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.
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.
I do love that picture of Maki holding a gun and smiling. She’s not a great character but that is a great shot.
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.
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?”
: 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.
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.
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.
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.
This seems… so counter intuitive to how it’d actually be in real life. So weird.
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’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.
: 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.
0 voters
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.
Fuck terrible design decisions. The only thing worse than mandatory casino grinding is mandatory fishing minigames. This is a cheese% run.
: 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.
There’s a good chance the “Lost Forest” actually does have the same name in Japanese as Zelda’s Lost Woods. It’s actually a fairly common name for “forest maze” levels in video games, and gets translated in a lot of different ways, from Zelda’s “Lost Woods”, to “Lostlorn Forest” in Pokemon, to “Phantom Forest” in Final Fantasy, and more.
And IIRC, at least the “true killer” scene in P4 had a big dialogue box saying “THIS SCENE IS GOING TO BE IMPORTANT. THINK CAREFULLY BEFORE YOU MAKE CHOICES.” or something to that effect right before you enter Namatame’s room. I think it even allowed you to save?
It did. It also is like, not THAT hard to figure out the right answers if you’re thinking about it, and have been paying attention.
: In recording this update, while looking for a map, I found something out. Basically, we’re MASSIVELY underlevelled. We should be around 40 at this point, but three out of our five party members are under 30.
: Thankfully, Maki’s new Persona can Traesto us out of the Lost Forest so we don’t have to backtrack. Anyway, I blame two things for why the party is underlevelled. The first is the stupid EXP system that ensures only the fastest party members are any good. The second is that Persona 1 doesn’t really put up any walls to ensure that you’re staying at the right level. It’s a pretty goddamn easy game.
: We can now negotiate with the demons around the Lost Forest, but this won’t matter because they jump about eight levels as soon as we get anywhere near Mana Castle, and none of the Personas we can fuse are worth a damn.
: See, that’s another problem this game has. At this point, I’m just gunning down every encounter like it’s SMT1, only pulling out Personas if something reflects gun damage.
: The Black Market also gets new armor and guns, which I grinded to be able to buy for everyone. The Jagd headgear in particular is a huge upgrade:
: At this point, our characters might as well be invulnerable to physical damage, Jihei in particular.
: I also grinded (offscreen) to buy five sets of Cupid Rounds, which have a chance of charming enemies. These make the next dungeon a joke, as well as giving us a significant boost to gun damage.
: Just outside the Black Market, we run into the bane of my goddamn existence in the upcoming dungeon: Yaka. Yaka reflects gun damage.
: Even being this stupid, I didn’t game over, mostly because Mark’s gun is so weak that it can’t kill him on a reflect.
: I don’t even know why I’m talking about any of the demons here, because most of them go down just fine to guns and we can’t negotiate with them.
: I also stopped and fused a new Persona for Jihei that I never wound up equipping. You can fuse Personas up to 10 levels higher than you are, but can’t equip them unless your P-Level is high enough.
: “Wait a second, Jihei…”
: " 'Sup, Nanjo?"
: “… It’s nothing. Carry on.”
: “Man, you’ve always been weird, but it’s really ramped up lately. You’ve been acting funny for a while now.”
: “…Don’t worry about it.”
: “Heh! You heard him, Jihei. Go right ahead.”
: “I’m sure Kandori is laughing himself hoarse right now.”: “What do you mean?”: “Kandori wanted that compact. Since Mai wouldn’t come out, he needed someone to get it and bring it to him. We were his patsies.”: Here’s what I don’t get at all about this. Kandori at this point can just summon demons to do his bidding. Why not just dial up Lucifer and have him kill Mai?: “What? That scumbag! Wait, if you knew, why didn’t you tell us!?”: “Because it’s still the only way to get to him.”: “Why, though? If he just needed the compact, why would he let us in?”: “He’s inviting us in. He has a rather high opinion of himself…”: So… Mana Palace. Mana Palace is very long and very boring - there’s no gimmicks to this dungeon apart from it being a maze. Thankfully, whoever made those Japanese maps made one for here.
: You’ll notice that there’s green text on the second floor indicating an item room in an area that isn’t on the path to the boss. I went there first - up the northeastern stairs (#2) then to where that room is.
: We also run into a new enemy type, Ocelot. Ocelot is weak to basically everything that isn’t Fire, which he reflects. Honestly, I feel like he’d be weakest to people misusing revolvers and also Gay damage. Someday I want to see a Persona spinoff where every Persona is a gender.
: Ran into some dragons along the way, but they’re weak to Charm.
: Anyway, this is that treasure room. It has NOTHING GOOD in it, just basic healing items that we already have a million of. There’s exactly one, maybe two treasures in this entire dungeon worth getting, and they’re both on the direct route to the boss.
: One Traesto and some walking later and we’re back where we should be. You have to go to the Northeastern stairs to get to the Southeastern ones that will actually let you make progress.
: Along the way, we run into Jinn. Jinn are absolutely not in this game solely because Aladdin came out four years earlier and was still popular at the time. They’re weak to rifles, but are absolute assholes if not charmed or taken down quickly as they have Mamagnara which can instakill Mark.
: This staircase in the center (#5) is the only one that doesn’t result in a dead end. Like an idiot, I went for the second treasure room in the bottom-right corner of Floor 5, which you have to do this long circuitous route to get to.
: These are called Tisiphone and die to guns because Personas in this game are a liability. Persona 1 is not a game about Personas, Persona 1 is a game about guns.
: Oh hey, it’s Orthrus! You know what my favorite thing about him is? How he’s in every Persona game and at no point is ever worth using.
: Along the way, Jihei finally maxes out his Agility, making him the fastest thing in this game. I’m not sure why I put the points into Dexterity, because I’m pretty sure there’s some kind of cap for how much your stats boost your defenses and we’ve already reached it.
: I don’t know why they bothered putting a room full of these in here, because honestly one Rattle Drink will put Jihei back at full.
