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

[Timrod]

: 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:

• Jihei: Level 43, Persona Level 40
• Maki: Level 33, Persona Level 34
• Nanjo: Level 34, Persona Level 34
• Mark: Level 31, Persona Level 31
• Reiji: Level 39, Persona Level 39

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.

[Timrod]

: 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.

[SpammyV]

Too bad you can’t actually negotiate the boss into giving up.

[Timrod]

@SpammyV

Too bad you can’t actually negotiate the boss into giving up.

So, here’s the thing. The manga kind of goes a slightly different route, where instead of becoming God Kandori, Kandori gets eaten by Nyarlathotep. Nyarly says that Kandori is already dead inside at this point - even if he hadn’t been eaten, he would’ve been a husk had the party managed to talk him down from killing himself. Really, Kandori had to die to illustrate a point in Jungian psychology. I was going to do a side update on it early on, but I might as well do it now and explain how it links up to the Persona series, but especially Persona 1.

However, I’ll also say the manga has its own AU where Kandori and Jihei’s non-canon dead twin brother/evil clone play house with Aki.

Anyway, back to Carl Jung. Apart from being an idiot who made a psychology school because an old guy with wings jangled keys in his face, Jung had this whole theory that as far as I understand it is very rarely taught in schools anymore (even as a historical thing) because of how weird and intertwined with mysticism it was. Jung was a lot like those people who post on 4chan’s paranormal board.

Part of Jung’s theory is this thing called the Map of the Psyche. There’s a bunch of different versions of it that get into varying degrees of mysticism, but let’s use this one because it’s simple. We’re going to ignore the side bits about the consciousness and unconsciousness and focus on the middle part.

At the top, you have the Persona, which Jung describes as being like a mask that people wear in order to interact with others. In his theory, it’s actually impossible to “be yourself” around anyone else, because you have a Persona for dealing with pretty much every individual social situation you’re in. In Persona, the Personas are… well, Personas given physical form.

Now, Jung also had a thing where it’s possible for the self (essentially, the entirety of what you are) to get eaten by the Persona (it’s actually more the Persona teaming up with the Ego to kill off the Shadow, but in Jung’s model this is effectively the same thing). In this case, you basically become a shell of a person who only really cares about what other people think. You’ll notice that as early as when we encounter him in Mana Castle, Kandori only really seems to give a shit about the party: he asks a lot of questions, but there’s not really a whole lot to his character besides his urge to kill humanity off. This is because Kandori is supposed to be a Persona without a Shadow.

There’s a reason for this that is ultimately explained in Persona 2 Eternal Punishment. Spoilers below.

The reason he wants to do this is because that’s what Nyarlathotep wants, and so that’s the only thing Kandori really cares about. Even from the time we first meet him, Kandori is a puppet for Nyarly and pretty much nothing more: that’s why he gives the speeches about how much he hates humanity as if he isn’t human himself… because he’s basically just a speaker for Nyarlathotep at that point.

We’ll skip the Ego and Self for right now, and talk about the Shadow. Where Kandori is a Persona without a Shadow, Maki is the exact opposite: she’s a Shadow without a Persona. The real Maki (as we’ll see at the very start of the next update) basically lives in a fantasy world of her own creation and has completely lost touch with reality. Aki and Mai are both her Shadow: Aki representing Maki’s jealousy and hatred of a world that left her in the hospital where she can’t be the Maki she wants to be, and Mai representing the world she secretly wishes she could live in: a world with no crime or sickness where everyone is (more or less) happy.

The fake Maki is actually an Anima (the male version is called an Animus), which are gender-based constructs that represent your true self, without the mask of the Persona on. The idea is that the Anima/Animus are how you’re supposed to sort of contact your true self in the unconscious… but in this case, it’s just an idealized version of Maki that has what she wants: to be healthy again and living her life. The Animus/Anima are part of the Shadow, so I suppose you could say that the fake Maki is also Maki’s shadow, meaning she has three.

As for the rest of the chart, it’s important to Jung but not really important to this game. The collective unconscious becomes far more important in Persona 4 and Persona 5, but in Jung’s psychology it’s the Land of Mystical Bullshit where Philemon comes from. In Persona 1, it’s supposed to explain why all of the Personas are mythological figures: the Collective Unconscious deals a lot with “archetypes” and part of archetypes is this idea of memes (in the psychological sense, not the internet one) that get spread through a collective mind that encompasses everyone. The idea is that the Personas are drawing on the collective unconscious to gain physical form.

[LaZodiac]

To be fair, internet memes are effectively a modern, bastard version of what the actual term meme actually means. I like it, it’s… this twisted ouroborus of meaning.

The other Persona games do KINDA touch on Shadows consuming the base person. P4’s villain is basically forcing the Shadow’s out of people to get them to deny, and thus be murdered by, those shadows, and the… I forget his name, but the Twisted Hero shadow, you know the one, he gets completely destroyed basically, and the person it comes from… basically becomes the selfless person Kandori is, though in a different way since Kandori’s shadow was a psychopath and this kid’s was just kind of dull.

Additionally, P5 is almost entirely focused (from what I’ve played of it anyway) about breaking into the Self of your targets and stealing that which is more treasured and personal to their self. Fittingly it is defended by the Shadow.

As a final thought; The entire party "okay boomer"ing Kandori fucking rules. God when Persona games are written well they’re good.

[Timrod]

: Once we’ve killed Kandori, we can use the hole behind that door to wind up right where we need to be. I don’t know why the developers chose this late into the game to give you a dungeon that doesn’t require you to walk all the way back to the entrance (or use a warp) but whatever.

: Meet the real Maki. Apparently, her condition has degraded so badly that she’s on life support.

: “Don’t you know what you did!?”

: “This is me…? No… I made everyone suffer…?”

: “You killed the only one the real me could rely on! No one will save us now! It’s all over!”

: I’m not entirely sure what Aki is on about here. It’s pretty clear that Maki has some kind of uncurable disease and is dying from it. There’s also the weird question of why Aki didn’t just use the compact to fix Maki.

: “There’s three Makis… are they all her?”

: “There’s three Makis? No way… this is some sick joke, right?”

: “There’s… three of her… Jesus Christ. They’re all Maki.”

: It sounds kind of out-of-character for Elly to talk like that, since she usually speaks in very formal Japanese, but my guess is that she’s saying the “Jesus Christ” part in English while the rest is Japanese.

: “They’re all Maki? Seriously? That’s just…”

: “Calm down, Maki! This has to be some kinda mistake… right?”

: “Stop saying that! That’s a lie! This is me, I can tell! I messed up the town and made everyone suffer! I did that…!”

: “Don’t take it so hard. He was using you!”

: “Calm down! You were being used, and it sucks, but that’s all it was. Okay? C’mon, get over here.”

: “You were being used… there’s no need to let it get to you, okay?”

: “Maki! You don’t have to take it so hard! It was all Kandori’s fault anyway!”

: This is one place where the game kind of diverges from Jungian psychology. Jung’s theory states that the Shadow isn’t something you have control over: it’s not part of your consciousness. Jung’s ideal state of being is that you’ve acknowledged that your Shadow exists and have balanced it out with your ego and persona. Even though Fake Maki is an anima (and part of the unconscious mind) she’s not the same thing as Aki or Mai.

: “I was jealous of everyone… wearing cute clothes, walking around town… gossiping about each other’s boyfriends… laughing and joking… I envied everyone who went to school and had fun with their friends.”

: “Maki…”

: “Even if I wanted to do something about it, I couldn’t… I cried and cried…”

: “My jealousy and loathing grew… I made up an ideal town to comfort myself… now do you understand? I’m hopeless…”

: “Disappear, everyone!”

: “Jihei! Let’s go back into Maki’s heart!”

: “…Wait, Masao. Do you know the story of the foolish girl named Pandora?”

: “Huh?”

: “The legend says she opened the gods’ box, releasing all sorts of evils. It applies to Maki. This town owes its miserable condition to her wishes.”

: “Rather than save her, we should focus on destroying the Deva System.”

: “If we destroy that thing, what’s gonna happen to Maki?”

: I like that this is the first instance of Mark actually being a character and not just filler. I wish they had done this way earlier.

: “From the looks of it, the system is keeping Maki alive. If we destroy it, Maki will most likely die as a result.”

: “But as long as the system is intact, the fundamental problem remains unsolved. Don’t let your personal feelings sway you… a small sacrifice for the greater good. The choice is obvious.”

: It’s been a long time since it happened, but Nanjo has another reason for wanting Maki dead. Technically, she killed Yamaoka.

: In case you can’t tell due to the sprites, Mark just punched Nanjo in the face.

: “I had you all wrong. I didn’t think you could really be that cold.”

: “Maybe what you’re sayin’ is true. It’s the kinda logic an adult would use. But dude… Maki might’ve made us suffer, but she also tried to save us all…”

: “I believe in Maki. I know she has what it takes to break away from that machine.”

: “You said it, man. If this’ll help Maki make peace with herself, I’m in.”

: “Yes… we need to let Maki know that she isn’t alone.”

: “I’m gonna go, too. I borrowed her handkerchief, y’know…”

: “Man is an emotional creature, I suppose. We can split hairs all we like, but the ultimate decision is made by one’s heart. I’ll go in as well.”

: “Sheesh, you and your arguments. You coulda just come out and said so. Wouldn’t a clever, mature adult stay here?”

: “Heheh… when will I learn? You always got some kinda comeback all ready.”

: “Good deeds should be done swiftly. Let us dive back into Maki’s soul.”

: There is alternate party member dialog here, but in every single case it’s “Something’s in the mirror!”

: “Now what!? We can’t get back like this!”

: “Something must have happened at the town inside Maki’s heart… with Kandori gone, she’s the only one who could do something like this.”

: “What about Kandori’s mirror? Let’s just have it send us back.”

: “Oh yeah! We still got Kandori’s mirror! We just have to make a wish and poof! We’re back in business!”

: “Mark! If we make a wish to Kandori’s mirror, can’t we get back to that town?”

: “Oh hey, what about Kandori’s mirror? Let’s just like, wish for it to send us back there!”

: “Oh yeah, we could still do that, huh?”

: Yeah, that’s a good idea. We could even try just wishing Maki’s disease away while we’re at it, assuming the mirror works the same way the compact does.

: I’m really surprised they did a cutscene for the Deva System exploding, but not for the mirror breaking.

: “Whoa! I-is this for real!?”

: “Is Maki resisting us…!? It seems that way to me.”

: “What is it, Masao?”

: “It’s Maki’s compact…”

: “Hm. There’s no mirror inside.”

: The alternate party dialogue here is all, believe it or not, exactly the same.

: “Let’s see here… the real Maki’s compact and the ideal Maki’s compact… The real one has a mirror. Hmm…”

: “Gimme that, Nanjo! Please! Send us back into Maki’s heart!”

: At this point, we have the ability to walk around and talk to our party members. There is going to be a lot of alternate party member dialogue here, as all four possible party members have a lot to say about this.

: “My mom was Kandori’s dad’s old mistress. She got thrown away like an old rag.”

: “But even knowing that would happen… she still gave birth to me. Know why she did that?”

: “She told me she couldn’t neglect her own child’s life. You have a mom too. No parent alive doesn’t love their child.”

: “You’re gonna see your mom again, so hurry and wake up!”

: “Maki! Please wake up! Please…”

: “You’re not the only one who suffers from having multiple aspects of yourself…”

: “Everyone says how elegant and beautiful I am, but it’s not true at all. I’ve always acted like someone I’m not. I hate seeing boys talk to other girls…”

: “That’s why I always wear a fake smile. It was so stifling… I’m no good, am I? But I understand now.”

: “What I really needed are friends I can trust. The ones I have with me here… I like someone now. You probably like him too, Maki. Please wake up…”

: “I wish I could talk to you again, about things like him. Okay? So wake up…”

: Unfortunately, given Atlus’s history of pairing the protagonist with the worst possible people, my guess is that Jihei ends up with either Maki or Ayase.

: “Wakey wakey, Maki! I still have your handkerchief. Anything you wanna talk about, I’ll listen…”

: “I get you how you feel. I used to think the same way… I would like, wish there would be no future.”

: “I worry about the future a lot. I think that’s why I party so hard… 'cause the future’s too depressing to think about, right?”

: “So I made up my mind to live only for now, and ran away from the future… but it doesn’t work like that.”

: “It’s my future, I have to come up with it myself… so I’ve made my choice. I’m gonna snag a great guy so I can live on easy street!”

: “So, Maki… I wanna hear your dreams for the future, too. Please Maki… please…”

: Ayase’s so basic you could rub her head on a dirty grill and that thing would be sparkling clean in seconds. My personal canon is that instead of going back to the fake town, Ayase gets catapulted like twelve years into the future and winds up with Yosuke from P4. They deserve each other. I also like how this is just The Breakfast Club.

: “Rise and shine, Maki, and I’ll tell you the funniest story I know!”

: “Y’know how they call me Brown? It’s a nickname I picked up in middle school.”

: “People think it’s about my brown hair, but really, it’s 'cause I crapped myself.”

: “See? Isn’t it funny? Man, it was embarrassing… I spent most of middle school as the butt of every joke in the class…”

: “I was sick of myself. I came to Hermelin 'cause I couldn’t take the local schools. So when I got to high school, I did my best to act like Mr. Cool… but I was lying to myself all this time.”

: “No more, though. I realized how dumb I was being from watching you… so there it is. Now c’mon, give us a smile…”

: Well, that was an interesting summary of the 1985 film “The Breakfast Club”. We’ve still got Mark and Nanjo to talk to.

