Keeping your initial Persona around in the Persona games

[DarklordKyo]

I'm a stickler for canon, I try to stick to what might have canonically happened in games where it's applicable. Unfortunately for me in that regard, spinoffs of the Persona series suggest that the protagonists use their initial Personas all throughout their adventures (like how, in Persona 4 Arena, Yu uses Izanagi exclusively).

I've heard there are players who are able to min-max things so they can keep Izanagi, Orpheus, Arsene, etc. around for the entire game, anyone have any tips on doing so?

 

[shrekfan246]

You can, but it's not something I'd recommend on your first play-through or without having a guide on hand. I don't think Persona 3 or 4 have the mechanic that 5 eventually unlocks which allows you to sacrifice Personae to grant experience to other ones, which makes them require significantly more grinding in order to level up the MC's Persona. I'm also not sure how stat growth works in the two older games.

I actually think that in the latter half of Persona 5 it's doable, if you have the patience and diligence to do a bit of grinding for monsters/money, but even in that one it's not something I'd recommend doing throughout the course of the normal gameplay, as much as I love Arsene's design.

 

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

I don't think you can keep Arsene initially since you are forced to put him into your first fusion along with the Pixie you catch in the tutorial.

You can call him back with the compendium of course, but past Level 12ish he stops being particularly useful. I've never been able to create him through fusion, and you'd need to sacrifice a lot of other Personas to get him up in levels/give him good endgame skills. I do remember seeing a video of someone creating a Level 99 Arsene, but again more trouble than it's worth.

Nice to see a Persona thread though; I'm currently trying to take down the NG+ boss.

 

[DarklordKyo]

I don't think you can keep Arsene initially since you are forced to put him into your first fusion along with the Pixie you catch in the tutorial.

You can call him back with the compendium of course, but past Level 12ish he stops being particularly useful. I've never been able to create him through fusion, and you'd need to sacrifice a lot of other Personas to get him up in levels/give him good endgame skills. I do remember seeing a video of someone creating a Level 99 Arsene, but again more trouble than it's worth.

Nice to see a Persona thread though; I'm currently trying to take down the NG+ boss.

Actually, it's apparently possible to do so without Arsene. Don't quite remember how, but you apparently can fulfil that tutorual without usung Arsene as a component.

Besides, I'm playing P3 right npw, not P5.

 

[DarklordKyo]

In P3P I used cheat engine to keep the Slime persona relevant throughout my playthrough

Fun was had

 

[balladbird]

If you're feeling sentimental it's certainly possible to keep him in your party, but even if you grind his levels his stats and skills won't be particularly viable, so ever having him equipped at a story-relevant time would be difficult. I know P3's later games had a variation on the starting persona that was powered up, and SMT: Nocturne eventually rewarded you for keeping your starting pixie in your party, but those are the only examples I can think of of the mechanics nodding to canon.

 

[Bobular]

I was able to keep Izanagi through to about half way through P4, but Orpheus and Arsene I lost in the first dungeons. I would like to see Persona 6 have a system where the main characters starting persona is tied to them and can be relevant throughout the game, maybe have the persona its self be relevant to the story.

 

[DeadProxy]

I've put over 300 hours into P5, and can tell you that it just isn't feasible to do it on a new game run.

Most likely you will lose Arsene to your first fusion, and even if not, he stops learning things by level 10 or something and you have no way to fix that for a number of in game months on your first playthrough. Personas also seem to take more exp to level up than you, so you'll either grind extra hard or something else that is also locked behind a progression wall.

Improving Arsene is more of a late game chore you can give yourself for a ng+ run. To actually give a tip though, the "best" way is feeding 1 persona to another for an exp boost, and look at their stats. You can see exactly what gains you get from the boost before it is applied, so you can cancel the boost if you don't get the stat gains you want. You can get between 1 and 3 points per level. This can get expensive as hell eventually, since you can only improve a persona once a day, so you need to delete the newly improved thing AFTER you update it in the compendium, then pay to put it back in your party and repeat as needed. You will need millions to do these things for high level stuff.

 

[Sleepy Sol]

It takes far too much effort for most to make your initial persona viable in P3-5.

It sucks, but you're just going to have an easier time progressing fusing them off. In 3 and 4 though, both initial personas have high-leveled versions that are pretty good and fun to mess with, but becoming capable of fusing them might mean moving to a NG+ cycle or expending a lot of effort grinding in the endgame (not to mention obtaining the materials to fuse them in the first place). Ergo, they're kind of in the same situation as Arsene.

 

[Aeshi]

Starter Personas have always gotten a raw deal in my eyes. For something that's supposed to be the purest manifestation of your heart, you sure seem to ditch them pretty quick in favour of something you made by stapling a pixie to a rotten horse.