I have just ordered Deadly Premonition from Amazon. I think this action really epitomizes the direction my gaming has taken in the last year or so. I started last year as a video game player who liked the same things as most of you. I would always read tons of reviews before getting games, and tended to like the things everyone else liked, and hate the games everyone else hated. I was careful with my money because I didn't want to waste it on a bad game. But, over the last year I have changed. I have started to see games less as a product to buy, and more of an experience.  

  Yes, I am well aware I sound like a crazy hippy man, but I have been inspired in the last year to check out more cult favourites, and more games that I would have just overlooked in the past. I used to love writing reviews, but lately I have changed. Reviews are too product-oriented, too mainstream and "correct" for me. As in, they critique the framerate and the particulars of the story, when all I really like to look at is whether I enjoy the game or not. I don't like nit-picking games. If I wanted to review a game right now, I would have two possible scores: "I enjoyed it" and "I didn't enjoy it".  
 
I am also well aware that according to a lot of people, Deadly Premonition is "a bad game", but I have stopped listening to them by now. I've seen the whole ER, I've heard plenty of people complaining about the game, and I still want to buy it. I know I might get frustrated, but I really don't mind at this point. Swery has struck me as such an honest creator, and someone who is willing to do weird-ass things with his game. I respect that, and I want to play what he has made myself.  
 
I no longer want to buy every game that comes out. I no longer just want a game with consistently good shooting and a mediocre story. I want games that are special in some way. I don't care if they're given a 1-star rating or a 5-star. And I really can't tell if this is a sign of maturity or immaturity. Maybe this is just my form of a teenage rebellious phase. But all I know, is that I just bought Deadly Premonition, and that sure is something.

 This is going to be a much shorter update than my last, but there is good reason. Normally, when we have a session where not very many noteworthy things happen I wait until we play again before I write the update. But this time, I know for a fact that our next session will have a lot for us to write about, which means the update would either be too long or I'd just forget to write all the stuff that happened this session. So, with that said, here we go!

You know how I just said, we didn't get much done? Well, that was kind of a lie because we totally maxed out our S.Links with two separate people! We only boned one of them though! The one we didn't bone was Drunk Monk. It has taken us literally forever to make it to Rank 10 with Drunk Monk, mostly because we have never had a Persona of the right Arcana to make it go quicker. So, it's kind of a big thing in a weird way that his S.Link is now over. In fact, looking back on it, we started this S.Link in our second week of playing this game! That was late August, and now four fucking months later we are finishing this S.Link. That is absolutely nuts. Anyways, the private investigator he hired found his family for him, so he has decided to go meet his family and beg for their forgiveness. To do this though, he has to get up and walk out of the club, something we had not seen him do ever. It was so weird watching him walk, having exclusively seen him sitting for all this time. He's a lot thinner than I expected.

Speaking of thin, we also Rank 10'd it up with Chihiro! Guess what, we boned. Just like we boned every other chick we have gotten to 10 with (which to be fair, is only two, so they could have changed the pattern without me being that surprised). But I'm getting ahead of myself here, because more stuff happened before we boned! Less interesting stuff, that involves less sex. What happened was Mitsuru called Chihiro and us to the Student Council Office to investigate about the money. Mitsuru told us that she knew Chihiro didn't steal it, but wanted to have a private meeting with us (by us, I mean our character alone, not our character and Chihiro) anyways just for kicks. Chihiro got all jealous about that and was like, "Get away you bitch whore" and ran away to confront the teacher and prove her innocence totally (which I guess would prevent the meeting between Mitsuru and our character. Apparently Chihiro doesn't quite understand that we live in the same dorm as Mitsuru, and could totally just meet with her anyways, and probably already would have if we were so inclined).

So, Chihiro confronted the teacher, and he revealed that he had spent all the money on a taxi ride, but didn't tell anyone because he was embarrassed. Mitsuru got pissed about this and wanted to sue the teacher, but Chihiro didn't want to, because this ordeal had let us and her become a lot closer. (Full Disclosure: I don't know if she actually said that (I honestly don't remember), but it sounds like something she would say, doesn't it?) Then, she took us to her house when her mom was at work and we totally did it. Or at least, I like to think that we did.

