So I beat the game through on Hard the first time, and now I'm plowing through for the New Game+ on very easy, just to try to and get all the Social Links in one playthrough (did not get Ai and missed Adachi by half a rank!) as well as too see another set of lover route scenes.

What I was thinking for my third playthrough was to do something I like to call the "Black Velvet Challenge". Basically you start the game on whatever difficulty (probably do Hard again) and then you are not allowed to enter the Velvet room unless you have to for the story. That means, no Fusing, no Skill Card Database, no Accessing the Compendium. You are only allowed to use the Persona and the skill cards that you get from Shuffle Time.

Has anyone ever tried this? It seems doable to me especially with the inclusion of skill cards and some of the other nice Arcana you can get in shuffle time, but it probably leaves a lot up to chance. Wish me luck!

@Adaurin: Good luck mate.

I've never done a run like that before - I think the main thing is that it'll be pretty grind heavy.

You can do it no problems, but without fusing you'll have to rely on shuffle time personas and most of those are pretty damn bad. Still, it'd be very doable on any difficulty, though I'd say Risky/Very Hard isn't worth it unless you want to spend a lot of time worrying about yen for the first half of the game.