New to the game, so quite a few questions.

[Dia]

Just finished the prologue, but now with some questions regarding the use of the free time.

1. Is there no levelling (I mean some time that is only dedicated to that) in this game? If I talk to my friends or try to go to the TVgate to enter the other world it seems that the rescue starts. So beside that quests where I try to rescue someone there, I cannot level?

2. The game told me to prepare before I go into the TVgate again. So, should I wait until the last possible day to do them? Do I miss things if I go to early?

3. Is it recommended to buy new equipment before starting a rescue (every time) or do I can simply do it occasionally.

4. Is it recommended to obtain as much of that social links as possible or should I focus my time on only a few. (Assuming that spending more time with the other NPSs provides more of that over time)

The persona aspect is quite overwhelming with all the stuff around it. So, some questions to that part to.

5. Can I just stay with my Persona from the start, or do I need to get "better" ones?

6. If I got it correctly my first Persona had the same class as my Character, is that recommended to stay that way? Or can I change that?

7. Can I just fight without using Social Links and just stay on my Persona? The game was pretty vague about that aspect only told me that I would gain more exp.. But then why should I ever go into a fight without using them? Have not tried it out because I had no interest in maybe screwing something up.

Thank you in advance for any answer. 😊

[CaptainLagbeard]

1. You can return to the TV world even after the rescue is done to do some grinding.

2. I do believe you will have less options to do social links with teammates if you have someone in need of rescue, but otherwise the game doesn't particularly care if you leave it to the last day.

3. You should upgrade your gear, or weapons at least, on a regular basis.

4. The party members I do believe will get extra benefits from you doing their social links so that is very much recommended to do those. The other ones they just give extra XP to personas when doing fusions.

5. You generally want to get new stronger personas, they don't learn new skills after a few levels which can place some limits on how good they'll be.
Technically you could keep Izanagi through the entire game and only use it, but the strongest attacks it gets are Zio and Cleave.

[ex_beat]

1. You can leave tv world at any moment, you don't have to finish dungeon in one go
2. It's usually better to finish it asap, but you are free to do it whenever (until fog sets and you get game over anyway)
3. Armor is helpful, but weapons only affect your basic attacks and don't empower persona's physical skills. Prioritize gear with useful stats
4. Getting link to level 10 allows you to fuse ultimate persona of this arcana. Party memebers also get bonus skills as their links progresses. Well, essentially focus on links you are interested in, as it is virtually impossible to max everything on first playthrough without a guide
5. Pretty much the whole point of the game is fusing new personas, though you technically can beat it with just Izanagi (especially in Golden thanks to skill cards)
6. MC can use personas of any arcana, it has no effect on combat
7. I don't understand the question. S links will grant personas of their arcanas additional exp upon fusion. Would do you mean by "go into fight without using them?"

[Zovi Mentov]

1. You can revisit completed dungeons, it's even required for some side-quests IIRC

2. No you won't miss anything if you complete dungeons early. Actually it's better to do them ASAP, so you can rest/heal if needed (for example if you run out of SP items, or Goho-M's) and still have enough time to do whatever.

3. You can do it occasionally, it's fine mostly. The only exception are items with elemental protection, you shoul really get them as soon as possible for your persona-limited allies.

4. You can't max out every social link in game without NewGame+, I think, so just do whatever lol.

5. You absolutely need better ones, starting Personas suck. Combat system in this game resolves around changing personas, it's kinda like Pokemon in a way.

6. Main character doesn't have Class or anything of the sorts. You can and should change personas when you need too.

7. Having social links just makes combat easier, and you get EXP boost when fusing new personal of that Arcana type. You can probably finish game without them, but why lol

[Phalte]

1. You can enter the TV at any time by visiting Junes and interacting with the elevator. You can go to the past dungeons by talking to the person they were associated with and current dungeons by talking to Teddie or the later navigator.

2. Depends on how confident you are. Leaving it to the last day means you can get the most social links meaning you can get a better fusion boost for the personas you fuse when you go in. Overall I would recommend taking 1-2 days to get to the top and then coming in on a 2nd/3rd day to fight the boss so you'll have max SP. Later on you get an (expensive) method for fully restoring SP so later dungeons can be quite easily cleared in one day. There are reasons to clear dungeons as early as possible though, as some social links (such as Adachi and Dojima) will be more common (because they're not on duty looking for the victim).

3. Once again depends on the quality of your current equipment. Make sure you equip new party members, but otherwise I would just check if the stat increases are worth the price.

4. Unless you want to focus on getting as many links as possible, I would "focus" the links for party members (especially the new navigator that joins later) due to the passive and persona abilities they gain. I would still try to get as many social links as possible though for fusing personas.

Another note is to always try to have a persona of the same arcana as the link you are developing, as this increases the friendship points you get when hanging out/selecting certain choices. You can buy cheap low level arcana-specific personas in the Velvet Room in the S.Shop District at any time (but if you want to talk to Marie, entering the Velvet Room will make her unavailable for the day, as she will enter).

