I just got Persona 3(FES) and have started playing it. I’m a pretty avid RPG fan, especially games like Final Fantasy and the like.
It seems like a good game and I like the feel of it, but I have a problem.
I am finding the first part of this game massively confusing. Not the story, mind you, but the gameplay. What am I supposed to be doing? I’ve only entered Tartarus the one time(it’s April 21 or 22). I have questions/confusions and am wondering if anyone here can clarify.
Social Links: Uh, these do what? They let me use Persona or something? I only have the SEES social link now. Why do I need more of these? What do they do? How do I get more?
Arcana: This is like a category for Personas?
Am I right that I choose when to go into Tartarus? How often am I supposed to go? If I don’t go, am I screwed up forever?
Does this game become clearer as it goes? I don’t get how I increase stats, like strength, magic, and hit points. I’m concerned I have no idea what I should do with my characters free time and that I’m going to be under-leveled and prepared when the time comes that I really need to be stronger.
More than confusing, I think… overwhelming. Each of the items individually is pretty straightforward, but there are a ton of them thrown at you all from the start; they hold back a few mechanics for later, but not much.
Social Links serve a few purposes. They are a huge part of the game and story to be enjoyed, at the most basic level. Mechanically, whenever you fuse a new Persona, it will get bonus experience depending on how high your social link is for its arcana. At the max level social link (ten), you’ll pick up five bonus levels whenever you create a Persona of that link’s arcana. Finally, when you reach the level ten link, you get an item that lets you create the Ultimate Persona of that arcana.
The Arcana are, as you surmised, the categories for the Personas. They’re your classic Tarot Arcana, plus or minus a couple. Each arcana is associated with one and only one Social Link, and somewhere between 10-20 Personas over the course of the game.
You choose when you go into Tartarus. How often you go depends a lot on how you approach it; you can go a little bit at a time taking care not to get tired and climbing up the levels, or you can go in all night long on the night before the full moon (because you won’t lose people for being tired the night before a mission).
Not going into Tartarus won’t screw you up forever, but if you aren’t high enough level to win the full moon missions, you obviously are pretty screwed. And I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler in a game centered around a giant tower to say that eventually you’re going to need to get to the top. I’d say that you generally want to spend as few nights on Tartarus as possible, while making sure that you level up and climb as high as you can before each next full moon.
Strength, Magic, etc are completely dependent on Personas; the characters don’t have them on their own. For your companions, they’re essentially one and the same, since they can’t switch Personas. For you, it’s all about what you have equipped. I wouldn’t worry at all about raising those stats on any given Persona… because a huge part of the game is that you’re constantly going to be changing them. It’s impossible to level Personas from fighting more quickly than you can from Social Links and fusing, plus you’d want the more advanced abilities on the more advanced Personas anyways.
Time management is the one thing that I regret I didn’t know a bit more about when I started the game. Unless you’re a super completion lover (in which case I’d say you’re going to need a guide, stat), I would just say that you want to make sure you do SOMETHING in every time period, especially raising Social Links and raising your three daytime characteristics. Just do what seems fun, make sure you’re doing something in every period, and don’t let the characteristics fall by the wayside, and you’ll be fine.
If you have any more questions I’d be thrilled to answer; I am a relatively recent convert to the Persona series (still among the only anime-styled anything that I have been truly bowled over by), and would be happy to spend the time I’m not using to play 4 to talk about 3.
I think this is pretty much true for me, as well. I don’t like Japanese animation with the exception of Grave of the Fireflies and Miyazaki.
I am totally impressed with the characters and style so far, so I’m pretty committed to playing it. It’s just very overwhelming and confusing.
Anyway, let me ask a couple more specific questions to see what you think.
When I am in the status menu for the protagonist, I can choose the menu option “Persona”. It shows me Orpheus’ stat, my first persona. However, after completing the first level of Tartarus, I gained the Persona “Pixie”. This leads to two questions, really.
[ul]
[li]I’ve equipped both Personas, yet I can’t use Pixie’s healing ability(Dia?)in battle. Is this normal?[/li][li]When on the “persona” staus screen, it only shows Orpheus. How do I get it to show me Pixie’s status?[/li][/ul]
Is there any reason to not fuse 2 Personas? I can fuse Orpheus and Pixie, and I think I can keep both sets of abilities. Is this right? Will it ever let me create a Persona I can’t equip?