: “The ideal Maki is the manifestation of Maki wanting to change herself. But if her ideal self denied its own existence…”

: “Maki, have you really lost hope? If there’s even a fragment left, call out to us…”

: Over in the corner, by the cabinet, there’s something sparkling. I also just now noticed, as I’m posting this, that Mai’s bear is on the chair next to it.

: “This size and shape… I think it may fit Maki’s compact!”

: “Seriously!? Maybe we can use this to go back! Lemme see that, Jihei!”

: “Owwww! Ugh… huh?”

: “I get it… the compact brought us here…”

: “Ngh… where are we!?”

: In case you don’t remember, we’re back at the entrance of the Lost Forest. In the manga, the party gets dumped in the gingerbread house, which is much closer to where we need to go.

: “Looks like it worked… this looks like the forest where that girl in white was… the child-Maki.”

: “Bingo! This is child-Maki’s forest!”

: “Wow, talk about luck! Isn’t this that little Maki’s forest?”

: Luck my ass. We have to walk all the way back through that dungeon fighting obsolete encounters, or buy items to repel them.

: “Hey, it worked! Isn’t this the forest where that little Maki was?”

: “Same to you, lady! Why’re YOU here?”

: “I… don’t really know. After I transported you all, I thought I heard Maki’s voice again… and when I came to, I was here. But why have you all come back?”

: You think she’d figure out that Kandori is dead and we’re coming back to get her. I don’t think the game ever confirms whether the scientists that were in the mansion with her got out, but I’m assuming they do.

: “What about Maki!? What’s going to happen to her!?”

: “If we leave her be, she’ll stay that way for the rest of her life. Or worse…”

: “No… can’t you do something!? My Maki…!”

: “Cool it, lady! That’s why we came back!”

: “Don’t worry… we won’t let it end like this.”

: “Relax! Just have fate in us – you can forget all about it!”

: “That’s ‘faith’, you cretin!”

: “Yeah, faith, exactly! It’ll be fine! Hahahahaha!”

: “The dude shows his true colors. After all that stuff about pretending…”

: “Indeed. He’s innately imbecilic… not a man to be ashamed of soiling himself.”

: “Mwahahahahahah!”

: Brown, shitposting since 1996. Quite literally shitposting. Anyway, onto Elly and Ayase.

: “Don’t worry. We definitely won’t leave Maki hanging!”"

: “Don’t worry, Maki-mom! I’m more competent than I look, y’know!”

: “Was that Maki’s voice!? She must be just past here!”

: “Let’s go! That li’l Maki might know something!”

: “Wait! Please… take me with you! She’s my daughter! I can’t leave her suffering like this!”

: “…Very well.”

: Survival not guaranteed, must bring own Persona, I have only done this once before.

: “I don’t care about that!”

: “Then that settles that. Come on, Suzakin. Let’s reunite a mother and her child.”

: We could go into the forest, but what we actually want to do is turn around and go back to the Mikage Sun Mall. You might ask why we’re not going to the Black Market, and that’s because…

: This is presumably why the Deva System broke: it was located on the eastern half of town. Let’s just hope all those scientists and Chisato/Yosuke made it out.

: We have a metric fuckload of money, and I believe this is the last shop in the game that sells equipment. Most of these hit fewer targets than our current guns, but do more damage overall. The armor shop doesn’t sell anything new, but I bought a full set of armor for Maki since I don’t think I got around to doing that at the Black Market.

: The streets around this area prove to be an issue, because both Berith and Titania can spawn. They’re levels 48 and 49, respectively, and are just over what our negotiation limit is (47). I did some grinding to get the party back up into range.

: Titania is an annoying pile of shit because she spams Magnadyne, the top-tier Earth element spell. I also lost a recording, so I had to re-record everything up until the end of the next dungeon.

: Before we can go to the next dungeon, we have to go all the way back through the Lost Forest to the gingerbread house, fighting enemies that are 15 levels out of date.

: And here we go, back to the gingerbread house. Incidentally, this run was done with the lower level party from the second run on Kandori I had to do, because FRAPS is a pile of shit but so is every other screenshot tool out there.

: “Waaaaaah! Mommy!”

: “I’m sorry, Maki… I’m so sorry…”

: “Mommy! Mommy! Waaaaaaaaah!”

: I really like the touch here that it’s ultimately Mark who gets Mai to calm down. This part of the game may not be great gameplay wise, but plot-wise I really like what the writers did. Honestly, I wish that they’d remake this game and just cut everything from the start of the game to Mana Castle or so.

: There’s one other change to the dialogue here. Can you spot it? They replaced Mai’s name in the dialog boxes with Maki’s. This is a change that will persist from now until the end of the game, and is actually kind of important: it’s showing that the real Maki is learning to live with herself and no longer sees Mai and Aki as separate people.

: “Maki… we want to help you. The real you. I know that sounds weird, but is there anything you can do?”

: “Nuh-uh. Nothing.”

: “Why not? Aren’t you also one aspect of Maki?”

: “There’s ANOTHER one of her!?”

: “The really bad me is called Pandora… Aki broke Pandora’s seal. Pandora swallowed Aki, and now she’s trying to make this world go away.”

: I’m not entirely sure what Pandora is supposed to be in terms of the Jungian psyche, but if I had to guess, it’s something like this. Real Maki considers herself a different person from Mai, Aki, and Fake/Anima Maki. Pandora is Real Maki’s Persona (with the evils in Pandora’s Box represented by Aki and the remaining hope represented by Mai) while Fake/Anima Maki’s Persona is either Maso or Tensen Nyannyan (depending on if the manga is canon, and it isn’t) both of whom are more loving and motherly figures.

: “But if she does that… we’ll… I’ll… die…”

: “What!? Then how do we get to Pandora!?”

: You take a bus there, and then you realize that Borderlands was never good and have it permanently removed from your Steam library.

: “Is this true!? Then where is this Pandora!?”

: Unless we’re talking about Avatar, in which case you don’t because that movie was the most generic anything ever made.

: “Now way! Seriously!? Then, uhh, where do we find Pandora!?”

: Oh, she means the streaming radio company. You have to use your phone for that. You’d think Ayase would realize this given that Pandora formed as a company in 2000 and this game takes place in 2006.

: Oh yeah, I should mention that Persona 1’s setting is kind of a plot hole. Persona 2 and Persona 3 establish that it has to take place in 2006, but the original PS1 release is set in 1996.

: “Am I correct?”

: “Uh-huh. But you’ll need the three compacts… and my energetic self’s help.”

: “Energetic… you mean the ideal Maki? We have the three compacts, don’t we?”

: “I remember you had two of them, Jihei. Red and green… we’re missing one.”

: “Jihei, aren’t you carrying two of them already? One red and one green… we only need one more.”

: “Didn’t you have two already, Jay? Red and green, huh…? We’re still missing one.”

: “Hey Jihei, didn’t you have them? One red one and one green one? So we’re still missing one…”

: “Please save the energetic me first… it’s all my fault… my energetic self is crying deeper in the forest…”

: “There’s another Maki behind this door? Then I’m coming with you all!”

: “Man, I’m confused. How many Makis are there, anyway?”

: Technically, just one. None of the other Makis are separate people.

: “What? My ‘face looks gentle’? You keep joking around, and that won’t be true for long.”

: One thing I love about this game is that they actually bothered to give Reiji lines after he kills Kandori off. There’s certain other games (Ni no Kuni 2) that would’ve just relegated him to the trash for the rest of the game.

: “Haha… children feel most at ease crying in their mother’s arms.”

: “Ahah… kids calm down quick when they can have a cry in their mom’s arms.”

: The text dump lists two lines for Elly at this point, and I’ll explain why: there’s this thing that happens in the manga and I believe in the Japanese version where Elly uses very formal Japanese at all times. When the party lands in the gingerbread house, Elly drops it for just a single line. They don’t really get this across in English. I’m not sure how you get one to trigger over the other.

: “Little Maki’s so cute… but if it was like, Little Nanjo or Little Mark… they wouldn’t be cute at all. Hell, I’d probably punch 'em!”

: “Hey, Jihei, what kind of kid were you when you were little? I was a little cutie, but isn’t it gross to imagine Hidehiko and Nanjo like that?”

: So, like I said, my capture software kinda fucked up and I lost my recording for this part. Thankfully, I saved right before the cutscene at the end, so we’ll start at the end and then I’ll do a quick overview of the rest of the dungeon.

: Most of Inner Lost Forest is a spinner maze, though a very basic one: there’s a lot of four-way junctions with a spinner in the center. This is the last room before where the cutscene is. Along the way are a couple of item rooms, but only two of them have anything of note inside: one has a Blue Tablet (a Persona fusion item) and the other has an SP Incense.

: The enemies are largely the same as the ones we fought out on the streets, but there’s a few new ones. Selket is a relatively rare encounter that… honestly, I just nuked through.

: Morrigan has reached Rank 7 by this point and has Mazandyne (the highest level blast spell in full-party target form). These guys are Beriths, which are like the Eligors in the other forest but tankier. The two middle enemies were more Titanias.

: Similarly, Yatagarasu reached Rank 7 and learned Mamagnadyne (highest level full-party target earth spell) which also does a crapload of damage.

: There’s an item room right near the end of the maze, but it’s got nothing in it.

: “Look! These people came all this way because they were worried about you!”

: Totally not a scene out of a horror movie. Maki’s not going to turn to the camera and have her face rotting off or some shit.

: Well, that’s… something. It’s supposed to represent Fake Maki wanting to erase herself from existence, but honestly it’s just kinda dumb.

: “Don’t you know what kind of girl I am?”

: “Maki… I know you feel like you can’t just let it go… but doesn’t everyone get jealous now and then, one way or another?”

: “I know I do. And on top of that, you were just being used. It’s Kandori’s fault, not yours.”

: Several times, and also you killed Nanjo’s butler. I’m amazed he’s not more angry about that.

: “I don’t want pity. It just makes me more miserable… I deserve to die!”

: “That’s not true!”

: “…”

: “Maki…”

: “Dude, Maki…”

: “Aw, Maki…”

: “What a petulant child…”

: And here it is, the last moral choice in the game. We’ll see what that does on the 8th floor of the next dungeon, in the next update.

: “Jihei is right! You’ve sown these seeds, and now it’s time to reap them! If you want to die, then why sit around here and mope about it?”

: “…”

: “You spoke of pity? Don’t make me laugh. We came here of our own will because we could sympathize with you.”

: “But even before that, did you think you were alone in this world?”

: “We live at the sufferance of others. Each is responsible for each. Your careless decision would have left behind wounds that would never heal.”

: God dammit Nanjo, you quote Linkin Park again and I’m ending this LP right then and there.

: I’d like to point out that Linkin Park was formed in 1996, so it’s not impossible for Nanjo to be a member. Just saying.

: “…”

: “Now let’s get back. We still have to rescue Maki on our own. I don’t leave things undone.”

: “I’m sorry, everyone. Please… please let me come along.”

: “Hehe… of course you can come! Welcome back, Maki!”

: So, remember how I said that it didn’t matter that Maki died during the Kandori fight and got basically no EXP out of it? Maki is now the same level Jihei is: Level 53, Persona Level 51.

: “Heh…”

: “I’m back, guys!”

: sniffle “Thank you, all of you… thank you so much…”

: “Mom… I’m sorry. I’ve been bad. I remember it all now. It was so lonely being by myself… it hurt… I wanted to see you…”

: “I’m sorry, Nanjo, and you too, Jihei… thank you very much…”

: “… I should apologize, too. I said some harsh things.”

: “Nanjo? Dude, are you blushing!? Haha, I get it! You’re so stuck-up, this is the first time anyone’s ever thanked you!”

: “S-silence, Masao! Honestly! Let’s get back, Jihei.”

: “I don’t know how to thank you all… Maki’s a lucky girl to have so many friends. Thanks again…”

: “I’ve finally come to my senses. Even if I’m a dream, or an illusion, or a shadow, I’m still me. Plus, I have Jihei and the rest of you with me! That’s all I need…”

: “A touching scene, but we can’t stick around forever, you know.”

: “Whew, it all worked out. But Jihei, if that had happened to me… Oh, I shouldn’t act so weird. Sorry. I’m sure you’d come and rescue me…”

: “I’m glad everything worked out. But if it had happened to me, Jihei… No. I’m sorry for acting so strange. I’m sure you’d come to my aid.”

: “That was so touching, even I couldn’t help but tear up…” sniff

: “That was pretty harsh, Jihei. I was worried about what might happen.”

: Now let’s head back. The rest of the Inner Lost Forest is basically this: four-way intersections with a spinner in the center. Now, I know what you’re thinking: isn’t that hallway west or our position shaped like a swastika? The answer is yes, yes it is.

: There aren’t really any notable new enemies here. Legion has a lot of HP and isn’t weak to much, but has low defenses and usually dies before it gets a turn off.

: There’s also Aello, which… honestly, Jihei casts Mazandyne and they all die.

: The dungeon also steps it up by having four-way intersections with a spinner in the middle AND one-way floors. I didn’t even bother finding my way back to the entrance and used an Emergency Exit because fuck this nonsense.

: I’m sorry, me. I made you LP YIIK for like three months and transcribe all that godawful dialog and now those memories will never go away.

: “I’m the ideal Maki Sonomura. It’s not like me to be so down. Now, can you tell us where the last compact is?”

: “Uh-huh. The real me has it.”

