Persona 4 Golden Catch-All

ahrezmendi wrote:

Oh #&$% son, I just learned something that I really wish I'd known sooner:

Spoiler:

Cafe Chagal, in Okina City, allows you to extract abilities from any Persona into a skill card. Gdon with Rampage, here I come!

I still dislike this, both in P3P and here. I think they make it too easy, and the mechanical balance is thrown off because of it. No cards. Only fusion.

Minarchist wrote:
ahrezmendi wrote:

Oh #&$% son, I just learned something that I really wish I'd known sooner:

Spoiler:

Cafe Chagal, in Okina City, allows you to extract abilities from any Persona into a skill card. Gdon with Rampage, here I come!

I still dislike this, both in P3P and here. I think they make it too easy, and the mechanical balance is thrown off because of it. No cards. Only fusion.

Wait, what? How is this, mechanically, any different than buying the required persona for a specific fusion chain, and then fusing them all? I see this as purely a time saving feature, making it easier to tweak the abilities you need rather than having to go through complicated fusion trees in order to reach the same end. It's not like this hasn't been possible since the PS2 version of P3, it's just simpler to do it now.

ahrezmendi wrote:

How is this, mechanically, any different than buying the required persona for a specific fusion chain, and then fusing them all?

In several ways, most of which thematically break the idea of personas.

  • Skill cards ignore inheritance restrictions. Surt with Repel Ice? Beelzebub with Hama? Sure, why not? In both P3 and P4 base games, skills had set affinities for various personae. Some they would certainly learn, some they had as little as 1/128 chance of learning, some they couldn't learn at all. This makes sense.
  • Social Links become far less important. You're just slapping a skill on a persona you already have with skill cards, not creating new ones. Sure, you still create new personas, but it's not the main method of skill manipulation, therefore it becomes less important to maintain good levels for a wide range of arcana, since you'll no longer need to use all of them as intermediaries.
  • There's no chance of accidents or of things blowing up in your face. I mean, really, you are calling down the power of the gods themselves, and sometimes merging beings with completely opposite purposes in life. There should be some risk here, some chance of things blowing up in your face.
  • From a pure mechanical perspective, it breaks game balance. If a boss is tossing you around with wind attacks, no longer do you have to figure out how to get your persona all happy to build a boss-wrecker persona (or even to just survive). Just slap a skill card on it and away you go. Building insanely powerful end-game personae is trivial, assuming you have access to everyone. Before, you would need access and be able to merge them in a way that makes thematic sense and have your SLs up to keep the persona's level up, as well. There were also fun little meta-games about giving an intermediary persona skills that are unlearnable by the target persona so that the target would have an easier time inheriting the desired skills.
  • Minor, but kinda makes Elizabeth/Margaret's persona requests silly now, doesn't it?
I see this as purely a time saving feature, making it easier to tweak the abilities you need rather than having to go through complicated fusion trees in order to reach the same end. It's not like this hasn't been possible since the PS2 version of P3, it's just simpler to do it now.

Yeah, it does make things easier. But it also does a lot to undermine the delicate gameplay/theme/story balance that makes the Persona games so unique. When they continually make "improvements" like this, when they sacrifice core thematic principles for the sake of widening their audience base a bit, they turn their games into Just Another JRPG™. They are removing the very ideas that made the games so special.

Minarchist wrote:

[list][*]Skill cards ignore inheritance restrictions. Surt with Repel Ice? Beelzebub with Hama? Sure, why not? In both P3 and P4 base games, skills had set affinities for various personae. Some they would certainly learn, some they had as little as 1/128 chance of learning, some they couldn't learn at all. This makes sense.

Fair point. To me the skill affinities of the various personae is not the interesting part of the game, but I can see if that was important then this change would not be a good one. What's more interesting to me are the limits on abilities you have access to at any given time, and the game still differentiates itself in a big way here. There's no way you're going to have a persona, even in P4G, which is equivalent to Terra in FF6 with every spell in the game. You still have that 8 ability limit, so your choices are still important.

Minarchist wrote:

[*]Social Links become far less important. You're just slapping a skill on a persona you already have with skill cards, not creating new ones. Sure, you still create new personas, but it's not the main method of skill manipulation, therefore it becomes less important to maintain good levels for a wide range of arcana, since you'll no longer need to use all of them as intermediaries.

I completely disagree. I argue they become even more important, because if you want to construct that ultimate persona you're going to need high social links to get all the high level abilities. The skill cards you get from shuffle time are so unreliable that you'd have to farm for dozens of hours to get all the abilities, so the easiest way to get precisely the skill you want is to extract it from a persona. The only way you're going to accomplish that with any ease is if you have a high rank in that social link, so the persona gets the ability you want upon fusion. Your Surt with Repel Ice example would require this, short of you being really lucky on shuffle time and/or doing a ton of farming.

