Click Here for Update 17
: The following run of Mt. Clusterfuck and the subsequent run of Caracol are not the canon ones for this LP. This run was done using a save I made after reaching the temple but before going back down the mountain to do the Jumping Geezer sidequest. As a result, the party is significantly lower level, lacks several Personas that I fused on the canon route, and is generally a lot weaker than the actual party will be.
: I also missed a lot of items as I was basically trying to speedrun Caracol for the cutscenes before doing the canon run of it. The canon run will be in the next update.
: First off, on this run, I picked the indirect route for the start of the mountain. I didn’t actually finish it (this is an even earlier save than the one I used for the Caracol run) because this was before I replaced the Prime Personas and thus this run was fucking suffering.
: The other route has you not fight the Nazis (which is of course bad) and puts you on a route with much easier enemies. I’d say this is actually the hard route because you’re getting way less EXP and money than you would be if you picked the other route.
: This route is basically a Lost Woods puzzle that involves memorizing (or writing down) a poem and then finding statues that have the correct poetry written on them.
: I have no clue what story they’re talking about. This honestly seems like a Resident Evil puzzle and I’m imagining Chris Redfield circa RE5 running through a forest after a BOW and getting confused because I’m pretty sure Chris Redfield is illiterate.
: I bet that asshole monk did this.
: The Nazis are basically nowhere to be found on this route. Instead, you fight mostly demons from previous dungeons, plus a few new ones. Hunhau is one of those. They’re very flammable.
: There’s a lot of hidden passages in this route, and also it’s pretty easy to miss the statues.
: This fight with Demeter is more or less where I gave up. Stuff was taking forever to kill and I didn’t feel like backing out. Taking the wrong route at any point dumps you back where the signposts were.
: Okay, now time for the non-canon Caracol run. Instead of picking “Yes! I’d like Yukino to get her ultimate persona back and also have her in the party for Caracol!” option, we pick the “No, I’d like to hear Satomi Tadashi assassinate Yukino’s character some more.” option.
: “Yeah… Yukki? We’ll come back for you later, so wait for us here… come on guys, let’s go…”
: Yes, let’s just leave Yukino in the middle of a spot that was just being used as a drop zone by robo-Nazis. I’m sure she’ll be perfectly fine by herself. Actually, if this was still Persona 1 Yukino she probably would be.
: I’d like you to keep this in mind. Please remember that Yukino is “canonically” straight at this point. I kind of have to wonder who was responsible for this one scene though. Satomi Tadashi was horny for idols, but according to the wiki, Yukino was modeled after an actress that Kazuma Kaneko (the character designer for a lot of the early SMT games) liked, and if this was some kind of inter-departmental warfare going on.
: Caracol is a lot like this one dungeon in SMT 1, where there’s a pretty straightforward route you can take that skips most of it. The other paths tend to have items, and a lot of what I missed are incenses and other valuables.
: Case in point, you can basically just take a right from the start of the dungeon and reach the first set of stairs.
: B2F starts with a conveyor belt puzzle. I’d post the Japanese map, but it makes this look a lot more complex than it actually is.
: Crowley starts showing up here, yet another demon based on a real person. He’s level 38 (and at this point the party is level 35) and reflects magic. This makes him very annoying when he’s behind a bunch of other demons, but at least reflections aren’t a practically-guaranteed death the way they were in Persona 1.
: The one item I bothered to grab was this All Incense, just so I knew how to get to it on my canon run.
: Getting to the end is really easy. You go North three times and then West once.
: The next room is a miniature teleporter maze (not really much of a maze) that can be completely bypassed by walking around it. The teleporter to Tatsuya’s right takes you to an item box in the middle of the room, but getting the item puts you back in the conveyor belt room.
: The Achilles Helm increases evasion but is otherwise identical to the ones bought from the store. Since Tatsuya is already a tank I put it on Eikichi because it’s male-only and we only have one other male character.
: Like Mt. Iwato, Caracol has a few cutscene rooms on the way to the boss.
: This battle was funny to me. If you’ll notice, in the cutscene there are five nazis, but there’s only four in the battle. That’s because the commander uses a skill called “Run Away” as soon as the fight starts. And to think I only scalped 40-some nazis on this run.