: That should technically be “the real us” but whatever.

: “The real you? Isn’t that where we got the green one? Jihei already has that one.”

: To understand what the deal with this is, I’m going to need to bring up the Jungian psyche chart again, because there’s something in that last Jung post I didn’t talk about.

: At this point, we’ve met Maki’s Shadow (Aki and Mai), we’ve met Maki’s Anima (Fake Maki), we’ve met the physical Maki, but we haven’t met her Ego or her Self, which Persona 1 kind of rolls into one thing. In Jung’s thinking, the Ego represents consciousness: essentially, it’s everything you perceive and feel while awake.

: The Self is a little bit different. Jung’s idea of the Self is that it’s a combination of the Ego and the Shadow. The Persona is part of the Ego, the Animus/Anima is part of the Shadow. Unlike the way Persona 4 pictures it, you can’t ever really “find” your true self under Jung, because you ARE your true self - it’s who you are when you’re by yourself and also unconscious because that’s the only way you can really interface with it, at least under Jung. There’s a quote from Jung I read that compares trying to find your true self with putting a mask on and looking in the mirror and getting confused as to where you went.

: “The Alaya Cavern?”

: “It’s behind the shrine.”

: “I’m --”

: “Mommy, would you please wait here with me?”

: “Why? Why can’t I go too!?”

: Two reasons. One, because you weren’t visited by the magic jangly key man. Two, and more importantly for Jung, it’s because realistically only you can ever know anything about your Ego or Self.

: “I want to deal with this. It’ll be okay. I have friends to help.”

: “Maki… all right. But you’d better come back, do you hear me?”

: “Hey, me? Look after mom, okay?”

: “Yep! I will. Be careful… me.”

: “Huh? I’m smiling!? Don’t get the wrong idea… it’s just my cavities acting up.”

: “Mai’s me, too… I just realized… I was pretty cure when I was little.”

: “Huh? Heehee… maybe that was just a little bit conceited.”

: “Hm… a genuine conversation with one’s inner child. A strange sight to see…”

: This immediately reminded me of Sundowner in Metal Gear Revengeance and now I want to see fanart of Sundowner in his Jungian psyche world playing with his inner child. Anyway, I think this script file gets some of the alternate party member text misplaced, and I think I might’ve posted some from this spot earlier. I’ll just post the rest.

: “I was quite cute myself, at that age. Would you like to see a photo sometime?”

: Elly also has this line listed and I have no idea where the hell it’s supposed to go.

: “Jihei? Do you prefer domestic girls yourself?”

: “I was really cute as a kid, too. The neighborhood ladies were all over me! No, really! I’d be walking around and they’d wipe my nose for me.”

: “Um, okay, so there’s teeny Maki and ideal Maki, right?”

: And then real Maki… ugh, it makes my head hurt."

: “Oh, it’s something I taught Maki when she was little. With her father dead and me busy with work, Maki was always alone…”

: “So I taught her this spell to chant when she was lonely at the hospital.”

: I think this might be a plot hole, because Maki has only been in the hospital for like six months.

: “I told her that wherever mommy was, I could always sense her presence…”

: Next time, we’ll head to the Alaya Cavern and see what all those moral choices we’ve been making were good for. I also made a quick stop at the Velvet Room to see what we could fuse.

: Unfortunately, the answer is not all that much. Most of these Personas we either already have (Morrigan, Yatagarasu) or are way out of our level range. Loki would be an upgrade for Reiji, except Loki fucking SUCKS.

: Not even giving him Megidolaon could fix that godawful stat spread, not to mention the insanely high SP cost.

: There’s also US Ambassador to Japan John Thorman, who… is not great. Good resistances, okay moveset, but godawful stats and a crazy high SP cost with very low Magic Attack (he’s actually below Lilim) for his level. Hard pass.

[Timrod]

@LaZodiac

To be fair, internet memes are effectively a modern, bastard version of what the actual term meme actually means. I like it, it’s… this twisted ouroborus of meaning.

The other Persona games do KINDA touch on Shadows consuming the base person. P4’s villain is basically forcing the Shadow’s out of people to get them to deny, and thus be murdered by, those shadows, and the… I forget his name, but the Twisted Hero shadow, you know the one, he gets completely destroyed basically, and the person it comes from… basically becomes the selfless person Kandori is, though in a different way since Kandori’s shadow was a psychopath and this kid’s was just kind of dull.

Additionally, P5 is almost entirely focused (from what I’ve played of it anyway) about breaking into the Self of your targets and stealing that which is more treasured and personal to their self. Fittingly it is defended by the Shadow.

As a final thought; The entire party "okay boomer"ing Kandori fucking rules. God when Persona games are written well they’re good.

So honestly, the entire end part of the SEBEC route past Mana Castle is actually really good. People have been calling for a remake of Persona 3 lately, but I think if anything they need to go back and remake Persona 1 and 2.

What you have off about Persona 5 is that the Palaces aren’t actually people’s Self - they’re what Jung would call a Complex, which is different from the Freudian idea by the same name. Jung considers the Shadow and Animus/Anima to be complexes, but they also exist outside of the general map of the psyche. Jungian complexes as a whole are fully in the realm of Jangly Key Man bullshit, along with the Archetypes and the Collective Unconsciousness and all that.

Complexes are kind of hard to define, but the idea is that it’s a repressed event that causes you to act a certain way. Usually, they’re not as extreme as the complexes represented by the Palaces are - they’re generally much smaller than that. Let me give you an example:

A few months ago, I left my house for work in the morning and hadn’t slept properly the night before. The way to work involves going to the highway. I stop paying attention to where I’m going, and I wind up halfway to the gym (which is in the opposite direction from the highway). Jung would say that I have a complex about fitness or something that drove me to do that.

The major bosses in Persona 5 are more based off the Seven Deadly Sins, but each of those could be boiled down to a complex: Kamoshida has an inferiority complex based around his time as an Olympic athlete, as an example. I think they only really use the Shadows as bosses because that’s what they did in P4.

I should mention that Persona 5 in particular comes up with this weird idea that only bad people have Shadows or Complexes, which isn’t true of Jung. Jung’s theory states that neither the Shadow nor the other Complexes are inherently bad - in fact (under his theory at least) without complexes you’d have nothing driving you. The negative parts come from the effects those things have on you if you can’t deal with them properly.

[LaZodiac]

@Timrod

his immediately reminded me of Sundowner in Metal Gear Revengeance and now I want to see fanart of Sundowner in his Jungian psyche world playing with his inner child.

You keep on thinking of really good ideas that people are too cowardly to create because there’s no one in the world who will draw a picture of Baby Sundowner using a pair of safety scissors to cut up paper dolls with his older self, which is the exact mental image

I got from this.

As for all the talk on Jung and stuff; thanks that was actually really insightful and answered a few questions I had.

[SpammyV]

I’m glad that we reunited Maki and Maki, but now if I’m following correctly we need Maki’s help so we can go stop Maki and Maki so Maki needs to stay back and protect Maki’s Mom?

[CommanderKeene]

Don’t forget that we’re stopping Maki and Maki from destroying Maki’s world and killing Maki, Maki, Maki, Maki, and Maki.

And then we’re going to join the Maquis.

[Timrod]

@SpammyV

I’m glad that we reunited Maki and Maki, but now if I’m following correctly we need Maki’s help so we can go stop Maki and Maki so Maki needs to stay back and protect Maki’s Mom?

@CommanderKeene

Don’t forget that we’re stopping Maki and Maki from destroying Maki’s world and killing Maki, Maki, Maki, Maki, and Maki.

And then we’re going to join the Maquis.

Maki and Knuckles, featuring Maki and Knuckles and over 20 pounds of Maki and Knuckles. And Knuckles.

Anyway, I wanted to do a quick post to say that I went back to Update 7 and started putting in the alternate party dialog and the optional stuff, and boy is there a lot! The update’s basically twice the size it was, making me very glad I didn’t try to fit in the cutscene with Tsutomu, because Update 8 will also have a load of alternate text.

While doing that, I realized why it is that Elly has two sets of lines after the return to the Lost Forest, and it wasn’t immediately apparent to me when I read the script for that part because it’s just a bunch of lines.

On every route that is not Reiji’s, there are a few spots where your party members can ask you questions that you can answer with a yes or a no: there’s one in Update 7 right after where we get Reiji. These all seem to be entirely optional and missable. Reiji doesn’t seem to have any, but that’s probably because most of his lines up until we kill Kandori are just ellipses.

So anyway, when we return to the gingerbread house after doing Deva Yuga, Elly has an optional question for you: “Do you like domestic girls?” I verified this using a video playthrough someone did where they had Elly.

The answer to this question determines if you get Formal Elly (the way she always talks up to that point) or Casual Elly. I’m going to go back and make a note of this in the update, but now I’ve figured out what the deal is with that. If you miss the question, it seems like she stays Formal Elly forever.

[Timrod]

: Welcome back to the Alaya Shrine. (Update: I had mentioned in the first draft that I loaded the save into an emulator to casino grind, but as it turns out, I could just buy the coins directly.)

: Naturally, here comes Philemon with his white-on-white subtitles.

: “Well done in returning here.”

: “I see my faith in you was not misplaced.”

: “The Alaya cavern behind this shrine leads to the sea of all mankind’s souls.”

: I should mention a couple of things here as well. First, the concept of a “sea of souls” will absolutely come up again in every other Persona game. Second, I looked it up and as it turns out, Alaya is shorthand for “Alaya-vijnana”, which is a Buddhist idea sort of like Jung’s collective unconscious except that it posits that reality doesn’t actually exist.

: “All souls are born there and someday return there.”

: “Sonomura Maki’s souil is about to return to that sea right now.”

: “It calls for you and for her ideal self.”

: “Now go.”

: “Only those who have been called may enter that cavern.”

: This is also a hint as to why Alaya Cavern is the worst fucking dungeon in this game. I’d put it on par with some of the dungeons from Devil Summoner. There’s one in Snow Queen that’s ostensibly worse, but even that doesn’t suck as bad as Alaya Cavern does.

: “Work together to help the lost soul.”

: So yeah, here’s the fucking godawful gimmick that makes Alaya Cavern suck. Remember how we spent all that time grinding Mark and Nanjo to be within negotiation range? IT WAS ALL POINTLESS! We can only take Jihei and Maki into the cavern.

: Philemon makes it seem like the Alaya Cavern is a point of no return. It isn’t. You can leave whenever - it’s just that only Jihei and Maki can go in.

: “…I’m putting Maki in your hands, man.”

: “We’ll be waiting here. Don’t take any silly risks.”

: In addition to sucking in general, the Alaya Cavern is easily the ugliest dungeon in the game. Let me go ahead and post the map.

: This in a nutshell will describe exactly why this dungeon fucking sucks. Notice that both Jihei and Maki are charmed - that’s because Otohime (the mermaid-looking thing) loves spamming Marin Karin and also cheating to be faster than Jihei. Doppelganger (the other enemy) likes to spam AOEs that hit our entire party because we only have two people.

: To make things worse, both Otohime and Doppelganger have giant pools of HP and resist Blast damage, which means Morrigan is useless and Odin is even more useless because I didn’t put anything good on him. What you’re supposed to do here is use Nuclear damage and guns… except none of the Personas we can fuse have Nuclear damage built in. Even worse, we only have one item that can even give a Persona nuclear damage, so it’s impossible for both Jihei and Maki to use it. This meant I needed to do some grinding. Again.

: The first thing I did was go to the casino and just straight up buy 6,000 casino chips. We’re not going to have anywhere else to spend the money anyway.

: Next, I buy two Scorching Tablets. Scorching Tablets can be given during fusion to make a Persona learn Megidolaon, the ultimate all-target nuclear spell.

: I then grind Maki up to Persona Level 53 (she was L53/P51 before) and fuse Usas for her. Usas has a really low agility stat, but makes up for it by having a much lower SP cost than most of the mid-50s level Personas and amazing magic attack/magic defense. Her resistances are also pretty good and she has no major weaknesses apart from death damage which actually kinda sucks.

: Jihei gets grinded to level 55 for Baal, who fucking rules. Sure, he’s got bad weaknesses, but look at that moveset! Bright Judgement was the move Kandori used to murder half the party at a time, and Bufudyne isn’t bad either. Add Megidolaon to the pool and… yeah. We’re probably keeping Baal until the end of the game.

: Back in Alaya Cavern, we go through the shitshow that is this dungeon.

: Alaya Cavern is full of mask enemies. These cannot be negotiated with at all, and must be killed. The one on the left is Wrath, the one on the right is Envy.

: It would’ve been more thematic if I’d taken Ambassador John Thorman, but Baal gets the goddamn job done. Everything’s just great… for now. You’ll see.

: The main dungeon consists entirely of going down a long spiral staircase, with a couple of optional stop-offs for items.

: The Crimson Tablet is another fusion item, and I only now learned how they work and it’s fucking stupid. To use a fusion item, you first have to know what Persona it makes - meaning you need a guide. You then need to make a fusion of the same arcana as that Persona and use the fusion item during that fusion, which will change it to whatever Persona the fusion item belongs to. If you don’t do it just so, the item is wasted.

: We eventually run into another group of charmfuckers. Guess what I do?

: Shove a fucking nuke in their face. We are all sons of bitches now. I should mention that most of the fire spells in this game cause slowdown, and Megidolaon (which uses the same sprites as Agilao and Agidyne) is no exception.

