Back in Persona 3, I farmed Tartarus a bit more for exp and finally got a few of the ice immunity items. With them, and a bunch of healing items picked up at the antique store, I was finally ready to take on The Reaper.

It turned out to be rather anti-climactic, though. I used a strategy found on some forums where I used Thunder Reign to keep him vulnerable to criticals, put crit rate up weapons on everyone else, and told them to knock him down. That caused the Reaper to keep losing his turn getting back up again while we got in the occasional all-out attack. There was one turn where I missed with Thunder Reign, but Akihiko still managed to crit him that turn. I never even had to use a single item in the battle.

And then I realized that I hadn’t actually accepted the request to kill him, so he hadn’t dropped the item I needed. Whoops. I had to do the fight over again, but this time it didn’t go as smoothly since Yukari kept attacking when she should have been healing, as I’d set her to Heal/Support, and that screwed up the attempts to keep him knocked down. By the time she’d stopped doing that, the Reaper was second in the combat order and Thunder Reign wouldn’t help since it would wear off immediately.

After that the battle was just a matter of healing and reviving as necessary (a Megidola would often kill Yukari even at full health, or the occasional light/dark spell would hit), and attacking with high-damage spells (Ragnarok seemed best) when the opportunity arose. I used a handful of items this time (mainly Bead Chains and Balms of Life), but still had plenty left over. There was one annoying stretch near the end of the fight where he kept using AE attack after AE attack though, and I just had to keep wasting Bead Chain after Bead Chain since Yukari was dead at the time.

That opened up Monad, which is another set of floors much like Tartarus, but with tougher enemies. It’s worth it though, since they give out a lot more experience as well, so this is where I’ll be grinding from now on. I went from level 83 to 88 just going through the first few floors, and the rest of the group gained a bunch as well.

I’ll have plenty of time to grind too, since there’s still 18 days left until the final battle.