Semi-Spoilery Tips Thread

Hello everyone, some of you may know me as the person on the discord (section09) who has no-life'd this game 4 times already and I'm here to bring you the hottest tips this side of Aoyama-Itchōme.

Some of these may be small spoilers? I'll do my best. They are in no particular order. Prepare for a stream of consciousness.

• You can often make tools when nothing else is available, so check even if you think you can't.
• There is a TV Quiz on the downstairs TV, try it out, you get knowledge from it.
• The Temperance Confidant is a huge time saver, try and finish it quickly.
• The Fool, Strength, Moon, Judgement, Justice, Magician and Sun Confidants do not require the associated Persona
• Always, ALWAYS, exhaust your SP before leaving a dungeon or mementos. Otherwise that is time wasted.
• Press Square on the subway map to see available confidants.
• Check back at the recycling center often, sometimes they have new things to buy.
• Feed your plant! Good food can be found in Shibuya, and the best food is in Shinjuku.
• Making coffee with a Hierophant persona gives you notes with Sojiro.
• There are some books that raise your reading speed or skill acquisition speed from movies and games.
• There are consequences for dating more than 1 person.
• The Fortune Confidant has benefits that are not immediately obvious. It's another good time saver.
• Kindness, Charm, and Guts are useful earlier, while Knowledge and Proficiency, are useful further in. (Take that one with a grain of salt, I might have missed something)
• Save in a new save slot every couple of days so you have the ability to jump back to any day in a month at a moment's notice.
• NG+ carries over: Social Traits, equipment, money, skill cards, persona compendium, and most importantly, certain key items which make the game A LOT easier the second time around. Also you are able to pull any level Persona out of the compendium from the start. Have fun 1-shotting bosses!

FOR FIRST TIMERS: This game does a fantastic job of making everything you do feel worthwhile, more so than any other Persona game. So even if you feel like you are being inefficient or not using your time wisely, you can be sure that as long as you aren't doing nothing, you are progressing in a meaningful way. So just go where the wind takes you, it's a fun game and everyone should experience it in their own way.

I hope I was helpful for someone, please post whatever tips I may have missed and please be mindful of specific spoilers, I will post them on top with credit. Also if anyone has questions or anything I'm happy to help.

1. Always go inside a Palace with at least a week to spare, NEVER go into a Palace for the first time three days before the deadline. You need to leave at least once when you get to the end of the Palace to place a Calling Card and that wastes an in-game day.
2. You can craft items during the night after placing a Calling Card and before fighting the Palace boss, so use that time to stock up on Chest Keys.
3. Not 100% sure about this but spending time with Sojiro and making coffee gives you the same amount of SL points but making coffee also gives you SP items.

My advice to add onto this would be to get the Death Confidant to rank 7 as soon as you can so you can buy the rank 3 SP recovery accessories at a massive discount. With this item, it's much easier to one-shot a dungeon on the first day it's available, giving you a ton of free time for anything you need.

A one-two punch of Hierophant and Temperance is a great way to never worry about SP again. Free 100 SP healing items every Evening is wonderful.

• You can rearrange the order of the skills of both you and your party's personae by pressing the square button while observing them in the stats screen; I find it really annoying having magaru and garu etc. on separate ends of the list so this was a small but meaningful bit of housekeeping.
• You can also lock personae in the compendium if you don't want to accidentally overwrite them, handy for the Strength arcana challenge in ng+
• Always check what items will come out of personae after a round of fusing, some really strong equipment can be found, especially towards the end.

Get to know your lady confidants properly, as in this game you can buy gifts for the ladies, and if you buy the gift that matches their interests, it helps speed up the process of getting their rank up.

And try to save up all your Memento requests for one run, that way you save time as the bosses in there are not super difficult.

and yea, level up the temperance and fortune links when you get them, they are weird stories, but they do grant super meaningful rewards that help you get the most out of the game days.

