Hardcore Risette Fan for Lazy People

Getting the "Hardcore Risette Fan" achievement can be a pain, I'm here for the lazy bums like me that still wanna do it, but with minimum work.

Introduction

This is a guide on how to get the "Hardcore Risette Fan" achievement but with minimal work.

When I decided I wanted to get all achievement for Persona 4 Golden, the first thing I was told is that it was a pain in the arse due to this one achievement. Scouring the internet took me to multiple guides, all requiring taking notes of each line you heard, or worse, filling out spreadsheets like it's a 9 to 5.

But for every guide with tons of work, there were a couple of comments of people that got this by accident. That meant there's a way, so I was determined to find it.

I would not have been able to do this if not by kirbo's The Hardcore Risette Fan Experience™️ guide. I pulled most of my info from their guide, and just adapted for my run. Their "My Experience - The Initial Grind" section was crucial to make this work. So thanks to kirbo for the amazing guide. Please go there, drop a rating, a thank you and/or an award.

Pre-reqs

First things first, there's a couple requirements for this to be feasible:

• New Game+: this is highly recommended, as you'll need to cruise through battles, tank hits, dose the amount of damage you give and receive, yadda yadda. You'll also need to skip a bunch of social links throughout more than half of the game, which imo kinda ruins the experience. It's for sure doable in a normal playthrough, but it'll take longer and will be harder, which goes completely against this guide.
  
• Money: your money carries over to NG+, so make sure to have a lot of it (I went with 1.5 million, but a third of that should be enough). You'll need to buy a bunch damage items and items to waste turns.
  
• Compendium: I did the entire thing with some very strong personas bought from the compendium, which makes it easier to control battles.
  
• kirbo's guide: reading this is a MUST to understand where lines come from and where you can rely on to get lines. Link to it here.
  
• P4G Save Tool: as I mentioned before, there was no way in hell I was going to alt tab every time a line played to fill notes or worse spreadsheets, so I found this save editor tool[www.nexusmods.com] that shows how many lines you've heard as a read only value. This is enough to track your progress as you go without ever having to write down a single line. Very important note: I only used this to look at my total number of lines, so I have no ideia if the editing part of the software even works. So I wouldn't recommend editing stuff as it may break your save. Do it of your own volition.
  
• P4G Community Enhancement Pack: this one not a requirement, but I highly recommend it. It adds a bunch of quality of life mods to the game, such as allowing you to call the fox mid dungeon by paying a Goho-M and the required money, reorganizing the party mid-dungeon, and a bunch of other very cool stuff. Check it out here[www.nexusmods.com].

Setup

The setup is very similar to kirbo's guide, just play through NG+ normally until you get to the Shadow Teddie boss fight. A summary of things to keep in mind:

• Buy 99 of each of the damage items, one for each elements, as well revives, ♥♥♥♥♥♥ medicines, and other items you can use to waste turns. You can do this anytime before the Shadow Teddie fight, just don't forget
  
• Keep party member's social links on level 1, leveling them up will mess up lines
  
• Get at least one level of the fox's social link, having the SP healing really helps. I got it to level 5.
  
• You can cruise through the game until teddie's boss fight with damage taken on low and damage given on high, just make sure to calibrate exp gain to normal/low as you level up. I tried to always be underleveled, about 5 levels below the average shadows I found. Just don't forget to set damage taken and damage given to low before you enter rise's boss fight, as teddie's will start without giving you a chance to adjust
  
• Turn on the "retry battles" difficulty option.
  
• Skip extra dungeon bosses for until after you get Rise, they're a good excuse to go back to the initial dungeons later. Since I did this alongside the Margaret achievement, I had to beat them anyway, so it worked out for me

So it Begins

Shadow Teddie Boss Fight

Alright, so the real deal starts when you get to the Shadow Teddie boss fight. Here's I experienced the first deviation to kirbo's experience, as for me, none of the lines said by Rise in the Shadow Teddie boss fight counted. I found this weird, and even thought the save tool might be bugged, but afterwards the normal lines were counted. In fact, later on the same thing happened on Shadow Mitsuo. I even tried reloading a save, thinking I did too much damage, and trying again with weaker personas, but still no good. It ended up not mattering due to the low number of bosses in my run, but it's good to keep in mind.

Tips and Tricks

Now, before we start, make sure you have all the pre-reqs. Here are some important things to remember throughout all the guide:

• Again, read kirbo's guide to have a basic understanding of all types of lines, be attentive to your battles as you'll probably stumble uppon sittuations that could lead into multiple lines as you play.
  
• Abuse of the "analyze shuffle" techniche. You can read more about it on kirbo's, but basically when you hit analyse, select a shadow, then hit back, Rise will most of the times say something. If you spam this (L1 -> X -> O) a bunch of times, you'll probably force trigger all available lines at that moment. It's random and can be annoying sometimes as she just repeats the same lines when you have multiple things happening at once, or sometimes she'll just take forever to say anything, but just power through and keep on shuffling. It can take a while for the line you want to trigger, but eventually it comes. Stalling by wasting the turn and going to the next party member sometimes helps, just be mindful.
  