: By the way, don’t ever go off the main staircase or this shit happens - you wind up in a stairwell with no down stair and have to go all the way back with the constant threat of charmfuckers hanging over you.

: B7F has a treasure room in it, but it has nothing good.

: You might be thinking “Oh boy, a fusion item!” and yes, it is… however, it’s a fusion item for a fucking level 97 Persona that requires two specific demons to fuse. The ONLY reason you would ever consider grinding that much is if you’re planning on doing the PSP-exclusive bonus dungeons, which… god, why the fuck would you do that? The bonus dungeons are a giant maze combined with a boss rush where every enemy is level 99 with 99 in every stat.

: On the lower floors, there’s new encounters. I forget what the mask is called because I was too busy nuking it. Mushus is the same way: you nuke it, it dies.

: There’s also Catoblepas (in front) and Dominion in the back. Dominion is a fucking piece of shit because it reflects all magic. This means if we accidentally hit it with a Megidolaon, that’s a game over.

: Fortunately, we have some pretty good backup abilities. Baal has a spell called Gentle Wave, which is basically Mabufula but with a set AOE instead of hitting the entire enemy party. It does a bit less damage than Megidolaon does, but it allows us to avoid hitting Dominion. The multi-sword enemy you see is Dakini, which is a giant piece of shit for reasons I’ll get into momentarily.

: Here we are, B8F, the second to last floor of the dungeon. We’ve made it this far, surely nothing could possibly go wrong.

: Two steps in, we encounter a group of 4 Succubi, which are this floor’s equivalent to the charmfuckers. I don’t know this as I’m not looking every enemy up on the wiki.

: Succubi, like Lilim, absorb ALL MAGIC THROWN AT THEM. This includes Megidolaon.

: They then respond by sleep-locking the party to death. If you get this encounter, you’re basically fucked no matter what you’ve got for a Persona unless that Persona is Lilim… who I didn’t have equipped. Second game over in this shithouse dungeon.

: Third attempt. This time, I get halfway through B8F without getting destroyed by sleepfuckers or charmfuckers.

: At the halfway point… we run into a very strange room. Is that… is that Jihei? What the shit?

: I swear that if I run into a child version of Jihei I’m ordering him to nuke it.

: “Jihei! There’s two of you! How…!?”

: “Why is he here? And why is he playing games?”

: I mean, same reason I am, to get away from all the Makis.

: “A-Are you… really Jihei?”

: Is the answer to the last one Elly, because it damn well better be.

: “Huh?”

: So, let me explain how this works. Jihei’s double plays a number of scenes we’ve already been through. Each of these scenes corresponds to one of the “morality choices” we made through the game: there’s six of them.

: I should also mention that no one on YouTube has the lines for what happens if you don’t pick the right choices. The script I have does - it was hidden at the end of a file. What I’ll do is post the line for the wrong choice directly underneath the related screenshot, using the Alternate Party Member Text header.

: “Remember this? You left the poor woman to die…”

: " ‘I’m looking out for number one’… are you sure that wasn’t your reasoning?"

: “And here, you tried to abandon an old man, though he was only a pawn…”

: “Did you really think that Chisato’s painting was superior…?”

: “Say ‘I wasn’t afraid of being turned to stone.’ Can you say that honestly?”

: “You lacked the vision to see through to the truth… you judge only with your eyes, and not with your heart.”

: “This man’s soul was sick with doubt… but you could not give his soul the salvation it yearned for…”

: “And the cause was the doubt gnawing at your own soul.”

: “And what did you say to that? You couldn’t tell her not to run, for you too were running, weren’t you?”

: “Can you look me in the eye and deny that, self?”

: “I’m every inch like you. I’m you… and you’re me.”

: “We’re two sides of the same coin. No, not just two…”

: “There are tens of thousands of 'you’s inside yourself.”

: At this point, we’ve jumped right out of Jung and right into Buddhism.

: “…”

: “Your will is rooted nice and deep. You have a good grip on yourself.”

: “I think you and your friends can handle them.”

: “They’re keys to awakening the strongest Personas sealed deep in one’s soul.”

: “Ask that old geezer Igor how to use them. But… don’t forget. The ‘me’ you see here is still you.”

: I know for a fact that my Buddhist doppelganger would absolutely end this with “You’re a big guy” and kill me if I did not respond “For you.”

: Going to need to use a bit of text here, so bear with me. Those items are for, in order: Jihei, Mark, Maki, Nanjo, and Reiji.

: Anyway, there’s four variations of this scene with Jihei’s doppelganger. One of them happens if you get none of the choices right. A second happens if you get more than zero, but fewer than half. A third happens if you get more than half, but not all of them, and finally there’s the version where you get all of them that we’ve just seen. Some of these are kind of dumb because there’s no way you’d know you did something wrong until now - particularly not fighting Hariti, which ultimately has zero impact on anything. That scene progresses exactly the same regardless of what you do. Let’s do the optional scenes now.

: First, let’s do the ‘no right choices’ version. These lines all happen immediately after the “tens of thousands of yous” line.

: “…So quit bothering me. You must know how it feels. Long as I can play games all day, I’m good. I’d rather stay out of trouble.”

: “Hurry up and get out of here. See ya.”

: “Why’re you acting like this!? Jihei is a nice guy!”

: “Let’s go, Jihei!”

: “…If you made it this far, it means there’s some hope for you. Alright, self… go do the best you can.”

: I hate Atlus for taking digs at the player (especially given how unrealistic the characters in any given Persona game are) but I really, really like this version of the cutscene. Anyway, next up is the ‘less than half the choices right’ version. In this version, we only get the Rosetta Stone for Jihei.

: “…Someone seems to be aiming to take your place, but that won’t happen.”

: “Your will is rooted nice and deep. You have a good grip on yourself.”

: “Here, take this. I think you can handle it. It’s the key to awakening the strongest Persona sealed deep in your soul.”

: Finally, the version where we get more than half, but less than all of them.

: “…Someone seems to be aiming to take your place, but that won’t happen.”

: “Your will is rooted nice and deep. You have a good grip on yourself.”

: “Here, take this. I think you and the girl can handle them. They’re the keys to awakening the strongest Persona sealed deep in one’s soul.”

: The ultimate Personas are all just above where our level is, and I’m not entirely positive that the rest of the party is going to be levelled up to match Jihei. What I’m going to do is hope that Atlus was nice enough to match levels. If not, I’ll grind, but I plan on Personalogging all of the ultimate Personas. You might also ask if Brown, Elly, and Ayase have ultimate Personas - they do, and we’ll maybe see them in Snow Queen.

: I made it all the way past Jihei’s doppelganger to the stairs down to the final level. Nothing could go wrong, right?

: This is the part where I find out Dakini reflects Nuclear damage, and manage to game over a third time. I didn’t find out until after I finished recording that there’s a way we could have cheesed this - the casino sells a fusion item that makes Succubus, which is basically a higher-level Lilim. It’s got crap for attacks, but absorbs all elements and reflects status effects.

: I also ran into a few more enemies on my final run - Yaksa and Tengu, neither of whom are noteworthy for any reason.

: I should mention that as soon as we go into that door, all random encounters in Alaya Cavern stop. This is probably a good thing even if it stops you from grinding, since why the fuck would you want to grind here?

: Fake Maki’s portrait versus Real Maki’s portrait is me before and after doing this godawful shitheap of a dungeon multiple times. It’s not even that long, it’s just tedious as hell.

: “There’s nowhere left to hide!”

: This line kind of didn’t make any sense to me the first time I read it, and it still doesn’t. I get what they’re trying to convey, but it’s kind of hard to explain. This line probably should’ve been something like “If I was more like you, my life would have turned out much differently…”

: “Stop that! I don’t want to hear that kind of talk from my own mouth!”

: “Did you ever try to change? How? All you did was hide under the sheets and cry!”

: I also really like how Fake Maki sees Fake Jihei and goes “You know what? I want to do that.”

: “But now’s our chance! We can change along with Masao, Kei, Reiji, and Jihei…”

: “Doesn’t looking at those guys make you feel like nothing is impossible? You just have to get over yourself!”

: “I won’t run away anymore… I’ll own up to the mistakes I’ve made!”

: I should mention (since it comes up surprisingly often in Japanese-made games) that Avidya is a Sanskrit word that means “ignorance”, though in philosophy it goes a little bit beyond that to include things like incorrect knowledge or delusions. It’s actually more of a Hindu thing than it is Buddhist, but the same idea is used in Buddhism.

: The other big thing about Avidya is that in Hinduism, it apparently is used to describe the Self (basically the same as Jung’s Self) living in a state where reality is suppressed.

: “I wonder if what I was trying to say got across… well, all I can do now is keep believing in myself. Let’s go back to the others!”

: Random encounters are disabled and I don’t feel like walking, so Emergency Exit it is.

: " 'Bout time! It was getting tired of sitting around."

: “It seems to have gone well, mm? Now then, let’s head to the school and meet this Pandora.”

: “Tch… you’re pretty tough. I thought you’d eat it. Then I could rush in and rescue the princess!”

: “Jihei! I’m so glad you’re back! You’re not hurt anywhere, are you?”

: I really, really wish we could get rid of Nanjo and Mark and just take Elly in their place.

: “Yeesh, Jihei, you were in there so long I thought you’d died.”

: So unfortunately, the game was not nice and did not update our other party members to Jihei’s level. This means that I’d need to grind some 12 levels for Mark and Nanjo, and 8 for Reiji, in addition to 4 for Jihei and around 5 for Maki. This is a lot of grinding, given that the next dungeon is the last one. We’re talking… probably a good four to five hours of grind.

: I did try to do a little bit of this on the actual PSP, and then remembered I kind of deleted Morrigan and equipped Odin to Nanjo. Odin has Bad compatibility with Nanjo, which means that he can’t actually use Odin to do anything.

: The first thing I did was head to the casino to pick up a fusion item.

: This would’ve been a complete pain in the ass if Jihei was anything less than level 59, because the limit for creating a Persona is… I think 10 levels above your highest character. We’re not actually making Hanuman - we’ll never reach level 68 and Hanuman kind of sucks anyway.

: What’s important is that Hanuman is a Magician arcana Persona. This means we can use the Suitengu Talisman to fuse Varuna for Mark.

: Varuna is fast, and more importantly has Mabufudyne for elemental coverage. Unfortunately, due to his nature as a “special Persona”, we can’t give him spells via stones or tablets.

: I also returned Hermod to get a pair of Vidar Shoes, which boost Agility by 5. These go on Mark immediately, boosting his speed to well over Nanjo’s.

: So now, I’ve got a question. The next dungeon is the last one for the SEBEC route, after which we will be moving immediately to Snow Queen. I want to grind out Jihei’s ultimate Persona because we’re likely going to need it, but I really don’t want to grind out the rest of them.

: There’s a memory editor code that works in the emulator (and probably works on the actual PSP if I bothered to install it) that gives everyone 500,000 EXP every battle. If I use this on the save I made immediately before I fused Baal, everyone winds up at more or less the right level to use their ultimate Personas. The question is, do we want do to do that in the first place?

: The problem is that most of the ultimate Personas frankly suck, apart from Jihei’s. Honestly, I’d rather do Avidya World with Baal reassigned to Nanjo (would take some grinding) and maybe find a Persona for Reiji and give it a decent move (maybe Magrydyne).

• Use the cheat, get everyone’s ultimate Persona
• Don’t use the cheat, stay console accurate.

: To help you decide, I’m going to Personalog all the ultimate Personas we can make right now. Keep in mind that even with the code, I’d have to find the right demons to fuse to make them.

: First up is Amon Ra, who is fused using the Rosetta Stone and is Jihei’s ultimate Persona. I’ve also heard he’s got a dagger of some kind. We absolutely want Amon Ra for his signature ability, Hieroglyphein, along with his amazing stats and low SP cost.

: Side note: The ??? you see under resistances on all of the Personas? That’s their resistance to Hieroglyphein. The wiki hides what it does, but I’ll say it here “Effective against Karma and Fiend order enemies.” I wonder where we might run into one of those?

: Next up is Verdandi, fused with the Pasque Flower. Verdandi is probably the weakest of the ultimate Personas - her SP cost is barely better than Usas and her moveset sucks, on top of having really low Agility for an ultimate. If I have to skip the ultimates, this is one I wouldn’t mind passing on. I also forgot to mention it in the image but “Passe” is the name of the fusion item in Japanese.

: This is Nanjo’s ultimate Persona, fused with the Amber Glasses. Yes, Nanjo is so boring that his ultimate Persona is just his butler. The manga implies that the Amber Glasses are actually the real Yamaoka’s. Having Yamaoka with us would basically reduce Nanjo to only using his gun, because all of Yamaoka’s moves SUCK. Seriously, 202 Magic Attack and the best you can do is some shitty status effects and no third-tier element spells? The only good part of Yamaoka is that he reflects EVERYTHING, but that isn’t really good enough.

: Mark’s ultimate Persona, fused with the Purified Water, is Susano-O. Having Susano-O as your Persona is like a kiss of death marking you as the worst character in your game (see also: Yosuke in P4). Susano-O isn’t awful, but notice that none of his spells are all-target. Varuna is the better pick for this reason, and if I level Mark up a bit I can probably get him something with Mazandyne.

: Finally, here’s Reiji’s ultimate persona, which is fused with the Babylonian Coffin. Mot is basically an upgraded Loki: he has most of the same moves, all of which are kind of bad. His resistances are good, but otherwise his brother Baal is infinitely better.

