Click Here for Update 8
: Welcome to Mu, where the front room is a casino even though I never actually spread the rumor about there being a casino.
: “Looks like they’re arguing over something.”
: It’s strange that the AD doesn’t recognize Lisa as being the third member of Muses. I guess he could be feigning ignorance.
: I wish I was doing videos for this because as soon as this text box goes away, Eikichi runs off-screen.
: “That idiot!”
: “Well, this does save us the trouble of sneaking in! C’mon, guys! Next stop, Muses!”
: I’ll probably spread the rumor about it eventually just to show it off, but the casino in Mu is very different from Judgement 1999 in Persona 1. The machines are numbered, and you can talk to people on the street to find out which machines are the easiest to win on. The only problem is that your win chance depends on Tatsuya’s luck stat, which is pretty low because we’re pumping Dexterity for fusion spell damage.
: I’m glad that Atlus largely got over the whole “everything has to be a maze” thing by the time Persona 3 came out. What I didn’t know going into this is that Mu is actually a really short dungeon.. but at the same time is the start of what is basically a filler arc.
: Surprisingly, our first random encounter is with actual demons. This is kind of a rarity in Mu. Nekomata is the one demon you want to negotiate with here: she’s easy to negotiate with and gives 15 free cards every time you do so once you have a pact.
: Ixtab isn’t worth negotiating with. I made a pact with it and had it immediately broken, and it gives pretty much the same amount of free cards Nekomata does.
: Layout wise, Mu is a lot like the SEBEC building from Persona 1, in that it has staircases that are cut off from the rest of the building. Going the wrong way on the first floor gets us a couple of Rattle Drinks, which are the mid-tier heal item.
: On my way back to the correct route, I got into a fight and Tatsuya’s Persona got a form mutation. Form mutations are basically a special kind of fusion which generally suck. Let me show you why.
: We can see here that Surya can mutate into Fukurokuju, who is a minor arcana Persona. The problem is that unlike regular fusion - where we can fuse and equip Personas up to five levels higher than the corresponding character - we can’t do that with a mutation. By the time we reach level 20, we will have access to Personas way better than Fukurokuju.
: When I said demons are rare encounters in Mu, this is what I meant. Probably a good 60 to 70 percent of the encounters in Mu are with mask cultists. They come in various colors to signify what element they are: blue are water, yellow are lightning, and red are fire.
: Once you reach the second floor (you want to do this from the side that didn’t have the rattle drinks) there’s two sets of stairs you can take. The middle’s totally skippable but has a few items in it.
: Hallways with stairs in them is pretty much the entirety of what Mu is. This one will bring us to the 4th floor.. but not the right part.
: Inside is a St Card, which is used at fusion to give a Persona 5 extra points of strength. It’s not great given that we have an All Incense from the Dresser Hag quest (which gives us 5 in all stats) but it’s there.
: Once we take the staircase further down on the second floor, we wind up behind a rope barrier a few feet from the reception desk in the front. Why they even have this up when the cast are trying to get through, I have no idea.
: It took me practically half the dungeon to run into a Minotaur, notable only because he takes two Mega Blazes to go down instead of just one. This is part of the reason why I was trying to farm cards, because apparently Mega Blaze starts falling off hard around this point of the game and needs to be replaced. I think that might be because the guide authors (including the born-again Christian “dying is not cool the devil is a wimp” guy) never bothered upgrading their Personas.
: Anyway, we go in a loop around the back staircase and now we’re on the franchise floor. This box here is special.
: Faust is a unique encounter who should probably be a mini-boss but doesn’t exactly qualify.
: He opens with Mephistopheles, an attack that causes random status effects to each party member. If he had managed to hit Tatsuya and Eikichi with sleep or charm, this might’ve been a bad time.
: For some reason, Faust’s physical defense is incredibly low. One Pegasus Strike takes him out without further issue.
: Faust drops a Miracle Egg, which is complete overkill right now. I never mentioned it in the Persona 1 LP, but in both Persona 1 and the Persona 2 duology your party recovers SP as they walk. I don’t know why they left that feature out of the rest of the games.
: Faust gave me just enough EXP to level Eikichi to 14. I really don’t understand why Eikichi is the source of like, 90% of all negotiations in this game. I think I’ve used Yukino all of once for that. This one in particular is annoying because Eikichi’s “sing” tactic has a roughly 10-second unskippable animation attached to it. Thankfully, we only need to do this to form the pact.
: I got to the final room of Mu without even encountering all the demons on the encounter list. This was with me getting here and then turning back because I forgot a couple of chests.
: There’s a door on the third floor I passed that leads there.
: We get a pretty good supply of free cards, which we’ll need in just a bit to fuse some Personas.
: Finally, just as I got to the door on the fourth floor, I ran into two of the demons we hadn’t seen yet. Moh Shuvuu is a returning demon, and Ochre Jelly is yet another Slime recolor. Both guides recommend negotiating with Moh Shuvuu, but I didn’t because making them Eager to get cards requires using Lisa’s “dance” tactic, which is another 10-second unskippable animation.
: There’s another demon we didn’t run into, but it’s the least useful one because it gives World cards (not usable for another 20 levels or so) and only a handful of them at that.
: I wonder what’s going to be behind this door? A boss?
: Nope! This is going to be a recurring theme for the next couple of dungeons: we go in, go through some floors, and there’s no boss at the end.
: There’s a cut between these two scenes, so I’m not really omitting anything. You can’t see the animation, but Tatsuya is in fact playing DDR in the background. I forgot how big DDR was in 1998.
: The nickname doesn’t even make any sense beyond being a dumb reference. They’d sound exactly the same.
: I honestly don’t know why anyone would want to be an idol in Japan. There’s the toxic fanbases, the need to keep up a very specific image at all times.. and thirsty game developers making elaborate self-insert characters to ship themselves with you.
: This is one thing I think Persona 2 does really well is showing off the actual hardships the characters are going through. Remember, Lisa doesn’t speak English - she was born in Japan but everyone assumes she does because her parents are non-Japanese.
: Mami also looks really, really off-model in this scene. I’ll show you at the end of the update.
: Giga Macho is our next stop, which I’m doing in the next update because I may or may not have spent my entire weekend getting sucked into Terraria again. Even with the “final update” it still has crazy pacing issues.
: Before we end the update, I made a quick stop at the Velvet Room to fuse a couple of new Personas.
Returning Persona: Nekomata
Origin: Japan
First Appearance: Megami Tensei (NES)
:
: Nekomata is a pretty average Persona, apart from the fact that she learns Zanma. As you can see, the Zan spell line (which did Blast-type damage in Persona 1) now does Almighty damage. This is as close to Megidolaon as we can get.
Returning Persona: Angel
Origin: Christianity
First Appearance: Shin Megami Tensei (SNES)
: Meet the Persona 2 Angel design, also known as Elly from Persona 1 if she was in a mainline SMT game. This is well before SMT Nocturne and the infamous “bondage angel” that has been in every SMT game since the PS2 era. We want Angel for one reason and one reason alone: I had to change Maya’s Persona and without Pixie we’d have no source of healing.
: What I had to change Maya’s Persona to is Fjalar here, not to be confused with Vidofnir. I don’t know how Norse mythology manages to have more than one magic rooster in it. We need Vidofnir for a fusion spell, and that’s about all we need him for.
: I did record a bit of Giga Macho (really just the entrance) so let’s go in.
: Oh no. Next time, we’ll go into a record store. In 1999. I’ll be spending the next week recovering from the YIIK flashbacks. In hindsight, I’m thankful that the Allansons probably never played Innocent Sin.
