Dang it’s like the writers sometimes remember that having teenagers with magic psychology spirits could let them have people facing their insecurities and maybe showing kids they’re not so alone.
Also with that grin I feel like Shadow Lisa is missing something…
That’s the stuff.
This is an extremely good edit and I like it a lot, thank you for making this.
Tatsuya being like “… I am in love with Jun” and everyone completely ignoring him to fight over him, while he and Jun just exchange shrugs is… extremely in character for this idiots, I think?
Also seeing them just casually allow you to go “I’m into Jun” and have it count as canon, and then looking at… every other Persona game, is frustrating me. Let me date the cute boys god damnit.
As far as I can tell the only difference between being 17 and being 30 is you get more left-wing and play more Animal Crossing, so they wouldn’t have to change much.
I was going to make a joke about why you’re waiting for Persona 7 when Persona 6 isn’t going to come out until 2050, but I looked up the years between Persona games and the sequence is actually more arcane than I expected.
Though I believe in Japan that is a crime requiring you to be sealed in the deepest level of Tartarus and having your name stricken from the Book of Life.
That’s what this game needs.
Yeah. The entire thing feels like an anomaly given the atmosphere of the game - I mean, when you have a writer with a self-insert character who is there solely to ship himself with an idol. I think part of it is that up until the middle of the PS2 era, Atlus was pretty much entirely composed of straight guys. Even now I’m pretty sure that’s still true.
My hope is that they’ve finally learned something after the controversy over Catherine Full Body and start diversifying the character base a little bit. I’d love to see a modern Persona game where there are female characters who aren’t thirsty for the protagonist, or where there’s gay representation.
All I’m saying is I’d like them to do what a lot of other RPG franchises already have and age the game up with their audience. Persona 4 came out over a decade ago - there’s people who were in high school when they played it who have since graduated college and have jobs. Hell, by the time Persona 6 comes out the same will be true of people who played Persona 5 around the same age.
: So here’s my attempt at Aquarius Temple, wherein I learn that Aquarius Temple fucking sucks. We’ll be handling all three of the remaining temples in this update because they’re all basically the same.
: Problem number one with Aquarius Temple, it’s full of green Masked Circle enemies. The problem here is that the only fusion spell I can cast on the same turn as Meltdown is Sylph… which is wind-based and which these enemies are immune to. This means that if we get our turn order fucked over (by something like a status effect) we’re going to be floundering around until it gets fixed.
: The second floor is full of pit traps. I ran into one trying to find a box that turned out to have nothing in it.
: Compound this with this encounter, which has two Scharf Schutze in the back. They have a spell called Sharpshoot, which does an instakill but is gun-type rather than light or dark. Both of them use it immediately, and then use it again when I try to revive Eikichi so I can use Meltdown.
: Then they use it again because fuck you that’s why.
: The second floor has a bunch of pit traps and no useful chests, so you want to move roughly like this to get around them.
: Just like Taurus Temple, all of the Zodiac Temples have two rooms, one which is a fight against Masked Circle troops and the other of which is a fight against Nazis. I’m not sure if it counts if you scalp the guy who scalped a Nazi or
not.
: All of the optional dialogue in this room is the same, except for these two lines.
: There’s a Strength Incense near the second cutscene room, and that’s pretty much all the items in Aquarius we give a shit about. There are some spell cards I picked up but none of them were anything amazing.
: I actually had to look this up, but he’s right. For some stupid reason, Aquarius is the zodiac sign for wind.
: "That’s not true, Jun-kun! You said when you were little that you wanted to be a teacher, didn’t you? Well, what’s a teacher’s job but to lead his students to their ideals?
: “There you go again. Moping like that has been a bad habit of yours ever since you were a kid, Jun.”
: “C’mon, houhou! See, you gotta cheer up! Houhou! Houhou!”
: He does it so hard the screen shakes.
: The money is right before the second relief room, and the card is right after it. If you do Aquarius Temple after doing… whichever the one is that changes its layout… there’s a Luck Incense down here as well.
: Before we go in, we want to equip Hermes on Jun. This is how we get his ultimate Persona - having Hermes equipped for this fight gives it the ability to mutate into Chronos at max rank.
