anime as possible, we ruined Mai’s hopes and dreams?

: Basically, this is the only warning you get that you’re headed for the bad ending. This is admittedly much more warning than you get in Persona 4 when you’re in a similar situation.

: At the end, assuming you have at least one answer wrong, Maki will step in and ask you if that’s really what you meant. Persona 4 REALLY could’ve used this in that situation, instead of waiting until the last day to ask me if I’m really, really sure I want to go back to Junes. Honestly, that and the “then who’s the real killer?” part were the worst parts of P4 for me. At least in the base game you had the clue of it being pretty much the only person on the list who you don’t have an S-Link with.

: “This is going nowhere. We’re begging you here! Please let us borrow it!”
: “If you won’t, I’m gonna have to give you a spanking, got it?”

: So, you might’ve asked yourself where the boss fight in the forest is. The answer is that on the good ending path, you skip it. On the bad ending, however…

: Mr. Bear is a total pushover of a boss fight, which I suppose is the game’s way of telling you that you’ve fucked up. He is very weak to five things: Nuclear damage, Blast damage, Wind, Fire, and Gun.

: Mark in particular can hit the boss for around 250 damage, far more than the 80-100 that everyone else hits for. Mr. Bear is honesty so easy that I just set the game to auto and waited for a few minutes.

: “Waaaaaaaaah! Now no one will be my friend!”

: We have effectively murdered Mai. She never shows up again on the bad ending route as far as I know. Naturally, I’ll go back to the good ending route for the rest of the LP and probably just find a video somewhere of the bad ending since I don’t feel like playing through this route twice, even from this far in. Next time, we’ll raid Mana Castle and hopefully kill Aki off.