: The optional dialogue in this room changes if you didn’t take Yukino with you.
: Lisa even calls out the fact that you fucked up.
: B3F introduces a new enemy, Virulenz Kraft. They’re little mad doctor type Nazis who are one of the most annoying goddamn things to fight. They have very high magic defense and like to cast Zanma to do a load of damage to the entire party at once. At one point I wound up fighting four of them at once and it sucked.
: Leviathans are very flammable and die in one Mega Blaze almost guaranteed.
: B3F is another teleporter maze: there’s three teleporters on the left side and three on the right. The only one that lets you progress is in the middle one on the right side.
: This takes you to a path that leads you directly to another teleporter. This one puts you right by the exit stairs.
: B4F is largely straightforward again. There’s a big initial room with some items I didn’t bother to grab and a door leading to a boss fight… and also the worst cutscene in this game.
: Somehow, Yukino has a Shadow. I’d like to point out that the other games in the series have since established that having the ability to summon a Persona means you cannot have a Shadow clone - the Persona is only granted when you’ve accepted that your Shadow exists. This is one of many reasons this cutscene is not canon… apart from one thing.
: “Kehhei! Don’t say that crap with Yukino-san’s face! She’s–!”
: I honestly don’t get what the fuck they’re getting at here. It’s stated in Persona 1 that Yukino was a delinquent until she met Ms. Saeko and turned her life around. She was already over this before Persona 1 even started.
: “What did you just say!? Take that back! There’s absolutely no way you’re Yukki!”
: Whoops, Maya just said the magic words. Unlike say, Persona 4, she’s right. This ISN’T Yukino, because Yukino was already over this years ago.
: In case you can’t tell, Yukino’s shadow just kissed Anna. I really, really don’t get what this is supposed to be. Yukino was kind of gay-coded since the first game, and now she’s straight, and now she’s vaguely bisexual I guess? I don’t get why this is even an issue for her, and if it was, why they never showed it at any point over two games. The best part is that the reason she has a shadow has absolutely nothing to do with her sexuality.
: Shadow Yukino’s Persona, going along with the theme, is Reverse Durga. She’s incredibly weak to Water, but weirdly does not use any Fire-element attacks at all apart from a single melee attack.
: Anna, on the other hand, uses water spells and is weak to… I actually don’t know. All I did was spam Undine over and over and it eventually killed both of them.
: I don’t know any more than you do.
: “It couldn’tve been… I do have a really bad feeling about this… but we need to hurry on ahead for now.”
: So yeah, this whole thing is super badly written, and it gets worse. Have I mentioned that Persona 5 takes a LOT of inspiration from this game, in particular the scenes in this version of Caracol? Probably why I didn’t like Persona 5 much.
: After the Shadow Yukino fight, you take a left and you’re more or less at the stairs. There’s an elevator so you can go outside and check on Yukino, but I didn’t think to do that. I probably should’ve. Instead, here’s another cutscene room.
: “Jun! You gotta say something! Are you gonna just let Big Sis go away!?”
: “…”
: “I won’t let you… I won’t let you go! If we lock Big Sis in the shrine until tomorrow, she won’t be able to go!”
: You can’t see it very well, but there’s a sequence where Eikichi and Tatsuya force Maya into the shrine and lock the door. We already know this isn’t how it happened. Strangely, I thought they were going to do something with the whole “Tatsuya Suou vs Tatsuya Sudou” thing but they never do.
: “No…! That wasn’t it, Jun… what we just saw wasn’t what happened at all!”
: “That’s right… Ta-chan tried to save Big Maya… we’re to blame here! You gotta remember!”
: “Jun-kun! I’m alive, see? Please, you have to snap out of it…”
: “I remember Philemon telling us… we had to save Jun-kun from the clutches of the Crawling Chaos… what in the world is that? I bet it’s what’s making rumors into reality… and controlling Jun-kun too…”
: Before I played this game, I had read that Persona 2 has the strongest writing of all the games. Maybe that’s Eternal Punishment more than Innocent Sin, because mind control villains are honestly just a sign of bad writing.
: That’s not to say it’s not possible to do a good mind-controlled villain, but it’s almost never done right.
