It was finally time for the endgame in Persona 3, and I loaded up my party with Yukari, Junpei, and Aigis and headed back up to the top of Tartarus. Spoilers, duh:
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I hurried through remaining days in Persona 3, mainly working on finishing off the social links I could and a last few weapon fusions. I maxed out the link with Bebe; I didn’t really want to help him sew a kimono, but his was the only one I had a chance at maxing out, and I had to abandon the links with Mitsuru, Chihiro, and Aigis. I was a total of 19 ranks short, out of about 220 total, but I screwed them up early on by spending too many school days working on non-school links when I could have left those for holidays instead.

With Bebe maxed I could get the Yurlungur persona, and I realized that I was also still missing Masakado, and with them the compendium is now 97% complete, and that’s as far as it’s going this time. I also couldn’t do any more of Elizabeth’s quests, since the only ones left are the joint skill ones, and I can’t get past the current one because I can’t make Metatron.

I popped back into Monad for one last grind session to earn cash, since that carries over to a New Game+, but I’ve saved on the day before the final battle, and that should only take one more day to go through.

I found some lists of good fusions in various forums and FAQs, but most take a lot of time, effort, and money in merging a whole lot of steps together, often requiring low-chance combinations that you have to keep retrying over and over and over. So, I just put together a good Helel one, with Victory Cry and Spell Master.

That’s pretty powerful as it is, though; when I also have the Satan persona around, I can cast the Armageddon spell that does 9999 damage to all enemies, which is good enough to kill them all but one special one (which I can’t fight on the first playthrough anyway). Normally Armageddon has a mana cost equal to your entire mana pool, but Victory Cry replenishes all of my health and mana after each fight, so I can keep casting it in every fight. And Spell Master halves the mana cost, so I could spend some mana out of combat and still be able to cast it in the next fight. So, yeah, I’m pretty much unstoppable now.

I also got tired of farming heart items from Messiah, since I kept getting the same ones, but I did at least get one Omnipotent Orb out of him, which blocks all physical and magic damage. Which isn’t quite full invulnerability since I can still take ‘almighty’ damage, but it’s not like they’re going to get a turn to attack after Armageddon…

Anyway, I could continue futzing around with personas for ages. Tomorrow, I start heading for the endgame in earnest. Oh, and apparently Chidori is alive again now, but has amnesia. Original!

I finished off the last grinding session in Monad, which got my character up to level 93. After that I maxed three social links in quick succession: the photography club, the rival athlete, and Fuuka. Maxing the social links with the girls always seems to wind up in their bedrooms…

Anyways, with that I was now able to fuse more personas, and got the compendium up to 96% complete. That’s about as good as it’s going to get this run, unless I can max out more social links before the end of the game, but that looks unlikely at this point. Most of these personas are still fairly basic, too; I need to redo them properly in order to get better combinations of skills on them, but that’ll take more time and money.

One of the personas I could finally make was Messiah, and I spent a while farming his heart items, since he produces good pieces of armour. And I found it way too amusing that I managed to fuse the Die For Me! skill onto him as part of the preparation for heart piece farming…