We also hung out with Aigis some more! It seems that her whole arc is going to involve this grandma lady and her cat, and she's going to learn how to become more human from these experiences. Mewlie (the cat we found for the lady before) has run away again, but the lady believes that it won't come back this time because it has gone off to go die. How sad! Now this lady is all alone. Well, except for her grandson, but he's a dick. We saw him being an asshole to grandma lady, so Aigis went over and tried to start some business with him. He responded by trying to ask her out, but she didn't really get it and then the dude left. I feel now is a good time to say that I feel whoever did Aigis' robot voice did a really good job. She still sounds robotic, but she sounds a lot more human than Fuuka.

We had another opportunity to hang out with Aigis as well, but this was outside of S.Linking. It all started off with our character going to his "Future Consultation" which is when you have a chat with your teacher about your future. The game asked us if we were going to college or not and then the teacher spouted some vague, ambiguous nonsense that didn't relate to our answer because they didn't want to record two separate bits just for this stupid consultation. Anyways, once we were done that, the teacher sent us to find Aigis for her consultation. Now, this raises some key questions. First, something that Levi pointed out, is the question of what order is this teacher conducting these interviews in? How would there be any kind of list where our name comes up right before Aigis'? Unless our name was Aardvark, this seems impossible. Also, we end up finding Aigis on the school roof. So, does that mean this is happening after school? How do they know all the kids will stay at the school instead of just leaving? Or is everyone else in the classroom and Aigis just snuck out because she's a rebel? So many questions.

Anyways, while we were up there we had a touching moment with Aigis where she realized she has become a lot more human, but will still never be fully human. I'm guessing this was probably in the original Persona 3, which lacked the Aigis Social Link, because in this version the whole conversation seems a bit redundant. Yeah, we totally know you want to be human, we've got to Rank 8 with you.

When we got home from that, it seemed like a normal night, with everyone just sitting around the dorm doing nothing. So, we did as we normally do, which is talk to everyone and see what nonsense comes out of their mouth. But, for some reason all anyone could talk about was Koromaru (AKA Dogmund), and how we should feed him a lot so he is ready for the battle. I read this as some sort of hint that we would need Koromaru to defeat the Final Boss, but Levi disagreed just thinking that the game was trying to be weird. I could not be persuaded though, and insisted we should go to Tartarus to level up Dogmund since he's about twenty levels lower than us. We started doing this, took fifteen minutes to raise him three levels, and then got bored of fighting and left. You can't really blame us, we've been fighting in Tartarus for so long that spending more time grinding in there just to level up some character based on a retarded hint is just too much for us now. So, if that was a hint, then we fucking failed and now we're never going to beat the game. But I still stand by my decision to leave!

Wow, that was actually a lot longer than I expected. Well, since I have become so skilled at writing so much about so little, prepare for a million word update next time when stuff actually happens! See you next time! Bye!    

Three hours fighting one boss and then we died. This is probably the worst boss fight I have ever faced. I'm way too frustrated and tired to write coherently right now, but I just wanted to say that this bullshit is bullshit and I am not looking forward to Sunday when we try again. It really sucks, because the fights leading up to this boss were fairly easy, and the game was leading up to this part so well with some great story hooks late game. Even the boss was really cool, right up to the point where it became the Death Arcana and started raping us. I'm not happy.

I'm going to start off this update by admitting that it actually previously had a different intro here, but since the time between me starting this update and me finishing this update was over two weeks, the old intro is no longer relevant or sensible. All that needs to be said really is that I have not written anything about Persona 3 FES recently, but we have played some. The only excuse I can think of is that Christmas happened, but we played all three sessions covered in this update long enough before Christmas that I could have written about them a lot sooner. Anyways, the only actual reason is that I am lazy and would rather sit around watching anime then write articles for this site. But this is not about my skill in procrastination, this is about PERSONA 3 F-ING FES! Let's go!