: I also did some shoe shopping before going into the boss room. This time around, I didn’t even bother upgrading armor or weapons.
: I can tell you for sure that I wasn’t even thinking about how little sense this dialog makes when I was playing through this in recording. Instead, I was more like “God dammit game I’m already asleep do I really have to do four of these?”
: This fight is annoying. There’s three Holy Lance units: one’s weak to earth, one’s weak to wind, and one’s weak to water. I believe either one or two of them null Fire, which means that Meltdown won’t do us any good.
: Early on, I just used Sylph and had the other three party members use regular spells. Meltdown simply wasn’t worth it because both times I tried it, it did no damage - I think they can also avoid it somehow.
: I got into a very nasty situation where both Tatsuya and Lisa had their Persona sealed and Jun was confused. I believe on the next turn, Eikichi got shocked and Maya got frozen to boot. Jun nearly died and I had to use a couple of rattle drinks to keep the party up.
: There’s a couple of things that made this fight suck less - the biggest one being that I still have two characters that reflect magic, so any spells the bosses cast were getting reflected back at them for extra damage. The other is that I had the ability to access about half of the “Elemental Spell + Summon Spirits” line of fusion spells (including Gnome, Sylph, Salamander and a few others) to mix up my elemental damage.
: This isn’t going to make a lot of sense until we learn who Queen Aquarius was. Unfortunately, we’re not going to learn that until the final dungeon. I did check, and the game DOES tell you… just not until way later for some reason.
: I took a quick trip to the Velvet Room for one reason, and it’s not Chronos. Chronos has the same problems as all of the ultimates - SP cost is too damn high. No, I came here for a different reason. Now that we’ve hit Level 46…
: In Persona 1, Pascal the Dog was a Persona I fused as a stopgap while grinding. In this game, he’s much better, though not as good as he is in Eternal Punishment. While his moveset may look kinda garbage (given that he’s still using Tier 2 spells at level 51), High Pressure is a skill used in a two-person fusion spell that’s actually pretty good, plus he still supports Meltdown.
: Pascal is also great in that he’s got Best compatibility with everyone.
: Let’s plow through Leo Temple next. I started noticing that the party is creeping up in levels, and there’s a tiny problem with that. You see, there’s one of those 1% encounter rate demons I want to get. It’s level 51, and by the time I finished Scorpio Temple the party was rapidly approaching level 49 (this was on the second run where I didn’t do Taurus Temple first). I still got most of the boxes but by this point I was mostly running from or negotiating out of random encounters.
: Leo Temple is a bit more complex than Aquarius or Taurus in design. Let’s post the map.
: Due to the route I picked, none of the dungeons had their B-version third floors. As it turns out, each element strengthens one other and weakens one other, and it just so happened that doing Aquarius first and Leo second meant that none of the other dungeons could be in their B layout.
: First and most important is 50,000 yen on the right side of the first floor.
: I got lucky, and Pascal immediately mutated to Rank 3. I’m glad this happened early because there was something I didn’t realize going in - the masked circle enemies here null fire attacks.
: Getting Pascal to Rank 3 allows us to summon up the power of the God Hand. Unfortunately, this does not include the Ball Buster or Head Slicer… or Yes Man Kablaam. Instead, it does slightly less damage than Meltdown but only takes two people and does Almighty damage.
: On the left side of the first floor is Dordona’s Oar, an item I probably should’ve picked up before I did Aquarius Temple. Dordona’s Oar fuses a Persona that’s basically Kundali Vidyaraja but slightly better.
: The second floor has multiple entrances. Going in from the northernmost staircase brings you to a Vitality Card. I don’t know why I bothered picking this up.
: Because I’m not using Meltdown anymore, Take-Mikazuchi is my new go-to fusion spell for the second half of each turn. You perform it by casting a spell called Thunder Baptism (which is basically Zionga) and Summon Spirits.
: Right, moving on.
: Right outside the Relief Room is a box I skipped on purpose because it’s empty. I don’t know why they even bothered putting it there when it’s like… three steps off the main route.
: Surprise! It’s another relief room with Masked Circle troops in it. Spotted the pattern yet?
: This fight’s bad because the enemies have an attack that hits for both physical and fire damage. Maya and Jun were at full HP before I went into that room. If Maya wasn’t reflecting the fire damage, there’s a good chance she would’ve died.