[Riley]

Cheat the dang system also EXCUSE you Surfing Butler is clearly the BEST Persona how dare you

[SpammyV]

Imagine fighting demons and meeting yourself but yourself is just, “Bro this WoW Raif just started and we really need DPS I’ll enlighten you later man.”

[Fefnir]

@Timrod

The bonus dungeons are a giant maze combined with a boss rush where every enemy is level 99 with 99 in every stat.

Wow, and I thought Square Enix was bad at adding bonus dungeons to their remakes. There’s no part of that that doesn’t sound like a slog.

[Timrod]

: So unfortunately, the EXP cheats did not work. This meant I had to do a lot of grinding manually, as in five hours worth. All of this was done on the actual PSP, not an emulator.

: My first instinct was to go to Avidya World and grind, since logically being the final dungeon and all it should have enemies that give the most EXP. There’s also a healing spot right inside the entrance. I should mention I only just now found out that Circle brings up a map screen.

: Avidya World has a mix of old and new enemies, including Girimehkala (Purski is the better elephant and we all know it) and Alecto, which is yet another generic harpy that dies extremely quickly to ma-dyne spells. Most of the enemies here are ice-based, so Varuna does an amazing job.

: The problem with Avidya World is this: most of the encounters are against one or two enemies: Gdon almost always shows up by itself, as does Ubelluris. Alone, they’re only worth around 2,000 EXP… but we can get upwards of 10,000 in multi-enemy encounters on the streets outside. The enemies here are a lot less threatening overall, but at the same time not worth grinding.

: I started by grinding Mark, as he was the lowest level character in the party at the time I started the grind. It took me over two and a half hours to get him to the point where he could get his ultimate Persona.

: Around the time that Mark reached Persona level 55, I started looking at new Personas for him, since Varuna isn’t exactly the best out on the streets where there are lots of things that are immune to ice.

: One thing I tried is Suzaku, who would be fucking amazing if he wasn’t a Totem Persona. Suzaku is fused using the Crimson Tablet we found in the treasure room on the 8th floor of Alaya Cavern. Unfortunately, he’s stuck with a garbage moveset until he reaches Max rank. I did fuse him as an experiment (and reloaded when I found out he sucks) so I’ll log it.

: Instead, I went with the Persona I probably should’ve given to Jihei instead of Baal, because it reflects EVERYTHING. Remember how I said Yamaoka would be really good if only he had a single damage spell? Meet Armaiti. Armaiti is Yamaoka but with the ability to use spell tablets.

: In hindsight, I probably should’ve given Armaiti Maziodyne instead of Magrydyne, since Magrydyne kinda sucks damage-wise. The coverage is nice though. I should also mention that I wish we had Elly, since her ultimate Persona is one of the few that is actually better than Armaiti.

: So yeah, this is where I spent about… three and a half hours or so.

: I immediately fused Susano-O, who I am probably never going to actually use because Armaiti is that much better.

: Next up was Jihei, who I wanted to get levelled sooner rather than later due to Amon Ra being a useless pile of shit until Max rank.

: Amon Ra’s moveset is a total mystery to me. Azure Cessation is an AOE spell equivalent to Maragion, except it only hits a small area that is actually equal to what Agidyne hits. I remind you that in Persona 1, all of a Persona’s moves cost the same amount of SP. We’re basically only going to pull out Amon Ra for the final boss.

: While levelling up Reiji, I find out that there is no way in hell I’m going to be using Hieroglyphein this run. To use it, we’d need to use Amon Ra a total of 100 times, since Jihei’s Persona level is within 10 of Amon Ra’s. If I wanted this to go any faster, I’d need to bring him up to level 74, at which point it’s moot because there are level 74 Personas that can kick the shit out of Hieroglyphein damage-wise. Fuck this game and its godawful mechanics.

: After another hour and a half or so (and fusing Loki as an intermediary Persona since I needed to give Reiji Megidolaon and he’s incompatible with almost everything) we get Reiji his real ultimate Persona: Barbatos. I’ll Personalog both.

: Loki sucks. Reiji’s SP is already pretty low, and with the Megidolaon spam he was going through most of it within a couple of fights. His design is… it looks like a Muppet, only made for sex.

: Barbatos, on the other hand, is goddamn amazing. Like Yamaoka and Armaiti, he reflects everything, only instead of reflecting Expel and Miracle like they do, he reflects Death and Curse instead. His moveset sucks, but we can fix that.

: Finally, I get Nanjo to 60, allowing us to fuse Yamaoka.

: With Yamaoka, we now have three out of five party members who reflect magic. As for offense, we’ve got two Megidolaons, one Magrydyne, and one Maziodyne, with an additional Mabufudyne if I leave Nanjo with Varuna. Yamaoka will never be useful outside of his amazing stats and defenses, but…

: I deleted Yatagarasu and got Ame no Murakumo, which is weird because you’d think Susano would drop that given that it’s part of his mythology. Ame no Murakumo is… pretty good for a sword.

: With that, it’s time to head back to school. I’m not going to bother fusing Verdandi, and there’s kind of a dearth of Personas between level 50 and level 60: you’ve got the ultimates, you’ve got Baal and Armaiti, and that’s about all.

: “Do you like school, Jihei? I… used to consider it dull. But not anymore, I don’t think. That’s thanks to my friendship with you and the others.”

: That’s Formal Elly.

: “Do you like school, Jihei? I… used to think it was boring, but I’m getting to like it. It’s much easier now that I’ve met you all.”

: “I actually really like school. I’m a crappy student, though. But hey, studying isn’t everything!”

: God dammit Brown.

: “Do you like school, Jihei? 'Cause you know, I kinda do. Most of the time, I get to do whatever I want here.”

: All of the doors in the school are locked, except for the library. This means we can’t heal one last time before heading into Avidya World. While I’m at it, let me mention one thing I did after I found this out.

: The first thing I did was to to the gem store in the mall and trade a bunch of gems for HP incenses, which I use on Maki.

: I also restocked on healing items. The gem store sells chewing souls (SP recovery) so I maxed out on those again.

: There’s one other thing we’re going to want, that I only knew about at this point because I’d seen the map for Avidya World. We haven’t seen a single damage floor this entire game, which is a remarkable amount of restraint on the part of Atlus’s map designers. That’s going to change. Anyway, the library is back on the 3rd floor of the school, where we left it.

: “Maki! Oh good, you’re safe too!”

: “Hey Yosuke, what happened here? There’s no one around but you guys.”

: “I’m not sure… it was like this when we got back. The east side of town’s vanished, too.”

: “I want to know what’s going on as much as you do!”

: “Pandora?”

: “I’m sorry, both of you… I’m at fault for all of this… it’s the real reason behind everything…”

: There’s a fade to black here while Maki explains the whole Five Maki Theory to Chisato.

: “…”

: “So that’s it…”

: “I promise I’ll return everyone to their original world.”

: There was something here that I realized makes no sense. Remember when Maki was talking about her dream world and how there wasn’t a hospital or a police station because it’s a perfect world and people don’t need those things? If there’s no doctors, who put the sling on Yosuke’s arm? Why is there a nurse’s office in the school? Why is there a doctor’s office north of the mall where I spent an inordinate amount of time recovering SP?

: “If you want to hit me, Chisato, I’ll understand. Go right ahead.”

: You know, I have a feeling that Maki actually mindwiped Chisato somehow and just kind of injected her with her own personality. The way Chisato is acting now is a complete 180 from the last time we met her, even after she gave up the whole Harem Queen thing.

: “You’re such an idiot, Maki! You’re just as thick as you’ve always been…”

: “Hey, Chisato, c’mon…”

: “It’s me who needs to apologize. You called me into this world because you thought of me as your best friend, right?”

: Wait, what? She wasn’t even there when Nanjo explained that whole thing! Maki is fucking evil! Seriously, I’m waiting for her to pull out Zelenin’s weird taco suit from Strange Journey and start preaching about how mindwiping people is perfectly fine if an angel tells you to.

: “And I… I betrayed you…”

: “Chisato… thanks…”

: “Now go on. We’ll wait here so we don’t get in your way. Once things settle down… let’s all go to an amusement park together! Sound good?”

: “…Yeah.”

: “An amusement park, huh? Heheh… might be fun to act like a kid again for a day. So let’s hurry up and get this done!”

: “Maki, please open the door for us.”

: “Will do!”

: There’s alternate party member dialogue here, but it’s all the same thing. There’s quite a bit of optional dialogue here, though.

: “Hmm… these compacts may represent the three primary colors of light. One’s heart can be any color, I suppose. Which color all depends on one’s self… perhaps’ that’s the reasoning behind it.”

: My heart is only unlocked with four blenders that are the exact base colors for the CMYK color standard. There’s the cyan blender, the magenta blender, the yellow blender, and the kapische? blender. All four colors.

: “All of my worst qualities are through this door… I refuse to let them win!”

: “Hurry and go. I’ll take out the small fry for you.”

: Reiji is basically invincible at this point, so yeah I can picture him running down the halls screaming “I’M FUCKING INVINCIBLE COME AT ME BITCHES”.

: “It all comes down to this… let’s end it quickly and visit the amusement park.”

: “So this is it, huh? Let’s hurry so we can get to the amusement park quicker! I want to ride the ferris wheel with you, Jihei!”

: Elly is still the best girl and I wish I could trade Maki, Nanjo, and Mark for her.

: “I’m pumped! Anyone who stands in my way will get a faceful of my Persona power!”

: “Hmm, an amusement park, huh? I SO wanna ride the freefall! Last time I rode it five times in a row - this time I’m gonna shoot for ten! And I expect you to be there with me, Jihei!”

: “Be careful. But man, you got it made, huh? It’s easy to tell who Maki likes…”

: If you have Elly or Ayase in your party, Chisato has another line here.

: “And it looks like she’s not the only one. Better look out, Jihei!”

: “Just keep hanging in there! I can’t do much, but I’ll be rooting for you guys.”

: Let’s get that map up.

: This is HALF of Avidya World. As you can see, it’s a gigantic fucking maze. I’m not going to post a whole lot of shots of the maze itself because it’s exactly as boring as it looks, and then some.

: The first two floors are really easy. It’s when you get to the third floor that shit gets serious. By the way, I’m glad I grinded a bit because once you leave the second floor, grinding is basically impossible. Ignore the “1F” in the top-left. Technically, the entire dungeon is on the first floor minus the end parts.

: On the third floor, two new enemies show up. One is Rukh, which is a total pushover. Weak to lightning, dies very quickly to Megidolaon, nothing special.

: The second… is Reiji’s Persona in demon form. As an enemy, Barbatos is exactly as overpowered as it is in Persona form: it reflects everything that isn’t physical or guns.

: The problem is that they like to spam Curse damage. One hit took off over half of Nanjo’s HP, and Barbatos has enough HP that you do not want to try and gun them down. Instead, you want to negotiate and grab their spell card, then use that to negotiate any other Barbatos away.

: Once you reach the “second floor” (really the 4th) things get even worse. Not only is Barbatos still around, but now the game tosses a new wrench into the mix.

: No, not you. Oberon is weak to pretty much everything and dies in one Megidolaon.

: No, it’s these things right here. Throne, like Dominion, reflects magic. Unlike Barbatos, they don’t have anything particularly nasty so it’s usually okay to gun them down, but in this case we just negotiate them away. Now it’s time to post the rest of the map.

: The fifth floor, as you can see, is a massive dark zone.

: Floor five introduces Tlazoteotl, which looks like a generic succubus but is actually the Aztec god of filth. From Persona 1 onward, she’s portrayed as the top half of a humanoid woman sticking out of a toilet. Like all Night order demons, Tlazoteotl absorbs magic and loves to use Death damage. We want to negotiate her away as well.

: Floor five also introduces us to Cromm Cruach. Hilariously, if you have Airgetlam with you, there’s a chance Airgetlam can auto-negotiate with it. I’ve never seen Persona Chat happen, but supposedly it does. Cromm Cruach is a joke, is what I’m saying. Very weak to being nuked.

: By the way, this is what happens if you don’t negotiate Tlazoteotl away. Mark died in one hit and Jihei is off getting stoned. This would be worse if we had Elly and her ultimate Persona.

: Floor six is straightforward, but has a very cruel joke in it. What you’re looking to do is get to these stairs, in the Northwestern corner. If you go the other way, there’s a hole that drops you all the way back down to the beginning of the dungeon.

: The stairs on Floor 6 lead us all the way back down to Floor 1, except now we’re in a back area. There’s a Velvet Room here, and I fused Verdandi but never actually equipped her.

: Floor seven introduces us to more new enemies. Culebre is a joke, as are Xiuhtecuhtli (the weird floating thing in front) and Hecatoncheires, also known as the toughest enemy in D&D 3rd edition, beating out even the Terrasque. Rangda reflects Nuclear (which is strange because it’s known for reflecting physical in P4 and P5) but is otherwise not dangerous.

: Finally, here we are at the bottom. Floor eight. Floor 8 has a bunch of unique enemies, which is really weird because it’s the final dungon… unless you’re doing Mikage Ruins, the bonus dungeon. I still don’t even know where that is.

: The mainstays of Floor 8 are Cherub and Jahi, which… they’re Divine (think Dominion) and Night (Lilim) order, respectively. They’re too high level to negotiate with, so they have to be gunned down. Fortunately, neither of them are capable of using death or curse damage - Jahi mostly uses a spell called Decover that stops you healing, and Cherub mostly sticks to physical attacks and Megidolaon (which three out of our five party members reflect and the other two usually dodge).

