: “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!?”
: “…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.”
: “…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.”
: “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?"
: “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!”
: “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…”
: “Oh man, you think there really is a way to go back?”
: “Jihei! You better find a way back!”
: “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.”
: “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.”
: “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…?”
: “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!”
: “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…”
: “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.”
: “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?”
: “I see.. I’m sorry to ask such an odd question, then.”
: “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!”
: 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 --”
: “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:
: “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.