: This dialogue doesn’t change if you told the party that Tatsuya is gay. I don’t know if I captured it, but the game will refer to them as “best friends” from here on out. Let’s just say… I have a plan to rectify that. I’ll talk about that at the end of the update when it’ll make more sense.
: “If you keep putting on public displays of bro-hood with him, you’re gonna find a raging bull of envy after you…”
: I have a feeling that if this hadn’t released in 1999, they’d have just straight-up said it.
: “I said that Leo is fitting for Tatsuya. Don’t you think, Lisa? He’s strong, free, and won’t be tied down by anyone…”
: “And that’s really all you said!?”
: “Mm-hmm.”
: “Well… okay then…”
: The thing I’d like you to remember though is that this dialog plays even if you haven’t done Taurus Temple yet, which we haven’t on this run. Even if you don’t explicitly have Tatsuya say he’s gay, there’s definitely hints to it.
: “Ahaha… Taurus is perfect for Lisa.”
: Anyway, let’s just skip ahead to the boss room. There’s really nothing else on this floor that matters - a couple of chests with healing items we could buy from the store and that’s it.
: I made sure to equip Tatsuya with Apollo to get the bonus resistances. What I found out later is that even if you don’t equip the Ultimate Persona for the shadow fights, they’ll still get the boost as long as you have them equipped when the fight ends. There’s even alternate dialog for it, which we’ll see in Scorpio Temple.
: If anyone in this game needs a sunglasses edit, Shadow Tatsuya is absolutely it.
: It doesn’t matter what you answer here. I picked the first option.
: This is kind of hilariously off if you assume that Tatsuya is gay.
: Remember how I said in Taurus Temple that you get the new contact with Jun regardless? This is where it happens. If you pick either of the bottom two options, you get the new contact. I couldn’t figure out which one would make more sense if we assume that Tatsuya is gay and Jun is his boyfriend, so I went with the second one.
: I’d like to think that the shadows are like the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, only instead of not being able to see things standing still they can’t comprehend the concept of not being straight. I’m further imagining the characters in Persona 4 going “Just be gay, they can’t see you if you’re gay”.
: Shadow Tatsuya is annoying for a couple of reasons. First, he’s de facto immune to lightning spells. My initial autobattle setup was God Hand with Jun and Eikichi, Take-Mikazuchi with Maya and Lisa, and then Tatsuya doing physical attacks because Shadow Tatsuya is immune to everything Apollo can dish out.
!
: By de facto immune, I mean that while Shadow Tatsuya shouldn’t be immune to lightning, it… just doesn’t hit him. I think this is because bosses are immune to status effects and both the Zio and Bufu spell lines have a status effect attached… and the developers forgot to just make the boss immune to Shock/Freeze instead of the entire spell.
: I didn’t realize this until… probably 3/4 of the boss’s health was gone. The game kept cutting the camera away so I couldn’t see that there were no damage numbers. God Hand and Tatsuya’s physical attacks did a good enough job of bringing him down to the point where I could’ve just left the auto setup as-is and taken a nap.
: It was about here that I realized that by the time we’re done with all four temples (keeping in mind I haven’t done Taurus yet on this file) the party is going to be pushing level 50.
: And that’s Leo Temple done. Now we just need to do Scorpio, which is the most complex of the four Zodiac dungeons. Leo Temple requires you to make a minor routing change (if you get the “B” version of the third floor, you take a different staircase and it’s like a minute detour if you get the wrong one) depending on which version you get, while Scorpio requires much larger changes.
: Before I headed into Scorpio I restocked on healing items. Scorpio Temple is easily the most annoying one.
: Let’s post the map while I’m at it.
: Another relief hall. Can you guess what happens here?
: Shortly after the first relief hall, we find Scorpio Temple’s gimmick. See that puddle on the floor?
: Those are damage floors that damage SP. There’s enough of them that even if your party is at full SP when you reach the first one, they’ll be at or near zero when you reach the last one.
: Finally. It took TWO FUCKING GAMES, but it finally happened! This is Persona Chat. It’s stupidly rare in Persona 1 (I believe it has a small chance to happen on a New Moon) and still pretty rare in Persona 2.
