Board 8 > Anagram plays Persona 3 (spoilers)

(+) Yeah! (+)

It's not like it matters because you have to date the girls if you want to max their social link. So his choices are either don't max the link or date them all.
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My impression was that The Answer is just part of the game, the same as The Journey, and you're supposed to play both?
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Anagram posted...

No I mean, is it worth it? Or should I just ignore his ass?

IIRC, in P3 you actually get some S-Link points towards the person if you accept the hangout. No penalty for declining though so feel free to ignore them if you don't want to use whatever day to hang out with them. It might be worth it if they call during like Summer Vacation if it's a school link because otherwise they're unavailable until school comes back IIRC.

also don't two-time with making appointments like this. just don't.
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Anagram posted...

My impression was that The Answer is just part of the game, the same as The Journey, and you're supposed to play both?

The Answer is a kind of playable epilogue. It was added for FES and wasn't present in the original release.

I will advocate for playing it unless it turns out you're really not feeling the gameplay. Others will tell you to youtube it regardless.
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Mitsuru is the best of the romancible females, but all the best P3 characters are the male ones anyway.
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Also The Journey is on its own a fully complete story. I've still never played The Answer despite P3 being one of my favorite games of all time, and I don't feel I've missed out on anything. (Though it's likely a reasonably good experience)
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My PS2 is only displaying in black and white now, I have no idea why. It was working normally minutes ago. Fiddling with the cords isn't helping.
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Is there any reason not to study before sleeping?
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Anagram posted...

Is there any reason not to study before sleeping?

Only if you're tired because then it doesn't have any benefit because you're too tired.
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Doesn't studying give you a chance of becoming tired the next day or something?

That's not a good reason not to do it, but at least it's a potential downside.
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It's 5/9, the moon is full, and plot is finally happening.
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I love how it shows Akihiko glaring, and the word "GLARE" appears next to his eyes, as if we don't get it.
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"No electrical equipment is operable during the Dark Hour except my bike, because it's special"

One second later: a bluetooth pings in her ear
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Yukiko, you're climbing a ladder to see if there are shadows on the train, is your priority really that the boys might look up your skirt? I mean, you've been doing this for a while, right? If you wanted to wear pants, you could easily wear pants.
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This weird creepy rap song playing really sets the mood, I kind of like it. It's not something I'd listen to casually like some of P5's music, though.
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P3 music so good though

And Yukari is the best p3 girl by a mile imo
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"Is this the friggin' boss?"

I realize Junpei plays video games, but he's edging dangerously close to Futaba territory here.
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Oh man, I didn't realize how bad Shuji Ikutsuki's voice acting was before. He's clearly a step down from the others.
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I played P3 pretty recently and used a guide because I wanted to max everything. I min-maxed on stats a lot more than I needed to; I ended up meeting the deadlines for maxing stats pretty early, and iirc had a huge amount of extra nights to burn at the end of the game (definitely over a month, maybe two?)

Days, on the other hand, were pretty tight. I think I only had a week of wiggle room or so (though I did a few unnecessary things that I could have killed to get maybe another week or so).
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Persona 3 has a really good soundtrack. Probably the best in the series.

Yukari is trash.
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LordoftheMorons posted...

Days, on the other hand, were pretty tight. I think I only had a week of wiggle room or so (though I did a few unnecessary things that I could have killed to get maybe another week or so).

In my recent Persona 4 playthrough (second time playing), I only followed a guide in the sense that I made sure to pick the right answers to everything. I maxed all the S.Links with literally 0 time slots remaining. I had to reset my PS2 for hours until I finally had a dream with Naoto so I could get some extra S.Link points and make the final meetup progress her S.Link, because I was THAT close to that cutoff.
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Yeah I ended up having more time left over in P4, but I either screwed up a few times in following the guide (or the guide was wrong? Kinda suspect it might have been in at least one of those cases) and I was really worried about errors compounding for a while because I was behind on a few S. Links.
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Made friends with fat kid

I don't even know where I got the Odd Morsel I gave to him
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My god, things just keep happening to stop me from going to Tartarus, and I'm basically out of money. Yukari is busy, Junpei has been sick for days, bah.
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Miraculously found a rare treasure spawn, killed it for an item I needed, then died in the next floor when everyone decided to miss all their attacks and three wild beasts decided to crit and hit every time.

wooo
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Death is not a hunter unbeknownst to its prey
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Anagram posted...

