Click here for Update 22
: This is it. The endgame. Welcome to Xibalba. I hope you’re ready for what’s basically Caracol 2.0.
: “That’s odd, though. They know we’re after them… so isn’t it a little too quiet? There’s not even a welcoming committee here.”
: “This spaceship can carry an entire city, so I bet it has tons of high-tech traps. Everyone probably fell for them…”
: “Hmm… I doubt they ALL died, but you’re right, there must be some pretty devious traps in there.”
: It doesn’t really matter which one you pick. All that changes is the next cutscene, which I would do both versions of were it not locked behind a godawful 45 minute long autoscroller.
: “Whatever it is, we can’t just stand here. We need to get the Heaven Skull so we can put the city back to normal. Let’s go!”
: You can’t see it because of how blurry the screen gets when stuff’s in motion and also because it’s under Eikichi’s portrait, but Lisa is dancing around the lasers trying not to get hit.
: Xibalba is easily the second worst dungeon in the game after Silver River. The floors aren’t particularly long or complex - but in exchange, the encounter rate is jacked up to the point where in some cases you’re getting encounters every other step.
: Layout wise, it’s pretty much exactly like Caracol - there’s a hallway then a cutscene room, and this repeats until it’s over.
: “Eheheh… I’ll show you some stars, too. Papa knows lots about the stars!”
: “Wow, that’s so cool! My daddy’s always busy with his job. Hey, Jun! What’s your daddy like?”
: “Huh? Um… well… h-he’s really cool and strong and great… really!”
: “Seriously…? I don’t have a dad, so I’m kinda jealous… you’re so lucky, Jun-kun!”
: I wonder who Jun’s mother could be? The game will only barely explain it shortly before the final boss in a cutscene room, because Innocent Sin has some serious pacing issues. It feels like there should’ve been another dungeon between Mt. Iwato and Mt. Katatsumuri where they put some of this stuff.
: “D-don’t worry about those k-kids… they say even m-meaner stuff to m-me…”
: “My papa… he’s… he’s not a deadbeat!”
: Honestly, why ARE we seeing this? The entire childhood plot arc was like five dungeons ago.
: “Jun-kun!? Are you okay…? Hang in there!”
: “I’m… I’m all right… sorry, everyone. Let’s… keep going…”
: There’s some optional dialogue here which I feel I need to show so that something about two updates from now when I finish the game makes sense.
: Can you guess what the final boss is going to be?
: The monsters here are largely the exact same ones we saw in Silver River, with Throne and Fafnir (a Catoblepas recolor I didn’t even realize was a separate demon until I was nearing the 5th floor) being the only new demons. I fought every random encounter in this dungeon without negotiating at all and barely gained a level out of it. Just use the Estoma card.
: Oh, Pascal the Dog is here as well. He’s worth exactly jack shit in terms of EXP and money and only usually appears by himself.
: Xibalba doesn’t have staircases, it has future space elevators. Most of this dungeon is laid out as follows, to the point where I’m not even going to post the map.
: There’s a hallway, a couple of small side hallways with items in them, a cutscene room or two, and then the elevator. That’s it.
: I should mention that around here, I decided to use all the incenses I picked up.
: The reason Tatsuya only has 80 dexterity instead of 99 is because each character’s stats are the average of theirs and their Persona’s.
: The big one here was Maya, who gained about 90 HP from using all the Vit and HP incenses. She’s still got the lowest max HP of anyone.
: I’m just going to summarize the rest of this because it’s about ten more lines that do nothing but tell you that Prince Taurus had his face blown off by a laser.
: Ares is an enemy that showed up in Silver River that I’m not sure I actually got a shot of. Annoyingly, I wound up using God Hand and a shitty water fusion spell for most of this dungeon because Mucalinda (Eikichi’s Persona) wouldn’t fucking mutate. Eventually it learned Malaquadyne so I could do Meltdown and Undine on the same turn.
: Does anyone want to guess what’s in this next cutscene room? Anyone?
: Most people think the microwave hallway in Metal Gear Solid 4 originated there, but it actually had a long and storied career before that.
: All Solid Snake really had to do to make it through the microwave hallway was to believe in himself.
: It’s because, as we’re about to learn, Maya is basically a six year old girl in an adult’s body.
: By the way, I started looking at stuff for my next LP and found a design document from one of the artbooks for Devil Survivor. The notes for all of them are basically “Giant breasts, needs bigger breasts, big breasts.”