: Persona Chat occurs when one of your party members has a Persona version of a demon and you encounter that demon in the field. I never once had this happen in P1, and we’ve encountered Barbatos easily thirty times thus far (if not more) with Eikichi having Barbatos as a Persona.
: Persona Chat is basically an automatic Eager negotiation. I kind of wish I had the script for Innocent Sin the way I did for Persona 1, because Persona 1 had some surprisingly good dialog in these.
: My route through here makes me hit like five damage floors, so the party’s SP is suffering. At one point, Eikichi and Jun reach zero.
: The only box I care about in this entire dungeon has a Phoenix in it that drops an incense.
: I am very, very glad that damage floors did not survive into Persona 4 and 5.
: Welcome to one of the most nonsensical twists in this game.
: “What is this!? What’s going on!? Why are you with that fake…? A-And you’ve lost weight…”
: I kind of hate this. I mean, it’s not a bad scene, but… like… why did they have to make her thin?
: “I-I… drove Hanakouji-san to this…?”
: “B-But why did you join the Masked Circle…!?”
: Now, two things I’d like to point out. First, Miyabi was at Sumaru Prison when Eikichi’s band got their hopes and dreams drained from them. She KNEW joining the Masked Circle was a bad idea.
: Second, she knew that Eikichi loved her no matter what she looked like. It was made pretty clear back in Zodiac.
: “Get your filthy paws off her, you goddamned fake… Miyabi’s… she’s MY girl!”
: Shadow Eikichi somehow goes from merely strange looking to looking like he’s got to take a shit.
: Now, you might’ve noticed that I forgot to do something before going into the boss room. Fortunately, I still had Hades in the party’s Persona stock even though it wasn’t equipped.
: My auto-battle strategy this time is Salamander and Blazing Burst. Does some 700 damage a turn, and with this I could more or less set it and alt-tab out of my capture card window. I equipped Hades onto Eikichi immediately after the battle started, and this is how I found out that it’s fine as long as the Ultimate Persona is equipped when the battle ends.
: One amusing detail is that instead of doing what all the other Shadows do and adding a “Dark” to every move, Bloody Honeymoon becomes Bloody Divorce.
: And with that, the party is dangerously close to 51. They’ll be a minimum of 49 by the time I finish Taurus again (which I still haven’t done) and I might need to fuse something with that Estoma card to make sure I don’t overlevel.
: Remember back in Leo Temple when I said that I had plans to rectify the game not acknowledging Tatsuya and Jun being in love? A few updates ago (specifically when I was doing Caracol) I contacted an artist who had done Persona 4 fanart and commissioned a piece of Yukino and Anna on a date because I figured the thread would enjoy it. Thankfully, they had some life stuff get in the way, because I saw this scene and went “Oh shit, I know what the thread’s going to want.”
: I got in touch with the artist again and commissioned a follow-up piece of Jun and Tatsuya in that same pose with the heart background, because I knew the thread would demand it. I can’t promise it’ll be done before the LP is, but I’ll be sure to post them in the thread when they’re done.
: “That was really cool of you, Michel!”
: “Eikichi-kun’s Manliness increased by 10! Now if you can get past your hangup about your dad, you’ll be all set.”
: “Aww, why’d you have to bring him up? Everything was going so well…”
: And with that, we’ve done all four Zodiac temples. I’ll do Taurus again and then it’s on to the final dungeon. Next time will be an Abandoned Factory update.
Now that we’re near the end of the game, I wanted to gauge interest on what I should LP next. I have a couple of choices, though I might need to explore a bit further to determine how viable some of them are as SSLPs. Here’s some of what I was thinking of:
Shin Megami Tensei IV - There’s no LP of it on the archive and someone did Apocalypse (which is admittedly missing images now since it doesn’t use the site to host) here. Cons are that I can’t do this on real hardware and capture it at the same time since 3DS capture cards are basically nonexistent. If I do this, I’d probably do my own LP of Apocalypse since the other one is missing images and at that point I’d have a de jure claim on it. I’ve never played SMT 4.
Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers - No LP of it exists on the archive, though people have done Devil Summoner and both Raidou games. This would be the 3DS version since the Saturn version is sadly un-translated. Same con as SMT 4 in that I can’t do it on real hardware even though I actually own a copy of the game, which I played about five minutes of before dropping because I couldn’t stand the first person view when it first released. This was before I did my first Persona 1 run.
