Persona Q Part 2: Late for Tea

After Elizabeth and Theo explained the main and sub Persona mechanic I went ahead and equipped low tier Personas to my current party. I got a bit confused over the purpose of this mechanic, but after playing some more I found that giving the whole party main and sub Personas is actually much better than retaining the exclusive wild card ability of the protagonist. Sure the sub Personas have very limited strength and are indeed mainly for support it does, however, make each battle more dynamic and less straightforward. Technically with sub Personas, everyone is given the wild card ability (except Zen and Rei).

The first floor of You in Wonderland lacked actual challenge and it served more as a tutorial for the player to get to know the basic components of each floor: Shadows, FOEs, Power Spots, shortcuts, and hidden areas. The real twist and turns, and frustrating backtracking are found in the second floor.

The main highlight of this floor is the party’s pursuit of the pink rabbit.

Aside from that there were a few areas where side events were triggered highlighting Rei’s absolute adoration towards food (or just anything with flavor), Shinji and Akihiko’s child-like quarrel over muscles-for-brains and further food talk, and Yuka-chan’s envy over Rei’s figure despite sucking food like a black hole.

just look at that smile! Aigis is so adorable!

As always Madame Mitsuru Kill Joy Kirijo butts in to disinfect all the happiness around her with her putrid air of superiority. Ugh.

FOEs are also getting harder to evade.

So before rushing in to get that treasure chest make sure there’s space for the party to move out of an FOE’s path of destruction. Accidentally getting into a battle against an FOE won’t be an insta-kill encounter though. I actually tried my hand with one of them back at the first floor, my attacks only did chip damage while the FOE delivered a brutal knockdown. It’s possible to escape, of course, but not without injury.

In this floor, it also shows that not all 100% map treasure chests are found at the end of the floor. This floor’s treasure chest is found somewhere at the bottom left of the map.

This time it gives the player another option of opening it. The first one is 100% map completion, but to those who hate backtracking they can, instead, spend play coins with the cost calculated according to the current percentage of the map.

The party wasn’t able to catch the pink rabbit and I get the feeling there’s a big boss battle coming at the third floor. After clearing the second floor Fuuka contacts the party and informs them that Elizabeth has some good news waiting at the Velvet Room.

The good news this time was another mechanic in managing Personas: Persona Fusion and Persona Compendium.

It was nothing new in the Persona world. What is new is StreetPass but I won’t be using that any time soon, I guess. What I would like to resolve is the shortage of Personas. Since all members of SEES can now equip sub Personas of any Arcana it gets a little hard to experiment in Fusion since it is two Personas for the price of one, and the resulting Persona is not always superior. So instead of just mindlessly throwing Personas as tributes for Polymerization I have to play smart. Ugh (just kidding!).

Here's the complete map of the 2nd floor:

Well that’s all for now. See you next part!

Gotta go!