5. You can but it will be much easier for you if you fuse new, stronger personas. At the very least try to get full elemental coverage. I would also recommend trying to get a persona with dark/light for the 2nd dungeon and onwards, as there are some tough shadows with no weaknesses except dark/light (which is a guaranteed one shot). Try to fuse personas that have the same arcana as social links you have ranked up the highest for the most bonus XP.

6. "You" don't have an arcana (I imagine you're talking about Fool, which is for the investigation team as a whole). Persona Arcana's only matter for the boost with social links.

7. Social Link XP is gained when fusing. For example, if I wanted to fuse a Titan of the Strength persona, I would get "bonus XP" upon fusing depending on the rank I had with the Strength Social Link. You get a LOT of XP this way. Social Links have no bearing on the XP gained from battles.

Man while I was typing this out two others answered.

[ウィッチ（？）]

1. Entering TV world will progress time so try not to visit there too many times. Or your free time for S-links and all daily stuff will be limited, if you spend too much time in TV world.
So levelling should be done while you are there as well as rescuing target.

2. Like said in 1, you will benefit by have lot more free time to spend. Also there is also some bonus that Doujima/Adachi will appear more often for S-link activity, if you rescue target early as possible.

3. Weapon do helpful (if you can spend that much money). But in battle, your persona stat is much more important - like weakness and resistance etc.
You should exploit their weakness and try to protects yours while in combat for best result.

4. Do them all if you can. Just be careful, some needs to be done quickly because they could be gone in later game.

5. You will eventually need to change it. You can't just hold on to same Persona with weakness that enemy might use often.

6. Does not matter what Arcana it have during combat. But S-link meeting gives you bonus points for having same Arcana so try to have many kinds of Persona as possible (at least for the S-link you are going to meet often).

7. S-link can be missed, but it do give bonus XP at fusion, as well as max it out to unlock special Persona.
But first time play, don't worry too much about it. There is NG+ feature so you can try best in next play.

[archmag]

1. There is leveling. Main character levels up and get HP and SP increases, plus increases the level cap for persona fusion. Main character's personas have their own levels and can be higher than character's, they get stats and skills. Characters themselves don't have stats other than HP and SP. Main stats that affect damage they deal and receive come from personas that they use. Other party members level up together with their personas which they can't change. You get freedom to decide what you want to do after you have 3 characters in your party. Then you can go into dungeon to farm exp, collect loot or progress, or do some talking in the town to increase social links.

2. By preparing they just mean that you should prepare. If you don't have anything else to do there is no reason to wait before going into the dungeon. And if you leave it till the last day you risk running out of all resources and either having to farms for scraps on level 1 of the dungeon to recover you HP and SP or get gameover. Certainly do the dungeon as soon as you feel ready, don't postpone it.

3. You don't have to buy new equipment all the time. The extra damage and defense mostly comes from personas that you use. Equipment effect is barely noticable. If you can afford better equipment - buy it. If you can't - not a big deal. You can get some good armor in golden chests. You unlock new equipment for sale by selling special loot in the shop.

4. The more social links you have the better. If you focus on some then you will get their bonuses early but then will have some holes in your schedule when you don't have any links to raise during certain days of the week. And you won't have enough days left to complete other links that you ignored. It is better to spread your talking so that you finish most of them roughly at the same time.

5. There is no reason to stay with initial persona. You can fuse better ones soon and transfer some useful skills to them. So instead of having one persona with 1 elemental skill you can have 2 personas with all 6 elemental skills.

6. Character has no class. He only has HP, SP and Level. The persona that you currently use defines his other stats like resists, vulnerabilities, physical and magical damage, defense, crit rate and skills.

7. Social links give some experience to personas that you create (fuse) so they simply let you fuse higher level personas to use. You don't use social links in the fight. The exceptions are social links for party members who give those party members some special skills, like ability to pick up knocked down allies on level 2, new skill for their persona on level 3, etc.

Originally posted by Phalte:

Man while I was typing this out two others answered.

While I was typing my answers 5 others already answered.

[Dia]

Thanks a lot for all your detailed answers, this has really helped me out.

[Lord Crocosquirrel]

Originally posted by Zovi Mentov:

4. You can't max out every social link in game without NewGame+, I think, so just do whatever lol.

This is flat wrong. You can (and should) max them all out the first run, I've done it myself. What you can't do is read all the books AND max social links in a single run. In a dozen playthroughs I've managed to get close, but there's just not enough time. The other thing you're not going to be able to do? Completely fill out the Compendium.

OP: Run the dungeons as you wish, but my rule-of-thumb is to go in there while it's raining, and nothing else is available except the Rainy Day Challenge at Aiya. Collect the sidequests after the newest victim joins the team, and run the previous dungeon while you go in to rescue the next party member.

The exception is for the final dungeon of the year- Magastu Inaba. One you kick the carp out of the final boss in there, it'll skip whatever time you have left before Christmas Eve. You're gonna want most of that in order to complete your SLinks.

