Persona 3 FES Endurance Run (Part 8-9)

 I've been putting off this update for a while now, and to be honest I have no idea why. It's now been about a week since Part 8 happened, and three days since Part 9, so my mind might not fully remember everything that happened or it's exact chronology. With that out of the way, here I go!

I feel since S. Links all happen in any order you want (to a certain extent), it's okay to lump them all together here. We had lost contact with Yuko for about three months of game-time, not aware of why this was happening. We had reversed our link with her Kendo Team buddy and I kept refusing to un-reverse it, while Levi kept telling me to. Eventually, I finally reversed it, to find that was the reason Yuko wasn't talking to us, as shown by the fact that she wanted to hang out with us the next day. So, we got her to Rank 9. Another person who's now at Rank 9 is Tanaka. It came as a huge shock to us, because we hadn't been paying attention to his rank, but we never get the "Maybe you'll be closer soon" when hanging with him so it goes pretty quick.

The King of Gourmet seems to be a lot more mischievous character than we had last suspected. He has formed some sort of cult (hence his "King" title). He believes that the world will end soon, and everybody who believes him will go to the afterlife, and get brand new bodies. This seems to be based off his insecurity about his fat-ass body. He offered to allow us in for a measly 100,000 yens, but sadly there wasn't even an option to say yes.

We also got our Charm to full and acquired the option to hang out with Yukari. This is a great thing. The very first time we hung out with her she invited us to the roof of the school, and it's awesome! So far, all we've done is talk about dead parents, but I'm sure it'll heat up soon.

There are also some minor characters we have hung out with once each. Both are in the student council. There's this boy who very much looked like a nazi. I don't even remember what he said to us because all I could think of was how much of a nazi he looked like. I was like, "daaaaaaaaaaaaamn." The other student council member we hung out with was a shy girl who makes a cameo in Persona 4. We walked her home and nothing really happened, but she has a phobia of guys, which we'll hopefully have to solve.

This is the part where I talk about fighting. I like to split up the fighting and the story bits because if I combine them it ends up being just a summary of what we did, with no real commentary. I've also decided it wold be a good idea to grind on the dungeons a bit more, so we don't die on bosses as often, which will lead to more game-time spent fighting, meaning updates with less other things, considering we can spend over an hour of any given session just fighting. And that's no fun to talk about. I've also been forcing us to take breaks a lot more frequently due to the monotony of the the fighting. But it's not all bad! Here's what happened last week in terms of fighting!

We have been using the Mitsuru/Yukari/Robot Lady party for a while now, so Junpei and Akihiko have become under-leveled almost to the point of usefulness. If anyone shall be replaced soon, it would be Mitsuru, because her constant Marin Karin/Tentarafoo-ing everything is kind of annoying. She does have Diarama though, which is very helpful. We've passed the one-hundred floor mark now, which is a whole lot of floors. The weirdest thing that happened was we found a six-shooter for Aigis, which the game described as a gun that transforms into six different guns. Either this is really clever or just some bad translation.

We fused some guys, most memorably a creepy lion man called Shiisaa who we kind of fused as a joke. He ended up being really useful against the next mid-boss though, because he was resistant to ice. We used the dog against that boss too, because he casts fire without being weak to ice. As for the main boss, because of our grinding, we managed to beat it relatively easily.

As for the actual story, a decent amount of things have happened. Akihiko managed to convince Shinji to join our group, by telling him that we have a little kid aboard, which is kind of messed up. Also, there's a little kid on our team now by the way, which is also kind of messed up. I'm not looking forward to seeing him blow his brains out. That is, if we ever end up using him.
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Junpei started talking to the evil red-haired girl (who no-one knows is evil yet) and told her he was the leader, trying to impress her. She took this knowledge and kidnapped him on the day of the ordeal, thinking he had the power to call of our plan. Obviously, it was heartbreaking fighting an ordeal boss without our level 16 Junpei (compared to our level of 32).

For the ordeal boss, we had the option to pick Shinji and/or Ken, but we stuck to our regular group of misfits. It went pretty well, considering we brought two party members who are weak to electric to a battle against an electricity-based boss. We had two personas who were resistant to electricity, so we ended up being a healer, because Yukari was down half the time. About halfway through, the boss got into a routine of charging for three turns before attacking, meaning we had one turn to heal everyone up, and two turns to attack and de-buff. It was the most satisfying fight yet, because we felt in control the whole way through.

We rescued Junpei and brought Chidori (the red-haired girl) to the hospital, where we tried to question her, to no avail. Mitsuru took away her evoker, which made her very sad. Eventually, after like a week, something actually happened when her persona tried to kill her. Shinji saved her by giving her pills called suppressants, and told us that everyone in Strega (evil persona users?) had to use these to keep their personae at bay. Apparently, he uses them too, so maybe he was in Strega too? This is the point where we stopped, so I'm not even sure.

Man, that was a long post. We're almost forty hours in now, and are into a routine of sorts. Everyone keeps saying there's only four shadows, but we're sure there has to be something after that, considering we have only been through five months so far.