There are some weird ways to get to my site, and these strange people have found them. These are just some choice search engine queries that have been typed into Google and somehow lead to my piddly little website. And I don't even get that many visitors! I want to see this kind of data for giant sites like the BBC or something! That would be nuts! But, without further ado, here we go: The Weirdest Google Searches That Lead to My Site.

"mike blackwell blog our story" - I don't know what this guy wants. Is he asking me to blog his story? Does he want to find a story someone has written about my blog? It's so confusing.

"modern warfare 4 cutscenes" - Somehow, this person discovered that the creators of Modern Warfare 2 had secretly produced not only Modern Warfare 3, but 4 as well! Having already seen all the cut-scenes from the 3rd one (they're not that hard to find) he went searching for the last piece of this epic saga. Sadly, he found himself at my site. Sorry, bro!

"why do games have all these cutscenes" - I love it when people ask Google questions. It's never a good way to get an answer, the most you'll ever find is someone just as stupid (or more stupid) than you asking the same question on Yahoo Answers. I like this one specifically because I can't help but read it as a Seinfeld joke: "And what's up with these video games? Why do they gotta have all these darn cut-scenes in them?"

"the year of things game" - I can't make head nor tail of this. I seriously hope English was not this person's first language.

"mike blackwell chairman of the board" - I don't know what board I'm chairing, but I would very much like to find out so I can fulfill my chairing duties in a satisfactory manner.

"mike blackwell house-sitting" - I don't house-sit. Also, I think trying to find a house-sitter through the internet is a terrible idea.

"Borderlands scythids are creepy" - I COMPLETELY AGREE.

"what if characters raging blast 2" - I feel terrible that I couldn't provide this person an answer to his question. I completely wasted his valuable time.

"anime girls two guys fuck" - I....I....I don't know. I don't know what I wrote to make this search yield my website, and I don't want to know. Maybe I posted it while I was sleeping.

So, by writing this update, I have just confirmed that more people will fall into my trap of a website through these weird-ass searches. From now on, I will try to focus my writing on these subjects, in order to provide my valuable readers with what they apparently want.

The internet is weird.

 Hello, everyone, this is the latest installment of our Persona 3 FES Endurance Run. We actually played two days in a row for the first time in about three months, but we still managed to get almost nothing done! We are officially three days of game time into this thing now. I've heard from sources that that's a decent amount of time.

So, ummm, we've been S. Linking with Mitsuru. I think we started doing this before the last update and just forgot to mention it, so I thought I should mention it now. We're Rank 2 with her right now, and the S. Link is actually pretty interesting. We've been taking her to different fast-food restaurants because apparently she's never tried fast food before and thinks it's pretty cool. We've got a strange feeling though that the game expected us to start this S. Link much earlier in the game. All you need to do is come first in a test in order to S. Link, and if you didn't Min/Max our skills for Charm and Courage as much as we did we probably could've done this during the myriad of mid-terms and exams we have done. I guess you could say we just weren't smart enough, both in the game with our Academics skill, and outside of the game.

Speaking of S. Links, we also had quite an interesting conversation our favourite Dying Guy, who decided to tell us about a story he is writing. It's about a pink alligator and a bird, and SPOILERS, but in a very dark turn at the end, the pink alligator accidentally eats the bird. He tries to spit it out, but when he finally throws the bird up it's already too late. And he said at the start he was trying to write a happy story to cheer him up. I don't think he's very good at this whole "book" thing.We also hung out with Mamoru, and once again had the game-bending problem of a friend complaining about not having enough money while we have over a million yens.

Interspersed throughout all this were a couple cut-scenes of our party members talking about the choice we are going to have to make. First, Akihiko and Ken talked about the dead people they like, and then deciding they are going to fight. Fuuka and Junpei also had a conversation about this, but I feel that there's was a bit more exciting. Junpei was sitting where Chidori once sat, and looking in her sketchbook, when Fuuka came up and they started talking. Now, this wasn't that notable until Junpei breaks out with an F BOMB. Yeah, he was all like, "'f' that...". Something about his delivery caught me off guard, as well as the quotation marks the game put around "f". Then, at the end, Junpei said to Fuuka, "Let's fight." This also caught me off-guard, and I was very confused until I realized they were talking about fighting Nyx, and not each other.

