I'm doing the P4 path. About 8 hours into the game and I still do not understand what the real point of giving Rise a sub Persona is. Is it JUST so level that persona up even though she can't use the skills?...

If there are navigation skills (they have a special symbol) on the Persona, she should be able to use them.

This. I have Personas dedicated to navigation, which are useless in combat. However, I sometimes put a combat Persona on the exploration navigator, because I don't find those skills particularly useful. It's nice to just have a combat Persona gain some exp while equipped on Fuuka.

This is such a weird system. Ok so if my protagonist's sub persona has those leader/navigation skills, he can't use them himself? Navi skills can ONLY be used if equipped to whatever the Navigator's sub persona is?

If that's the case, then wouldn't it be a good idea to dump a whole lot of Navi skills into one persona and then just equip that to Rise forever?....That's weird.

Maybe, but I'm assuming higher level Personas can learn better navigation skills.

@l1ghtn1n: I have another question and I'm picking you at random.

What exactly does that white-ish part of the health and SP bar mean? I know it's like...your sub persona's or something. But what is even the point of that? Your sub personas give you a health boos I think, but does that white portion of the bar regenerate after battles are over or something?

@frostyryan: Yes, any bonus hp or sp is automatically restored to full at the beginning of every battle, effectively making your first move or two "free". Once your hp or sp drops below the white then it's taken out of your primary points, which do not restore automatically.

Thank you! I feel like a grandpa trying to work with new technology and being like "THIS ISN'T HOW PERSONA WAS BACK IN THE DAY" Even though I only started playing SMT games in general this fucking year

It's probably clear by now, but yeah, Navi skills are what you want on a sub persona for Rise/Fuuka - and they are indeed only usable by Rise/Fuuka. When you have both it's probably a good idea to have one sub persona on one that has nothing but battle Navi skills and a sub persona on the other that has a bunch of Navi skills for exploring the dungeon (safer gathering from power spots, show display FOE locations, display treasure/shortcut locations etc.). Then have your party set up so that one of your Navigators is for battle and the other for outside of battle.

You do earn better skills on better/higher level personas - stronger healing, for instance. So it's certainly a good idea to pile a bunch of navi skills onto a persona and then give it to your Navigator, but it's also going to be worthwhile to revisit that and try and fuse something better as you go on.

Yeah, that sub-persona SP really affects the strategy, because you can freely cast some high-SP skills (worth it if it would end the battle quicker or trigger a boost). When combined with boosting you can often go whole battles without spending any "base" SP at all; not to mention if you get certain skills that passively increase crit rate then boosting becomes kind of overpowered [e.g. physical skill to crit + boost, free media the next turn, rinse & repeat].

Not that it breaks the game though (FOE's that you can't knock down can always kill your boost by hitting you), but the "grind" is completely different from for example Persona 4, where I would constantly be miserly with my SP.

Zen and Rei have that SP restore skill also, so it's like all I have to worry about is casting media for any lost base health. That's crazy.

Also do you know if Margaret's healing cost stops increasing? I've healed with her so much before I knew exactly how the HP and SP worked, so now I have her charging me 900 and it's a real bummer.

I have not played this game yet and this thread is freaking me out haha. I went from playing Persona 3/4 to SMT IV and found it difficult to adjust since pretty much all the names/concepts are the same, but the battle system works slightly different. And then going from that to this: Ah! I'm gonna be very bad at this game for the first few hours, I think. Still excited, though.

It's not so hard to adjust. Other than what's said in this thread, the only thing do get used to is drawing maps. And that's super easy and fun.

By the way, I also went from P3/4 to SMT IV. Wow what a difficult time that was at the beginning. (got easier and easier over time though, like Demon's Souls.)

@frostyryan: The clinic cost always seems to be (your protagonist's level * 100) yen.

That's precisely what I did. Ame-no-Uzume is a good candidate for this early because it learns 3 Navi skills on its own.

There are stronger navi skills on higher level Persona's, so you still want to upgrade them every now and then.

@zeik: Right, I eventually fuse them upwards, but not nearly as often as the regular personas. Also, once you can extract skill cards, it stops being as much of an issue.

I am not ashamed (I am a little ashamed) to say that I died about 5 times in the first few hours and then turned the difficulty down to easy. I've enjoyed it a lot more since then! It's weird because I usually love difficult games (Dark Souls, Meat Boy, etc.), but with JRPGs I tend to just get sick of dying.

@supermike6: FWIW, the beginning of SMT4 is brutal compared to the rest of the game. If you can make it through that, the rest shouldn't be a problem.

@ttthrasher said:

Hmm, I might turn the difficulty back up then. The last few hours have been awfully easy.

@supermike6: I feel like you'll be more satisfied with yourself if you turn that difficulty back to medium or whatever the middle setting is. I too was tempted to go easy but I was like nah.

TRUST US, the game gets easier because you get better. Those first few hours are brutal. Let me put it this way: I beat the last boss in one try. It was my first SMT game outside of Persona too. YOU CAN DO IT, BROTHER!

@frostyryan: :) i'm about 15 hours in, so I'll give it a shot. I feel like I haven't really had to engage with a lot of the systems so far because I've been able to take most things down by just beating on them. I'll turn the thing up and see how it goes; there'll be an adjustment period but I'd like to feel like I'm using more strategy. And there's something kinda great about dying a bunch; that final boss of Persona 3 took me four 3-hour attempts (mostly because my party members liked to heal the boss.....), but god damn was I pumped when I finished that game.