: The White Tablet gets us the ability to fuse Byakko, who is actually a pretty okay Persona. Unfortunately, he’s also Level 39.
: Okay, time to do this bullshit one more time, after using Traesto to warp back to the start because it’s still faster than walking to the boss from that treasure room.
: On Floor 4, we hit a Dark Room. I’m amazed that Atlus had the restraint not to put spinners or damage floors in here. In fact… I don’t think I’ve seen a single damage floor in the entire game.
: Yaksini here inhabits the fourth and fifth floors, but I’ve only seen her on the side with the dark rooms. Here, she’s not bad - has… I want to say Megido, but honestly I just gunned them down and/or charmed them before they could do much. When we see her in the Snow Queen quest… that’s a different story.
: The fifth floor is a carbon copy of the fourth, complete with a dark room in the exact same place.
: Gasp. I knew this because it’s like, the first line of Reiji’s page on the Megami Tensei wiki, where I got his portrait from.
: “You may be the child of Father’s mistress, but Kandori blood flows through you.”
: “Reiji…? You’re that slimebag’s brother!?”: “Shut up! My name’s Kido! Reiji Kido! This is for my mother – the woman your dad used and threw away like a dirty rag! This wound will never forget!”: It’s about here that I realized that Reiji makes no sense as a character. He hates Kandori… because Kandori’s dad was an asshole.
: So, uh… while working on this update, someone pointed out that there’s actually slightly different dialogue in a lot of scenes if you have someone else as your fifth party member. From this update forward (and I’ll go back to the relevant scenes if I can find them for the previous updates) I’m going to include alternate text in relevant cutscenes. Obviously, Reiji’s scene here is the most relevant.
: “Looks like this is it, Mr. Kandori.”
: “You low-down, dirty coward! I’ll shove your dirty tricks down your throat!”
: “Hey, give us that compact back! I need it for… uh… stuff!”
: “Hmph… Nonsense. Take your grievance up with my father’s grave.”
: “Kandori!”
: “What a bothersome dog. Muzzle him, Aki.”
: “Reiji!”: “You’ve messed with us one too many times!”: “Is that Mai’s compact?”: “Hmh. Youth oft destroys itself… a common failing of headstrong boys.”: “Aki! He’s not your daddy. Don’t you know that!? Give that compact back!”: “Pbbbbbt! You can’t hurt Daddy!”: “The two compacts reunite in my hands… I have you to thank, young man.”: “You snake… what’s your plan for the compact!?”: “Show them, Aki.”: “Okay, Daddy! Erusaer Tsymmom!”
: This is kind of like that scene in Tails Gets Trolled with the blank piece of paper.
: “It’s my ambition given shape… now witness its power!”
: “Wh… what is that…? Don’t tell me that’s our town…”
: “It’s my new castle… I call it Deva Yuga. A worthy name for something that will usher in a new, shining era.”
: “Ngh… you little…!”
: “Oh my God…”
: “gulp The whole town disappeared…”
: “No way… did all those people die!?”
: “Kandori, you devil…”
: “I can’t believe you did that…”
: “How exquisite… it’s no mere compact. You’ve all seen its majestic power! I’ve acquired the power to make my desires reality… power over the dimensions without need for the Deva System!”: “Yes… I’m starting to see now. The compacts and the Deva System were only laying the groundwork. Now…”: “I will become a god on Earth. And a god has only one duty…”: Gotta love how Kandori is just YHVH or Mastema. Thousand year kingdom of God, make humanity my slaves, etc etc.: “I get it… you’re planning on annihilating humanity!”: “Like hell!”: “I won’t allow it, Kandori!”: “Such senseless defiance…”: You can’t see it very well due to the bad graphics, but Kandori raises his hand and suddenly Nanjo and Mark are in their low-HP battle sprite the way Reiji is (or that Elly/Ayase/Brown would be).: “Masao! Kei!”: “I’ll now return to the real world. Do you despise me? If so, then follow me there… after defeating this!”: I take it back, Kandori isn’t YHVH, he’s Mr. Big from Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker.: “Ngh…”: “You son of a…”: “Objects of one’s desire cannot be easily obtained. But the joy of overcoming obstacles to obtain them is the highest bliss… so says your new god!”: Unfortunately, the text dump I found doesn’t seem to have anything anyone says in battle in it, so I have no idea if the other possible party members have alternate text here.: Oh god it’s Sonic Adventure 2 all over again. You faker!: The gimmick to Saurva is that Nanjo, Mark, and whoever your fifth party member is start the fight at a quarter of their normal HP.: Officially, Saurva is weak to fire and wind. Unofficially, he takes somewhere between 1.25x and 1.5x damage from guns of all varieties. I had Nanjo and Mark set to heal Reiji and Jihei and Maki set to gun mode.: His attacks consist of Magnara (single-target Earth damage) which is what nearly killed Mark in this shot, as well as Makajam (AOE silence) and a weak physical attack.: Now, here’s where shit goes south and I wish I had grinded enough to equip Hermodr. You see, one of Saurva’s attacks (which he doesn’t seem to use often) is Mamagnara. Jihei, Maki and Mark are all weak to Earth. Nanjo absorbs it because he has Lilim and Reiji is neutral to it but has low magic defense.: Thankfully, I was able to get Jihei back up in time to finish the boss off.: “If we don’t hurry and catch that scumbag, things are gonna get out of hand!”: “There must be a way! That’s the kind of bastard he is! He’s still toying with us. I’m not giving up until my hands are around that bastard’s neck!”
: So, you might be asking what happens in this fight if you don’t have Reiji with you. Reiji will still show up, but will be knocked out by Kandori before the fight begins.
: “Yo, Reiji, you still alive?”
: “Ngh… where is he?”
: “You dummy… we told you, you couldn’t do it alone. He went back to our world.”
: “Then what are you waiting for!? Hurry after him!”
: “But how…? We haven’t any means of returning to our world!”
