Click Here for Update 6
: We’re on our way to Kasugayama High, also known as Cuss High. : Cuss High is largely the same inside as Seven Sisters, with one exception that we’ll see a bit later. : Right away, we encounter two new enemies: Empusa and Agathion. The guide says that you should be making pacts with the demons around here, and it was here I finally found out what pacts do. : Unfortunately, the developers caught onto the whole “party member catchup” thing from Persona 1 and got rid of it. Eikichi is only level 6, which makes us basically unable to make a pact with anything. : So anyway, here’s what making a pact does, apart from being a bad game mechanic. When you make a pact with a demon, it doubles the number of tarot cards the demon gives on a successful negotiation. It also causes the demon to give you Free Cards. Why is this important? : The answer is that there are certain arcanas that demons do not drop cards for. To get Personas of those arcanas (Emperor is one) you need to use Free Cards. The sole exception are Fool Personas, which were a pain to get in P1 and are even more of a pain to get in P2. : Apep here is one demon the guide recommends making a pact with for Strength cards. Unfortunately, we need Eikichi to do that. : Even though Eikichi has told us where to go, we don’t want to go there just yet. Most of the rooms in Cuss High are blocked off, but 1-2 isn’t. : This gets Tatsuya another pair negotiation technique with Eikichi. I think the cutoff point for this is actually a bit after where we are. : This student gives us a hint about where we’re going next. It seems Cuss High has a bomb shelter built underneath it. I looked it up, and this actually wasn’t unheard of in the US: a bunch of schools had bomb shelters built underneath them in the 1960s, during the height of the Cold War. : Interestingly, a lot of these bomb shelters were built by civilians and to no one’s surprise a lot of them were both poorly planned and probably not all that effective against a nuclear bomb. One article I saw had a piece about a school with a population of 1300 students in the 60s. The municipality wanted to make it a fallout shelter.. that could hold a total of 340 people. How did they plan who’d get in and who wouldn’t? They uh.. didn’t. : Most of these shelters were meant to be decommissioned after the Cold War ended, but in a lot of cases that never happened and they were simply forgotten because there was no centralized recordkeeping system indicating where they all even were. There was even one under a high school in my home state of Connecticut, found in the early 90s. : Japan apparently has the same problem, only theirs are even more of a problem. For one, they’re much older (dating back to World War II) and also tend to come with the problem of unexploded WWII-era bombs. : If you walk by the rooms, you can see that some of them are decorated for the festival. Unfortunately, we can’t go into any of them. : The encounter rate is absurdly high, and we run into Puck. Puck was in Club Zodiac, but I don’t think I ever saw him. The guide recommends making a pact with him to get Lovers cards, and I did but it broke before I could get anything out of it. : You know what I’m not already tired of? Running around a building chasing after someone. Not like we’ve done this twice already. : Now we get to go all the way back to the stairs and climb back up to the third floor. : I’m pretty sure that by the time I got here, I had already put in more time than I did in Thanatos Tower in P1 because of how slow everything is. : 2-4 is just down the stairs from 3-1, so it’s not much of a walk. : Now we get to go all the way to the bomb shelter. I took a break and went to see what I could fuse at the Velvet Room. Unfortunately, everything there was either no good or would break the ability to use Mega Blaze. I could’ve replaced the Pixie we made with a Harpy, but there wasn’t much of a point. : The stairs to the basement are right near the gym on the west side of the school. : It’s kind of strange to me that the school has such a small basement. I know the one in Connecticut was only part of the basement and not the entire thing.
: “Forgive you? Forget that! There’s a whole laundry list of stuff we gotta ask you! There’s no way we’re just letting you go!”
: “You’re gonna tell us about the emblem curse whether you like it or not!”
: “What did you just say?”
: “Kehhei! Come out and face us!”
: “Raaaaaagh! That scumbag!”
: “Eikichi! What the hell!?”
: “Yeah, what she said, you moron! Why’d you go and break our only contact with the outside!?”
: “Whaaa…? B-But…!”
: “Oh, well. No use crying over it now. It’s at times like this that you gotta remember to think positive, guys! Together, we can find a way out!”
: “Hey, Lisa… do you have a mirror? Eikichi-kun mentioned a rumor that the one person who got out used a mirror, right?”
: “Ng Hai. I don’t have one with me now… I usually keep it in my bookbag.”
: “My my, hey hey… three ladies here and none of them has a mirror!? Good thing I’m so beautiful…”
: “Ai..yah… what now!? You better take responsibility for this, jackass!”
: “Me!? This is your fault! You better pay me back for it! That’ll be 1,000,000 yen!”
: “That’s enough! Thanks to you two, we just lost what might be our only hope of getting out of here!”
: “Think positive, guys! This isn’t over until we decide it is. Let’s brainstorm! There has to be a way!”
: “Maya-san… we’re all exhausted. Let’s rest a while to cool down a bit. We’ll take turns keeping watch.”
: “I couldn’t sleep for some reason… mind if I sit here?”
: “You really think… we can get out of here…?”
: “Oh, sorry, sorry! Gotta think positive!”
: “That’s the first time I’ve seen you smile. You’ve got a great one!”
: “This guy’s my good luck charm. When times are hard, like now… I always ask him what to do.”
: “So many terrible things have happened… rumors are becoming reality, and we’re under attack from actual demons…”
: “But it hasn’t been all bad. I got to meet you and your friends…”
: “I’m having so much fun with you all. It’s like.. being a kid again…”
: “I just can’t bring myself to believe that Joker really is a bad guy. It was like he was a child crying after having a nightmare…”
: “It’s like how you guys get into fights and try to act cool, but my Persona tells me you’re a bunch of good kids. I sense it the same way…”
: “True indeed… sometimes, I wonder if what we think of as real could just all be a dream.”
: “That I’m watching a dream go by while forgetting something important to me.. Joker, too, maybe.”
: “Oh, sorry. Didn’t meant to get into such heavy stuff with you. Well, leave the lookout to me and get some rest.”
: “Goodnight, Tatsuya-kun. Sweet dreams…”
: “Oh yeah!”
: “It’s okay. I mean, you’re practically me. And I’m you. It’ll be like I still have it!”
: “Ahahahaha! You’re the greatest, Tatsuya! No matter what happens, we’re gonna keep our promise to each other! Forever and ever!”
: “We’ve all been too focused on the idea that there’s no exit. You know what they say: ‘what’s most important can’t be seen with one’s eyes.’ right Tatsuya-kun?”
: “Hm!? What’s going on with them…?”
: “There’s probably a loophole we’ve been overlooking. The key to cracking this rumor’s logic is the mirror. Now let’s sort through what we know one more time and think of a way out!”
: "Correct! No one knows where the exit is, so you can’t get out… but rumor has it that one person got out by using a mirror.’
: “Now here’s our problem, since we don’t have a mirror anymore… what do mirrors really do? They reflect things, right?”
: “Yes! That’s it! You’re not the only thing that appears in a mirror. Think about when you drive a car or ride your bike! Okay, and what do you mean by ‘everything in range’!? Keep going…”
: “Bingo! That’s right, Tatsuya-kun! That’s the importance of the mirror!”
: “I think whoever escaped in the rumor managed it by accident, but they did it by finding an exit reflected in the mirror!”
: “I get it.. if the rumor is that no one knows where the exit is, then the exit does exist!”
: “Right! Not knowing isn’t the same thing as not existing… that was just us jumping to conclusions.”
: “Ahaha! I had my suspicions that would be the case right from the–”
: “But with no mirror, there’s no way for us to indirectly look for it! If we can’t see it, we still can’t get out!”