There’s two things that come to mind here. First you may be seeing Dia as Pixie’s “Next Power” option. This means she’ll get it when she levels up and then you can use it.
the other is that you might have had to reload or something similar and lost Pixie and not recalled it since any personas you have on you should be in the persona list (eventually you’ll be adding and dropping them like crazy but not when there’s just two).
Absolutely. You might need a certain persona’s powers or you might not be happy with the results of the fusion. Early on though fuse like crazy since it’ll be an easy way to get more power.
As for your earlier questions…
For Tartarus I went roughly every three nights and I probably overdid it most of the time. It’s tough to work out since you have less time than you think but you’ll be able to accomplish more than you realize in the time given. I can’t count how many times some life event threw me off while playing but I managed it (just barely that first month by reaching the top on the last day but still…)
I say hit Tartarus until the enemies run from you. Then you’re overpowered for the next full moon.
There’s a lot of stuff going on but it does become easier to manage eventually as you break it down. You’ll find the balance of personas you want, get a pattern for building up social links and the like.
The most important advice I can give you is to not waste a day and get education up as fast as possible. Those skills don’t go down so if you force it up fast early in the game then you don’t have to worry about it and the tests later in the game. Remember that there is a set pattern for every day and there are things that you can do in the mall at night rather than going to Tartarus (a few social links, and that incredibly handy arcade where you can really boost your studying). Use the afternoon and the evenings to full advantage.
You don’t ‘equip’ more than one Persona. Go into your Persona menu and select one, hitting X and confirming the Equip - you get the telltale glass-shattering sound. That means you’ve changed Personas, and the one you changed to will show behind you on the main menu. You can also change Personas in battle with the related command, once per turn. This is useful if you need to bust out Dia just for that turn, for example. Be aware that you will also be sporting the equipped Persona’s strengths and weaknesses from certain elements, so it doesn’t hurt to check before you switch Personas in battle for that turn.
Er, that’s not quite it. The idea behind fusion is that, in general, the stats and skills will be transferred to the newly fused Persona, but this is extremely limited, especially with low-level Persona. If you have more than three or four skills in one of the fused creatures, you’ll be losing most of them by doing the fusion. However, as JSG mentioned, fusing is basically the only way to advance in the game, stat- and skill-wise, since fusing upward within your level is always faster than trying to level up any given Persona. The trick is to try and keep the Persona with useful skills, then use the rest as fusion fodder to unlock even awesomer demons.
As for the social links - at first it does seem more like you’re doing them just for their own sake, to fill the time after classes. As you meet more people, tho, and the opportunities start to become real choices, you’ll also be finding that the EXP boost from having strong social links is quite key to fusing Personas with powerful skills. If you’re having trouble starting, just remember - don’t overthink it. The game presents a lot of options to you compared to most JRPGs, but unless you just totally ignore Tartarus and can’t make it to the end of the ‘block’ of dungeon before the next full moon, there’s no wrong way to play the game. If you’re really worried, just make duplicate save files every in-game week or two, so that if you find yourself underleveled for the monthly story encounters, you’ll have some recourse. I didn’t exactly grind hard in the game, tho, and I didn’t have trouble with anything in the first half of the game.
OK, so I’ve played more and I think I’m figuring most things out. Along with this comes more questions and observations, of course.
I think the problem I had is that I did not realize that while the Protagonist can have 6 Personas, only one can be equipped at a time. By switching which Persona you are using, you access different abilities in battle. Right? It appears switching personas does not cost a turn in battle. Is this right?
How can I ever gain enough points in Charm, Courage, and Academics? It seems like they have crazy high requirements to reach the top level(6) in those categories. Any activity I do seems to take the entire day and gives me minimal gain in any category.
If I’ve cleared Tartarus as far as I can go before the next full moon, is there any point to going in it? I’ve seen from This Site that the first block is only 14 levels, but the others are 45 or so. I’m assuming I’ll gain the stamina to stay in longer than 5 levels at a time. Right?
Uh, not to sound creepy, but I only have relationships with males right now. I will be able to build social links with girls, right? Kenji is nice and all, but he seems…gay. Yes, yes, he’s hot for teacher, but he seems rather hot for the Protagonist if I do say so. Weird.
Anyway, I think I’m getting it…somewhat. What a weird, game!
Let’s see if I do better by replying when I’m not juggling other tasks.
Yes, one persona at a time and switching is free but if you switch once you cannot switch again on that same turn. As a rule I had personas set for defense, for offensive magic, and for support which I switched to as necessary when climbing the tower.