: “We can’t! How the hell do we beat a guy with that kind of power? Never mind that, how do we even get back to our world!?”
: “Just like that, huh? How do you suggest we get back, call a cab!?”
: I mean, it worked for the protagonist in Persona 4, only he got a limo.
: “Reiji’s right. There must be some way… heh. For once, we’re in agreement.”
: “…Yeah.”
: “Maybe there… the place where there were rumors of people being spirited away.”
: So, this is a weird script error where I guess the writers just kinda forgot that Maki is from a different universe than everyone else. The haunted mansion is actually where the SEBEC building was, and doesn’t exist in the actual Mikage-cho.: "Maki… it’s our world’s problem now. You can go back home.: “No! I’m not going to be the only one who has to sit back and watch!”: “I like this town! I like all of you! I like… me! And I can’t just stay quiet and watch the things I like be destroyed! It’s just not something I would do!”: “The things we like, huh…? Looks like no one has any complaints.”Next time, we’ll do the Haunted Mansion. I’ll also be going back and adding the additional party member dialogue to the previous updates over time, so if you’re curious about that be sure to go back and check it!
Hey everyone, a quick addendum to the last update. A person by the name of Piyotr on Discord told me about how there’s actually alternate dialogue if you picked a fifth character who isn’t Reiji. This caused me to look up the game script, since obviously I didn’t feel like playing through Kama Palace another three times.
As it turns out, there’s actually a good deal of optional dialogue in this game - anytime you’re in a room with your party members, you can talk to them. The thing is that the game makes this seem unimportant: in about 50% of cases, your party members will simply tell you where the next objective is. However, there’s a few cases where there’s actually character building dialogue going on.
Therefore, from Update 11 on (and eventually going back) you’ll start seeing these banners:
The first one is for the dialogue we’d get in cutscenes if we had a different fifth party member, while the red optional dialogue box denotes optional dialogue from talking to your party members outside of combat. The second one will include dialogue from Reiji in the SEBEC route.
These changes will probably start immediately after Update 5, as it’s impossible to have any fifth party member before then. As of this post, I’ve already gone back and changed Update 10 slightly, and will go backwards from there. This might make things sound a little weird, but that’s because I’m updating these things after the fact - if you’re reading this after I’ve made the changes, anything not enclosed in these banners is from the original update.
Maybe the SEBEC building is new in the original world and it just never replaced the Haunted Mansion in alt-Maki’s world? Mark could have played there as a child, before the mansion got knocked down and replaced with a corporate building. There was a large empty field next to my house for years where my siblings and I used to play before somebody went and built a bank on the property.
I actually went back and looked using the Snow Queen save file, and as it turns out there actually IS a haunted mansion on the map: it’s near the school and isn’t named “haunted mansion” and you have no reason to ever visit it on either route.
: The Haunted Mansion is just south of the Black Market, but instead of… I dunno, making it so we can just get there, we have to go all the way around the map.
: This is where the game’s garbage EXP system really starts fucking me over, and I kind of wish I had just done this playthrough on an emulator. What I’d like to see is how long this game takes to finish if you remove all the grinding.
: Immediately, we run into one of the two extremely annoying encounters in this area. This is another reason Persona 1 is badly designed: if you’re already underlevelled, there’s no way in hell you’re going to do any meaningful grinding here. Celaeno here is a giant piece of shit that resists everything to some degree and likes to spam Mabufula, which can kill Mark in two hits.
: Our first trip in the Haunted Mansion is to a side room off to the left. The Haunted Mansion is largely very straightforward, just long and tedious as hell unless you’ve spent hours and hours grinding.
: What we’re doing here is going up the stairs labelled with a 2, in order to reach a room that has a Vitality incense in it.
: It was around here that I found out how demon negotiations actually work.
: Yaksini here is level 38. Jihei at this point is level 42, with a Persona level of around 40. We should absolutely be able to negotiate with Yaksini… except I couldn’t. This is because as it turns out, your negotiation level limit is not based on the level of the character doing the negotiating (which would make sense) but on the average level of your party.
: Now, let’s do some math. I believe that at this point, the levels were as follows:
This gives us an average party level of 36, and an average Persona level of 35. The problem here is Mark. Everything here can kill Mark in one hit, and Mark is a total piece of shit all around: his gun sucks, his Persona sucks, he’s slow as shit, and there’s very little I can do to make him suck less as all the Personas I can fuse are garbage. This will improve somewhat in the next dungeon, but for right now we have to suffer.
: Unfortunately, the text dump I have doesn’t have any of the text that happens in this room, so I have no way of getting the alternate party member dialog for this spot. I also didn’t capture the party’s dialog because I assumed it’d be in the dump, but I can tell you that it’s mostly Nanjo asking why none of the scientists here are taking responsibility for the whole alternate universe fiasco and everyone else repeating him.
: By the way, there’s also a new chest trap for this room, just because.
: Just outside the treasure room, since I walked back to try and get some more EXP for our non-Mark party members, we run into more new enemies. Zombie Painter is immune to guns, but weak to most elements.
: There’s also Sumizome, who mostly just sits back and spams single-target magic. They’re very weak to status effects, meaning our charm bullets work pretty well against them.
: Finally, there’s Alastor. Alastor is a piece of fucking shit and the reason this dungeon sucks to grind in. Alastor has an attack called Hell Eyes that attempts to instantly kill the entire party. Nanjo is immune to it because of Lilim, but no one else is.
: Going around the right side of the first floor, you go past a save room and then into one of the three dark areas in this dungeon. These aren’t too bad - if you look on the map you can see that they’re pretty linear.
: I really want to know how Kandori convinced so many scientists to go through the Deva System. You’d think after the first group doesn’t come back, the second group wouldn’t go in.
: The second floor is largely more of the same: you have to take the long way around and there’s a dark room in the middle.
: Finally, the third floor is a small dark room maze before reaching the boss room.