Shin Megami Tensei: If - Someone suggested this earlier in the thread. An LP of it does exist on the archive, but it pre-dates the fan translation and all of the images are in Japanese. While I could do this on real hardware, I probably wouldn’t want to given that it has multiple routes and I’m afraid of burning out on it the way I did on SMT 1.
Devil Survivor: Overclocked - Somehow, no LP of this exists on the archive. The original DS release was my first exposure to mainline SMT, and I got about halfway through it before getting stuck because I had no idea what I was doing. There is an LP of Devil Survivor 2, but not of Devil Survivor 2 Record Breaker.
Kyuuyaku Megami Tensei - There’s a person doing a VLP of Megami Tensei I NES, but this is a remake on the SNES. As far as I can tell, both Megami Tensei I and Megami Tensei II are pretty short and I’m pretty sure I could do them on real hardware. Same problem as SMT If in that I’m afraid of burnout.
Enchanted Arms - I’ve heard this is a pretty mediocre JRPG but that it has some neat design elements to it. I have it on my 360’s hard drive but haven’t ever played it. Not sure how suitable it is for an SSLP.
Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition - This one would definitely NOT be a completionist LP because I tried that once (not in LP format, just casually) and you will burn out very quickly if you try to do all the sidequests. I played through about a third of this on the Wii, but have not touched the DE despite owning it.
Well, if you want to stick with just SMT choices and let luck decide the next LP (barring technological barriers), just number the following six choices in any order you choose and roll a die to see what you’ll get: Eternal Punishment, 4 + Apocalypse, Soul Hackers, If and any info on Hazama’s Chapter you could find, Overclocked and Record Breaker, and Kyuuyaku. Honestly they all seem like viable choices to me and whichever one you choose would be one more LP that hadn’t been done before but should’ve been by this point. Besides other games in the smaller subseries like Last Bible, Majin Tensei, and Devil Children, and one-offs like Giten Megami Tensei and Card Summoner, those are the only viable choices left that haven’t been done for LPing yet.
Just be sure to pace yourself and/or do other games if you feel like you’re starting to burn out over any aspect of what game you choose.
Oh I wasn’t aware you were apparently a saint.
As for what game to do next… honestly, I wanna see you do Devil Survivor. I played it myself and it seemed super cool but also I had like a billion other things to do that weren’t “devote myself to the time it takes to beat an SMT game completely” so I dropped it. That’s the one I’m most interested in, of these games.
(also do Eternal Punishment)
Preview of what the Yukino/Anna pic is going to look like! Artist is working on it this week, and then will move on to the Tatsuya/Jun piece.
The MegaTen games on that list that I haven’t beaten (and thus are the most interesting to me) are If and Kyuuyaku, which are the ones you say you’re most afraid of burnout doing. Thus, I’m going to vote for Enchanted Arms, the game on the list that I know absolutely the least about. Naturally if it turns out to somehow be ill-suited to SSLPs (or at least ones in your style), that’s another thing.
So, let me just do a quick post about why I won’t do Eternal Punishment until the PSP version is fan translated. I actually talked to a couple of people on /v/ (4chan’s video game board) about it this morning.
[Image Credit: Anonymous on /v/]
As it turns out, the PS1 version of Eternal Punishment DOES support save transfers from the Japanese version of Innocent Sin… sort of. Someone dumped a debug build of EP to one of the “lost content” wikis which allows you to import an Innocent Sin save into the US version of EP. You import the save into the debug version, make a save in the debug version, and then transfer that save to a regular copy of EP. This functionality was stripped out of the official release.
[Image Credit: Anonymous on /v/]
The PS1 version of EP only takes a few things from an Innocent Sin save. Those are:
The Anonymous who posted these images also posted a copy of his Innocent Sin save, which has Tatsuya at level 56 with the best gear in the game (including an item I definitely want to try for in the LP). This means I could theoretically start Eternal Punishment with a fully-geared Tatsuya.
Here’s why I’m not doing that, unless I get overwhelming demand to do so.