It does take a lot of time to get the top. It’s roughly two months of real effort to max out an ability but there are certain things you can do. Remember that you have Afternoon, Evening, and Night. In the afternoon you can do a lot of different things, in the Evening just a few things at the mall (determined by the day of the week), and then when you get back at Night you can still Study. I missed the fact that Evening was a vital time initially when I played.
Studying is the most important to max in my view since there are rewards for it and getting the Empress social link.
You can keep going back to keep getting more levels. Staying ahead of the curve isn’t a bad idea but it isn’t necessary.
Yep there are six women who you can have a relationship with. Three of them require a maxed out stat (study, charm, or courage) and one only becomes available in the last few weeks of the game.
I’m going to drop a minor spoiler on how to open up the other two. It’s relatively simple but if you’re exploring you might not want to know:
[spoiler]The two women available immediately are tied to other social links. One of the team captain and she opens up by going to practice enough. She’ll be waiting by the front door to the school on days when you don’t have practice and you’ll walk her home to activate the link (Strength IIRC).
The other is tied to the student council and she’ll be in the hallway outside of class once you have built up that link enough. She’ll give you Justice once you walk her home once.[/spoiler]
FWIW I spread out my social link efforts and didn’t max anyone out until late in the game. I think this was the wrong approach since there are few that you have a fairly limited window in which to work on them. Of course the problem with maxing a few at a time is that you lose the breadth of personas you can power up.
But in a good way! Persona 3 sucked me in for a full month so I haven’t grabbed the fourth game yet. I will soon, though…
One thing to keep in mind with the girls is that, girls being girls, they tend to get jealous if you are hooking up with more than one at a time, once you’ve gotten to a certain point in your relationship. The corollary to this is that once you get a given social link to level 10, it’s an unbreakable bond, and you can go do whatever the heck you want. So with the girls especially it’s worth your while to push the early two to level 10 as soon as you can, because you get access to the next three - each of which requires a maxed stat - something like half or two-thirds of the way through the game, and then the final one, as JSG mentioned, near the very end. Relationship management gets very tight once those second three are available if you want to get them all, so you don’t want those first two getting in the way.
Forgot to reply to this… I got to spend some serious time on 4 this weekend, thank you Mr. Blizzard. I’m about 25 hours in now, and I definitely love it. I think I liked the characters/story in 3 a little bit better, but the gameplay refinements in 4 are huge and make me think it might be a bit hard to go back. Nothing major, but a lot of little things that just make you say “why in the world wasn’t it this way in the last one?”
Since I didn’t play 3 for the first time until late this summer, I think P3 and P4 might have to fight it out for my Favorite Game of the Year title. Long live the PS2!
In Persona 3 FES, do the characters have extended stamina on the night before the full moon? I read that in the original Persona 3, you could grind levels and plow through Tartarus on those nights, since characters stayed with you. Has this changed?
My copy is FES and the only time I did this was the first set of Tartarus missions since I had to reach the top floor before leaving in order to complete the Elizabeth quests. I didn’t notice any problems with exhaustion. Later on I was more careful about the date. I typically ran up to the top of that section of Tartarus on the first night after the full moon before I did my grinding for XP and gave myself a proper rest for the days before facing the major arcana.
Anyway, I’m done with the May Full Moon boss(the one on the monorail). Am I the only one that saw that boss as a lady with spread legs? Oddly creepy.
I guess I get the game now. Work on Charm/Courage/Academics and any Social Links during the day and evening, with an occasional visit to Tartarus to climb the tower and level up battle skills.
I still have zero plan for what Arcana Persona to focus on, which of course makes me grasp at the Social Links that are presented to me. I’m currently good friends with Kenji, doing OK with the guy on the Student Council, and just starting with the Track Team and MMORPG girl.
I’m basically just winging it on S. Links, since its’ hard to control or predict what will be offered to me.
Once I get a Link to the max(Kenji probably), can it go down?
Yeah, one of the ways that the game keeps from breaking itself is that the night before full moon, you have unlimited stamina in Tartarus, so there’s no way to play/save yourself into a corner where you haven’t leveled up enough to beat the full-moon boss. In fact, as I got later into the game, I’d put off Tartarus trips until that night and do all of my leveling/exploring in one several-hour session.
I’m really excited about Persona 4 - I loved 3 to death and I hear that 4 has been streamlined and made better, and the setting and style of it.
My understanding is that links do not degrade. They can become stalled if the person gets angry at you but that’s it.