: Mangadhai is some kind of buffalo, and dies to Megidolaon just like everything else that isn’t Night or Divine order. They’re supposed to be some kind of buffalo-hydra mix from Mongolia that can grow up to 100 heads. Swallow your buffalo, don’t let your neck react.

: Hresvelgr is annoying as shit in that it has a lot of HP and resists most types of magic.

: There’s also Ganesha and… Grimies. The wiki claims that Grimies are supposed to be the greys rumored to be kept in Area 51. They only ever show up in Persona 1.

: Fafnir made an appearance on the tile immediately before the boss room. He died quickly.

: By the way, see those exclamation marks? Those are damage floors, and you have to pass over like ten of them to get to the boss room. They do… exactly one damage. My guess is they had to bring the map designer for SMT 1 into the hospital with a terminal case of blue balls. “I just want to put in damage floors! What the hell is wrong with you guys!? Where’s the damage floor spirit? What? You mean I can put in damage floors! Fuck yes we’re doing this entire dungeon full of damage floors! What do you MEAN they only do 1 damage!?” At least he got his revenge in Nocturne.

: Oh, hi Maki.

: OH JESUS DICKSHITTING CHRIST! She-Mara! She-Mara! This is not a fucking drill!

: So yes, Pandora is a giant two-headed penis monster, with one of the penis heads being Maki’s face. I’m pretty sure there is an entire category of weird furry porn dedicated to this shit. (Note: there is, it gets posted on /v/ all the time.)

: You know, if I ever walked into my own Jungian psyche and found out that deep down I was actually giant penis monster, I’d probably start reconsidering my life choices.

: “Look! Is that the core of the Deva System behind it!?”

: No, I’m pretty sure that’s a gigantic blob of sticky white stuff.

: “No! That’s no gate to paradise at all! It’s a Pandora’s box that will bring evil to this world!”

: So, Pandora. If you’ve really been paying attention, you might ask why we’d want Hieroglyphein in this dungeon, considering that none of the enemies we’ve run into thus far have been Karma or Fiend order. While Pandora is neither of those things, she also takes bonus damage from Hieroglyphein. In fact, it’s her only consistent weakness and will end her much more quickly than any other method.

: You can see that Megidolaon is only doing around 275 damage. You do NOT want to waste your SP here. Instead, if you don’t have Hieroglyphein, you want to use guns. Guns are Pandora’s only other weakness.

: Pandora spends most of her time trying to hit you with status effects, in particular Stone and Paralyze. She has one move that is particularly dickish called Evil Smile, which “levels down” your character and drains a considerable amount of their SP in addition to paralyzing them.

: This is very bad because Mark is our dedicated healer for this fight. The problem is that both Evil Smile and Paralyze Puncture (non-elemental magic damage plus paralyze) go through resistances, so even if you would normally reflect the paralyze (as Mark does) it’ll still hit you.

: The trick here is to just spam guns. Guns should be your one and only damage source. Pandora’s first form has around 5800 HP, and will die pretty quickly. I should mention that Pandora also causes massive amounts of slowdown due to all the sprites or something.

: You just watched a giant naked green version of yourself hatch from a giant penis monster where one of the dicks is your face. How is ANY OF THAT beautiful? What the fuck is wrong with you?

: Pandora’s second form is where you want to start using Hieroglyphein, but no other magic. You see, Pandora has a gimmick here.

: When her hair is red, Pandora ABSORBS all magic thrown at her that isn’t Miracle element or Hieroglyphein. This is very bad, and there’s almost no way you’re going to figure this out without healing her for some pretty substantial damage without using a guide. What you want to do here is use physical attacks. Assuming she doesn’t buff her defense (which she can), Mark can hit her for over 300 damage with a single physical attack.

: In this form, Pandora has two pretty nasty attacks. One is Mabufudyne, which three out of our five party members reflect back at her. Thankfully, reflected spells do not get absorbed (and Pandora reflects rather than absorbs ice anyway).

: The second is an attack called Butterfly Storm. Butterfly Storm hits everyone for non-elemental magic damage and also applies a random status effect, which also bypasses resistance/reflect on status effects.

: After a few turns, Pandora’s hair changes from red to blue. When her hair is blue, Pandora becomes highly resistant (but not immune) to physical attacks. Instead, she becomes weak to the following magic types: Earth, Electric, Nuclear, and Gravity. Good thing we have three out of those four damage types covered!

: A single Megidolaon from Jihei did like 400 damage, with Maki doing basically the same on her turn. I really should’ve just given Mark and Reiji Megidolaon as well, because Magrydyne and Maziodyne don’t really work all that well on her.

: Magrydyne and Maziodyne hit for about 175 damage each, meaning that Reiji and Mark combined are hitting for less than Jihei does. This could be much worse, however. If we were using just the ultimate Personas, only Jihei would be doing any kind of damage, as Pandora nulls wind (Susano-O), blast (also Susano-O), curse and death (Mot) and expel (Yamaoka, if I bothered ranking him up).

: At one point, the fight got pretty dicey, as Mark ran out of SP to heal and Pandora killed both Maki and Nanjo. Megidolaon saved this fight. Looking back, I probably should’ve fused Morrigan again and given her to Nanjo instead.

: “You already know, don’t you?”

: “It’s 'cause we’re not alone.”

: “Because we work not as individuals, but as a team.”

: “It’s because we work together.”

: “We’re not alone!”

: “Heheh… that, and we believe in ourselves.”

: “People can’t live in isolation. If things are hard, just look around. We’ll be there for you.”

: “At last… it’s over.”

: “Yeah…”

: “Thank you… all of you. We have to part ways now… but I’ll never forget you all.”

: “Hey! Whaddaya mean, part ways…?”

: This is actually technically correct. Fake Maki is an anima, and the anima is considered part of the shadow.

: “It was fun… really, it was.”

: “Hey! Maki…! That’s not fair! Whoa!”

: And there goes our party.

: I’d like to say that this CGI looks creepy as shit.

: God dammit. I don’t hate that Jihei gets a kiss, I hate that it’s not from Elly.

: Jihei’s got that same look Leon does at the end of Resident Evil 4 when Ashley asks if he wants to stop somewhere.

: Oh look, it’s white-on-white subtitles man again, for a scene that I should mention is COMPLETELY NON-CANON. Seriously, Persona 2 is going to establish something about Philemon that makes this scene not work.

: “Nothing more need be said…”

: “I’m sure you have all discovered by now your true selves.”

: I mentioned this before, but under Jung you cannot discover your true self and Philemon logically should know this because he invented it.

: “The smiles you wear are no longer false masks.”

: “You may find yourselves troubled, suffering, or even lost in the future.”

: “But there is nothing to fear.”

: “Look to your soul for your true self.”

: “No matter what trials you may face, that will be enough for you to weather the storm.”

: “Now go forth…”

: “Into your bright futures.”

: As a warning, Persona 2 establishes that this scene is not and cannot be canon.

: What… no. It can’t be…

: PHILEMON WAS ROLAND THE ENTIRE TIME! Oh dear god the Ni no Kuni 2 LP never ended. I’ve been trapped in it since 2018!

: I should mention that this exact text sequence over stock footage plays over the bad ending as well. The bad ending happens in Maki’s hospital room in Deva Yuga, and ends with Mai closing the door to Maki’s psyche and destroying the Deva System.

: Is this the part where I unlock The 4th Survivor and I get to play as HUNK and just neck snap all the demons to death? It feels like that part.

: I remember my high school graduation. It sucked.

: Fuck yeah Reiji! My goddamn boy!

: Obviously, this scene will be different depending on who your fifth party member is.

: “Huh? After all that bitching, you decided to show up anyway?”

: “Heheh…”

: “What in the… you’re behaving rather strangely today.”

: “Hidehiko was telling anyone who’d listen. Something about this being the last… I came to get a good look at you screaming in terror.”

: “Indeed? That does sound like something worth witnessing. I believe I’ll stay around to observe as well.”

: Just wait until you see Brown’s version of this scene. This entire end sequence is all about dunking on Mark.

: “That dick! He’s always doing stuff like this!”

: “What’re you laughing about? Look, there’s no way I’m going! Forget it!”

: Somehow, Maki magically cures her anime disease. I think it’s a cop-out, personally. There’s a similar character in Persona 3 (the death s-link) who doesn’t magically get cured.

: “It seems Masao is cancelling today’s plans. Such a pity.”

: “Huh? How come? I was really looking forward to it…”

: “Nanjo, you evil…!”

: “Heh heh heh…”

: “Is he telling the truth, Masao?”

: “N-no way… um… I’m… I’m goin’.”

: “Heh… looking at Maki now, what happened before is like a bad dream.”

: “Heh. Pandora, eh…?”

: “Don’t tell me you’re still thinking about all that.”

: They then leave for what is presumably Tokyo Destiny Land from SMT 1, where Jihei re-aligns himself to Chaos to escape Maki.

: I find it weird that they included this here when roughly half of these characters are people we’ll only meet in Snow Queen. I guess if you played Snow Queen first (like I did) it’d make more sense.

: I don’t quite understand what the point of this particular cutscene is, but whatever.

: After the cutscene, we get these “where are they now” info cards. These are, as far as I can tell, only questionably canon. What happens is that in Persona 3, Trish (the fairy who runs the healing springs in the dungeons) becomes a talk show host and interviews most of the Persona 1 cast. This is how we know that Persona 1 takes place in 2006 and not 1996. What I’ll do is post what we do know about each character from P2 and P3 in a side update (along with the alternate versions of the ending scene) in a second update.

: Mark has some fucking freakish body proportions.

: Nanjo’s is also extremely non-canon.

: Anyway, I’d like to thank everyone for reading and posting in the thread. We’re done with the SEBEC route! Now I can move on to… wait… what do you mean I still have to do Snow Queen? Next time, we’ll start Snow Queen and see what would happen if the SMT 1 designers actually got their way. Anyway, one last piece of music to post:

[SpammyV]

“I hope you still think about me at least once in a while”

If I just saw a weird blobby monster you with your face coming out of a stalk and another neck that’s got a butt over a mouth split open and a butterfly you comes out I’d be trying pretty hard not to think about that for the rest of my life, sorry.

[Timrod]

: Okay, let’s do the alternate party scenes for the ending first. First up is Elly’s version. I’ll assume we’re staying Formal Elly so this flows better.

: “Is that so? Oh, my… hee-hee!”

: “Tsk… people do like to talk, but nothing’s noisier than girls gossiping.”

[Jihei and Mark enter here]

: “Sorry, guys… man, that was hell. Jihei and me lost our second buttons on the way here! Those girls were all over us… we had to surrender the buttons to survive.”

: I’m not entirely sure what he’s talking about, probably some kind of Japanese cultural thing.

: “There were a bunch of people looking for you too, Nanjo.”

: " ‘A wise man never courts danger.’ Use your head, man."

: “Yeah, yeah, if you say so…”

: “It must be difficult for you all, being so popular…”

: “Well, I hate to break it to you, but you’re hanging out with us next!”

: “Let’s go! Time waits for no man, you know.”

[Maki and Elly leave the diner.]

: “Aw man, there they go. Heheh… looking at Maki now, that mess before seems like a bad dream.”

: “Heh. Pandora, eh…?”

: “Man, you’re still stuck on that?”

: “Oh, it’s nothing. I just remembered the last thing in Pandora’s box…”

: “Well then, Mark, shall we go?”

[Nanjo leaves the diner.]

: “Wait a sec, did you just call me Mark? Hey!”

: Next up is Ayase’s version. With hers, I haven’t seen a video of it, but I assume it takes place with her and Maki already at the diner. Judging from the first couple of lines, I assume she’s talking with Maki.

: “Seriously !? Jihei!? That’s totally awesome!”

: “Huh… Jihei I could see, but Masao?”

: “Remember the promise, Jihei? We’re gonna ride the freefall 10 times! Over and over until we hurl!”

: That’s seriously all that’s in the script. I assume that Nanjo and Mark never show up.

: Finally, we’ve got Brown’s. I’ve been saving this one. I haven’t seen a video of this one either, but I assume everyone but Brown and Maki is already at the diner.

: “Hey, looks like Mr. Smellypants is here.”

: “Heheh… laugh it up, chump. Today’s the last day you get to call me that!”

: “You’re not too fond of heights, are you Massy? Or should I say, Mr. Dampcrotch?”

: “What the – who told you that, you bastard!?”

: “Mwahaha… your mom gave me every last detail! My, my, how shameful for a sixth-grader!”

: “That stupid cow! Can it, okay? It’s better than crapping your pants in junior high!”

: “Well technically, sixth grade’s part of junior high, too… heheheh.”

: “I’m gonna get a good look at a return performance by Mr. Dampcrotch today!”

: “Those nitwits! Where do they think they are!? Ugh, they give me a headache.”

[Jihei and Maki enter.]

: “Sorry to keep you waiting! Huh…? What’s wrong, guys?”

: “Jay! Maki! Perfect timing. Mark here wanted to tell you how excited he is to ride the freefall!”

: “Ooh, really? Then let’s get going!”

: “Hidehiko, you dick!”

: “Heeheehee…”

: “What’s wrong? C’mon, let’s go! Chisato and the others are waiting outside!”

: “Hidehiko…! I’ll get you!”

: “Man, I can’t wait to see this!”

: The rest of the ending from this point on is almost identical to Reiji’s - including Nanjo doing the thing about Pandora’s box and Brown responding “What’s that supposed to mean?” the same way Reiji did.