: “Did you just hear it say ‘Maki’? Hmm… it sounded rather like Maki’s mother to me.”
: “I’ve been telling you, I don’t have a mom!”
: Yes Maki, we all understand you were hatched because you’re a horrible fucking gremlin. Now if you and Mark would kindly fuck off so our average party level goes up. Maybe take Nanjo with you.
: “The door doesn’t seem locked… what should we do, Jihei? It may be a trap. Should we go in?”
: This is probably THE most nonsense scene in the entire game.
: “That voice… there’s no mistaking it. It’s Maki’s mother!”
: “Maki! It’s no use… it seems that the demon is controlling her… I know the voice is unquestionably Maki’s mother’s… but you can’t trust that! Let’s get the first strike, Jihei!”
: “Dude, Jihei, what do we do!? That demon’s gonna kill Maki! We gotta defeat it, now!”
: “Well, what’s it gonna be, Jihei!? That monster could kill Maki! Let’s get it already!”
: The correct answer here, even though it absolutely would not be in any other SMT game, is to lower your weapons. Unfortunately, I kind of forgot to capture the actual bossfight if you choose to do it, but rest assured it’d just be Jihei spamming his gun at it until it dies.
: Anyway, to understand why it’s the correct answer (apart from the incredibly stupid twist), you’d need to have played SMT 1 or 2. In both of those games, one of the options that comes up during negotiations is to lower your weapon. This almost NEVER works - with most demons, doing this is a surefire way to fail. Hariti was one of the demons (at least, I think she was) where this option worked.
: I should mention as well that this is a reference to the mythology that Hariti comes from. Originally, Hariti was a child-eating demon in whatever form of paganism they practiced in Pakistan. When Buddhist missionaries arrived in Pakistan, they changed the Hariti myth to a story where the Buddha kidnaps one of her kids and hides them under a rice bowl, causing Hariti to convert to Buddhism and become associated with child-rearing. Shit’s weird.
: Hariti then becomes Setsuko Sonomura, because… I dunno.
: “Oh, it’s the haunted mansion. I was just having a dream about this place…”
: Maybe I’m dumb, but that line just seems kind of nonsensical.
: “See? Maki’s mom doesn’t exist in this world, so this has to be her! But what’s she doing here…?”
: “You okay, lady?”
: “Yes… I’m all right… Maki used to get lost at this haunted mansion often when she was little…”
: Even Maki’s mother wants to get rid of her. This strikes me as a “Oh, hello officer, yes I’m aware Maki is probably at the haunted mansion again, no I don’t know how she keeps getting out or where she finds the money for the bus or why there’s a sign saying ‘if lost, please send to nearest orphanage’ sign on her back” situations.
: “I’m used to looking for her here. I was just dreaming about those days…”
: “I was searching for her in this huge mansion, and I heard Maki call to me. I don’t remember anything after that.”
: “But why don’t I exist here…?”: The next time you’re having an awkward conversation with a family member about why they don’t exist, just tell them the dimensional passageway is about to disappear.: “I’m sorry, lady, but we have to chase down Kandori.”: “Alright. Just give me one moment! The dimensional passageway is very unstable right now. Someone has to stay here and operate the machine.”: “What? No…! We can’t leave anyone here!”: “I’ll do it! Don’t worry… go ahead on your own. Though I’d be grateful if you came to get me when this is all over with.”: “Miss…”: “Yes? Speak quickly, there isn’t much time.”: “Yes… please do. Thank you…”: So now we’re in Deva Yuga. I’d like to skip the next cutscene (you’ll see it next update) and talk briefly about how I’m planning to try and grind a bit to get our party level high enough to negotiate again.
: The first floor of Deva Yuga is all shops: there’s a Velvet Room (second door on the right), Trish’s Spring, and General Store all in this hallway. The most important part of that is Trish’s Spring, since most of the Personas we have equipped right now have a very high SP cost for what they do.
: The first thing I realized is that we had a better Persona option the entire time that I never bothered to look at for some reason. Azrael is basically Lilim, only he nulls magic instead of absorbing it. I fuse him immediately and then pass down the older Personas: Nanjo gets Hermodr and Mark gets Lilim. The challenge here is that Azrael has a really shitty moveset, but I offset this a bit by giving him a Megidola stone I found, which will allow him to make use of that relatively high magic stat.
: My goal here is to get Azrael to Rank 7, then make an auto-battle setup that consists of Jihei using Tarukaja and then letting Mark and Maki get all the kills. Azrael is also compatible with Nanjo and Mark, so we can pass him down once we can start negotiating again.
: You might’ve noticed that there was more time than usual between the last update and this one. I’ll explain a little bit about why that is as we get into the dungeon, but the gist of it is that levelling in this game sucks.
: “Hurgh… I feel sick. You must be tougher than you look, Jihei…”
: Says the dipshit I had to spend like three hours grinding just to get him to somewhere close to Jihei’s level.
: cough “Probably because it was a forced teleportation. Really, we should count ourselves lucky we came through in one piece.”
: “Ngh… what’s with you, Masao…? You look ridiculous.”
: “Heh… might want to look in a mirror, Reiji. You’re blue as a zombie.”
: “Heh. If you can make jokes about it, you’ll be fine. Let’s get back on track.”
: “Can you stand up, Maki?”
: “Ngh… up we go! I’m okay now.”
: This is where I wish the website hadn’t fucked spacing up for text, because next part is going to kinda suck. There’s three different scenes depending on who you pick, so I’ll split them up with my Mr. Saturn here.