: Just to get an idea, it took until B5F for the non-canon party to reach the same level the canon run party will be when I start that run. This is how long Mt. Katatsumuri is.
: There’s a couple of monster boxes around here, including this one with Orthrus in it. Orthrus is very flammable and is also a regular enemy in Caracol. He’s not a bad one to encounter either: while his negotiations aren’t 100% consistent he drops a lot of cards and also drops Strength Cards, which would be useful if I’d bothered to hunt down one of the 1% spawn rate demons in the Abandoned Factory.
: The only reason I’m bringing that up is because the box with Orthrus in it happens to be directly on the path to progress, and also because it’s the only time when a monster box has items in it beyond what you get from killing the demon in it.
: “Hey… you know what a doppelganger is?”
: Yeah, I shot a few hundred to death in Persona 1. No, really.
:
"The night is still, the streets are quiet, in this house lived my Love
She left the town long before, yet her house still stands in the same place
There I also see a man standing and staring into the heavens
Wringing his hands in violent grief. I shudder when I behold his face.
The moon reveals to me my own likeness. You Doppelganger, you pale companion
Why do you mimic my lovesickness, that tormented me at this place for so many nights in the past?
: “Jun-kun and Tatsuya-kun… your personalities are different, but maybe that’s why you two draw each other together like shadows…”
: I uh… I don’t think Maya gets what that poem is about, and I’m not entirely certain the writers did either. The poem is called “Der Doppelganger” by Heinrich Heine, and it rhymes in its original German. Wikipedia tells me that Franz Schubert turned it into a song the same year he died… and the song is nearly five minutes long. The translation they used may also not be totally accurate.
: You know what would’ve made this game infinitely better? If no one understood the flower symbolism. I mean, just think about it. The party confronts Jun, he’s like “I’ve been sending you flower messages for weeks, assholes!” and they’re like “Wait, what?” Seriously though I want to know what kind of person can identify all of these flowers and their meanings on sight and not be like, 90 years old. It’s like the whole thing with the anniversary gifts by number of years you’ve been together.
: So, one other thing I’d like to touch on, since Maya’s alluding to it pretty hard. We haven’t really met Jun yet, but one of the possible interpretations for Tatsuya and Jun’s relationship is that they are in fact gay.
: The people who worked on this game have pretty much all but directly said that Jun is gay, and there’s an option you can pick later on that has Tatsuya profess his love for Jun. There’s a couple of other things hinting at the fact that Tatsuya is potentially gay: one being that Lisa loves him but he has zero interest in her.
: If you’ll recall, I mentioned there were a couple of things that were believed to be reasons that Atlus didn’t localize Innocent Sin on the PS1. One of those is that a gay relationship, especially one where the playable character is gay, would be “unacceptable” for Western audiences. This is how the 90s were, and also why the 90s sucked.
: This also makes me wonder if Yukino being changed was because they felt there were “too many” gay characters.
: I’ll put up a poll as to whether we want Tatsuya to be gay or not. As a warning, the ending does not make as much sense as if Tatsuya is straight, but that’s fine by me.
: On B6F, Maya alerts us to a boss being near.
: Right near the boss room, I run into one of the last Nazi enemy types. I think these are either the highest or second highest level Nazis in Caracol. The usual Maxi Tempest/Undine combo takes them out without an issue.
: I hope you’re ready for the most ridiculous cutscene of this entire game.
: “Jun-kun! Please stop this nonsense!”
: The camera then pans over to seven of the remaining ten Holy Lance mechs… and a person in the front. I’ll give you exactly one guess as to who that person is.
: Meet one of the other reasons people gave for this game not being localized. In the initial release, Hitler was of course referred to by name and didn’t have the sunglasses.
: I prefer the version without the sunglasses. He looks like he lives in constant fear of being scalped, which is the natural state all nazis should be in.
: By the way, I should mention that the given reason they censored Hitler has to do with CERO regulations - apparently, CERO put a rule into place sometime after the PS1 era that makes it verboten to show depictions of real people in games. It’s apparently still around, since I looked up Pro Evolution Soccer (aka Winning Eleven) and the 2019 version had a “David Beckham Special Edition” in the US and Europe that was renamed “Legend Edition” in Japan.
: “Only those born under the constellation of the Grand Cross can control the five skulls.”