I'll cite myself as an example of this: I've been trying to get Gdon with Rampage for quite a while. I've collected on the order of hundreds of skill cards, I've never gotten a single Rampage.

Minarchist wrote:

[*]There's no chance of accidents or of things blowing up in your face. I mean, really, you are calling down the power of the gods themselves, and sometimes merging beings with completely opposite purposes in life. There should be some risk here, some chance of things blowing up in your face.

Accidents don't occur often enough for this to be statistically significant. Thematically I see what you mean.

Minarchist wrote:

[*]From a pure mechanical perspective, it breaks game balance. If a boss is tossing you around with wind attacks, no longer do you have to figure out how to get your persona all happy to build a boss-wrecker persona (or even to just survive). Just slap a skill card on it and away you go. Building insanely powerful end-game personae is trivial, assuming you have access to everyone. Before, you would need access and be able to merge them in a way that makes thematic sense and have your SLs up to keep the persona's level up, as well. There were also fun little meta-games about giving an intermediary persona skills that are unlearnable by the target persona so that the target would have an easier time inheriting the desired skills.

Again I completely disagree. This would be true if it were easy to acquire every skill card, but it's not. To do this in any realistic time frame, you'd need to be able to get the abilities from fusion then extract them, and by the time you've done that with every single ability the game is already a cake walk. You still need to manage your fusions, and keep your links up, in order to get anywhere near this.

TL;DR - It's not like the game is just showering you with skill cards, and you can hand out Megido to every single persona in your compendium. Even using Marie you'd be hard pressed to do this, buying cards from her is incredibly expensive. The sort of stuff you're talking about is NG+ level power, and you've already broken the game at that point.

EDIT: Oh, and let's not forget that P3P turned the oh-so-broken Fusion spells into consumable items. I think being able to one-hit kill Death using Armageddon, repeatedly I might add, is a far more broken mechanic than skill cards.

Just saved Kanji. Man, that felt good. I was 24 used Rakshasa, so it wasn't a difficult fight beyond Yosuke being weak to Zio. God dammit, Yosuke. Really like the look of Kanji's persona, can't wait to put him to use.

cyrax wrote:

Just saved Kanji. Man, that felt good. I was 24 used Rakshasa, so it wasn't a difficult fight beyond Yosuke being weak to Zio. God dammit, Yosuke. Really like the look of Kanji's persona, can't wait to put him to use.

Kanji's shadows are some of the best.

Spoiler:

Hulk Hogan :)

This might be only half of the situation, but here goes.

I learned to save before fusing after getting a really lame, stupid, horrible Persona in P3P. Being a level/money grinder anyway, having to buy the original set and try again still is more of an annoyance than punishment. Saving first is still a habit that continues with me in P4Golden.

It seems that Chagall only allows certain skills from certain personas to get copied. From the looks of it, based on both experience and snooping around the Internet:

  • Each persona can only convert one skill to a skill card
  • Don't accidentally write over that skill before going out for coffee.
  • That skill is has to be known by the persona, and is likely to be a skill it gains in later levels.
  • Thus, social links are still awesome for gaining skill cards through the cafe, unless you can farm a lot of XP or LVL Up cards in a big hurry.

I get what Minarchist is saying too. My introduction to SMT had no skill cards, no chosen inheritance, and no compendium. It was a lot more harsh but finally winning that game felt good.

Then there's attempting to use the card more than once.

Method One: Spend an afternoon at the Cafe (no social links, no jobs, no Aiya) to get the card. Give it to Marie. Buy it back repeatedly at a markup.

Method Two: Register your persona. Spend an afternoon at the Cafe (no social links, no job, no Aiya) to get the card. Delete the persona. Go back to the Velvet room. Buy the Persona again (either at a lower or greater cost than the skill card). Spend yet another afternoon at the Cafe (no social links, no job, no Aiya) to get the card.

All said and done, it looks like a different kind of grinding with a new set of penalties. I agree that a clever player could probably abuse this as well.

As a personal aside, I love getting SOS replies from people with vulgar names. I start to get offended then think, "at least this one doesn't have the anime name."

I've been taking on more night jobs, too.

ahrezmendi wrote:
grobstein wrote:

I got up to the "Love & Peace" boss. He is really tough. My main character is PL 56, and the other party members are lower. The boss seems to have a non-elemental attack that kills all my dudes from full health. Kind of regretting being on Very Hard at the moment. Probably have to farm for XP, would rather not.