First, a different Anonymous on /vr/ (4chan’s retro game board) posted that they had emailed cj_iwakura, the person translating the PSP version of EP, and were told that the EP translation is still underway and not dead. The last thing I would want is to start an LP of Eternal Punishment and then have that fan translation come out halfway through.
It’s apparently a very long process because the text is compressed and hard to work with, which is a problem people from /vr/ ran into when they tried to hack the PS1 version of Eternal Punishment to change the names of the Persona 1 cast from the Revelations: Persona names to their real ones.
[Image Credit: Anonymous on /vr/]
This is an example of that attempt. In the PS1 release, Kenta/Toro is known as “Chunky” after how they renamed him in R:P. Unfortunately, this patch was never finished or released.
The other reason I do not want to do the PS1 version of EP is that the PSP version of Eternal Punishment has… significantly more data it takes from an imported Innocent Sin save. Unlike the PS1 release, Eternal Punishment PSP has not one but THREE scenarios in which you play as Tatsuya instead of Maya. You have to unlock them and the third one doesn’t unlock until the very end of EP. It’s not quite the size of The Answer in Persona 3, but from what I’ve heard it’s pretty close.
Among the data the PSP version uses is the choice you made in Taurus Temple (ie; whether Tatsuya is gay or not). I don’t want to talk too much about it because it kind of spoils the end of Innocent Sin.
This is the real reason I’m not doing Eternal Punishment. Doing EP without the Tatsuya scenarios is like doing Persona 3 without The Answer. Are there things wrong with the existing LP of Eternal Punishment? Hell yes there are, namely that the person who LPed it had never played Innocent Sin, because neither the fan translation nor the official one had released yet.
They also pretty clearly had not played the PSP version of Persona 1 and it physically hurts me seeing them refer to Nanjo as “Nate” and Eriko as “Ellen”.
If people really, really want me to do Eternal Punishment now, I’ll do it. Otherwise, I’m waiting until the PSP version so I can do a complete and accurate LP of it on real hardware, just as I did for the first two games.
That’s 100% valid, and I can wait. I honestly hadn’t figured that much stuff was going on with EP!
Oh right, you wanted to gauge interest. Here is some interest for your gauge.
Having played ~2-3 hours of Xenoblade Chronicles, I’ve decided the only way I want to experience it is making one of my friends play it for me. So that’s my comically selfish vote on that.
Other than that, I prefer newer games to older ones just because they’re more visually engaging, so that’s…pretty much everything other than Kyuuyaku Megami Tensei, I think. Regarding Enchanted Arms, I know nothing about it, but the Wikipedia page describes it as something like an SRPG/JRPG hybrid which sounds like it could be…rough to play.
Oh, I noticed you seem pretty invested in doing things on real hardware as opposed to emulating. Any particular reason for that?
Part of it is that I already own most of the hardware. I got into it when the mini consoles first started coming out: I wanted the SNES mini but they were impossible to get, so I bought a real one instead. Then I got a Sega Saturn so I could play Policenauts and it slowly spiralled out of control until one day I found myself bidding on a consolized Neo Geo MVS.
What made me do Persona 1 and Innocent Sin on real hardware though was the LP of Shin Megami Tensei 1 on the Archive. It was done on an emulator in 2007 (pre-dating the ability to use flash memory cartridges on most retro hardware). I’ll explain some of the problems with it since I played SMT 1 myself… using Kyuuyaku as an example because I just saw a VLP of it that does the same thing.
: The first thing you do after naming the hero and heroine (Nakajima and Yumiko, by default) in Megami Tensei 1 is allocating stats. Here’s something the manual probably tells you but the game doesn’t: Nakajima can’t use magic.
: Since Intellect governs how strong your magic is, it’d be a waste to put any points into it. Right? Well, if you’re playing on an emulator and don’t mind abusing savestates, sure.
: Negotiations in Megami Tensei 1 (and continuing all the way to SMT If) are random. The only thing that influences the outcome is your Intellect and to a lesser extent your Luck stat. On an emulator, you can simply abuse savestates until you get the outcome you want, but for real hardware this isn’t possible.
: This is what you’d see in an LP done on an emulator - a completely optimal stat build where you just pump Vitality and Strength (maybe putting a few points into Speed) and never touch Intellect. On real hardware, you’d probably want at least a point or two in Intellect to make negotiations better. Doing this will open different strategies that probably would be reset-heavy or impossible otherwise.
