When I see someone who has an exclamation mark above their head and it says something along the lines of "You feel like your relationship with Marie/Adachi/Nanako/etc isn't ready to deepen yet..." does that mean that if I spend time with them, I'll only be wasting my time? I have done it a few times and it's just some really generic cutscene that says, for example with Nanako "You witness a precious moment with Nanako" and then time has passed. Should I be waiting until it strictly says a relationship is ready to deepen or should I be spending time with them regardless of if it's gonna deepen or not? I just don't want to end up wasting a bunch of time. I'm on June 11 and my Social links are doing pretty good, half of them have 4+/10 and the others are mostly 3 with a few 2 and 1s.

@xyzygy: It's kind of an exp system. The little notes above their head is how many points you get, and you need a set number to rank up. I think the max is 3? I think it depends on what you pick in dialogue options if there are any and what persona you are carrying.

So yeah, you aren't wasting your time. Aside from some that rank up with the story, like the Fool link. You can max out any other link just by doing it over and over as fast as possible.

EDIT: Actually I'm not so sure now... Marie and Adachi, for all I know could be special cases as the new golden additions. And Nanako was always gated by personality rank. Though in her case you wouldn't be able to even start an event in that case... It's PROBABLY not a waste of time? XD

@tobbrobb: but what I mean is that during these specific cutscenes there aren't any chances for me to give any dialog input in order to obtain those little notes above their head. It's just some super generic little cutscene that repeats over and over again and I can't do anything in it. I can recognize an S.Link upgrade cutscene because I'm able to give opinions and actually talk with others, but in these ones it just seems like nothing happens.

Basically I guess what I'm asking is: if I leave them alone when it says this, will it automatically in a few days switch to saying that the relationship will deepen?

You need to do them anyways. You don't RANK UP every single time you hang out with them. You need to prove your dedication to them and hang out with them even if they won't immediately rank up. The higher level social ranks sometimes require two to three times where you need to hang out with them before reaching the next significant RANK UP date. If you have a Persona from their type, that two to three times may be cut down to one to two times. Either way, you will never move forward with that social link unless you hang out with them some times when they won't level up.

The generic scenes get you a fixed amount of points toward the next rank. The rank-up scenes give you those options for bonus points, so you can potentially reduce the amount of times you'll need to hang out before the next rank. But yeah, unless they changed things from the PS2 game, you're not gonna get anywhere by waiting.

@liquidprince: Awesome, OK. It's good to know I didn't waste my time spending it with people when they didn't rank :)

Yep, you're never wasting your time. It's just a balancing act of whether you hang out with some one else and immediately rank up, or put in the extra time into someone else.

Social Link levels are determined by "points". The first 2 levels will require ~1 point (you'll get them in 2 meetings), and everything else requires more points. For example, lets say rank 3 requires 5 points. If you answer all the questions "correctly" when ranking up to rank 2(answers grant different point values usually between 0-3) then you will likely hit rank 3 on the next meeting (hitting the point threshold required). Also holding a persona of that person's affinity will increase point values, thereby ranking faster.

So yes if you want to rank that person up, you get points by meeting with them towards the next rank. However, if you're playing Golden, then you can gain points towards ranking up at the shrine during the night, or by talking to that person during the night (will give points towards next rank, but if you already have enough points for the next rank then be aware that points DO NOT carry over. Once you hit a new rank, your points reset. You can't store enough points to rank several times.

ps: meeting with the person grants more rank points then using the shrine.

@mcfart: Yeah, I know about the shrine stuff but I find that I'm so busy with reading material or jobs that I never have time for it! But during the day though, I always give friends the priority. And even at nights when Nanako-chan or Dojima-san is there I will stay with them. I can see how the shrine is useful for people who want to max S.Link first and foremost though.