: “Maki, Elly, can you stand up?”: “Are you okay, Elly?”: “Ngh… thanks, Maki. I’m all right now.”: Next up is Brown’s.: “Get a grip, Hidehiko. You’re the leader, aren’t you?”: “S-Sure I am! I was just messing around with you guys. I’m totally fine, just watch me! Grrrr!”: “How was that!? A leader’s gotta lead! Repeat after me! Hehe… just kidding.”: “Haha… you’re so funny, Hidehiko.”: “I know, right? I’m a total stud! Good looks AND a great sense of humor! My only rival is Nakai from the Judas Brothers!”: “A certain guy in a knit cap can’t beat me. Yeah, you know what I’m talking about, Maki!”: “What an idiot…”: Finally, Ayase’s.: “Are you okay, Yuka?”: “Grgh… Blaaaaaagh…”: “Ew… gross!”: “Shuddup… I’m clean!”: “Here, Yuka, use my handkerchief.”: “…Thanks, Maki.”: As a small side note, there is a VERY slight difference if you don’t have Reiji with you here - Maki will notice Dr. Nicholai instead of Nanjo. The line is almost the same, except Maki’s is “It’s that old scientist!”.: “Hey, the old dude survived!”: “Something seems weird about him, though.”: I swear, you leave someone alone for five minutes in the Shin Megami Tensei universe and suddenly they’ve been brainwashed and are screaming for the thousand year kingdom of God. The Messians were a mistake.: “Dude, what’s gotten into you!? C’mon, why’re you talking like Kandori?”: I really have to say I don’t get Kandori’s motivation. Doing the whole “kill all the humans” thing makes sense when it’s Lucifer or the Demiurge or YHVH or whatever the Christian God calls itself in any given game, but it doesn’t make sense when the character wanting to kill off and/or enslave humanity is human.: “Kandori!?”: “What the hell are you talking about!?”: “You madman… have you brainwashed the entire globe with that mirror?”: The manga does a weird thing here where it kind of melds this and the cutscene that happens at the end of Deva Yuga, and it’s the point at which the author kind of realizes that Jihei isn’t his own character and lets Nanjo be the protagonist for the rest of the story.: “That’s preposterous!”: “All I need to do now is give the order for them to kill each other… and everything will be over. A fitting end for a species of fools.”: I honestly want to ask the writer for this game how Kandori as a character makes any sense. I feel like at one point he was meant to actually be YHVH in disguise or something, and they just kind of forgot.: “Nothing else will be hurt. Only mankind will be wiped from this planet.”: “But why!? Why do you want to do this to people?”: “Hah… that sounds rather unlike you… Maki Sonomura.”: “The mirror’s power affects all. You children are no exception. Can you still reach me where I await? Hahaha…”: “Oh, we’ll reach you, you bastard! Let’s go, Jihei!”: “Wait!”:Let’s go, Jihei!": “Wait, you coward! Dammit! Follow me, everyone!”: “Hold it!”: “Don’t just stare into space, Jihei! We gotta hurry or my future’s gonna be wiped out! So let’s go after him already!”: There’s a little bit of optional text here, but most of it is various forms of “Come on, let’s go get Kandori!”: Anyway, here’s Deva Yuga. Before I post the map, I’d like to talk a little more about the grind I went through just to get our party into negotiation range level-wise.
: Deva Yuga is also one of the dungeons where its theme was completely changed between the PS1 and PSP versions. The PSP version sounds like Persona 4 music and sucks.
: The lesson I learned a bit too late is that you can’t grind more than one person at once. It just doesn’t work. I spent two hours or so trying to grind Mark and Maki at the same time, and because of the way the EXP splits up they were both getting around 2000 EXP when if I did just one of them, they’d get 5500.: Edit: I actually looked up the best ways to farm EXP, and as it turns out healing and buffing get you EXP even if you’ve done no damage.: The worst part, by far, was getting Mark levelled enough to use Azrael. Azrael is amazing because he has Good compatibility with everyone but Reiji, and Reiji doesn’t need it. Eventually, I got the party to an average level of 42, which is enough to negotiate with pretty much everything in this area.: Except these assholes. These are “M.I.B”. Like the guards in the SEBEC building, they’re extremely tanky and have no weaknesses. The best way to deal with them is guns.: There’s also these enemies: Incubus on the left and Doppelganger on the right. Doppelganger is interesting because they’ll actually respond to your negotiation attempts by impersonating the character you’re using to negotiate.: I also fused a couple of new Personas. This one is for Reiji, replacing the level 24 Vidofnir he had.: As you can see, Yatagarasu owns. The only part that sucks about it is that it doesn’t get Mamagnaradyne until Rank 8. I stuck a Maragion stone on it to give it some elemental coverage and also to give it an AOE earlier.: Jihei gets Odin, who has a really high magic stat but kind of crap moves. I gave him a Mabufula stone to get him an AOE. Most of the -dyne spells in Persona 1 are AOEs by themselves even if they’re not ma-dynes, so Odin should work if I can get him to Rank 8.: Finally, I made a new Persona for Maki simply because her current one was trash.: Marduk is basically an okay persona: he’s not a liability resistance-wise and has decent stats, but his moveset kinda sucks.: Since Aonbharr was kind of a piece of shit and we have so much money that Emergency Exits are nothing to us, I deleted him. Because he was at max rank, we get this extra little bit of dialog. I think everyone reaches that stage of life where they don’t need a mythological Irish horse anymore.: One of these days, I’m going to wake up and look at the mythological rooster perched on my bed and tell him “Vidofnir, I don’t need you anymore, my life’s evolved into that stage where I’m just over Norse mythology.” Right now though, I can’t bear to let him go.
: Papageno is a half-decent bow for Maki that can charm on hit. It’s also a nation-wide pizza chain, which I assume is run by mythological roosters. Delivery in thirty minutes or less, or the All-Father will strike your enemies down. He’ll strike your enemies down even if it’s on time, that’s just how Odin works.
: Anyway, we’re at the point in the game where the dungeons start resembling Warcraft 3 tower defense maps. This isn’t even as bad as it gets. Not even close. The guy who made these maps says that the highest level enemies we’re going to encounter in this dungeon are level 45… which might turn out to be a problem since our average party level right now is just over 42. Let’s find out together, since I haven’t recorded the actual dungeon yet.
