Persona 3 Portable – General Gameplay Tips for New Players

General tips to get better at the game.

Beginners Tips

All credit goes to y0shi!

Introduction

Persona 3 is the hardest game in the entire series by far. Both in managing your time on the overworld and in the dungeons. Here are some general gameplay tips for newcomers from someone who replayed these games more than he sould.

Managing Your Time

You are going to be spending your time on the overworld mostly doing one two things. Those being:

• Raising social stats.
• Working on your social links.

General way you should be tackleing these task are simple: Always spend your time with a available confidant in the mornings and after school. Spend most of your night raising Social Stats (There are some social links only available in the night like Tanaka), but there aren’t many night social links so i would advise saving them for later in the game where you will have nothing at night since you should bea able to max out your social stats about 60% into the game.

Raising Social Stats

There are a lot of different ways to raise your social stats like part time jobs, studying exc. But only a few of them are worth spending a time slot. The best way to raise your social stats by far is the Arcade in Paulownia Mall which you can access. Here is the games you can play to raise your stats:

• Horror House (costs 3.000 yen to play) = This greatly increases your courage.
• Quiz Game (Costs 2.000 yen to play) = This greatly increases your intelligence.
• Print Club (Costs 1.500 yen to play) = This greatly increases your charm.

These cost a lot of money for early game so farm money on Tartarus and sell unused items.

There are also ways to raise social stats without spending a time slot. Most noticable being The Nurse’s ofice. Whenever you spend time at Tartarus there is a chance of you becoming tired. Whenever that happens visit the Nurse’s office and choose ”Drink it” when asked. This will raise your courage without spending a time slot. The other way of gaining social stats without spening time is though classroom questions. Always look the answers up when asked. Answering correctly will raise your charm.

Ranking Up Social Links

Always equip a persona from the same arcana as the person you are spending time with. This will greatly boost the points you get from correct answers. If you are early in the game and have no personas from the same arcana you should still spend time with that social link because the first rank up requires no points while the 2nd and 3rd rank up requires little to no points so you can still rank them up. After a certian point in the game (about 1 month in) you will get access to the compedium which you can summon personas from. This will make it easier for you to get the persona you need for that arcana.

Combat

You should ideally clear Tartarus in a single night so you can have more time spend on Social Stats and Social links. So here is some tips to maximize your combat abilities.

• Always fuse for a better persona. If you aren’t on the end game fusing new personas is the best way to get stronger. Don’t save your current persona, it’s best to just fuse it to get a new one 90% of the time. If you really don’t want to lose your current persona just save it to the compendium so you can take it out later. Physical attack are a lot weaker in this game since its divided into 3 catagories. (Physical attacks were pretty much busted in Persona 4 and Persona 5) So don’t rely on physical personas too much also fuse magic personas.
• Always target weaknesses. Yeah this one is obvious. But one mistake i always did was not using magic attacks in order to ”save mp”. This leads to you not finishing the encounter in 1 turn and probably getting hit which leads to you using healing skills which costed more than than magic attack thus making you lose more mp at the end.
• Best party members to use are: Aigis (best physical attacker + really good tank against physical) also (Aigis best character in the game it’s not open for devate, have a nice day).

Akihiko (solid elemental and physical attacks + support skills what else do you need).

Yukari (for heals). Ken is also good for healing + he got some insa kill skills but i still prefer Yukari. Mitsuru isn’t utterly garbage in this game because you can control her moves this time so she is also a good pick.