: Now I’ll do a brief thing on where each character is at the time Persona 3 starts. In Persona 3, Trish (the healing fairy) has her own talk show that can be seen throughout the game on the TV at the dorm, and does interviews with most of the P1 cast. The reason I’m doing this, by the way, is that if you happen to go on to play Eternal Punishment after reading this LP, you might get really confused for a bit. That’s because Eternal Punishment’s localization (which does not seem that bad otherwise) uses the Americanized names from Revelations: Persona for the P1 characters.

: Maki will return in both versions of Persona 2, where she works as the assistant to a psychiatrist and is presumably going to college to be a therapist. By the time Persona 3 rolls around (which is actually 2009, the same year P2 takes place) Maki is described by Trish as an “excellent therapist”.

: Nanjo will return in both versions of Persona 2 as well, though he has a bigger role in Eternal Punishment than he does in Innocent Sin. He presumably takes over the Nanjo Group before Persona 2 starts, and later forms the Kirijo Group (which will be familiar to anyone who has played P3) which spins off as its own company. Essentially, he becomes the Speedwagon of the early Persona games.

: Reiji will return in both versions of Persona 2, where he’s a salesman who works with another character we’re only going to meet once we do Snow Queen. When interviewed by Trish, she describes him as “a man in his 20s with a sour face” and quickly corrects it to “a handsome salaryman”.

: Elly will return in both versions of Persona 2, but like Nanjo has a much larger role in Eternal Punishment. I can legitimately see people playing EP not understanding that this is even Elly because of how different (and homogenized with Maki and Yukino) she looks. In both versions of P2, she’s started a successful modelling career.

: Brown will return in both versions of Persona 2, where I assume he fuses with some kind of demon representing godawful fashion sense. In P2, he’s a TV presenter and godawful comedian.

: Yukino will return in both versions of Persona 2, but has a much larger role in Innocent Sin. In P2, she’s a photographer working at a teen magazine called “Coolest”, along with the protagonist of Eternal Punishment.

: As for the rest of the cast - Mark and Ayase never show up again. Ayase in fact never even gets a cameo in Persona 3 and is the only member of the P1 cast not to do so.

[Timrod]

: After spending several hours grinding levels, it’s time to get some casino coins. If you’re doing Snow Queen the way we’re going to be doing Snow Queen, you want everyone at Persona Level 21 before going into the school again. This is absolutely key, because once we go into the school, we lose our ability to grind.

: I loaded the save into an emulator, and used that to bypass the casino grind. The easiest and fastest way to do this is to start a game of Code Breaker, and immediately make a save state.

: You then play through Code Breaker using the solver program (or just failing until it shows you what the correct code is) and then reload your state and put the correct answer in. This will win you a gem set plus a MILLION casino coins. Fuck casino grinding.

: We then go back to the point at which the two routes break. I was incorrect on something I said in the SEBEC route - picking the second option does not automatically put you on the Snow Queen route. No, the Snow Queen route is much more complicated.

: First, we need to go to Classroom 2-4. If I remember right, this is one of the classrooms we had to visit to get information on Reiji when we started the SEBEC route.

: If you’ll remember, Devil Boy is Tsutomu, who we met in Maki’s dream world before we fought Tesso. One piece of trivia I think I forgot to mention in the SEBEC route - Tsutomu is actually the nephew of a character called “T-Shirt” Isono from Devil Summoner, which means that technically Devil Summoner (and thus Soul Hackers and the Raidou games) are canon to the Persona universe.

: Next, we need to see Tsutomu himself. If you’ll recall, we met him in the library in the SEBEC route, and that’s exactly where he is in the real world.

: If you’ll recall, Tsutomu in Maki’s dream world was the exact opposite.

: “You know of ‘The Snow Queen’, right? Yes… the fairy tale.”

: I’d like to pause here for just a second. This game came out several years before Frozen did, and The Snow Queen is not particularly popular in the United States (I’d never heard of it when I first played the game). I tried to do a reading of it, but it’s like 19 pages long and my voice started giving out six pages in.

: “It’s the traditional play performed by St. Hermelin’s drama club.”

: The game will eventually give us a plot synopsis, but I’m definitely going to expand on that because the original Hans Christian Anderson story is… something else.

: “Heeheehee… don’t be so hasty. Listen to this… for some reason, The Snow Queen is usually performed while wearing a mask.”

: “Which brings me to my point. In truth, the mask is cursed. The students who wore it while playing the role all died unnatural deaths. Isn’t that interesting?”

: This part is something I’d also like to take just a second to address. The Snow Queen quest implies that Mikage-cho had some weird shit going on even before Kandori built the Deva System. I’m not sure if this is supposed to be because it takes place in the same world as Devil Summoner (which means that SMT-style demons are around) or if it’s supposed to be sort of an early version of the rumor system we’ll see in Innocent Sin.

: Our next stop is the drama club, which is located behind the gym. As it turns out, one of these club members will give you a Rapier for Jihei if you talk to them before starting this whole quest chain. It won’t matter on this route because of how we’re going to be handling it.

: This is a dead end. Next, we need to go to the Student Council room, which is on the second floor near the library.

: What’s funny is that the student council president actually gets an intro box despite not even having a portrait.

: Next stop is the principal’s office. We met Principal Ooishi’s dream world clone in the SEBEC route, but never got to meet the real one.

: Ms. Saeko is the homeroom teacher for all of the main cast, if you’ll recall from the SEBEC route. The principal has an intro box, but it’s the same as it was in SEBEC.

: You can probably tell what we’re going to do next.

: I’m pretty sure that Vice Principal Hanya’s name is supposed to be a play on “Hannya”, a demon/ogress of Japanese legend. Goro Majima has one on his back in the Yakuza games.

: Our final stop before being sent on the Snow Queen route is to the gym. You’ll recall that we saw the old gym in the SEBEC route, but never saw the new one. That door back there is where we’re going.

: That just seems like a really weird place to put a cursed mask. Why they didn’t just burn it or something, I don’t know. Clearly the staff at St. Hermelin are Umbrella Corporation levels of stupid.

: There’s a weird item jingle that plays here that doesn’t play anywhere else in the game. I should mention that the Snow Queen quest was dummied out of Revelations: Persona, but you can still get the mask here via a Gameshark. We’ll talk a little bit about why that is later.

: I actually really like the Snow Queen route because it feels like a late-80s/early-90s horror film.

: “You don’t even know if that really is Maki!”

: An explanation. The police station segment from the SEBEC route is not canon. Also, I’m going to continue calling the protagonist Jihei even though I used the Naoya Toudou name for the Snow Queen file.

: “Omigod, Jihei! Masao’s in big trouble!”

: “Kei was hurt, so Masao, Hidehiko, and Eriko brought him back here.”

: This is the canon version of what happens at the police station. Presumably, Nanjo went by himself to save Mark and got hurt in the process.

: “But then…”

: “Y-Yeah, but…”

: “So he and Maki went outside together? Oh, I have to bring them back!”

: “Wait, Ms. Saeko! If something happens to you, what’ll the gang here do? Let us go instead!”

: You know, I wouldn’t mind doing a sort of B-Game of the SEBEC route with Yukino, Elly, and Brown. I hope someday that if Atlus remakes Persona 1, they add that in.

: “Oh, good point, Yukino! Thanks…”

: “That… that mask! Goodness… I didn’t think it was still lying around here…”

: “It reminds me of my high school days… I wore this mask when I was in a play called ‘The Snow Queen’.”

: Plot synopsis time! I’ll add some stuff as we go along. The demon is described as a hobgoblin in the original story, and he also runs a school of demons.

: The story goes into more detail about why the hobgoblin does it, but the key reason is that he believes that it shows how humanity really looks.

From The Snow Queen, believed to be public domain.

All who went to the demon’s school- for he kept a school- talked everywhere of the wonders they had seen, and declared that people could now, for the first time, see what the world and mankind were really like.

: The demon was clearly a Chaos player, and made the mirror to show anyone who picks the Law route how dumb they look.

: The story goes into a little more depth, describing how the mirror shattered into bits small enough to get caught in people’s eyes and also their hearts somehow, despite the fact that I’m pretty sure if you breathed in a sand-sized piece of glass you’d cough it out almost immediately. The story also describes some of the glass as being used to make windowpanes and eyeglasses.

: This part is actually accurate to the original story, the kids are in fact named Kay and Gerda. The story goes way more in depth on this: they’re both poor and live in houses so close to each other that they can step out of a window and into the house across the street. A key point is that they keep roses, even though they’re in a densely-packed town with no room for a garden.

: The way this happens in the story is kind of unintentionally hilarious. To get how I pictured it in my head, imagine Danny Devito as Frank Reynolds saying this.

From The Snow Queen, believed to be public domain.

One day Kay and Gerda sat looking at a book full of pictures of animals and birds, and then just as the clock in the church tower struck twelve, Kay said, “Oh, something has struck my heart!” and soon after, “There is something in my eye.”

: The way Hans Andersen depicts Kay’s heart “becoming a lump of ice” is that he starts being snarky. No, seriously.

From The Snow Queen, believed to be public domain.

“Why do you cry?” said he at last; “it makes you look ugly.
There is nothing the matter with me now. Oh, see!” he cried
suddenly, “that rose is worm-eaten, and this one is quite crooked.
After all they are ugly roses, just like the box in which they stand,”
and then he kicked the boxes with his foot, and pulled off the two
roses.

“Kay, what are you doing?” cried the little girl; and then, when
he saw how frightened she was, he tore off another rose, and jumped
through his own window away from little Gerda.

When she afterwards brought out the picture book, he said, “It was
only fit for babies in long clothes,” and when grandmother told any
stories, he would interrupt her with “but;” or, when he could manage
it, he would get behind her chair, put on a pair of spectacles, and
imitate her very cleverly, to make people laugh. By-and-by he began to
mimic the speech and gait of persons in the street. All that was
peculiar or disagreeable in a person he would imitate directly, and
people said, “That boy will be very clever; he has a remarkable
genius.”

: This isn’t exactly how the story goes. What happens is that Kay joins a bunch of older boys who take their “sledges” (which made me stop for a second the first time I tried doing a reading because I thought they were talking about sledgehammers) and tie them to passing horse-drawn carts to ride behind them, almost like a primitive form of wakeboarding.

: Kay winds up tying his sled to the Snow Queen’s, and gets taken away pretty much by accident. The HCA story has a lot of kids being taken by people not for money or anything, but just because they want a kid, because child kidnapping is just fine in HCA’s fantasy worlds. Also, the Snow Queen has a sled pulled by chickens that are made of snow.

From The Snow Queen, believed to be public domain.

The snow-flakes became larger and larger, till they appeared
like great white chickens. All at once they sprang on one side, the
great sledge stopped, and the person who had driven it rose up. The
fur and the cap, which were made entirely of snow, fell off, and he
saw a lady, tall and white, it was the Snow Queen.

“We have driven well,” said she, “but why do you tremble? here,
creep into my warm fur.” Then she seated him beside her in the sledge,
and as she wrapped the fur round him he felt as if he were sinking
into a snow drift.

: I only added this part because “here, creep into my warm fur” sounds like the start of someone’s tale about getting laid at a furry con.

“Are you still cold,” she asked, as she kissed him on the
forehead. The kiss was colder than ice; it went quite through to his
heart, which was already almost a lump of ice; he felt as if he were
going to die, but only for a moment; he soon seemed quite well
again, and did not notice the cold around him.

: I should mention that if any of this sounds familiar, you might’ve read the Narnia books as a kid. The White Witch in that was based almost directly on the Snow Queen.

: Oh right. The entire reason Kay wants to stay with her is because snowflakes are one of the only things the mirror doesn’t effect, and that property also carries over to the Snow Queen herself (who may or may not be made of snow).

: The synopsis here skips a LOT of shit. Hans Andersen goes off on a lot of side bits. Gerda first assumes that Kay is dead, and tries talking to the sun to confirm it. I’m not even kidding.

From The Snow Queen, believed to be public domain.

Oh, indeed those long winter days were very dreary. But at
last spring came, with warm sunshine. “Kay is dead and gone,” said
little Gerda.

“I don’t believe it,” said the sunshine.
“He is dead and gone,” she said to the sparrows.
“We don’t believe it,” they replied; and at last little Gerda
began to doubt it herself.

: Gerda then puts on her new red shoes, which she attempts to throw into the river as an offering to get the river to give her Kay back.

From The Snow Queen, believed to be public domain.

“Is it true that you have taken my little playmate away from me?” said she to the river. “I will give you my red shoes if you will give him back to me.” And it seemed as if the waves nodded to her in a strange manner. Then she took off her red shoes, which she liked better than anything else, and threw them both into the river, but they fell near the bank, and the little waves carried them back to the land, just as if the river would not take from her what she loved best, because they could not give her back little Kay.

: Given that this is a magical fantasy world where people can talk to the fucking sun, I have no doubt that it is somehow possible for a river to wear shoes. Anyway, Gerda throws her shoes again, but this time from a boat. The boat starts moving, and carries her to the house of a witch who tries to keep her forever and buries her rosebushes underground because they’d remind Gerda of Kay.

From The Snow Queen, believed to be public domain.

“Oh, how I have been detained!” said the little maiden, “I wanted to seek for little Kay. Do you know where he is?” she asked the roses; “do you think he is dead?”

And the roses answered, “No, he is not dead. We have been in the
ground where all the dead lie; but Kay is not there.”

