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Walkthroughs and similar

Persona 1 wikidot

Very old and not entirely finished but a very useful resource and one that I find indispensable myself. Contains a walkthrough alongside other very valuable information.

Notable Pages:

Recruiting Reiji - If you want to use Reiji as your 5th Sebec party member make sure to follow this. He's essentially a secret party member and has a somewhat esoteric unlock method.

Intro to demon contact - Worth reading in full but the 3rd chart underneath the "Matching the characters' conversation techniques and the demons' personality" header is worth having on hand while playing for the sake of easy spell card negotiation.

All the equipment pages but especially the Weapons one - The equipment pages list where you get equipment and who uses it. Shops don't update with new equipment, so you're stuck with whatever new shops carry. You can make do with just what you can purchase in terms of armor but in terms of weapons, especially the melee ones after a certain point you need to either use the casino or itemize max rank personas in the velvet room to get new weapons.

Skill tablets - List of purchasable single use items that can be used in battle to use a spell, or added as an item in fusion if a totem is not being used to add an extra spell of the player choosing that a given persona can get upon ranking up.

Gamefaqs Guide

I have not used this myself but a more in depth alternative to the wikidot walkthroughs and guides, make sure you are looking at the posts under the "Shin Megami Tensei: Persona" heading and not the "Revelations Persona" heading

Kouryakutsushin Maps

Japanese site so i'd highly recommend viewing it on either a browser that can translate full pages or with an extension that can do so. Maps for the full game. I consider this absolutely indispensable resource for some of the larger dungeons- particularly the one in the black market and after.

FAQS

Q: What do I play first, Sebec route or Snow Queen Quest?

A: Sebec is the main story and core game experience, where as SQQ is intended as a more condensed, more difficult side story for those who really want to challenge themselves. I HIGHLY recommenced playing Sebec first, and would recommend considering swapping to emulator for SQQ if playing on actual hardware because of the difficulty present in SQQ.

Q: Does this game have multiple endings (outside of the distinction between Sebec/SQQ)?

A: Both Sebec and SQQ have a bad ending Sebec's ending depends on the players answers to Mai's questions when encountering her in the Lost Forest. Not answering correctly results in the bad end and loses the player access to multiple of the late game dungeons. I'd highly recommend pulling up a guide at that point even if not otherwise using one to ensure you answer correctly. If you fight a boss after talking to Mai, that means you've locked yourself into the bad ending, and need to restart from your last save if you want to avoid that. SQQ's ending depends on if the player has 10 or more mirror shards before fighting the boss in the courtyard. If the player has less then ten they get the bad ending and lose access to the final dungeon of the route. I'd recommend having a guide pulled up to ensure you grab all the mirrorshards you can.

Both of the bad endings are generally just rather abrupt premature stopping points so i'd recommend aiming for the good endings on your files and watching the bad endings on youtube later if you're curious.

Q: Can I speed up the battle animations at all? Or battles in general?

A: Hitting start will swap the animations to quick mode until either you swap it back manually with start, or an in battle cutscene plays. You can swap back to quick animations anytime outside of cutscenes. Auto mode can help speed up battles and i'd recommend starting to utilize it once you feel like you've gotten your bearings with the system. On emulator I also personally like having a speed up button bound to somewhere on my controller or keyboard to help further speed things up sometimes.

Q: When should I start swapping out Persona's.

A: I think you can get pretty far through the game with just the base personas, I tend to start swapping out my party personas around the sewers/black market area of the game. Nanjo is a good candidate for an early persona swap though because Aizen Myouou is mediocre until you hit max rank. You do definitely need to swap out your personas as you progress and but it's not necessarily super frequently. Generally if a party member feels like they're under-preforming and they're the same level as anyone else and have a max rank persona then I'd start looking into fusing a new one for them.

Q: One or more of my party members are way over/under leveled compared to the rest of the party. Why is this?

A: Experience points in Persona 1 are distributed based on how much a given party member contributes to a battle, both in terms of damage but also stuff like support moves such as healing or buffs/debuff spells. Generally this tends to lead to situations where Maki as the main cleric gets all the exp, or Mark having the most limited reach with his weapons gets shafted in terms of exp division. If a party member is falling behind in terms of level an easy way to catch them up is to fight some of the easier encounters relative to your level and have the party member needing to level up do all the damage and guard/heal them with your other party members until theyre caught up. If they're only a few levels under the rest of the party this doesn't take a ton of encounters to get them caught up.

Q: What causes personas to rank up?

A: Persona's rise in rank depending on the amount of times they are invoked in battle. Persona's rank rises according to the amount of total invocations used on a persona without getting into some of the minutia of mechanics you need rough around 100-200 invocations to reach the max rank of 8, with you needing less invocations if a characters level is significantly higher then a given personas. A persona invocation counts as a given persona using any spell, regardless of if it's necessarily "successful" or not. For example hitting an enemy with a spell it's immune to still counts as an invocation because the persona was invoked to use the skill, even if the spell didn't do anything.

Q: During SQQ, what order should I challenge the towers

A: On your first playthrough i'd highly recommend doing them in ascending difficulty, so Hypnos, then Nemesis, then Thanatos. This means you lose out on the majority of the ultimate personas, but I think it's the best order in terms of narrative and game play pacing for a first experience, and there's still other good high level personas you can use in substitution for the other party members ultimate personas.

Tips and Tricks

Encounter rate: this is something that drives alot of people away from the game but you can lower it using either the "clean salt" item or the "estoma" skill. The level 17 persona Shouki is the first demon the player can fuse that learns estoma naturally, but if you use the clean salt item in fusion you can add estoma to that persona's set of skills it gains upon ranking up.

Using Moon Phase inheritance to gain powerful skills: Twitter graphic about a savescum method to get a powerful skill onto a persona my utilizing the way moon phases effect fusion. Of note to this is that it only takes 1 invocation of a persona for it to rank up.

Gem/Totem fusion: When you try and fuse a persona of any given arcana, you can use a gem as your fusion item to move up and down the list of personas when using the gems you can receive from demon negotiation.

If using a totem in fusion, one also only needs the spell cards to fuse something in the same arcana as the resulting totem persona. ie: if someone wanted to use Genbu, they would need the black tablet artifact to use in the fusion of two spell cards that would result in a temperance persona.

Using Mediarama: Mediarama does a significant amount more healing then one would expect from a mid-tier spell in this, enough that you can just use Mediarama the rest of the game once you get access to it.

Buff/Debuff stacking: Unlike more modern mainline smt games, moves that raise and lower stats can be stacked up to 3 times. Access to Tarunda and Mediarama relatively early on has made the level 18 persona Phaleg a fan favourite to take through the game into the end. I'd highly recommend grabbing Phaleg if you can he's been indispensable in my playthroughs.

Emulator visual: Idk where else to put this but if you want to get rid of the white lines around the character portraits that show up in the default ppsspp settings go to game settings> texture filtering> and change that from auto to nearest