: The first thing we want to do is go into the elevator. There’s no real reason for us to take it anywhere but the third floor, but there’s a treasure room on the second floor and I don’t know that the text dump I have has all the optional dialogue in it.
: Correction: The second floor treasure room is pointless. No dialog, and all it has are a couple of healing items we have 99 of thanks to the general store located in the entryway. At this point, thanks to all the grinding, we have just over 1.3 million yen.
: Instead, we want to head straight up to the third floor. Deva Yuga is a lot like the SEBEC building was: we start on Floor 3, go down to Floor 1, then climb up to Floor 5 and fall down holes back to Floor 1.
: This dungeon is very long and very boring, considering that 90% of the enemies we encounter here were also encountered in Mana Castle. However, there’s an upside to this: because we’re now roughly the appropriate level, we actually gain levels faster thanks to not having shit Personas anymore.
: Our first really new encounter is Scylla and Salome. Scylla is kind of a pain in the ass to negotiate with, and the first time I encountered them our party was only at an average level of… 42.8.
: Along the way, I set up a new grind method as an auto-battle option. Jihei, Maki and Reiji all have useless buff and/or debuff spells that do nothing but still give them some EXP in battle. I was still trying to grind Nanjo up, simply because he was the lowest-level person in the party. At this point, I’m ignoring Maki on purpose, but that’s for a reason.
: I wasn’t even really using the map to navigate the way I did for the last few dungeons, and just sort of grinded along the way.
: Eventually, we descend to the first floor and can see the shops from where we entered Deva Yuga. I’m just going to skip ahead a bit because we don’t really encounter anything else new until the backside of Floor 3.
: By this point, our party’s negotiation level was up to 44, allowing us to negotiate with all but one demon in Deva Yuga. Kiyohime here is EXTREMELY weak to ice - Jihei was pretty much instakilling them with Mabufula for somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 damage.
: There’s a treasure room on the back side of 3F which has a few good items in it - there’s an incense and a Black Tablet, which can be used to fuse… actually, I’ll get back to you on that if I ever get around to using it.
: No great optional dialogue here, though. Kandori’s goons are doing the usual “Kill all humans thousand year kingdom of God” bit and the party’s dialogue consists of four variations of “Everyone sounds like Kandori!”: Somewhere on 4F, I got an enemy to drop an Answeller, which is thus far the only weapon upgrade for Nanjo we’ve seen.: There’s another treasure room on the back side of 4F, but up until this point it’s basically just a very generic maze. No weird gimmicks or anything. I think I got through pretty much everything from the start of Deva Yuga to the fifth floor without any fight even getting to Mark’s turn.: The treasure room has the one SEBEC worker who was apparently not hit by Kandori’s bullshit, and also an HP Incense that I’m probably going to give to Maki.: Finally, after a good… I want to say around 40 minutes of wandering around Deva Yuga, we find the stairs going up to the 5th floor. Now, if you’ll remember, the basement of the SEBEC building had two switches in it. The 5th floor of Deva Yuga is essentially the same thing, only significantly more dickish if you don’t have a map. If you look at the minimap, that red dot is the first switch we need to press.: On the way, we run into the only demon we can’t negotiate with - Jirae Kwancha. Kwancha was the bane of my existence when I played SMT1, because the only thing you can really get out of negotiations with him in that game is for him to join your party and he’s really stingy about giving you money. In this game, Kwancha takes stupid amounts of damage from magic and dies by the time Reiji finishes his turn.: We also run into Mizuchi up here. Mizuchi is within our negotiation range, but is a complete pain in the ass to actually negotiate with. The reason for this is that all of the negotiation techniques we have that work on them also have a chance of making them angry and causing the negotiation to fail. Other than that, they’re just like Nozuchi was in Mana Castle: big HP pool but easily taken down by guns.: That’s the first lever, which apart from being out of the way isn’t really that bad to reach.: More new encounters. Cupid is kind of annoying in that it resists almost everything that isn’t physical attacks and can spam Bufudyne, though they prefer to use Marin Karin to charm people. I should mention that Bufudyne (and all -dyne spells) are AOEs in this game, though they have a definitive range and do not necessarily hit all enemies.: THIS PART is the part of this dungeon that can be a complete kick in the dick. You see, what these levers do is unlock a door way back on the 1st floor. Somewhere in this room is a hole that leads to the 1st floor. Can YOU find it?: It’s kind of hard to see, but if you look on the minimap you’ll notice there’s a square in that room I’m conspicuously avoiding.: That’s right. The hole is in the dead center of the room, and if we’d fallen down there we’d have to Emergency Exit our way back and go through the entire dungeon a second time.: The fourth floor is also tricky, in that there’s a hole directly in front of us. However, there’s also a Velvet Room behind us and we had a full deck of level 40+ spell cards, so I decided to see if we could fuse anything good.: Here, we run into the final two enemies in this dungeon we haven’t seen: Virtue and probably my favorite enemy in SMT1, Purski. In SMT1, Purski was an old man type demon who would ask you for booze almost every time you negotiated with him. With enough Luck, you could pretty much turn Purski into a bank.: Purski isn’t a Persona, but dammit he’s getting a Personalog anyway.: In the Velvet Room, we’ve now got a whole list of Personas to fuse including… oh my god. Is that… it can’t be…
: For those of you who don’t get the reference, Pascal is the SMT1 protagonist’s dog. He not only has his own theme song, but fuses himself with a demon to become Cerberus. It’s a bit hard to tell, but Cerberus in Persona 1 is colored like Pascal. Pascal later becomes a dimension-hopping dog spirit who appears in both SMT2 and SMT If. Unfortunately, his moveset in Persona 1 absolutely sucks and his stats aren’t good enough to justify blowing a stone on.: Instead, I fuse Morrigan, though unlike this shot I didn’t blow the one Agidyne stone I found so she only has Zandyne and Mazandyne. Those alone are enough to make her good, but a solid magic stat and high agility/dexterity make her a great pick even with her garbage resistances.: I should note that Morrigan has one of the highest magic attack stats of any Persona we’ve come across, except for Odin. There’s just one little problem. Actually, two. The first is that the upcoming boss is highly resistant to Blast damage, which accounts for 100% of Morrigan’s damage output.: The second problem is that door to our right in this screenshot. I mis-read the map and assumed we had to go down that door. We do not want to go down that door, because it puts us back at the start of the dungeon. I had gotten a skill roll on Morrigan that made grinding her way less of a pain in the ass, so I sucked it up and went all the way back through Deva Yuga after checking the map again.: The problem is that in the process of doing so, I closed my screenshot tool, and therefore lost all the footage of the first run through from where I fused Morrigan to the boss. This means that what you’re seeing is a hasty second run where the party is about three levels lower (on average) and I never fused Morrigan. Thankfully, I do have a save file from the first run with Morrigan in it that I made after the boss, so we’ll use that going forward.