: “Ha… and what would a ghost from the past, resurrected by rumors, wish for?”
: “The same as you, marionette of the Wheel of Fortune. Destruction and progress… these contradictory impulses are constantly at war within men.”
: “It was your fears and expectations of them which summoned me. And now that I am here, I must live up to the, nein?”
: “True… but that’s my duty. I wish you’d leave, old man… along with that trash over there…”
: Jun then sends his clones of Tatsuya, Lisa, and Eikichi to attack the Holy Lance.
: “They only have meaning when you achieve them under your own power! If man wants to evolve, then…”
: This is a theme Persona 5 Royal explores a lot, and it’s one of the reasons why it sucks.
: “Foolish girl… do you believe that all humans have such a sugarcoated view of the world?”
: “Indeed… the rampant illusion of freedom causes man to worry over petty matters. The masses will always desire a leader who decides everything for them… anxiety over the future only causes them pain!”
: “That is why I, Joker, will lead mankind into a new era! Humanity will be freed from the suffocating chains of raison d’etre!”
: Hmm… three colored lights. You can’t see it, but each one of these is a tower. Does this remind you of anything? A certain alternate (yet canon) story route in Persona 1? Yes, we’re about to go into what is basically an exact copy of Snow Queen.
: You know, it’s too bad Yukino isn’t here, because I know EXACTLY what she’d be thinking.
: A city being demolished as a giant stupid-looking dungeon arises from it. Oh look, it’s Deva Yuga all over again. This game really is just Persona 1 with a new wrapper on it.
: The light pillars roughly correspond to the last few dungeons we did. The southern one is the Aerospace Museum, the Western one is Aoba Park, the Eastern one is Smile Hirasaka I think, and the northern one is GOLD.
: “Wunderbar…! Such a dignified appearance is worth of the true city for a Fuhrer… the Fuhrer Staat!”
: “Hahaha… aaaahahahahaha! Look! What Father said was true!”
: You know, I have to wonder, where’s Taurus? Anna/Scorpio is dead, Sudou/Leo is dead, but Taurus is still alive.
: “Ngh…!? No… what… I wanted… wasn’t… this horrible… thing!”
: “Jun-kun!”
: Queen Aquarius pushes Jun out of the way just in time to take a bullet from a Holy Lance mech.
: Jun then summons Nyarlathotep, who kills the mech.
: It’s hard to tell, but Hitler has a jetpack.
: The Holy Lance then fly off after him.
: Remember the last time we were midway through the game, fought a guy whose Persona was Nyarlathotep, and then he transformed into a stupid looking monster under almost exactly the same circumstances? It seems like the writers really only had one story in them.
: The first phase of the Joker fight is basically “put it on autobattle and take a nap”. If I had Yukino, this would’ve been much faster because I could’ve done Blazing Burst and probably Undine as well.
: There’s a way to kill Joker in two hits, but it involves a 1% encounter rate demon in the Abandoned Factory. If you get it, you can fuse a Persona called Nezha that has a fusion spell which does around 1500 damage to a single target. The problem with this is that I didn’t feel like grinding for it and even if I did, you have to rank Nezha up to 6 for it.
: In this phase, Joker likes to use Abortive Slash, which poisons on hit. Don’t bother curing it. What I did was had Tatsuya and Lisa use Blazing Burst, Eikichi on heal duty (since whatever Persona I gave him learns Mediarama, the second-tier full party heal spell) and Maya using Zanma and generally being useless.
: He also has a couple of full-party attacks that don’t hit for a lot of damage and sometimes dumps the “illusion” status effect on you. Illusion, as far as I can tell, is equivalent to Blind in Final Fantasy.
: The nice part is that you get a pretty much guaranteed level up after that fight, so everyone’s HP and SP will be topped off.
: No, that’d be Elly. Elly is the model of an angel.
: So yes, we’re dealing with God Kandori Angel Joker. He turned himself into an angel. He’s Angel Joker. Funniest shit ever.
: You’ll notice my entire party is poisoned. This is fine, and you’ll see why.
: Where regular Joker liked using status effects, Angel Joker’s thing is spamming instakills. Holy Sword hits two people and is a guaranteed autokill, though Quetzalcoatl (who we’ll have on the canon run) might be able to reflect it.