• Take your time in battles, avoid using guard (makes the party member imune to status effects), and waste turns with items or "useless" skills like Tetraja, let the enemies hit party members so you get things like low HP lines, status ailments lines, debuff lines, yadda yadda. It was a lot about feeling for me, if after a couple of turns enemies did nothing, I'd just kill them or run.
  
• Don't stress over not getting everything, and abuse of the fact you can always just repeat things. Not sure if you did kill 2 enemies with Yosuke? Do it again. There's hundreds of battles, you'll always have a chance later.
  
• Avoid all-out attacks and wiping enemy parties, they eat up lines. Your max simultaneous lines are always the number of enemies minus one. i.e: if there's 4 enemies and you hit all 4 weaknesses, Rise will say one of the few all-out attack lines, skipping the hit 4 weaknesses line, same if you kill all 4 at once.
  
• Swap party members oftenly. My metric was levels, I tried to keep them as closely leveled as possible.
  
• Focus on Teddie, as he levels up automatically, and can be really really annoying recovering from ailments and triggering auto-attacks and stuff. Put him in your party and prioritize getting lines for him.
  
• Use the fox to heal SP and make things easier.

The Grind

After beating teddie, just progress through the story until you unlock Void Quest. Remember to not level up party member's social links, ESPECIALLY RISE. You can quickly enter here to get the "strong enemies" lines, as you'll be underleveled. It's just like 3 lines, should be pretty quick, but you'll probably end up just getting this naturally as you go, so it'sprobably safe to skip this.

The real deal starts back at Yukiko's Castle. Here's what you're looking for here:

• Go with your lowest level party members, if you have teddie, bring him.
  
• Look for battle start lines (advantage, ambush and normal battle starts, for different numbers of enemies), as this dungeon has a lot of 1 enemy parties, which is rare in other dungeons, so you can get a bunch of lines for those. As per kirbo's guide, you can get "a single Laughing Table on floors 4-6", I just cruised through and tried my best to see new lines often.
  
• Also following kirbo's, you can also get some lines for every character defeating different numbers of enemies, knocking them, some ailment quotes for the characters, low hp, victory lines. Just vary the party member you use to hit weaknesses, vary single target and AoE spells, and stuff, you should get a bunch.
  
• You can also get lines from rush mode here, just equip weak weapons on party members, press ▲, and wait.
  
• Go up until you beat the extra boss, and you're done.

After that, go to the Steamy Bathhouse. This is the most grindy part, so here's what you're looking for:

• Start from the bottom until you reach Floor 4, then go back to Floor 3.
  
• Floor 3 has a fixed layout, after climbing down from Floor 4, just exit from the left door, and you'll be greeted with a crossing style path and 2 shadows. Here you can get battle start lines you didn't get on Yukiko's, as well as reinforcement lines. Kirbo has a screenshot in their guide, check it out.
  
• Two very important enemy parties also spawn here: the Monopolizing Cupids and the Autonomic Basalt. For these, you can abuse the cupid's 100 HP to setup hitting weak point lines and finishing off multiple enemies lines, they're weak to ice. The same can be done with the basalts, they are weak to wind, but they have 161 hp so takes a while longer (Yosuke's Garu if he's weak enough is of great help here). Just do your party members one by one, getting 1 knock -> 1 kill, 2 knocks -> 2 kills, all up to 4.
  
• Cupids can also inflict Panic, so always waste turns and never guard, if you get a panicked party member, make sure to analyse shuffle to guarantee Rise say's the line.
  
• Just grind for a bit until you feel like you got most knock and kill lines for all your party members, then proceed through the dungeon.
  
• As you go, more ailments, and debuffs, and hitting crit lines will appear, just shuffle on and keep on playing. See something like Panic? Stall the battle, try to get more party members inflicted, get their lines, wait for them to run away (triggers another line) and so on. Someone got enervated? Shuffle them, and attacking with them will most likely make them fall, which is another line. You get the deal.
  
• Beat the extra boss, and you're done.

At this point, check the save tool to see how you're doing. Kirbo states that they were at 139 lines, but I was already at 170. I'm not sure why, but probably due to the fact I didn't need to tab out to take notes, and did the extra bosses. I'm not sure how long kirbo grinded, so it could be that as well. I did it for 2 hours total of actual grinding for this section (yukiko's + bathhouse), not counting the time to actually progress through the dungeon and beat bosses. Since we're not actually tracking our exact lines, I made sure to always be around 30 lines higher than kirbo's guide. This might not be necessary as I'll discuss later, but if you wanna follow my exact steps and you're lower here, just go back to the dungeons above and repeat the steps.