: The door opens because the Mayans fucking suck at building traps. It explains why they’re hot garbage in Civ 6 and why the Inca are the superior South American civilization. Seriously I feel like if the Spanish had just left the Inca alone we’d already have a functioning space elevator. Those guys built roads over mountains, it would’ve been a matter of years before they built one to space.
: Right outside the microwave hallway we run into the worst enemies in this dungeon. Hellsehen (and the robots, called Metal Zentaurs) are extremely resistant to magic. Worse, they like to spam both poison and confusion to fuck up fusion spells. You basically need either Take-Mikazuchi or a Persona with Maziodyne to kill them.
: Seriously this feels like it’s some kind of Mayan temple to daddy issues.
: So, this is Maya’s dad. He has a name that as far as I know is only mentioned in the artbooks - it’s Masataka Amano. Remember how I hated Fujii or whatever his name was, the photographer who died outside Caracol? That’s because in Eternal Punishment, we find out that he worked with Maya’s dad.
: Keep in mind that Maya is 23, and I think in this scene she’s 6 or 7 years old, meaning that Yukino is still a toddler. Fujii is working with him at this point. Yes, he’s old enough to be Yukino’s father and then some.
: “Is it more important than me or Mom!? That’s… so selfish, Daddy!”
: “Liar! You promised… you promised you’d come home… when you were assigned to the war zone… do you know how scared I was!? That Daddy might have forgotten about me…!?”
: I like that Atlus went through all the trouble of making what I’m pretty sure is a new portrait for this specific scene. And now we know why she has the rabbit. You know, the one we haven’t seen since the bomb shelter.
: So I’m gonna level with you here, I don’t like the writing for this last part of the game at all. The problem is that the plot kind of didn’t have enough time for actual character development (even though it did) and so what we have is the game throwing a giant mess of plot at us and hoping something’s going to stick.
: I mean, just thinking about, it we basically went from knowing nothing at all to “Hitler has returned and is using his army of possibly robo-Nazis to raise a Mayan spaceship from the ground so he can take over the world” and then back to nothing.
: I think part of it is that up until this point, Atlus was pretty much used to making games that just didn’t have a plot. Persona 1 was, as far as I know, their first attempt at actual writing as opposed to making a dungeon crawler and telling you “there’s demons, kill them all”.
: So I’ll just warn you now, a lot of the stuff at the end of the game will make exactly zero sense if you assume Jun is gay and has no romantic interest in Maya.
: “I went into the same line of work as my dad… maybe I was trying to outdo him…”
: “Dad died pursuing his dream. All he left me was this… that’s why I… I wanted to be a successful journalist who could balance my work with a family, the way he couldn’t…”
: “Have you… ever heard this poem before?”
: As far as I know, unlike Der Doppelganger, this is not an actual poem. At least, the only results when I searched for it were P2 fansites.
: “What does it take to prove you were ever alive…? Even if you die, as long as you’re remembered, you’ll live on as a memory.”
: Why the fuck are we going into this NOW!? This is the end of the goddamn game! We’re supposed to be wrapping the plot up, not adding new plot points!
: “But then, if you’re forgotten… that’s really no different from being dead…”
: “No man is an island… so we try to imprint our existence in others. Following one’s dream may be one way of doing so.”
: Hold on I need to contact that artist again and get a picture of Jun as Venom Snake doing the “You’re all diamonds” thing.
: “That’s how it was with me. If you guys had really forgotten about me… I might not be here right now…”
: The way he calls her Big Maya just reinforces the whole Metal Gear Solid thing.
: I’m imagining this as an ad for a fast food restaurant and it’s incredibly amusing. “This… is where my Persona has been guiding me for the last ten years… to Big Jack’s Burger Shack, just five minutes off Exit 39 of I-91. Big Jack’s, where we’ve got the best burgers allowed by state law!”
: I didn’t capture it because it happened in the same battle, but Isis also got a “change form” mutation. I was like “FUCK YES I GOT DAGDA”. Nope, this game hates me.
: Instead, we get the ability to change Isis into King Arthur, who… sucks. Weak to magic across the board, doesn’t even null physical attacks, shit moveset, high SP cost. I think he might actually be the worst Persona in the game, on par with some of the shittier Personas from the first game.
: “You’ve got a point. We haven’t seen Igor’s face in a while, either. I kinda wish we could have a chance to switch out some of our Personas…”
: Yes, I too want to send Mucalinda into the trash pile for being shit and refusing to learn High Pressure.