: This room is full of more brainwashed idiots and also some useless gems. The lone chest by the old guy is a trap.
: The 6th floor is notably different in that it has no random encounters. I should mention that on the real run, I got a Kwancha here (since the average party level was something like 46 or 47) and had a full deck of current-level spell cards.
: The 6th floor is one of those light puzzles. Every tile in this room is a light, which starts in an off state and turns on when you step on it, and then back off on it when you step on it a second time. The map I posted earlier betrays the solution: you’re supposed to make a cross with it. The first run, I actually lit all of the lights up because I figured that was the solution.
: This is way easier than it looks, because you can do a dance of sorts to go backwards through tiles without turning any unnecessary ones on.
: As someone who owns two Neo Geos, I am physically incapable of hearing the word “Bingo!” in anything but the voice of the announcer from Neo Turf Masters.
: “You guys are so aggravating! I won’t let you get in my Daddy’s way!”
: “… That’s enough, Aki. Stay back.”
: “But, Daddy…”
: “Wait in the other room. I’ll be with you soon.”
: “…Okay, Daddy.”
: “…Don’t worry. I won’t do anything further.”
: “…”
: “What the hell!? What, all of a sudden you’re not in the mood anymore? What a bunch of crap… after all we did to get here!”
: “What!? Something seems peculiar about this…”
: “Hey! Did you finally snap or something? Apologizing now won’t help! I’m too pissed off now!”
: “What the hell’s with you? Decided to beg for your life all of a sudden?”
: If you’ll remember, this is the second time we’ve been asked this question.
: “Huh!?”
: “People aren’t strong enough to live without a goal. Everyone wants something.”
: “No matter how small the desire… it gives them the strength to carry on.”
: I wonder… can you have a real person as a Persona? I feel like it’d be real effective if you had Jeff Bridges in his role in The Big Lebowski and just have him go “Yeah, whatever man. Nihilist.”
: “But… if every desire is fulfilled, what’s left to strive for? When one’s wishes have been granted, the only thing that awaits… is a bottomless solitude; an eternal emptiness.”
: They’re nihilists, Mark. They don’t believe in anything. Say what you will about Persona 5’s villains, but at least they have an ethos.
: “Then wouldn’t it be better if one chose not to ascend the stairs of desire? That way… one’s dreams are kept alive.”
: “…”
: I also feel like Kandori has seen Nier Automata and is just trying to out-do Weight of the World and failing miserably at it.
: “Hah. The winds of solitude and emptiness blow within me… such is a god’s lot.”
: “…”
: “Dumbass! How old are you? And you don’t even know that yet? We’re alive so we can do the best we can, every second of every day.”
: Masao Inaba, motivational speaker. Actually, I really like this moment. This is probably the best Persona 1’s writing gets.
: “You’re always so frickin’ sulky. It’s not good for you, man! You gotta look on the sunny side!”
: “Why else…? To kill you and put an end to your filthy bloodline! Until I do that, I can’t give my mother the happiness she deserves!”
: Reiji sounds like he’s Richter Belmont, but honestly I think his response is the best of all the possible fifth party members, except for Elly.
: “So I can be a better man! I’m sick of lying and running like a coward! I’ve made my decision… I’m gonna beat you and say adios to the lame, fake me!”"
: “I live to protect the things I treasure. The people you see here are my most trusted friends… now that I have them, I won’t give them up that easily!”
: Elly absolutely should’ve been the protagonist for this game. I’m glad I saved her until Snow Queen.
: “For my future husband! I won’t have it easy, I know… but I’m gonna have a house, even if it’s small, and I want a boy and a girl. I’ll name them Takuya and Yuki and…”
: This is yet another one of those moral choices. If you’ll remember, this is the same answer we gave to Mai when she asked us why we were alive. We’ll see what doing this gets us just two dungeons from now. This is the second to last one of these.
: “That’s right! Our reason for living… we may never understand it.”
: “But I still believe in myself! With or without a reason, I’m going to live a life I won’t regret!”
: I should mention that the dialogue here is 99.9% identical to if you pick the other option, as it is with all of the other moral choices. The only difference is she prefaces her comment with “That’s not it at all!”
: Nanjo’s comment here is easily the best of all of them, so I’m just going to post all of his dialogue here as screenshots.
: And now it’s on.
: “Heh, looks like you’re finally ready to thrown down!”
: “Can you defeat me? Can you protect the things you claim are precious?”
: “…For my mother and my friends, I’ll kill you.”
: " 'Course we can!"
: “Yes! We can!”
: “Like, duh!”
: “Shut up! That’s our line!”
: “If what Nanjo said is true… there’s still time! Stop this nonsense, and bring back our town – our world!”
: “Hah… you’d tell a god to condone nonsense? That, too, is a grave sin… a god commands and condemns. It does not lend an ear the pleas of vermin.”
: I mean, that’s kind of what a god does, lending an ear to the weak and oppressed, but whatever.
: “Spout that crap in hell. I’ll send you straight there!”