Proceed to Void Quest and just follow the same overall recipe:

• Focus on teddie, swap party members, stall battles when you get status ailments and debuffs, try to get some unique lines such as running away, crits, dodging, etc for each party member.
  
• Here you'll fight your first boss fight with full Rise lines. Kirbo's says you can get a couple of lines here. Again, for me boss lines didn't count, but doesn't hurt making sure she says them, maybe it works for you.

Once again, check the save tool. Kirbo was at 138, I was at 211.

Final Steps

I then progressed the story until I unlocked Secret Lab. Now is the time to level Rise's SL to Level 2, as it unlocks affinity lines (she says what enemies are weak / imune to at the start of the battle). Very important: as soon as you level up her social link, you'll lose a bunch of battle start lines, so make sure to have enough lines from the initial grind before you do it. I dont have an exact number, as I'll mention in my Final Thoughts in the guide, but I'd at least stick close to kirbo's numbers.

I think by this point, Teddie's SL will be higher and a bit annoying with auto-attacks that make you miss lines and even curing ailments, so try to focus less on him. Go into to Void Quest and progress following the usual steps, you'll get the new affinity lines very naturally here, as well as others you missed for party members. Progress through the dungeon and beat the extra boss.

At this point the save tool stated I had 228 lines, so I was sure it was just a matter of time. This one I have a screenshot I shared with a friend:



Finally, go into Secret Lab and you know the drill, stall, scan, get poisoned, enervated, yadda yadda, use items, force lines, play battles. This is a dungeon with some backtracking, which helps naturally grind for lines. One very useful enemy here that appears on floors 5 and 6 is the Mind Dice, as said by kirbo: "on floors 5-6 you can find Mind Dice, which will cast Debilitate on your party, lowering all 3 of your stats at once". With this, you get basically 3 free lines for each party member.

A good tip here is to go to items and select something like a Soul Drop, that way you can hover over party members and it'll show you the stats they have lowered. Sometimes for some reason just 2 out of 3 stats got lowered, I shuffled for minutes like an idiot not realising one of the stats wasn't lowered.

Every time you find the Dice, just stall until your party members get debilitated, shuffle and profit. I did this for 3 characters, then swapped 2 characters and on my last shuffle for Chie's atk down I got this:

Final Thoughts

Considering in the end, I was always in front of kirbo in number of lines, and that I got the achievement even before the Naoto Shadow fight, I'm pretty sure this can be even more optimized and requires even less grinding. Just to make sure, I checked if the boss fight lines counted, but no, I went in and out at 251.

Unlocking Naoto would mean a couple dozen new lines, so if I ever had to do this again, I'd probably not do any grinding on the Bathhouse, just progress normally with the tactics shared throghout the guides but with Naoto also in my party, progressing through Secret Lab's secret boss and Heaven. If that wasn't enough (which I think it would most likely be), I'd then go back to the Steamy Bathhouse for some grinding.

But yeah, that's it. I thought this was going to be way more miserable than it actually was. It ended up being pretty okay, not that grindy, and getting the achievement was for sure very exciting. Thanks once again to kirbo and their guide, would never have done it without it, do go there and drop some awards or stuff idk how that works.

That's all folks.

[FairFruit]

@Akatosh it's an indirect consequence, actually! raising social links unlocks skills for the characters that can halt your progress, like skills that recover from ailments, trigger automatic attacks, and other stuff. those add chaos and can prevent you from get predictable lines. so it doesn't poof the achievement, but it makes it harder

[Akatosh]

Why does raising a social link other than Rise ruin the achievement? Is it proofed somehow?

[FairFruit]

@Studerty I'm not sure, but it should be fine? I believe it'll only add to the level 2 lines. I'd make a save, level her, and test to check if the weakness lines are not overwritten

[Studerty]

Can i level up rise to sl. 3?

[Gundyr]

oh ok thank you!

[FairFruit]

@Gundyr now if you want to know precisely every line, you'll need to take note every time you hear them. This excel sheet [docs.google.com]is how people do that. I'd recommend just following my guide and doing it without it, but yeah, it exists.

[FairFruit]

@Gundyr I used the save tool I shared in the guide. Every time I did a dungeon, I saved the game and opened my save with the save tool. It shows you the total number of lines you've heard. It's not as precise as keeping a sheet, but it's enough to know you're progressing. If you're not sure about a line, if you've heard it or not, you can always just get it again (as long as it isn't a locked line).

[Gundyr]

Wait... how did you manage to see the progress of the lines that Rise's said? I'm looking for a way everywhere but it seems that I can't find a solution.

[J U N G K O O K]

This achievement was popped randomly in my NG+ run, as I remember I just ran the dungeons multiple times to get this achievements in the end

[Tidus]

Thanks for the guide! closing in on this rn, For anyone who says use the achievement mod nobody cares as it is whether you do it legit or not, its for self satisfaction. clearly you do though if you gotta mod an achievement on to your profile lol.