Then Christmas happened! We spent Christmas with Yukari, because she's still our favourite. We hung out, and it was Christmas! Whoooooo! I still find it interesting how much different Christmas is in Japan then over here, where they celebrate Christmas Eve as a sort-of Valentine's Day, and don't even care about Christmas Day for the most part. Interesting, I say.

So, the day before New Year's Eve, Aigis comes crashing back into the dorm (not literally) after being repaired. She tells us that we should kill Ryoji, because then we can all be happy! But, everyone peer-pressured her into not killing him, so it all worked out. Also, I think we're going to be able to S. Link with her soon, since she's becoming a lot more human. The next day, it was New Year's Eve, and so everyone sat down to discuss. Turns out, no one wants to kill Ryoji, and everyone wants to fight the New York Nyx, which lead us to believe that we probably wouldn't get to make the actual choice in the end.

But, in fact, we did have to. Mitsuru smartly decided to send us to talk to Ryoji, which makes sense since we are the only one who doesn't speak. But, if you start thinking like that, you break the whole game, so let's get off that train. Anyways, we went into our bedroom to talk to Ryoji, and the game popped up and said, "HEY BRO DO YOU WANT TO KILL HIM YES OR NO" and we picked "NO I DO NOT". This makes me incredibly curious what will happen if we had gone the other way, but hey, I guess that's what New Game Plus is for. Ryoji didn't like our answer though, and he tried to convince us to change our minds by changing into Death right in the middle of our room. The juxtaposition of us and this big-ass monster man standing in our little room was actually pretty funny, and also made me realize that the ceiling in our room must be pretty damn high. It was then that Levi reminded me of the fact that he looks exactly like that Persona we summoned at the beginning of the game, which was some pretty cool foreshadowing.

After that, I don't even think we got the chance to go back and talk to our buddies again, it just skipped straight to the next day, which was New Year's Day. There was a big festival at the shrine, where there were like three stalls, and about three people standing around. It was sick! All our lady friends were wearing kimonos, which guys in Japan seem to love, even though they actually aren't that revealing at all. It doesn't make sense to me. The funniest bit was when Ken asked them if they were naked under their kimonos, afterwards saying that Junpei had told him to say it. Ah, good ol' Junpei. Then, we got a chance to run aroung and talk to all our party members, and they all said things like "Hey, I think fighting Nyx might be hard, but I'll do it anyways!" The best part was the music that played during, because it completely didn't fit what we were doing. They have this really dramatic, slow music playing as we run around a festival and talk to party members about pretty much nothing. I find this especially sad because we probably will never get to hear this song again for the rest of the game, and this song is awesome.

Oh yeah, did I mention that we got our SEES S. Rank to Max? Well, we did. But it doesn't really matter, because the game pulled the same thing Persona 4 did, by just starting a new S. Link that is exactly the same except for the name. This one is called the "Nyx Annihilation Team" S. Link, and it is nowhere near as well implemented as Persona 4's "Seekers of the Truth" one was, and I will tell you why very soon.

Obviously, because this is still a video game, a new block of Tartarus opened up. We have until the 31st to get up to the top, and fight the final boss and WIN THE GAME. This block is all icy, probably because it's really high up like a mountain. That's the only sense I could make of it. Sadly, this block won't be a complete cake-walk, because there arefive whole bosses in it. And here's where the terrible S. Linking comes into play. It pops up EVERYWHERE. As soon, as we discover where a boss is, "HEY S LINK", once we beat the boss, "HEY S LINK". We have already got all the way to Rank 5 in about an hour.

If you know math, you may have figured out that we managed to defeat two bosses during this hour. So, maybe this will be a cake-walk after all. Nothing particularly interesting happened during these boss fights, except for one thing. So, something particularly interesting did happen during these fights, I was just lying to you. What happened was that we managed to find yet another hidden power of Fuuka's, by poking around in the game's retarded menus. If we go to Tactics during battle, and try to tell Fuuka to do something, she has a special spell we can do called Oracle. We decided to try it out right away, because we didn't know what it did, and it sounded cool. What happens is she drops this glowing ball of energy from the sky and it lands in the middle of the field with an explosion. We though, "Awesome! This'll do a ton of damage!", but in reality all it does is restore all our party members to full health. Oh wait, that's pretty cool also. This makes on of our items (which we happen to have a decent amount of) completely obsolete, because this does the same thing, but doesn't even waste any of our actual turns. It was pretty cool, and made us realize once again that we kind of suck at this game.