Miraculously found a rare treasure spawn, killed it for an item I needed, then died in the next floor when everyone decided to miss all their attacks and three wild beasts decided to crit and hit every time.

wooo

Welcome to Persona!
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Do they have gold hands in FES?
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Yep
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Anagram posted...

Miraculously found a rare treasure spawn, killed it for an item I needed, then died in the next floor when everyone decided to miss all their attacks and three wild beasts decided to crit and hit every time.

wooo

P3 will do that to you
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P3 is still my favorite.
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It could just be me, but it really, truly feels like the random misses and falling onto your ass and enemy crits happen way more often than in P5.
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And the stupid enemy instant death spells seem to hit more often.
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One weird thing about this game is the same piece of equipment having different stats. I have a million short bows and they all have different effects.
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How do you stop your allies from exploring if you get separated on a floor transition?
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Took me like thirty minutes to find a Wealth Hand and catch it without it escaping, and Elizabeth just immediately gives me another quest to find a rare monster. Goddamn this woman.
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I tried going to the arcade for the academics machine twice in a day instead of doing another social link, but it wasn't enough to get me to rank 3 before the exams. Damn.
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First exam is hard to ace. Second and third ones are easier, I think.
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Anagram posted...

It could just be me, but it really, truly feels like the random misses and falling onto your ass and enemy crits happen way more often than in P5.

Anagram posted...

And the stupid enemy instant death spells seem to hit more often.

I think you're right about the miss/fall down thing. It did feel that way to me too. Less sure about instant death, I think it actually hitting felt about the same. P3 AI may have been more happy to use it though so it certainly felt like a bigger threat. You definitely want to get defenses against it as soon as possible.

Anagram posted...

How do you stop your allies from exploring if you get separated on a floor transition?

If you can't give orders (I think Square opens that menu while you're walking around Tartarus) then I'm not sure you can do much. And if there's no order to make them sit still you almost certainly can't do anything about it.

Anagram posted...

I tried going to the arcade for the academics machine twice in a day instead of doing another social link, but it wasn't enough to get me to rank 3 before the exams. Damn.

y'all acting like i was kidding about academics taking forever to raise

Points needed to reach the next Academics level: 18, 56, 60, 60, 60
Points needed to reach the next Charm level: 18, 12, 16, 14, 22
Points needed to reach the next Courage level: 16, 14, 14, 16, 18

Most activities are +2. Arcade is +4.

Like it literally takes 62 points to bring Courage from Rank 2 to max.
...it takes 56 points to get Academics from Rank 2 to Rank 3 lol.

KamikazePotato posted...

First exam is hard to ace. Second and third ones are easier, I think.

Yeah. I was tempted to say it's just impossible to ace the first one but I don't know that for sure. You could probably technically do it if you literally ignored everything else to grind Academics.
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xp1337 posted...

Points needed to reach the next Academics level: 18, 56, 60, 60, 60
Points needed to reach the next Charm level: 18, 12, 16, 14, 22
Points needed to reach the next Courage level: 16, 14, 14, 16, 18

No kidding. I got both Charm and Courage up to rank 3 almost without trying.
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Havin' fun, makin' friends

Old couple turns out to be senile and drop the bomb that their son is dead
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And Akihiko finally joins the party, although he still has that bandage over his eye.
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Anagram posted...

It could just be me, but it really, truly feels like the random misses and falling onto your ass and enemy crits happen way more often than in P5.

They do

P5 is 4 games after P3 FES (P4, P3P, P4G), and the combat has improved and streamlined a lot in each one. The bottom line is that there's not much to P3 combat at all. You hit their weakness, or they hit yours, and that's it. They added all this random BS to make things more interesting, and it's just frustrating.
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Crying Tables boss: defeated with ease. Although it helped that I just happened to have a persona with ice attacks and no fire weakness.
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foolm0r0n posted...

They do

P5 is 4 games after P3 FES (P4, P3P, P4G), and the combat has improved and streamlined a lot in each one. The bottom line is that there's not much to P3 combat at all. You hit their weakness, or they hit yours, and that's it. They added all this random BS to make things more interesting, and it's just frustrating.

It's good to hear I'm not just crazy, thank you.
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Akihiko is weak to ice when a million enemies on this floor use ice

Thanks, game
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In complete fairness, sometimes the enemies miss attacks and fall over, which is nice.
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Even outside of the wonky hit chances, Persona 3 is just harder than the others. The further the series gets away from being a Shin Megami Tensei series, the easier it gets. Persona 5 was a cakewalk (although part of that was because I knew what I was doing by then).
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Currently working on making a valkyrie with tarukaja.
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Is there a reason to fight red shadows?
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