Did you try Magic and Physical Mirrors (or Makaracorn/Tetracorn) to withstand it?

Neither Magic nor Phys. Mirror stops the attack. It's pretty annoying. But I gained a few levels, fused a Persona who repels all elements, and used 2 or 3 Macca Leaves (all-party heal 400HP) to get through the late stage where he just spams his best attack, and I was able to beat him.

Damn, that's rough if mirrors don't stop it.

I'm still going back through the bathhouse in order to collect items for quests. Soon I hope to return to the area I'm actually trying to complete, then back to social links. I believe Yukiko is next on my list to reach 10.

The boss of Void Quest just threw me a curveball when he did:

Spoiler:

Evil Smile followed immediately by Ghastly Wail.

That'll teach me to be lax about removing Fear from my party.

General question, no spoilers please: Do I need to be worried about not seeing social link story arcs resolve? Seeing how a character's story with myself plays out is just as much a draw as the combat to me. How many max links can you do in a play-through, or doesn't it work quite like that?

You can completely max out every social link in a single game, but that's not likely the first time you play if you're not using a guide. I wouldn't worry too much about it for the first time, but I would focus on your party members social links first since there are immediate and powerful benefits to getting those as high as possible.

ahrezmendi wrote:

You can completely max out every social link in a single game, but that's not likely the first time you play if you're not using a guide. I wouldn't worry too much about it for the first time, but I would focus on your party members social links first since there are immediate and powerful benefits to getting those as high as possible.

When I played the PS2 version, I did use a guide, and still didn't resolve them all. It requires a sense of long-term time management (and putting off some party members, or certain perks like jobs and studying) because certain links are only available at certain times. You will drive yourself insane if you worry about a "perfect" game the first time through and don't carefully follow a guide.

No, I'm not striving for perfection, just a resolution to the characters I like. I don't mind leaving Yosuke and Kou(?) behind. I could take or leave Chie. She's fun, but her personal story, ie none, hasn't grabbed me. I haven't unlocked Kanji's link yet, but I already love that character. Yukiko is definitely my girl. Ok, description of fictional relationships went on too long there.

You do get additional time in P4G to work on social links, at least an additional month, possibly 2, so you ought to be able to easily finish all the links you want to finish.

EDIT: 2nd time did it.

Spoiler:

I made sure to keep Marakukaja going at all times, and burned through all my 150 damage items, but it made the battle a lot easier. I could easily survive Mitsuo's Gigadyne. In fact, the only time anybody died was when I didn't get Fear off Teddie soon enough, and he went down to a Ghastly Wail. In the end it wasn't too tough, once I knew to remove Fear immediately I was never in danger.

I'm almost to the end. I can't believe that I can still play through a game let alone a JRPG. I still love the characters. Even the weakest written characters are still well fleshed out. Man Atlus could sell me a Persona 4 math game and I would buy it.

JohnKillo wrote:

I'm almost to the end. I can't believe that I can still play through a game let alone a JRPG. I still love the characters. Even the weakest written characters are still well fleshed out. Man Atlus could sell me a Persona 4 math game and I would buy it.

I can already see those bowling pins lining up for me. I'm 75 hours into the game and I can see myself watching the Anime, buying the soundtrack, playing Persona 4 Arena, etc. Well done, Atlus.

75 hours in. Spoilers if you're not after November 1st.

Spoiler:

Nanako.

Fighting Nanako's kidnapper. I'm grinding a bit because I'm having trouble with this boss.

I'm not sure how to bolster my party members with some kind of elemental defense. I'm not expecting that no one is ever going to be weak to an attack. But when you have these boss fights that take forever it can completely ruin everything when even one party member gets knocked down. And I feel like I'm missing something fundamental when it comes to those situations. Am I?

DSGamer wrote:

75 hours in. Spoilers if you're not after November 1st.

Spoiler:

Nanako.

Fighting Nanako's kidnapper. I'm grinding a bit because I'm having trouble with this boss.

I'm not sure how to bolster my party members with some kind of elemental defense. I'm not expecting that no one is ever going to be weak to an attack. But when you have these boss fights that take forever it can completely ruin everything when even one party member gets knocked down. And I feel like I'm missing something fundamental when it comes to those situations. Am I?

Not really a spoiler but I know some people like to figure these thing out for themselves so I'll mark it as one anyways.

Spoiler:

I got through by using magic mirrors once his health got low. You can also try wall spells but unlike mirrors they wear off after three turns so you'll need to keep recasting them.

I can't remember, are you playing on Very Hard, DS?