So, yeah, there we are. 74 hours in, and still learning how to use basic moves. Goodbye, everyone!    

Sometimes, I feel like devoting an entire night to one game. Often, this is because I have nothing scheduled for the next day and think it might be funny to feel terrible about myself the next morning. Earlier this year, I did this with Spiderman: Web of Shadows, and ended up having a very good time. This time, I had a couple of choices. The most immediate and obvious choice in my mind was Tales of Symphonia, which I have been trying to play some recently. But, I really just don't like that game enough to play it for even one hour straight, let alone a whole night.

Now, after reading the title, you are probably wondering why I chose Sonic Unleashed, an arguably worse game instead. Well, the answer is simple: I don't have to pay attention when I play Sonic. With Tales, I'd need to be listening to the dialogue and reading the  excruciating  amount of text the whole time. With Sonic, I can turn the volume off, put the  Bombcast  in my ear, and just run really fast. Playing it this way actually makes Sonic Unleashed surprisingly fun. I mean that, this game's pretty cool.  
 

Hello internet, and welcome to the another update on my Persona 3 FES Endurance Run! Last session was a session of love, determination, and courageousness. And by that, I mean we fought a bit and then talked to a bunch of random people! Awesome.

Today, we found something important. Something very important. We found out how to change the  music in Tartarus. After 66 hours of this (and slight variations), we figured out how to turn it into this, this, this, or this (I know that's a lot of links, but stick with me here.) In the end, we decided to go with the first one, mainly because it's energetic enough to keep us from getting bored (for the time being). It's actually really cool because whenever I leave a battle I always forget it's going to start playing this new song, so I get super pumped. The only real problem with this discovery is that it took us over sixty hours to find it. I remember reading before I got this game that you could change the music, and at the time I thought that would be cool. But after playing the game for a while without ever finding out how, I completely forgot about it until now. It turns out that you're supposed to press the square button to bring up a command menu that allows you to split up or regroup your party, and then scroll down to the option "Ask Fuuka something." We actually went to this menu to try and use Fuuka's brand new spell that allows us to leave Tartarus without using an item, which thankfully was there as well. 

This is really cool and all, but it just really shows how terrible the game is at explaining things, and how batshit crazy the menu system can be. Another thing that highlights this is an item you collect called "Old Documents". You find one of these at the top of each block of Tartarus, and if you give them to Elizabeth he gives you a ton of yens. But what are these documents all about, you may ask, and how do I read them? What? You think going to the Key Items screen and then selecting them from there makes sense? Well yeah, it sure does, but while they appear there, there's no option to read them from that menu. You have to pause the game, go to "System", and then go to "Dictionary". The Dictionary is a log that allows you to look at some key words and phrases from the game and figure out what they mean. Now this is a really cool feature, and I mean that. If you stopped playing for a long while and forgot what was going on, this would be incredibly helpful. The problem is, it's hidden in the "System" menu, an option most people would never go to, and the game also never acknowledges its existence ever. The game alludes to you being able to read the Old Documents somewhere, but never explains where. And you know what? After all that, the Old Documents really aren't that interesting at all.

Another thing we thought to change that improved our experience was to change my TV aspect back to 4 by 3. For some reason, we had been playing the game in 16 by 9 (Widescreen) the whole time which made the game look kind of shitty, to be honest. But running at it's native aspect, it's way better and I wish I had realized this from the start.

So, with our new music to keep us going, we headed back to Tartarus for some fighting! Aigis is still getting repaired, so we had to replace her with Ken for the time being. Ken kind of sucks, but it didn't really end up mattering too much. We managed to defeat the last two bosses of this block, and collect the final "Old Document" of the entire game! Tartarus is now practically over, I guess. Like, for real this time. And even if it isn't, we at least won't have to go back there for another whole month since we did so much fighting in November! Yeah! This month's going to be awesome!

Besides that fighting, we didn't actually do much for the rest of the session. We talked to a lot of random strangers on the street just for fun, remembered how weird some of the conversations can be, so we continued that for a while. Then we remembered that there could be a method to this madness, because we could be completing some of Elizabeth's requests. This is a feature I haven't talked about much, mostly because we barely ever use it. What it is is that Elizabeth will tell you some things to do, and then you have to do them within a certain deadline. These requests vary from finding a weapon in Tartarus, fusing a specific Persona, getting an item from a stranger, or just feeding a cat. The reason we don't do them that much is because the prizes she gives aren't very good at all, and the requests really aren't that exciting either. We did the one about feeding the cat, obviously, but other than that we just do the one for collecting the "Old Documents" every month and that's it. We tried at the beginning, but a lot of things have to be done on specific days, and we would always forget. But today, since we were doing so much talking, we decided we would do a few. And , to be completely honest, I can't for the life of me remember what they are, so there you go. 

So, during all that time, we only actually went through three days of game time, which is a record for us of wasting time. This is why it's great that there were some more mid-terms the next week, allowing us to waste a week in about five minutes. Obviously, thanks again to Levi's iPhone, we managed to ace all our mid-terms so well that I think after this we'll finally be able to hang out with Mitsuru. Only problem with that is that we are also about to S. Link with Aigis, and we still haven't got to ten with Chihiro. God, there's just too many women and not enough of us! I guess that's a problem most men wish they had.

Speaking of problems I wish I had, the members of S.E.E.S had a couple of meetings to discuss whether we should kill Ryoji or not. Most of us don't think we should! OK! Yukari and Mitsuru also had a private meeting which lead Levi to make the most retarded conclusion ever: (and while this isn't a direct quote, it's goddamn close enough for me) "Why would two girls talk to each other in private if they weren't bi-curious?" That's a very very good question, Levi.

Well, that't it and that's all for today! We're about 68 and one half hours into this game now, so that's a thing!

 Wow. This is going to be another one of those "A whole bunch of story things happened" kind of updates. We literally didn't fight anything during the whole session, but the game did reveal the biggest twist yet and it was really nuts and also really awesome. But first, Social Links!

I guess we're going to bone Chihiro at the end of this. I haven't really been thinking about that, but it's going to happen. I mean, that's how these things work right? I don't know how I feel about that. Oh wait, yes I do, I feel awesome! Anyways, this time she was accused of stealing money from the student council. See, she's the treasurer for the council, and apparently she "forgot" to give some money to a teacher or something. I think this might be related to her extreme wanting of those comic books earlier, but probably not. It has to be a coincidence, right? Why would she steal money when her boyfriend has over a million yens? That just wouldn't make sense. We also hung out with the Dying Guy, and he's still kind of sad that he is dying. You know what, I probably would be too.

We tried to hang out with Rival Athlete man, but he totally stood us up. We stood in the mall for about a minute and then he called us up and was all like, "Oh, I'm sorry, my mother died so we can't hang out." What an asshole.

So, now I'm going to summarize a whole bunch of story, which is a pretty tough thing to do. This wasn't a session of action scenes and dramatic deaths, it was mostly just a lot of talking, which makes writing an update about it pretty tough. But, I'm going to slave it out, if only for you, my future self. It all started when Ryoji stopped going to school for a couple days. Apparently, he wasn't feeling well, but Aigis is still assured that he is "dangerous". Whatever that means (I actually know full well what that means but I'm trying to keep the illusion of present tense).

Also suspicious is the way Aigis has started coming back to the dorm later than normal recently. I wonder if these two will possibly connect in some way and continue the story. Well, yeah they will. During the Dark Hour one night, Aigis goes to the crazy bridge (the one the two members of Strega jumped off of) to look for Ryoji. It turns out, that was a great place to look because he's actually right there! But wait, he shouldn't be around during the Dark Hour. Aigis interrogates him on this very subject, and he doesn't really seem to know very well either. Anyways, long story short: It turns out Ryoji is death.That's right, HE IS DEATH. Which leads me to question who the fuck the other Death (the one in Tartarus) actually is. Oh wait, before I get sidetracked, maybe I should explain the part about Ryoji being death a little more.