“Thank you,” said little Gerda, and then she went to the other flowers, and looked into their little cups, and asked, “Do you know where little Kay is?” But each flower, as it stood in the sunshine, dreamed only of its own little fairy tale of history. Not one knew anything of Kay."

: Gerda talking to the flowers is four pages out of the story’s total run time of 19 pages. The flowers are kind of racist in that they describe a “Hindoo woman” throwing herself into a funeral pyre and then go on a bunch of unrelated, YIIK-like bullshit. There is one paragraph here that the writers found very important.

From The Snow Queen, believed to be public domain.

What do the hyacinths say? "There were three beautiful sisters, fair and delicate. The dress of one was red, of the second blue, and of the third pure white. Hand in hand they danced in the bright moonlight, by the calm lake; but they were human beings, not fairy elves.

The sweet fragrance attracted them, and they disappeared in the wood; here the fragrance became stronger. Three coffins, in which lay the three beautiful maidens, glided from the thickest part of the forest across the lake.

The fire-flies flew lightly over them, like little floating torches. Do the dancing maidens sleep, or are they dead? The scent of the flower says that they are corpses. The evening bell tolls their knell."

: This is important. Remember this, especially the idea of there being three dead girls. Anyway, Gerda then meets a talking crow who takes her to a princess who gives her a new outfit and a carriage and horses and an entire crew of footmen, who are then brutally slaughtered by a group of bandits. Have I mentioned The Snow Queen probably takes place in Norway?

: The bandits are run by an old woman with a beard, and her daughter takes a fancy to Gerda and demands that Gerda give her all of her clothes on pain of being gutted with a knife. The bandit daughter has an entire flock of pigeons and also a captive reindeer she likes to threaten to murder. Gerda finds out from the reindeer where the Snow Queen went.

From The Snow Queen, believed to be public domain.

“What are you saying up there?” cried Gerda. “Where was the Snow Queen going? Do you know anything about it?”

“She was most likely travelling to Lapland, where there is always snow and ice. Ask the reindeer that is fastened up there with a rope.”

“Yes, there is always snow and ice,” said the reindeer; “and it is a glorious place; you can leap and run about freely on the sparkling ice plains. The Snow Queen has her summer tent there, but her strong
castle is at the North Pole, on an island called Spitzbergen.”

: If you’ve ever played Crusader Kings 2, particularly as the Vikings, you’ll know what Lapland is.

: Lapland is a region inhabited by a group of people known as the Sami, which consists of parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Lapland was the English term for it - today it’s called Sapmi.

: Spitsbergen is the largest island in Svalbard, which is an island chain that is considered part of Norway. Svalbard is probably most famous today for being the home of the Svalbard seed vault.

: Anyway, Gerda keeps going and winds up in Lapland, where she meets an old woman who tells her that the Snow Queen is actually in Finland. Gerda then goes to Finland and meets another old woman, who tells her where the Snow Queen’s castle is. Gerda accidentally leaves her boots and gloves behind, and prays so hard that God himself sends angels to massage her feet.

From The Snow Queen, believed to be public domain.

The snow-flakes ran along the ground, and the nearer they came to her, the larger they appeared. Gerda remembered how large and beautiful they looked through the burning-glass. But these were really larger, and much more terrible, for they were alive, and were the guards of the Snow Queen, and had the strangest shapes. Some were like great porcupines, others like twisted serpents with their heads stretching out, and some few were like little fat bears with their hair bristled; but all were dazzlingly white, and all were living snow-flakes.

Then little Gerda repeated the Lord’s Prayer, and the cold was so great that she could see her own breath come out of her mouth like steam as she uttered the words. The steam appeared to increase, as she continued her prayer, till it took the shape of little angels who grew larger the moment they touched the earth. They all wore helmets on their heads, and carried spears and shields.

Their number continued to increase more and more; and by the time Gerda had finished her prayers, a whole legion stood round her. They thrust their spears into the terrible snow-flakes, so that they shivered into a hundred pieces, and little Gerda could go forward with courage and safety. The angels stroked her hands and feet, so that she felt the cold less, and she hastened on to the Snow Queen’s castle.

: This isn’t what happens in the story - not quite. She does cry on him and melt his heart, but then invokes the power of Christ to make him cry.

: The story goes further, because Hans Andersen was a fucking weirdo. First, Gerda runs into the reindeer who carried her to the castle, who invites them to drink milk from his pregnant wife.

From The Snow Queen, believed to be public domain.

When they arrived at the bush with red berries, there stood the reindeer waiting for them, and he had brought another young reindeer with him, whose udders were full, and the children drank her warm milk and kissed her on the mouth.

: Then they go back to the Finnish woman, who somehow knows how to get them back home. They meet the robber’s daughter, who tells them the crow that got Gerda in to see the princess is dead and his wife is in a terrible depression. Then they go back to grandma, who recites the Bible at them. THEN they live happily ever after.

: Well, that was a fucked-up story. I see why they never talk about it, and now I’ll probably never be able to watch Frozen (not that I ever have) without imagining a dipshit reindeer going “Hey kids, wanna nurse from my pregnant mate?”

: “Yes, but some say it’s cursed. I guess I can see why. It’s because of this that my friend was…”

: “C-C’mon, Ms. Saeko! Cut it out! We’ve got enough to be scared of… that mask gives me the creeps! Why don’t you just throw it away?”

: “Oh, sorry about that! It’s just a silly school legend. ‘Whoever wears it, dies’? Ha!”

: “I wore it, and I’m okay, aren’t I?”

: “See? So it’s better if I went looking for those two!”

: Why would you do that!?

: “Ms. Saeko!? What’s wrong!?”

: “Wh-What’s going on!?”

: I got this on stream, but there’s a sort of very quick before-and-after effect. Think that one scene at the end of The Day After Tomorrow, then don’t because that movie was trash.

: “Huh? Uh… where am I?”

: Oh shit, we’re in Finland! Nobody talk to the fucking reindeer!

: Or it’s the school courtyard.

: “Whoa! Look!”

: “Ms. Saeko!”

: Ms. Saeko starts putting up giant ice spears, which are actually a clever bit of asset re-use. These ice spears are recycled from the animation for Bufula, the second-tier single target ice spell.

: “Ms. Saeko…?”

: “Saeko? Oh… I see what’s happening.”

: “Poor Saeko… hahahah.”

: “Huh? But you are Saeko! Are you okay!? Did you trip and hit your head or something?”

: “Hahaha… “I wore it, and I’m okay”, eh? Teeheehee… Ahahaha! That’s the Saeko I remember so well.”

: “What’s wrong with you!? Stop with the jokes, 'cause they aren’t funny!”

: “Jokes? Look around you. Hahaha… you think this is a joke? Beautiful, isn’t it? A peaceful, perfectly still landscape.”

: She’ll give you some turkish delight if you jump in her sleigh! I’ve actually had turkish delight, got it from a bodega near where I work. It’s like grandma candy covered in powdered sugar. You pretty much can’t eat it without looking like you just dove nose-first into a mountain of coke. It’s… okay I guess. Not my favorite.

: “What are you saying!? You’re our teacher! This is just…”

: “Oh, what a lovely girl. Hahaha… come closer, girl, and I’ll give you ageless beauty.”

: “Don’t do it, Yuka! It’s the mask… it must have taken her over!”

: This? This is why Yukino is the best character in this game, tied with Elly. I personally think that as stupid as the premise for this part of the game is, it’s AMAZINGLY written. There’s a very good reason that Atlus re-used a lot of the concepts from here for Persona 3. Also, fuck the manga for not showing this part.

: The manga glosses over Snow Queen in all of like three pages, and changes it so that the Snow Queen is a sixth (or is that seventh?) Maki that wears the same mask we saw her wear in the Inner Lost Forest in the SEBEC route. Snow Queen would’ve made a more interesting fucking manga on its own than the dumb bullshit they came up with for the SEBEC route, and this is why I hate it when people say that Persona 1 isn’t worth playing and you should just read the manga.

: “Who put it on without thinking twice? Not to mention… isn’t it rude to go around calling people monsters?”

: I think my favorite thing about this is how the Snow Queen is an actual villain who feels like she wouldn’t be out of place in Persona 4.

: “Hahahaha!”

: By the way, you’ll notice that the Snow Queen doesn’t call herself that until now.

: Yukino is having exactly none of her bullshit and I love it.

: “What a reckless young lady. Your teacher is going to be… a sacrifice.”

: “A…a sacrifice?”

: “Yes, that’s right. Saeko is so full of hope. If I offer her as a sacrifice…”

: “Huh…? Does that mean everyone’s gonna get frozen? I hate being cold!”

: “That’s not gonna happen! I’m taking back Ms. Saeko, right now!”

: “Well, aren’t you brave? Fine… you can have her. But Saeko will stay frozen as long as she has this mask on. So will the school.”

: Naturally, the Snow Queen pulls an Aki on us and stops us from leaving the school. This is why we couldn’t enter the school once we got back from the police station in the SEBEC route.

: “There’s no escape. You only have two choices…”

: “Welcome the Eternal Night, or take the mask off Saeko.”

: Okay, so what you’re saying is that we need to take the mask off and be free? Find ourselves in the debris? Feed our anger like fire?

: “Okay, but like, how do we do that?”

: “Hahaha, keep fighting it. Nothing’s more beautiful than despair after a struggle.”

: This is the part where we find out that Ms. Saeko’s surname is Enoshima and she’s being taken over by Junko. Weirdly enough, Ms. Saeko does have a canon surname: it’s Takami.

: “Hey! I asked you a question!”

: I could absolutely see this being remade to actually take place in 2009 and Yukino going “Seriously what the shit is your deal? First you’re Junko Enoshima, now you’re some kind of wannabe Jigsaw! Get your fucking shit straight!”

: “A game!?”

: Those towers are Hypnos, Nemesis, and Thanatos, and they form the three major dungeons for the Snow Queen quest. Remember that part from the story where it talked about the three dead maidens? I wonder if that’s got something to do with it…

: And now we start getting into the meat of why Snow Queen is so fucking hard. Two words: time limits.

: “I’ll turn Saeko and the school back to normal. I must leave this mask now and prepare to call down the Eternal Night.”

: However, there’s a second twist to Snow Queen which is going to make things even harder.

: “I hope you enjoy yourselves while I’m gone. Hahaha… I’ll see you later.”

: “This is all your fault, Jihei! If you never found that stupid mask, this wouldn’t have happened!”

: “You better own up! Are you a man or not!? Say something!”

: “Stop it, Yuka! Pointing fingers won’t help the situation any.”

: “It’s not like Jihei knew what was gonna happen.”

: The screen flashes a few times here.

: Oh look, it’s our old buddy, Jangly Keys Man, he of the white subtitles.

: “That thing again…”

: “Huh…? “Again”?”

: Ayase hasn’t actually met Philemon yet. In fact, we’ve never seen her Persona. I should mention that this cutscene was the one they dubbed for Revelations: Persona before scrapping Snow Queen to meet the holiday deadline. You can watch that here.

: “A moment, please.”

: “You are angry and frustrated.”

: “But that will not rescue your teacher.”

: “There is only one way to do that…”

: “The Demon Mirror.”

: “It can remove the source of the mask’s curse.”

: “However, the Snow Queen has shattered it.”

: “The twelve shards are scattered amongst three towers.”

: “Take this mirror frame with you.”

: “Fit the mirror shards you find into it.”

: “If you gather enough shards to reflect your teacher…”

: “She can be saved. There isn’t much time left. I pray for your success.”

: “Umm, Yukino? You know the towers are guarded by demons, right? Aren’t we a little, y’know, shorthanded?”

: “You can stay here if you want. We won’t force you to come, not when we don’t know what we’re up against.”

: “Uh, no, I meant, it’s just…”

: “I’ll do whatever it takes to save Ms. Saeko. I used to be a lousy delinquent. Even my parents gave up on me… but not her. She never gave up on me. Ever.”

: “Now it’s my turn to help her, and my… expertise can be put to a good cause.”

: “Hey, Yukino… you’re not planning on leaving me here all alone, are you? 'Cause I’m going with you! I feel much safer around you and Jihei.”

: “Haha, sure… whatever floats your boat. If we get stuck in a bad situation, I’m sure you’ll help lighten the mood.”

: “Kei gave it to me. Him and Masao went to the police station for some weapons. But Kei got hurt, so they came back to school.”

: “He handed me some guns and said to hold on to them while he went to the nurse… so I kept one for myself!”

: “Hehehe… I always wanted to try shooting one of these things!”

: “…”

: “Gah! The wind’s picking up! Brrr, it’s cooooold… my ears hurt! C’mon, let’s go inside, quick!”

: “Yeah, standing here won’t do anyone any good.”

: “I dunno, maybe we should grab a couple more people, like Yuka said.”

: “Sure, sure, but let’s get inside! I’m freezing to death here!”

: Next time, we’ll find Elly and Brown, fight a giant penis, do a bunch of fusions, and then… well, you’ll see.

[LaZodiac]

Limited to two party members in a dungeon that spams charm.

Yup. That’s Shin Megami Tensei! How the fuck did this series get popular?

It REALLY sucks that Yamaoka is a bad persona because that’s actually really cool, in a sense, that this rich idiot fucker… wants to be as cool as his butler, who died saving him.

So… was Philemon meant to be Kandori at the end there? Because I don’t recognize this generic old man.

I think the point of that final CG is meant to be closure for both arcs. “Here are all your Snow Queen friends, and the compact that Maki chose”.

And now… Snow Queen time. Oh boy!

God, maybe it’s just me, but this immediately seems way more interesting.