Persona 3 FES Endurance Run (Part 17)

 Hello, and welcome to Part 17 of this here Endurance Run. Our last session really re-invigorated my wanting to play Persona 3, which is why we have a new update so quickly. It's also why this is such a substantial update, because we played for about four hours. About two of those were grinding, but there were still Social Links!

We started by opening our S. Link tab on the pause screen, and looking up how many times we had S. Linked with people in total. It turns out it's about 117 times. 117 times seeing the card show up and having the screen say "I am thou, and thou art I." Also, after 117 times, our character is still surprised enough to be taken back and have a question mark appear above his head every single time. I mean, come on, you should be used to this by now!

One thing that I have become used to now is teenagers shooting themselves in the head. The fact that this happened every time anyone does a spell has really acclimatized me to watching teen suicide. I find this rather disturbing, but kind of funny at the same time. I know they are not really killing themselves, but at the start of the game it really creeped me out whenever they did it, but now it's completely normal to see fragments of a dude's soul fly out of his head as his eyes go dead and his head flies back. Yukari even just sticks it straight between her eyes! She just doesn't give a shit!

Sorry about that tangent, I was going to talk about S. Linking now. The first thing that happened as soon as we started the game was Yukari's persona evolved. She found the full un-doctored video her dad wanted to give her that reveals he was a good guy all along! And he warns us that you should definitely not under any circumstances kill any of the Shadows that were let loose. Whoops. Anyways, her Persona changed from a sweet bull head into some weird helmet thing. The only evolution that has actually made the Persona look cooler so far is Akihiko's, because his new Persona has a guy riding in his chest, and is also carrying the entire world in one hand.

Fuck, I was going to talk about S. Linking. We got to Rank 10 with Yukari! This game continues to be a shit-ton more explicit than Persona 4, with her literally saying, "I hope no one hears me scream." Yeah. What the fuck. She gave us a "strap", which seemed like a complete non-sequitur until she revealed that it was her strap for her cellphone. Apparently, she likes to talk to the little figure attached to it, but now she has friends so she thinks that we could get more use out of it (which is kind of a dick implication). Fuuka continues to be a terrible cook, Chihiro continues to be a shy chick, Dying Guy continues to die, and Rival Athlete man continues to eat too much food. Oh, and Drunk Monk continues to be completely uninteresting and very slow because we don't have a single Persona of the Tower arcana.

Speaking of drinking, a new kid joined our class! Apparently, he's an exchange student who was living in America for a bit. He immediately started the day by asking out Aigis in the middle of class. The teacher introduced him, and he was going to his seat, when he just started talking to Aigis for two minutes. I mean, come on! You're standing in the middle of the classroom during class asking a girl out! Have some class! Aigis responded by telling him that she thought he was "dangerous", and she looked fucking pissed so I guess she doesn't like him very much. I don't really either, because all he's done so far is ask out every single girl in the school. All of them. It's pretty nuts.

We also had another dream where we talked to Igor, and he was all like, "Hey, remember that thing you signed?" and we were all like, "Yes" and he was like, "Okay." Junpei went to visit Chidori again and she told him to get the fuck out and everyone was confused.

Well, Tartarus is back, and apparently what we thought was the top turned out not to be as someone just kind of stuck some more stairs there and tried to pretend they were there the whole time. The new block is really awesome because the floor is all disco-y and the stairs are rainbow-coloured. They even added an extra back-beat to the fighting music to make it funkier. We fought our way up to the mid-bosses who are really hard. We've fused some pretty damn good guys right now, but this boss is still kicking our ass, mainly because two of our main party members are weak to electricity, which is what it casts. We hit a complete brick wall trying to defeat this guy, so we decided to try and level up some of our guys we've completely forgot about.

We decided to level up Akihiko (because he's Null to electricity) and Koromaru (because he's cool(also we re-named him Dogmund because it's an awesome name)) but obviously left Junpei back at level 17 because it's way funnier that way. Akihiko was level 23, while Dogmund was around 37. We spent like two hours grinding them through the latest bits of Tartarus, so now they're close to being good enough, but not quite. We're thinking of replacing Aigis with Akihiko in the long run, but we really like the way she shoots guns at bitches, so we're probably going to put her back in after this boss fight.

All those deaths were our first in a while, which still makes me pretty happy. We have now played 56 hours (I think we're playing this quite slowly) and we're probably going to spend at least another hour next time grinding with Akihiko and Dogmund. If anyone has any advice for that boss, I'd love to hear it though! See you guys next time!