: “…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?”
: “No… I… feel faint…!”
: “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!?”
: “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!”
: “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’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.”
: “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…”