: “Kandori… we’ll close the curtain on this farce, if that’s what you wish!”
: So… the Kandori fight. Let’s talk about why this was a total pain in the ass the first time around, and even worse the second time where the party was several levels lower.
: Kandori resists pretty much every type of magic, especially Nuclear and Blast. This made Jihei and Nanjo’s Personas effectively worthless. The good news is that he’s 2x weak to all types of guns, and 1.75x to Earth. Maki, Mark, and Reiji all have Personas with strong Earth-based attacks. In practice, you probably want Jihei and Nanjo shooting while the other three spam the various Magna spells.
: Kandori is pretty weak here - his most annoying attack is a single-target instant death spell, which he never used the first time around and only used once in this round. Having everyone shoot him is just that much more effective than trying to use magic.
: Eventually, after absorbing probably a thousand bullets to the face, Kandori gives up.
: … or does he?
: Remember back in the subway tunnels when we fought Yog-Sothoth Jr? If you’ll recall, he mentioned reporting to his master that he’d been defeated. Nyarlathotep is his master, and also Kandori’s Persona.
: “I’m not owned!” Kandori cries as he shrinks into a corncob.
: Meet God Kandori. God Kandori is the point at which if you’re using Lilim to try and cheese the game, you will be in for a bad time. Incidentally, he’s also the final boss if you’re on the bad ending route.
: “Holy shit…”
: “Have his body and soul been dominated by the Persona!?”
: This is something that none of the other Persona games really acknowledge. In the writings of Carl Jung, which Persona is based off, Jung puts forth the idea that someone could be totally devoured by their Persona, basically becoming a hollow shell that only really cares about what other people think. I find it really strange that they never touch on this again in the series, as far as I know.
: God Kandori is a complete pain in the ass. He keeps Kandori’s weakness to guns, but his elemental resistances switch - he becomes resistant to Earth and most of the other basic elements in exchange for a new weakness to Blast, Nuclear, and Gravity. This is where Morrigan would’ve been useful.
: God Kandori has two attacks he loves to spam. The first one is called Bright Judgment, and you can see what it does - Maki is dead in one hit, Reiji lost roughly two-thirds of his HP and even Jihei took some pretty heavy damage. Vidofnir would’ve been useful here, had I not gotten rid of him. The problem here is that all of God Kandori’s spells do Miracle damage, which most of our Personas are weak to.
: The second attack is called Eternal White, and is basically just Bright Judgment with a different graphic.
: The trick to this fight is you’re supposed to space everyone out: both of Kandori’s heavy hitter spells only hit a limited area. Fuck that shit though.
: He then follows up with Maziodyne, which nearly wipes the party. Nanjo is only alive here because he’s on the far left of the formation and wasn’t hit by Eternal White. This is where I’m very glad I bought some 40 Balm of Life at the store on the first floor.
: None of those previous attacks are nearly as annoying as Derangement Voice. Derangement Voice inflicts Panic, which is like Charm but also causes anyone hit by it to randomly change position in the formation.
: So yeah, things did not go so well. By the end of the fight, only Jihei and Reiji were alive. This was not the case in my first run, where only Maki ended the fight dead.
: For reference, Jihei was level 51 at the end of the fight in the first run. Maki was around 43, Nanjo and Mark both hit 45, and Reiji hit 49. You might think this is a problem, since Maki is underlevelled and only wound up getting like 6,000 EXP to Jihei’s 60,000… but it’s not. You’ll see why.
: “This… was the only way I knew.”
: “Maybe I summoned you here because I wanted to hear someone say it… Hah, I must seem a fool… but I feel remarkably content.”
: “Where is the real Maki?”
: “Ah… you’ve solved the mystery of the two worlds. I’m not surprised.”
: Keep this in mind in the upcoming scene, because it’s not going to make a whole lot of sense. The manga goes into way more detail, but I’m pretty sure the game explains it after we leave this room.
: “Maki Sonomura’s…”
: “Huh? What’re you saying!? What does that mean!?”
: “And the town you live in is the world inside Maki Sonomura’s heart… am I correct, Kandori?”
: “Yes, and not only her. Mai and Aki are also shadows within Maki Sonomura’s heart… all of you are nothing more than aspects of her.”
: “No… that’s not…!”
: “Maki, Mai, Aki. Simple anagrams. Maki must have conceived of her own paradise in her heart… one modeled off her memories of Mikage until the day she was hospitalized.”
: That’s a weird choice of words, but yeah, we’re essentially in Maki’s shadow realm. This explains why the gym at the school was different.
: Honestly though, I really like this part a lot. It’s a shame that we had to go through shit like Kama Palace to get here.
: “It’s a common sentiment. Chisato and Yosuke were no doubt drawn in by Maki’s unconscious desires. When it came to her crush and her best friend, she wanted the genuine article.”
: “But… she was linked to the system even before then. Her wavelength must have synchronized with the system’s.”
: This sounds like shit writing, I know. The explanation in this game sucks - basically, Maki is some kind of psychic and took over the Deva System somehow. Atlus has since retconned this: Maki is not in fact psychic and does not possess any kind of supernatural powers other than having a Persona.
: “Once she had internalized the power to interfere with the dimensions… the paradise within her heart seems to have grown beyond our imaginations.”
: This is also a bad explanation, but the game will go a little more in depth on this next update.
: “You know the rest…”
: “You’re lying! None of that makes sense!”
: “Then go… meet your true self… she is here, in this castle…”
: Remember how I said Maki being a bit underlevelled wasn’t a problem? She just left the party.
: I’m not going to bother doing an alternate party member thing here, because they all say the same thing: “We should go after her!”
: Before we do that, let’s hear what our party members have to say, as we’re not chasing after Maki until the next update. This one’s long enough as is.
: Finally, there’s a bunch of Japanese text on the back wall. We can read it.
Next update, we’ll chase after Maki, grind out some levels, and hopefully come very close to ending the SEBEC route.