I’m going to drop a small bit of spoiling on the mechanics of the social links. It’s pretty minor and you’ll probably figure it out in a month or two of in game time but it can help you right now. It’s mainly being spoilered in case you prefer to discover this stuff on your own:
There’s two key things it appears you have not worked out regarding social links. The first is that everyone is on a weekly schedule. The athletic kid is available on the days of practice, Kenji on certain days of the week, and so on. There’s one that is only available one day a week (which makes that person a real pain). If you know their schedules then you can plan out your time with the various activities.
The second thing is how social links improve. For your typical link you can think of it as a scale of a certain number of points. Say, zero to one hundred for the sake of example with every ten being the thresh hold to the next level of link. Spending time with people causes a certain amount of increase as does answering their questions correctly when you have a special event. When the game says “You feel your relationship could grow stronger soon” that means you’ve reached the next thresh hold and the next time you hang out with them it will be a scripted sequence at the end of which you’ll gain a level.
I’m in mid-June in the game now, and things are much clearer. I’m still spreading my S. Links out pretty widely, gaining reasonable gains in a lot of Aracana.
I’m curious about Persona 4’s gameplay improvements. What are biggest improvements they added? Things I wish P3 had are:
The ability to pull up the map of the currently floor you are exploring. I should be able to push select and see what we mapped already…
Floors already explored should remain the same(and mapped) when you re-enter.
I should be able to control everyone, especially in boss battles(I heard P4 did this).
Truthfully, I wish the skills/magic would have clearer names. I get it mostly now, but I still need a guide to remember things like Sukunda and other things.
When I examine my Personae, I wish I could see what the skill do, not just a list of them on the bottom of the screen. Some skills are not listed under “skills” when you select it and I don’t really know what they do.
The floors being random is a design decision, I think, and part of how the game plays, so no that hasn’t changed.
Yes, you can control everyone.
& 5. The names for the skills are all that same, BUT, you can now pull up a detailed description of the skill at any time (in battle, when fusing personas, when choosing what skills to get rid of at level up if you already have 8, pretty much whenever you’d want to). Also the descriptions for some of the more obscure skills are more successfully descriptive.
The below are only spoiler-y in that they are details of very basic game mechanic changes that you didn’t ask about above:
They’ve changed the balance on some of the time management stuff (5 day-time characteristics now instead of 3, exploring a dungeon takes an afternoon and most of the time also a night, you no longer regain all HP/SP just by returning to the entrance of a dungeon so SP is much more generally limiting). There is weather now instead of phases of the moon; except the weather can also affect some other stuff during the day so it matters a bit more than the moon did. Equipment available for sale works differently, which also effectively increases the difficulty a little. Many social links, a majority even, give you social link + something else when you’re working them rather than just the link boost. Quests work a little bit differently, generally for the better. There’s a better balance between stuff to do during the day and stuff to do at night.
I’m sure I forgot a couple of things too. It’s gonna be a rude awakening when I go back to 3 at some point though to play it through again and get all the links maxxed.
You can do this in Persona 4. (Just pressing Start brings up a full screen map of the current floor.)
Persona 4 basically fixes all the game mechanic problems I had with Persona 3 FES (which I still consider an amazing game). I’m still undecided on which I like better story-wise, although the main story in Persona 4 is more intriguing to me than Persona 3’s was. The Social Links in P3, though, I think were overall better.
But Persona 4 is in the running for game of the year, as I’ve already put close to 60 hours into it since getting it earlier this month. I haven’t played it in about a week because of Rock Band 2 and being away for Christmas, but I plan on jumping back in soon. Get Persona 4 if you’re enjoying Persona 3 FES, it’s worth it.
I had over 100 hours on my Persona 3 save, and I didn’t finish ‘The Answer’ completely due to time constraints and other games, but it wasn’t so much ‘hard’ as it was ‘annoying’, because you mostly had to level grind for the entire game. It’s kind of just an epilogue with a lot of grinding that racks up hours. It’s not BAD, just time consuming for not a lot of story.
It had a lot of boss / miniboss battles where there were multiple demons of conflicting weaknesses, and though I never got a game over even once in P3, in FES I game-overed several times. Megami Tensei / Persona games tend to have harder learning curves and difficulty, but if you’re really worried about it you can always select ‘beginner/easy’ mode when you start a game. The biggest pain in the ass is usually instant-kill (Hama / Mudo) skills.
I got P4 when it came out, though, and I haven’t put it down since.