Bosses in any Persona game are to some extent endurance fights. Even in Normal P3P, with my party crazy overpowered and stomping normal fights using only Rush Mode, bosses still made me take a more defensive stance. The last boss I fought in P4G took me something like 2 hours to beat, and that was on try 2 once I knew what was coming. My rule of thumb is be very proactive about guarding, and when in doubt heal instead of dealing damage. Like you said, just having 1 character down can mean the end of the battle, so don't let it happen.

I don't think you're missing anything fundamental, the bosses tend to have few if any weaknesses so you don't get many All Out Attacks. On top of that they can't be Dizzied, so you can't gain yourself extra rounds to reapply buffs or heal. They're tough fights.

The single most useful spell I've found for boss fights, and even red enemy fights, is Marakukaja. The spell just says "Defense" but it actually reduces damage taken from all attacks, regardless of type, so it's incredibly useful against later bosses who have Almighty damage, or just toss out a lot of AoE abilities. If you don't have Marakukaja, fuse yourself a Pyro Jack or Parvati, but I can't imagine you don't have that spell if you're in November already.

I'm playing on normal difficulty. But this is also my first Persona game. So it's all a bit new. It's typical to have bosses that have no specific weakness. I clearly either missed or haven't gotten any "wall" abilities yet.

Man....

Spoiler:

Matsuo

is freaking tough. I've had battles go on for 15+ minutes only to suddenly get one-shotted probably five or six times. And that's after grinding through an entire dungeon in between tries.

Warriorpoet897 wrote:

Man....

Spoiler:

Matsuo

is freaking tough. I've had battles go on for 15+ minutes only to suddenly get one-shotted probably five or six times. And that's after grinding through an entire dungeon in between tries.

Yeah, I had to go back and grind for a while to be able to deal with that fight. I just got past it in my playthrough.

Warriorpoet - Marakukaja. Seriously, it'll save your hide on that battle, it made all the difference for me. Also Sukunda helps a lot.

DSGamer wrote:

I'm playing on normal difficulty. But this is also my first Persona game. So it's all a bit new. It's typical to have bosses that have no specific weakness. I clearly either missed or haven't gotten any "wall" abilities yet.

There are a few wall abilities from earlier level personae, but you can get the same effect from a timely guard. It's the stat altering spells that I find make the biggest difference. I spend the first few actions of any boss battle getting Marakukaja, Masukunda, and Matarukaja up. Just those three will have you healing your party less and thus able to focus on taking out the boss.

ahrezmendi wrote:

Warriorpoet - Marakukaja. Seriously, it'll save your hide on that battle, it made all the difference for me. Also Sukunda helps a lot.

DSGamer wrote:

I'm playing on normal difficulty. But this is also my first Persona game. So it's all a bit new. It's typical to have bosses that have no specific weakness. I clearly either missed or haven't gotten any "wall" abilities yet.

There are a few wall abilities from earlier level personae, but you can get the same effect from a timely guard. It's the stat altering spells that I find make the biggest difference. I spend the first few actions of any boss battle getting Marakukaja, Masukunda, and Matarukaja up. Just those three will have you healing your party less and thus able to focus on taking out the boss.

I'll look and see who has those spells enabled. That is definitely something I'm missing and I'm not honestly sure who has those abilities.

Here are a few places you can get them:

Spoiler:

Pyro Jack and Parvati both get Marakukaja at level 34.
Kanji gets Masukunda at slink level 4.
Lachesis and Raphael get Masukukaja at level 51 or so.

Also a bunch of the vegetables you can grow in the garden will cast these spells on your party, plus items you find.

So uh, apparently this will be out in the EU on PSN 2 days before it hits retail shelves. That's... interesting? good? You be the judge.

EDIT: Also, Domination Machine can kiss my shiny metal behind. I need to gain a few more levels, 'cause I have no answer to his pattern.

I'm in the

Spoiler:

old school

dungeon, and have a bit of a problem. I keep getting one shotted by a

Spoiler:

gundam.

I have done little to no grinding at this point and I am a level 36. I'm also really late in the month, the ran has already set. Any suggestions? If I make it past this thing and get to the boss, how much trouble am I going to have?

EverythingsTentative wrote:

I'm in the

Spoiler:

old school

dungeon, and have a bit of a problem. I keep getting one shotted by a

Spoiler:

gundam.

I have done little to no grinding at this point and I am a level 36. I'm also really late in the month, the ran has already set. Any suggestions? If I make it past this thing and get to the boss, how much trouble am I going to have?

Worst case you can grind through the lower level dungeons. I did that around that boss. Earned enough money to heal with the fox and leveled up in the process.

Does Rise have an unhealthy obsession with red lights?