I developed a few new social links in Persona 3 today, including the swim club at the school, the student council, and an MMORPG player. I also managed to finally advance my Academics stat one rank, which will come in important since you need a decent academics skill for the exams coming up.

I started getting requests from Elizabeth in the Velvet Room, usually to find a certain type of item or use a certain skill, but one of them involved taking her on a ‘date’ to the mall. Some of her requests are timed, and one wants an item from the 16th floor of Tartarus. I was only up to floor 4 by this point, so I blitzed up a whole bunch of floors in a fairly short time, and fortunately the enemies don’t get too tough too quickly.

The only real trouble was on floor 10, where a boss fight was blocking the way. They were an extremely annoying fight because even after figuring out their weakness, I failed the fight four times in a row. After a perfect opening round and all-out-attack, they then proceed to either focus on me and kill me off in a single round, or hit everyone with their elemental weaknesses and I never got another chance at control (I didn’t have a suitable counter-persona that still let me hit their weakness yet), or my first attack missed and I was dead before I got another turn, or they knock out a party member and send me into a constantly-recovering death spiral, or…

It wasn’t until I finally changed tactics and decided to try and keep two of them knocked down instead of going for an all-out attack that I finally succeeded, and even then it took three more tries before it worked, due to misses leading to the above scenarios again. Oh well, I got them in the end and I’m on floor 11 now with three or four more days before the deadline, so I should be in good shape.

And it turns out Japan has their own sleazy shopping network hosts: