1st death: Killed by midboss on 3rd floor. It went like this…
Souji - Brave Blade
Yosuke - Garudyne
Boss - Attacks Teddie for 290 HP
Teddie - Bufudyne
Yukiko - Mediarama
Boss - Rampage that does over 500 damage, killing half my party including Souji. That bastard.

2nd death: Killed by a random Encounter with a Phantom while on the way to mentioned misboss. Unfortunately for my party, I had on Sraosha on Souji and it’s weak to Dark. The Phantom decided to cast Mudoon on poor Souji. Can’t blame him, he must’ve thought that Souji was so kick ass that he had to get rid of him first

3rd death: Killed by midboss again. This time, it went somewhat like this…
Souji - Brave Blade
Yosuke - Garudyne
Boss - Attacks Yukiko for 250 HP
Boss - Rampage that does over 500 damage, killing half my party including Souji. That bastard x 2. This made no sense, as I thought Teddie would have time to cast Defense up before the boss would do his Rampage…

I finally defeated the boss on my fourth try, by having Souji guard so he wouldn’t get killed. The irony is that he dodged it this time. Grrrrr.

The good news is, I finally finished the game! And the final boss was tedious but not overly hard. woot!

After finishing Kasugayama High, our party needs to find more leads to the Joker since they have exhausted all their options so far. So we go around the city asking our Rumourmongers about new things they have heard of. A new area named Konan opens up after you talk to the first three Rumourmongers and a fourth one is located there.  Unfortunately the Kuzonoha detective agency is empty at this point so we cannot spread rumours yet =.=

In the meantime, I decide to feed the cat there. Apparently, if you feed it 10000 yen, it’ll give you an Incense Set which increase your stats. Easy right? If we didn’t have to feed it in increments of 100 yen!

Pop it in? Strange way of putting it. *pops in 100 yen* *pops in 100 yen* *pops in 100 yen*…

After 10 minutes of this nonsense, the cat finally spits out my Incense Set. YES! However the madness doesn’t stop here… next area is the police station in Konan.

We find a dog here that also wants my hard earned money! Another 10 minutes wasted popping in money for more stat increasing items. Then we go take a look at Maya’s apartment.

Maya’s awesomeness went up tenfold after that scene. It’s a change from the clean rooms that protagonists have *coughSoujicough* At this point the detectives should be back at the agency, so we go and spread our rumours, buy some weapons, then follow a rumour about a ghost closet in the Abandoned factory…

Hm what a light picture, dunno what happened there. We run into the boss after going around a bit. It’s a freaking CLOSET! I wonder if the table enemies from Persona 4 were modeled after this boss here… It wasn’t too hard a boss though, cast a few fusion spells and it went down in a few turns.

Next destination is the Mu Continent casino where we heard that the idol group named Muses were gathering for a show. The back of the casino is home to a whole entire DUNGEON. I should stop capping random words, but this game is really, really strange.

That dungeon is huge alright. Ran in there for two hours and finally got to the end of it. I still have to collect some Tarot cards so I’ll be spending some more time there but imagine how much money the casino owners must’ve spent on a dungeon extension…

And to finish, the usual party stats. Gained 3 levels since the last log and added 3 hours of gameplay. I really hope it’s not going to be one level per hour ^^;

The part that took the longest was trying to get Lovers and Strength cards to be able to summon new Personas. Freaking enemies always got angry at my answers for some reason. I’m just trying to be nice!

After playing for two hours I’ve finally managed to obtain the needed 72 Lovers and 48 Strength cards.

Success! Ah, those tarot card illustrations are so pretty aren’t they?

After that grueling training, the team went back to finding the Kasugayama student president. He then tricked the party into a maze without light, which took FOREVER to get out from (thanks Atlus for that traumatizing dungeon). I had to increase the brightness of my screen to even see anything. Cheating? I think not!

Then we go back upstairs in hopes of finding the school president once and for all. Oh and to beat the crap out of him for making me go around in circle around the school for two hours.

Ha! You’re going down!

Up to 8:38 hour of play time after some throughout asskicking. Only level 13 though. Seems like it’s just as slow as Persona 3 and 4

Taking a small detour to the gameplay now.

I have to say, I really like the cycling of attacks until you decide to cancel them; you can work on something else while the battle takes place! It gets a little annoying only if you need to heal someone since you need to switch targets, but it works for stuff like Media.

Ah, we still get maps in older PSX games. The maps are already pretty streamlined, plus I suppose they were needed since there are much more places to visit compared to the latter games in the series.

One of the plot points revolves around rumours becoming true. You can gather rumours from people in the city then go to a detective agency to spread them. You can change how often you get items from events, or the price and quality of weapons and armour and even have optional boss fights. Pretty cool stuff!

The only truly tedious part so far is collecting Tarot cards to summon Personas. It takes forever and contracts break way too easily. How are we supposed to know how devils think?

Haven’t finished playing Persona 4 yet, but the last dungeon I went through drove me nearly batty. Going backwards in the series sounds like a good plan no? Ya right. At least I can play the Persona 2 games in order now that Innocent Sin’s been translated.

Woot, got to the title screen unscathed. Behold the pixeliness! It’s hard to go back to the PSX when games look so good these days.

The menu screen, in full gray glory. The transitions between menu screens are pretty spiffy to see.

The battle screen. Very different system from Persona 3 and 4, but it’s still strangely addictive. Must be the customization aspect.

All in all, I’ve had a blast during the 5 first hours of the game. Here’s hoping that the rest is equally as good

I know, shocking isn’t it Naoto? You just become more and more awesome by the day

Please stop ruining your games with such horrible english dubs!
We are forced to go to extremes like this because you are making
the games we love unplayable!

Consider multi-language or special-edition releases with the
original high quality Japanese voices.

“Ruining your games”, “forced to go to extremes”? Hm… After hearing some of the high pitched Japanese actors, I’m starting to wonder if people have lost their hearing. Yea, I don’t think most people would buy an overpriced special-edition release for a PS2 game.

I’m getting a little tired of weeaboos who want their games/anime/whatever to be as close to the original as possible, yet somehow feel like they are entitled to have a perfect understanding of it. I’d understand if it was a terrible dub (Chaos Wars anyone?)… but this is Persona 4. No way this is a sub-par dub, this is some good voice acting! And this is coming from someone who watches her anime subbed. Here’s a video of one of the scenes of the game with Teddie, Yosuke and Chie talking:

Woo, Teddie and his bad puns @_@

I’m not against the release of undubs at all; I would have loved to play the undub version if I could. I simply do not like this written attack on Atlus especially after they went through the effort of including an artbook, a soundtrack along with a new voice track with the game. Go Atlus, keep releasing awesome games!

There was supposed to be a character breakdown after this, but this post is getting too long already. Til next time!

I bought my tickets way ahead of time, on October 14th or so according to the tickets. Yet I managed to only get crappy ass seats. I wanted the $98 tickets and ended up purchasing $58 ones. Ticket scalping? Ticketmaster sucking? Or perhaps I can’t buy tickets!

There were no goodies to purchase at the concert, which is a little disappointing. I’m one of those fans that buy a little something (or lots!) to remember the concert by.

The Toronto fans aren’t the screamer type, was expecting more noise and yelling and whatever happens at concerts. We got glow sticks though, which looked awesome in the dark:

Woo! The centre was almost full, there were a few sections at the back that were empty, but it’s not like you would be able to see anything from there anyway.

Following are a few videos of his performance. You can tell I was sitting wayyy at the back so sometimes I filmed the screen instead while watching the show.

Opening - Golden Armour:

Nocturne:

Piano Duel:

Ending - Nunchucks:

His first costume was interesting and he had this huge feather on his head… He played the piano, drums, guitar and Chinese table harp. Very skilled All in all it was a lot of fun, and I would definitely go again and get closer seats!

It came with lights, so we just needed to get a few ball ornaments… decided on a colourful set. Still looks a little conservative. I will have to go make some ornaments at one point!

I love the character, the wings and the colours! And it’s most likely a figure I can display at home safely. The previous figure I’ve purchased looks fine from the front, but not so much if you look at it from the back (it has to do with her flying dress…). They won’t show you these types of things from official photos!

I’m starting to think that I have a thing for wings; if she didn’t have them, I wouldn’t look twice at this… T_TJ

Karol in his dress…

… and as a knight. I can’t believe the other knights believed he was one of them.

Here’s the whole video for anyone interested:

There are more in the related section. Judith and Estelle’s videos were very funny as well.

Go Brave Vesperia!