: The LP of SMT 1 on the archive does this, and then abuses savestates to get significantly stronger than you’d be able to normally by savestating through battles with higher level demons for loads of EXP… but that’s simply not the experience you would have had if you had played it in 1992.
This is why I did Persona 1 and Persona 2 on real hardware. It’s because things like the Snow Queen grind (and having to re-do Thanatos Tower eight times) are part of what you’d experience had you played it in 1996 with a guide. That’s not to say you “cheated” or “haven’t beaten the game” if you’ve played on an emulator even with savestates or speed-up, but it’s simply not the same experience.
Yeah, plus I’d definitely want the PSP version’s music to post. Like this, for instance:
I mean *sparkles with angelic purity* I wouldn’t abuse savestates. =D
No update yet - still working on grinding the factory for demon rumors. As it turns out, the estoma trick becomes a lot less useful at high levels. In fact, to really get use out of it I’d have to grind to 70.
Have this, though. The artist is Eligap#5969 on Discord. I can’t link their portfolio or their twitter because they kind of do NSFW stuff on the side.
Alt without the heart.
You can’t link their twitter but you can like, Not Link their twitter I think? Like tell us what their @ is or whatever. Because that is some slick art.
I linked it on my Twitter, which should be fine. The artist’s account is @EligapNSFW and I linked it through my Twitter here: https://twitter.com/TimrodDX/status/1284100773220057089 which should be fine since the link to my tweet has no NSFW material in it whatsoever.
: This update’s going to be on the short side, but rest assured it took me like two hours and multiple re-records to try and get all the dialog. By the end I was ready to do just about anything else but start Xibalba.
: Since I had to do Taurus Temple again, I figured I’d show off Maya’s apartment. This is where you can use the CDs you buy from Giga Macho.
: Maya’s apartment is an ungodly ruin that makes my room look clean by comparison.
: Spoilers, she’ll never clean her apartment.
: Back in Taurus Temple, we now have the fourth skull and have re-acquired the power of Gay. Trust me when I say being gay is going to be very important.
: “Hello, Maya speaking.”
: “Wh-whoa! What’s wrong, Tamaki-san? Calm down and…”
: “WHAT!? Prince Taurus took Ms. Ideal!?”
: God dammit, Tamaki. You should fucking know better.
: I should mention that while working from home last week, Youtube recommended me this video from the History Channel titled “America Unearthed: Ancient Mayans in Georgia”, starring a bunch of people willing to say that they honestly thought the Mayans built a city in Georgia before returning to South America because they needed clay or something.
: “That perv’s still alive!? What’s he want a middle-aged lady like her for !?”
: I actually laughed while watching it because it sounded like they were LARPing Innocent Sin.
: “Their destination is no doubt Xibalba. We should be able to follow them through Heaven’s Gate at Sevens… the Narurato Stone.”
: “Aiyah! That’s the secret of the Narurato Stone!?”
: I stopped by Hiiragi Psychotherapy to heal quick before making a trip to the Velvet Room. Maki’s not there. I wonder why?
: So, here’s the thing about the Abandoned Factory. Unfortunately, the part I wanted to be level 50 for (so I could abuse Estoma) doesn’t open until after you’ve gone all the way down to the bottom of Xibalba. By the time you’ve done that, the 1% encounter rate demons are horribly out of date.
: I replace Jun’s Persona with Isis. Her stats are pretty good, but more importantly this gives us a third person in the party who reflects magic. With Tatsuya being a magic tank, this means that most bosses are going to be dead easy.
: There’s three reasons I want Isis. First off, Cu Chulainn (which I had equipped to Jun) sucks. Second, at Rank 8 Isis learns Megidola which means we can pull off both Meltdown and God Hand in one turn. Third, look at that mutation list. Anyone who has played SMT 4 Apocalypse will know why I’d want Dagda. The mutation is apparently very rare but I’m hoping to get it.
: In Persona 1, Mucalinda was a level 76 Persona who was absolute and utter trash. In this game, it’s slightly better in that it has at least some resistance to magic and takes 1.5x from physical as opposed to the 2x it took in Persona 1. More importantly, it has access to Megidola. I’m still going to ditch it ASAP.