- There's an extra ding after getting confidant points that indicates whether you have achieved enough points to reach the next level immediately. This is especially useful when hanging out with a lady to know whether you need to give them a gift or not. Similarly, if you're utilizing the Fortune confidant she will have an extra line of dialogue if you've achieved enough points to rank up.

- Excluding party member confidants, Temperance and Star have some pretty game changing abilities. Try to level them asap.

- You can swap out party members anywhere in the dungeon from the stat screen, not just the entrance or safe rooms. Make use of this to get the most out of your team's SP.

- Don't always go for the all-out attack in combat. Negotiating for items or money can be a much more efficient way to end fights, but even against bosses, going for a Baton Pass will often result in a more damaging attack. Especially with Yusuke's Baton Pass buffed skills.

- Don't forget about your guns during boss fights. This is actually advice I need to remind myself of, but given that bosses are set up to be fought on separate days with full resources you don't need to worry about conserving bullets, so just spam out your whole clip at once. This is especially true when you get the special gun attack from the Tower confidant.

During a flu season (11/13, 11/14, 11/15, 12/8, 12/9) you can go into Mementos and kill the Reaper easily. There's a chance he'll be inflicted with despair and will commit suicide (if he doesn't, run from the fight and re-engage). This will get you a trophy and you can repeat this as many times as you want for easy EXP.

I was struggling with first palace while trying to reach the treasure in one go. The biggest tip I found to accomplish this was to sell the soma you can get as free DLC. It gets you 50,000 which is enough to buy highest armor and weapons for everyone

If you want to easily complete any negotiation just look at the demons type in upper left just before initiating the negotiation. Choose your answers accordingly

Timid: choose "kind" answers

Upbeat: choose "joke" answers

Irritable: choose "serious" answers

Gloomy: choose "vague" answers

People have already mentioned the Fortune confidant, but I think it's important to reiterate how important this one is at rank 7. It allows you to do an affinity fortune, which grants you 3 notes with ANY confidant if you have the persona associated with them (2 otherwise). This can be done on any sunny/cloudy day, and it doesn't make any time pass. There isn't any note effect on the screen when it happens, but trust me - it works. I didn't think I'd be able to max out many social links my first time through, but now I think I can get most of them because of this alone.

I needed to hear that, thanks. I would be lying if I said I hadn't been stressing about whether I was being "efficient" enough with what I do. It's my first Persona game (I haven't even watched the ER for P4), and so all I know is bits and pieces I've heard online about how you have to optimise everything you do.

If you have a persona that you want to start every battle with (like, say, somebody who has Attack Master/Speed Master/Defense Master/Auto-Mataru/Auto-Maruku/Auto-Masuku), go into the config options and turn off Persona Memory. This will cause whatever persona you've selected in the persona menu to start every battle. I didn't find this until 110 hours in, but it saves so much time now that I don't have to go in and manually switch back to my lead-off persona after every battle.

I know thinking about NG+ for a ~100-hour game in a series you're new to probably isn't a thing that's crossed your mind, but just know that your social stats (knowledge, guts, etc.) are one of the things that carry over, so if you do decide to do a NG+ run (which you can pretty easily tear through, because your compendium also carries over), you won't have to devote almost half of your days to read/bathing/movies/etc., allowing you to spend most/all of your time with social links and max out everybody fairly easily. You really only need to optimize if you're trying to do absolutely everything in a single playthrough, but that's more a fool's errand for a newcomer to the series. Just have fun and focus on the things that you're enjoying!

Okay, this isn't necessarily a tip thing, but I didn't find an extra thread on this and didn't think it was important enough to make one myself. But I've got a question: I've heard somewhere that getting all the S.Links/Confidants is even easier than in P4, which was already an improvement on 3. Is that true? Actually, maybe one more thing I'd like to know(I'm wary of reading anything else not directly related to this): Is there one single, huge tip that would help out with completing more Confidants? Because I rarely if ever replay games, so I'd like to see as much of it in one go as possible.