: “We’re in a real fix… there’s no time to go back to the city and no way to get there if we could. Just hang in there, guys.”
: “No use hoping for a miracle. Let’s just go.”
: “Aiyah! We’re so lucky! Let’s go, Tatsuya!”
: “Oh goddess of destiny, thank you! Thank you! Let’s break on through!”
: “Wait a second, you two…! Doesn’t this seem a little too good to be true!?”
: “Yikes…”
: “Oh man, this has to be some kind of trap! We need to hurry after them! I’ll go after Eikichi-kun. Tatsuya-kun, you and Jun-kun follow Lisa!”
: “Big Maya’s right, I think. Let’s go, Tatsuya!”
: Honestly, I don’t know what the point of this cutscene is. It’s not really advancing character development, because we already know that Eikichi is a complete dumbass who will gladly run face-first into any trap he sees. It’s also not a plot point in the sense that we’re not splitting the party up again.
: “Aiyah!? Where did you two come from? I don’t remember seeing you inside.”
: “We wanted to ask you the same thing… what happened in there, Lisa?”
: “Whaaaat!? Nuh-uh. It really was just a healing spring inside. I know, because I was yelling at Trish about what a ripoff her prices were. Maybe you two were just dreaming.”
: The trap was actually just trying to make Tatsuya and Jun hug.
: “Well, I definitely came out of the Velvet–”
: “Hang on… what’s going on here? When I was in there, it was full of traps… should we go back in and look again?”
: Given how Persona 1 worked, you’d think there would be a different route through the dungeon if you actually tried to go into the Velvet Room, but nope, it’s just a Velvet Room.
: The fifth floor has an elevator on it, but Jun refuses to let us use it. This is where I got really confused because there’s supposed to be a way back to the city from here.
: What this is probably supposed to be, given that the name of the room is “Terminal”, is a Nazi-developed version of the teleportation terminals from the mainline SMT games.
: Eikichi then proceeds to star in Shin Megami Tensei III, where he is merged with a demon and becomes the “Dummy-fiend”, a creature of pure stupidity.
: “E-Eikichi-kun!”
: Honestly though, you’d think there’d be at least some Nazi body parts strewn around here. How would you know when the last person to use the teleporter is off the pad on the other side?
: Somehow, Lisa fails at using a Terminal.
: And now we’re back at Sevens. The game does this ostensibly because there’s new armor and weapons we can buy, but now we can do the “ultimate weapons” sidequest… which I’m not going to do for the most part. For one thing, I never actually wound up buying new armor since uh… I think after Mt. Iwato.
: Between this and restocking on healing items I was down to around 500k yen.
: We were kind of supposed to do Doors 4 and 5 of the Abandoned Factory a long time ago - I think Door 4 opens after the Aerospace Museum and Door 5 opens after Mt. Katatsumuri.
: The process for opening up the two hidden rooms in the Factory is extremely annoying. Before you can do any of it, you need to have read all of the notes in the first five rooms.
: So now we finally find out what happened here: someone started a rumor that made demons appear. We find out exactly what the deal is (and why there are two hidden rooms) in Room 5.
: This is where we get the clues about the hidden rooms - the liquid waste disposal area and the secret boardroom. Here’s the annoying part. Instead of this just being a rumor you can take to Todoroki, you have to spread it via demons.
: There’s one final note we need to get, which is done by going through Room 1 and going into Room 5 from there. It doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know.
: Room 6 has a Crimson Wing in a locker, which allows us to fuse Suzaku. This is only really relevant if you’re trying for that one fusion spell.
: So basically, here’s how demon rumors work. You have to make a pact with a demon, make it happy again, ask it for information until it gives you the rumor you want, and then use a different demon to spread it.
: In the Boardroom, we run into someone who looks… kinda familiar.
: What he’s really asking here is “Do you want Tatsuya’s ultimate weapon for free?” and the answer is yes.
: So in the past three years, Nanjo became a biker. This has to do with his story in Eternal Punishment.
: In Eternal Punishment, Nanjo’s entire storyline is based around a rumor that Kandori somehow survived Persona 1 and is in Sumaru City.
: So here’s why the ultimate weapons aren’t worth it. Right now, we could go buy a weapon from the store that has 143 attack. The ultimates can be powered up through demon rumors, but… yeah, no. The other problem is that if you screw up a negotiation, the demon can curse your weapon and render it useless (1 attack). Next time, we’ll finish the factory and finish the game.
: “That perv’s still alive!? What’s he want a middle-aged lady like her for !?”
