: While I was recording stuff for the main LP, I decided that I should probably do the pre-requisite grinding for the Snow Queen route, since we’re already about halfway through the SEBEC route at this point. I remembered this being real bad and taking hours upon hours when I played it the first time.
: Meet Naoya Toudou. Much like our friend Jihei, he is also a one-earringed high school boy with a Persona. Unlike Jihei, Naoya had to spend the first two hours of his game in Mikage Hospital.
: Specifically, at this part of Mikage Hospital, running back and forth in front of the doctor’s office.
: There’s two reasons we want to do this. First off, we NEED to be level 21 at a bare minimum before even considering going after the Snow Queen. Second, we want to do it here because of a couple of quirks of Persona 1 I’ve already show off: namely that any time a character leaves the party, they’ll automatically match the protagonist’s level when they return to the party and that the Persona awakening cutscenes (such as Elly’s in the hospital) give us exactly enough EXP to level up, regardless of what level we are.
: So anyway, the first half-hour or so is spent slowly and painfully having Seimen Kongou cast Garu on a single enemy at a time, until he eventually hits Rank 7 and learns Magaru, in which case you can wipe entire encounters with one press of the “auto” button. You’re probably going to want to go into the formation editor and specifically make an auto setup for this. The reason for that is…
: Pixies. Fuck Pixies. Pixies reflect wind, meaning that it’s likely Naoya will knock himself out if he casts Magaru while they’re around. The best thing to do is negotiate them away, because escape chances in this game are abysmal.
: This is Naoya at level 19. The EXP might not seem too bad, but this is from that six zombie encounter I posted above. All of the other random encounter types will give us FAR less experience, down to a minimum of around 50. This is why we want to hit 19 before even meeting Elly: because getting some 2700 experience from that cutscene is much better than getting 200 and having to grind out 2700 later.
: Eventually, we meet Elly and Naoya levels up to 20. You might realize this isn’t level 21, but that’s not a problem because we still have one more awakening cutscene: Brown’s. The reason this grinding is important, by the way, is that there are no random encounters in the hub area for the Snow Queen quest. If you haven’t grinded enough, you’re probably going to have to restart the game.
: Apart from being level 21, we also need two other things: around half a million yen and 19,000 casino coins. Ideally, we need to do this before we go to the Alaya Shrine for the first time.
: Even with all the encounters and selling the 37 QQ Helmets I picked up along the way, we’re still… several hundred thousand yen short. That’s fixable… I think. Maybe. We’ll see.
: So anyway, let’s tackle the casino coins next. Judgment 1999 is run by… apparently the Magypsies from Mother 3. Good to know they got another job.
: We need to spend 10,000 of our hard-earned yen buying around 100 casino coins. This can be done with less, but we want a bit of a buffer. Judgment 1999 has three games, but we only give a shit about two: Video Poker and Code Breaker.
: You might think that not being able to see the coin count is an emulator bug of some kind - it’s not. The PSP has a very bright screen and my capture card’s brightness settings were set too low.
: The rest of this is going to look like canned ass for a bit because I thought that there was some weird resolution problem. I’ve been playing the game in 4:3 to simulate a PS1, but the game runs at 16:9 on the PSP itself. I had to jack up the brightness a ton to even make the coin counter sort of visible. The game gives you a starting hand of 5 cards, you pick cards to keep and then get dealt up to 5 additional cards. Here, I got lucky and got a straight on my first hand.
: The reason everything is so blurry, by the way, is this is just how the PSP is when you put it in composite output mode. The component cables I have won’t work right for some reason, but it’s still blurry even with those. Anyway, after you win a hand you’re given a couple of options to increase your winnings. All the guides I’ve seen recommend picking High & Low.
: High & Low gives you a card and four face-down cards. Your goal is to try and find a card of a higher value - Joker always wins. Every time you do this, you double your winnings. Naturally, you can savestate your way through it, and I absolutely recommend doing so if you ever decide to do this yourself.
: Finally, there’s Code Breaker. Code Breaker is how you can grind a decent amount of money in the early-game, provided that you have the solver program someone made (which even then is not great). Unlike the other casino games, Code Breaker uses Metal Cards, which you can get as a drop off the zombies in the hospital.
: On a side note, I’m kind of amazed at how much Code Breaker looks like a Neo Geo game. Anyway, here’s how it works. First, you pick nine random numbers. The dickish part about this is that you have to use every number exactly once, but the game will accept your guess even if it’s not valid. Here, I just picked random numbers. You’ll notice that the first prize is a million casino coins. Your chances of winning that (without savestates) are approximately 1 in 8192.
: Each guess lowers the prize by a tier. Here, I got REALLY unlucky. The numbers in the “B” column indicate that you have the correct number in that row, but not in the right position. The “H” column indicates that you have the correct number and the correct position. This left us with… around 1600 solutions.
: Picking one of those at random gave me this, which is much better. The third prize is usually what the solver is going to get you, and that’s what we want. Divine Voices are a healing item that sell for 12,000 yen each, and you also get another Metal Card.
: With that, the solver gives us the right number - 924 156 837, and we win the third prize. The solver doesn’t always work this well - I’ve had it get down to like eight possible solutions after four tries, which can definitely happen if you’re unlucky enough.
: Anyway, my question for all of you is this. Does anyone care if I just put my save into an emulator and cheese the casino to get the 19,000 coins we need? I’ve done this on real hardware before, but it’s a pain in the ass.
- Cheese this shit, required casino grinding is bunk
- Don’t cheese ths shit
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