@paulunga: Yes, it's easier. I managed to max out every Confidant on my first playthrough with no help from a guide. In P3 you had to follow a very strict guide to pull that off (the one time I did it I kinda felt like it ruined the fun), and P4 it was a little easier, but still unlikely to pull off on a blind first playthrough.

The most important things to do to accomplish this is to always bring the respective Persona arcana with you when you hang out (excluding the handful of automatic ones), and get the Fortune Confidant to rank 7 asap so you can spend money for "free" Confidant points. With the latter you can all but eliminate the need to waste days hanging out for extra points without ranking up. That being said, I didn't actually level mine that quickly, so the sooner you do it the easier it will be.

Getting Temperence to rank 10 is also very good, as it allows you to use your evenings after dungeons to raise more Confidants or social points.

@ajamafalous:Holy shit, I had no idea about that Persona memory thing. That's huge. Especially since I've wanted that since P3. I kinda just gave up switching back outside of boss fights because of how tedious it was.

I'll echo that it's way easier. I have a little over 2 weeks left on the calendar and I only need to do 2 rankups for a day confidant and 3 rankups for night confidants and I will have maxed everybody (I also have maxed social stats), all without a guide. Prioritize getting Fortune to 7 as soon as it's available, and then use Fortune's Rank 7 ability to help you rank up other people without wasting days spending time on non-rank-up hangouts (probably starting with Temperance, as its Rank 10 will also help you not waste time). And, as always, make sure you've got a persona on you that matches the arcana of whoever you're about to hang out with.

EDIT: oops this is basically exactly what @zeik said above me lol. Oh well!

Press the touch pad to get the answer to class questions (but not exams). They're community choices but the right answer has always had like 98%.

Don't bother upgrading guns for damage. Get a gun for each person with the highest accuracy early in the game, then don't bother upgrading again. You only really need guns for exploiting a gun weakness.

Pressing Square over a location on the map (if it has a social link card icon) will tell you who it is that is there, and most importantly whether visiting them right now will give you a rank up.

Reading magazines for locations you've already uncovered will not take time so you can select them and Mona will say you know about this already. Not important but will clear them as 'read'.

Buy the laptop (I think it's at the end of summer) and repair it at your bench. You will not be disappointed.

Don't bother with the shopping channel on sunday. It's 90% terrible.

Every sunday (day or night) you can buy a 1 stat boosting drink from the Shibuya underground walkway for 5K. Pricey, but I bought one pretty much every Sunday.

@alistercat: I agree about the guns early game, given the scarce resources, but late game when you're rolling in cash they're worth upgrading. They can be a pretty good source of free damage against bosses if you empty the clip.

Good guns and the Tower link also means that later int he game you will often start ambushes off with up to half of the entire enemy parties health gone for free.

I haven't spent money on any guns and I still start those ambush battles at half health; I think it mostly just depends on how fast you mash X

@ajamafalous: Well you just hold the button down to use it but it might be just a flat %.

If so it's presented in a really strange way.

You can just hold x to straight dump on fools. It will always drop them to half health, your guns don't matter.

@theblue: @efesell: Oh shit lol, didn't know you could just hold it down. Does that work for the video games in your room also?

Wow...I guess I need to stop ignoring the fortune lady!

By the way, why is the Sun confidant so special? I hung out with him, got zero notes, and then he was immediately ready to go again the next day. Got another rank. wtf

@frostyryan: He just ranks up automatically every time. Doesn't matter what you pick or if you bring a Persona.

Probably because he's the only Confidant that cuts off early. You only have like until mid November to max him.

@zeik: WHAT? Well looks like I fucked this up.

I just got to the point where you "check out" the sixth dungeon and that's near the end of October...hmm. Wonder if I'll have time to finish him. I'm like rank 4 or 5 with him.

I waved off Haru when I got her as a tag-along addition to the team, but she turned out to be essential to my boss line-up. Her +Gun skills and Psy abilities made her a hallmark of why I was able to win against end-game encounters.

Seriously, Haru is not a joke to wave off. One-Shot Kill with her made up at least 50% of my damage against bosses. Her basic gun attack is also incredibly strong.