Apparently, Ryoji is the "Appriser" who is meant to summon the crazy maternal being god thing "Nyx" to fuck everyone up and destroy the world. I have no idea why, but that apparently doesn't matter yet. He was created during the experiments done by Yukari's father, which are the same experiments which created the other ten (or maybe twelve, I don't know) big shadows we had to defeat. Aigis was created to destroy these shadows, and had actually fought Death about ten years ago, on this very bridge, but at that point he wasn't human yet. So, in the longest anime cut-scene yet (and probably the best) it shows that Aigis couldn't defeat Death, so she had to seal him away in a little kid who happened to be nearby. After that is explained, Ryoji kicks Aigis' ass and she gets all sad and broke.

Then, Fuuka discovers that Aigis and "someone else" (I wonder who it is) are at the bridge, so all the rest of us run over to see what the fuck's up. We see Aigis all broke on the floor, and then Ryoji explains it all for the second time. But this time, he reveals the biggest bombshell: THAT KID WAS US. Ryoji was actually living inside us for most of our whole lives! In fact, it was really just a pure coincidence that we happened to come back to this town again afterwards and start this all again! Damn our parents! If they're alive, that is. Us coming back also caused so many people to get Persona powers, which come to think of it doesn't make much sense considering Strega and "Mitsuru and Akihiko's Hunting Crew" were both around before we got here. But I rolled with it at the time, so whatever.

Us destroying all the shadows didn't actually destroy the shadows at all, but instead caused them all to be brought together with Ryoji and allow him to escape us. That's why he didn't come to town until after all the shadows were gone. In a kind of funny coincidence, right after the cut-scene, Levi and I were talking about how this meant that Pharos was actually Ryoji, and that's why he left us after we defeated all the shadows. The funny thing was that we figured this out, and then I pressed X one more time and the game popped up a message saying "Hey, Pharos was totally Ryoji, guys." Also, while Ryoji was inside of us, he developed more human attributes, which is why he takes the form of a human now. Also, he's still the pretty nice guy he was before, it's just now he knows that he is death.

Now, more about this Nyx business. Nyx is some sort of crazy god who is going to destroy the whole world. That's pretty much all we know about her so far. Oh yeah, and she's going to destroy the whole thing by Spring, so we better hurry up or everything will die. Ryoji decides to give us a certain choice concerning this though, because he's still a nice dude. If we kill Ryoji, we will be able to forget everything that has happened (the characters will, not Levi and I) and be able to live in peace right up until the end of the world, so it will be quick and painless. Or, we could not kill him, and use that time to try to figure out how to stop her, which seems useless since the game has been constantly telling us that she is a crazy god who cannot be stopped. I don't know if we (Levi and I) will actually be able to make this choice or if it will be made for us, but if we have to make it we're obviously going to choose not to kill him. But, either way, we don't have to make this choice right now, because he's giving us until New Year's Eve. Then, he left and disappeared into non-existence for a month while we decide.

So, yeah. Bam, I guess. That's a whole lot of shit to take in. After the cut-scene, we decided to go and talk to all the characters in the dorm, and they provided us with some other nuggets of information we hadn't thought about. First, Strega must have known about this too. This is probably what they were talking about with the "Master Plan". Second, the Chairman obviously knew, which is what he meant by "The Fall". I still wonder why he wanted to kill us though. Maybe he wanted to unleash Ryoji quicker? I don't know, I'm usually not very good at figuring out these things.

And that's where we stopped. We tried to go to Tartarus, but Aigis got sent back for repairs since Ryoji kicked her ass so hard so nobody wanted to go. Also, I think they were a bit shaken up about the news. But, the good news is that when Aigis gets back, we'll probably get to S. Link with her, which is awesome! We're now 66 hours into the game, in case you wondering. I just realized that it was only a two hour period of gameplay that all this happened in. Weird. I guess that's what happens when you don't fight at all. Anyways, this update ends now!