: This, by the way, is why we don’t want to bother curing the poison. Getting autokilled removes the poison status, so you’re just wasting turns.
: Angel Joker also uses Hamaon (full-party instadeath), which is theoretically capable of wiping the entire party in one go. It’s very unlikely, though.
: The instakills tend to just be really fucking annoying. Here, he used Holy Sword, and then as soon as I revived Tatsuya he followed up with Hamaon and a second Holy Sword.
: This is where that 1500 damage fusion spell would come in handy, except there’s a good chance that he’ll just interrupt it with an autokill. There’s a trick you can do where if you have the entire party guard at once they’ll shift around the turn order so they’re all clustered together (which would stop him interrupting mid-cast).
: The good news though is that according to the wiki, Angel Joker doesn’t get any kind of stat downgrade if you only have four party members. This means he’ll go down much faster with two fusion spells per turn instead of just one.
: I like that his clothes just suddenly change color. Judging by his outfit, Jun is most likely a Cuss High student - you can tell because his jacket’s the same color as Eikichi’s.
: “A Nemophilia flower… I’m sorry… Big Sis… I’m so sorry… Tatsuya…”
: “I…I… sob”
: Meet Jun’s father. You might recognize him if you’ve been reading the LP in one go, because he’s the ghost in the clock tower.
: You’ll also notice he looks a lot like Kandori from the first game.
: “Father… we need to stop this… I… I just wanted to be like Big Sis and lead everyone to their dreams!”
: In case you’re wondering what that was, Kashihara just took Jun’s Persona. Though, as we’ve established in Persona 1, Nyarlathotep is actually an SMT demon masquerading as a Persona.
: Are you ready for the worst scene in the game? I hope you are, because I wasn’t. I thought I knew what happened here, but no, it’s worse than that.
: “To escape the eternal suffering that comes with understanding one’s existence, man has summoned from the abyss that which should not exist.”
: “What awaits you from here on will be a crueler fate than even that which the Crawling Chaos has woven…”
: “The Crawling Chaos again… what exactly are you talking about? There’s still too much we don’t know. About Jun-kun’s father, and that Persona… or why rumors started to come true.”
: “Eventually, the time will be right for you to learn everything. If anyone can stop him… the darkness from thriving, it is you.”
: “The power amassed by the feelings which have been fostered over ten years… show him the potential that lies within you.”
: And here it comes. Three, two, one…
: Fuck this scene. Fuck this scene in its entirety. Yukino is now braindead because her Shadow died. This is kind of important to remember for the later games - if your Shadow dies, you go braindead.
: I’m just going to call this a non-standard game over. It’s dumb, it sucks, and it makes no sense. I’d like to remind you that if the SEBEC route in Persona 1 as shown in the game is canon, Yukino was the protagonist for Snow Queen. I prefer to think that the Snow Queen route (as shown in the P1 LP) is canon and that Yukino actually laughed at Nyx as she took a nap and let Nyx defeat herself with her own spells.
: Next time, we’ll do the canon run of Caracol and see the end of this cutscene.
: By the way, since the “Hide Details” thing breaks polls, I’ll post it here, outside the update. Don’t reveal the text until you’ve read the update.
Is Tatsuya gay?
- Yes
- No
0 voters
writers 
: “Because you remind me of how I was once. I had no idea what I wanted or why I should go on living. I wished everything would disappear.”
: “You bastard… you’re just a frickin’ fake–”
: “Don’t worry, leave it to us! We’ll thrash those bad guys in no time and make sure you get your parents back!”
: “Hey, Big Maya… I don’t think now’s the time to ask stuff like that…”
: “It’s a flower of hope.”
: “I see what you mean, but… it’s crazy to try and fight them alone and without a Persona, even for you!”
: “You’re absolutely right… I was a pathetic little girl for a long time… but I’m different now. I found what I lost…”
: “C’mon, houhou! See, you gotta cheer up! Houhou! Houhou!”
: “If you keep putting on public displays of bro-hood with him, you’re gonna find a raging bull of envy after you…”
: “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…”
: “What is this!? What’s going on!? Why are you with that fake…? A-And you’ve lost weight…”