I recommend running off to Gamefaqs for a ROMSL walkthrough, and then do as you please for run 2+

Pay attention to Marie-- If you want the hidden dungeon, finishing her Slink before December is absolutely critical.

[FleshyBB]

I can answer a few of these for you, I'll avoid spoilers too.

1. So after a rescue, you're able to return to the TV World and go back through the dungeons you've done. It's how the game approaches grinding, and there's optional bosses at the end of them if you want to do them. You can also find sidequests around town, usually to get certain materials off certain enemies, from people with like a speech bubble over their head with three blue lines after you've done the main rescue of a dungeon.

2. No, you can do it whenever. The rescue quests only start once someone appears on the Midnight Channel and a new dungeon unlocks, but like above you can return to the previous dungeons to grind / side quest. The important thing is to beat it before fog happens again. And depending on how you're doing elsewhere, like how leveled your social link is with the fox that let's you pay healing SP, it can take you some time to do them since the balance is kind of around how long your party's SP lasts. You just have to learn how to manage time effectively.

4. With social links, there are I suppose optimal ones over others, but you should be fine going with personal preference for the characters you want to know more about just keep in mind to try and balance them out. It is a roleplaying game after all, and the social links are part of the roleplaying. That said, party member's social links give you bonuses if you level them up that they can use in combat, like helping downed members back up or getting them out of the Panic status. The Fox social link does as well since each time it increases it lowers the price of healing allowing to do dungeons longer in a single run. Usually when talking to a character the game will tell you if "You feel you will grow closer to this person" or not too.

5. If you're talking about Izanagi, he stops getting new abilities around like lv. 16 I think? So you should be fusing. Think of it like Pokemon in a way, where at certain levels personas will get new abilities. When you fuse personas the new persona has the option to learn some of the abilities of the personas you're fusing highlighted in red. So say you can have a persona that's your buffer/debuffer set up with Rakunda, Tarunda, etc., maybe have one set up for healing, one to fill out gaps among what characters you choose for your main party to get weaknesses/downs, and sometimes you might just want to level up a certain persona to get an ability to use in fusion, etc. Giving and buying skill cards with Marie also helps with this in the Velvet Room. The persona stuff is where a lot of the depth comes from in the game.

6. By class do you mean the Arcanas? Izanagi's is The Fool, which is attached to the Investigation Team's social link. You don't have to stick with it, no. The Persona you have equipped does affect the protagonist's attributes in combat, such as weaknesses and whatever. But unlike everyone else, the protagonist is able to use multiple personas and switch between them.

7. Social Link levels give you a bonus when fusing personas of that Arcana. So say you explore Yosuke's social link a lot and level it up, when you fuse personas into one of The Magician Arcana you get a fairly significant xp bonus to that Persona's level.

[Dia]

After now spending quite a few hours in the game and having a lot of fun, I still have a few questions.


8. Might be a controversial question but is the huge amount of different persona classes just a gimmick? For me there a literally two classes. Mages and Fighters. All persona that I tried out could be put in one of these two categories. For example, I do not see any difference in between Magician, Priestess, Sun or Aeon. For me they are all Mages and not really different and it’s not like one would outperform the others in the dmg spell department. So, am I just missing something or using them completely wrong? Maybe I only notice a difference on the highest difficulty or so, or I need like the best one of each class.

9. After roaming through the forum here I noticed the words true ending. So I don’t want any spoiler but It would be nice to know if I can reach this through normal play or does this like require some actions on my part that I would never try to do in an normal first playthrough? (like doing ALL quests, have ALL S-Links or like talking to ANY NPC even if they have no quests or so)

10. I really do not get light and dark spells. Are they only instant kill skills or do they have also normal dmg spells because I haven’t found one yet. Also, I have seen that they do not work against bosses, so are they just something to skip and not waste a Skillslot on?

11. Will I ever be forced to use a specific team composition? I just stayed with my first group and have not levelled the others at all. I just want to be sure that not like in the last fight I have to use a specific follower.

Thank you in advance for any answer.


Also, thanks to everyone that made a fuss about this game at the start, without that I would have clearly skipped it and missed one of the best games I played in a long time.

[Phalte]

8. Persona "class" or "arcana" only exists for determining which social link it will take it's XP bonus from.

9. Max Marie Aeon Social Link (you'll have plenty of time near the deadline as she'll be available everyday at that point) and get Adachi Jester Social Link to 6 (this one is a much steeper deadline). Then you have to choose correct dialogue choices during a major event near the end of the game (don't worry you'll get a save prompt beforehand so you can load back if you mess it up).

10. Basically all instant kill spells. There are quite deadly enemies though with no weakness besides light/darkness, so having at least one avenue for Hama/Mudo is recommended. One good thing is that because it's insta kill you'll never have to get an "upgraded" version, as enemies who are weak to it will be hit by it 100% of the time.

11. Nope you always have complete control on who you bring, no party members ever leave or anything so don't worry about one of your main four disappearing.