: Remember way back at the start of the game when we said Principal Hanya died? This is where that choice comes into play. We don’t actually need to go through here at all and it’s not quite as great as I had hoped, but I did anyway. There’s three classrooms, one on each floor, where we can see the Persona 1 cast back in action.
: Brown takes out a pair of nazis without even trying, which is kind of incredible given that he still had Lilim equipped at the end of Snow Queen.
: See this textbox here? It’s glitched. This took me three attempts to capture properly, because it auto-advances and goes by extremely fast compared to the rest of the text in this game.
: You might ask what happens here if we said that Hanya lived. What happens is that instead of the Persona 1 characters, there’s a scene where Principal Hanya shows up and drives off the Last Battalion. It’s incredibly dumb.
: Elly takes out five nazis, which is in keeping with the fact that she had the best ultimate Persona in the first game and the only one worth using.
: No, GOLD was that gym that blew up even though the party defused all the bombs.
: Getting all these optional scenes sucks because the hallways are full of Last Battalion who like using instakills.
: Why they didn’t put Yukino here, I don’t know. It would’ve been nice to see her and Ms. Saeko again. At least we know what Yukino and Anna are doing right now (just look up above this update if you haven’t yet).
: You’ll notice that two of the remaining Persona 1 cast haven’t shown up here, those being Reiji and Nanjo. The wiki insists they’re here somewhere but I did a complete search of the building and did not find them.
: Oh, right! I found out that Xibalba is an actual thing in Mayan folklore - it’s the underworld that serves as the land of the dead. Supposedly, there’s a cave that goes there in… I think Colombia.
: “He said that underneath Sevens is the Silver River after it breaks off from Tanabata River… and that the Heaven’s Gate that led to the underground Silver River… it was supposed to be this Narurato Stone.”
: Just like the end of Snow Queen, we take a pillar of light to the final dungeon.
: “The walls are shining… the Silver River is a pretty appropriate name for it.”
: “If we go down this river, we should come out at the entrance to Xibalba.”
: “One of their boats is over here. Question is, who’s going to pilot it?”
: Starring Danny DeVito as Eikichi “Michel” Mishina.
: Have I mentioned that in Eternal Punishment, it’s revealed that Maya has totalled like three cars?
: Maya manages to hit every single rock in the river while doing donuts.
: I thought Kasugayama High was the worst dungeon. I was wrong. This is.
: Silver River is an autoscrolling stage that lasts anywhere from about thirty minutes to the better part of an hour.
: There are encounters every two seconds, but in a lot of cases the enemies are worth negotiating with.
: Vucub-Caquix is definitely worth making a pact with. They give out the smallest number of cards (less than any of the demons in the Zodiac temples) but give you a Garudyne Card if you negotiate with them and ask for an item.
: Manbannannan gives out 50 free cards per negotiation, and is definitely worth making a pact with once you’ve gotten a few Garudyne cards.
: The correct answer is go straight, because it puts us on the shortest path. I hit “go right” because I’m a dumbass and thought I might grind for some more cards.
: Hunab Ku is another demon definitely worth making a pact with because it gives out Magnadyne Cards.
: Succubus is one of the reasons I regret going through the longer route. They’re highly resistant to magic and just generally suck to deal with, plus their negotiations are not consistent.
: Lucifuge, however, is the reason you do not want to be in this garbage dungeon for even a second. He’s going to be in pretty much every encounter and is completely immune to magic. There’s only one thing that can make him fuck off… the power of Gay.
: Pucel just kind of exists and gets mowed down by Meltdown.
: Yet another reason not to stick around is Seker (the birds in the back behind Yaksa). Seker likes to use instakill spells and tends to go before the party does. Basically, Silver River sucks and you want to spend as little time as possible in it.
: Unfortunately, this section also has auto-scrolling text. The line before this is Lisa going “Aiyaahhh, I’m bored, can’t we be done with this already?” If this dungeon wasn’t a giant piece of shit I’d re-record it.
: Next time, we go into Xibalba. Now would also be a good time to mention that the Tatsuya/Jun commission is officially underway and should be done for the end of the LP. If you haven’t seen the Anna/Yukino one, it’s above this post.
