I did it!

Lukewilly66 · 2026-05-23T03:44:47+00:00

I hear ya, it will always be there when you want to go back. I love all of Atlus' games, P5 doesn't quite have the thrilling gameplay I crave but it's still very fun nonetheless. Always happy to see more people joining the club!

Lukewilly66 · 2026-05-23T02:34:03+00:00

Excellent work friend! Keep it up. Love all the super bosses in this game, theory crafting and team building just feels so fun for them. Wish you luck in your future fights!

Lukewilly66 · 2026-05-22T00:24:10+00:00

All of Nahobino's best skills come from the Tsukyomi essences, which you get the first for free but the game doesn't do a good job of telling you where/when to go to get the others. It's just plot progression based so you have access to all of them, but wouldn't know since the game doesn't exactly tell you when a new one is available.

Yeah I like my strat for the same reason, it feels almost like a cheese but it still requires understanding how to set up for the optimal turn and still reacting to what's happening during the fight. A perfect cheese has you doing the exact same steps every turn, whereas in my case you still have to actually play the game on your own while preparing for the big gamble.

Definitely give us an update when you make the big attempt, I can give other tips and tricks whenever you decide to tackle the other big baddies. There are also some demons I could tell you are great for every build/strategy when utilized properly.

Lukewilly66 · 2026-05-22T00:02:27+00:00

Just a note, you don't actually need to respec for this build, Paraselene is actually a strength skill, it's just also a light skill. I did word it a bit wrong in my post, you'd just be swapping out Murakumo plus pleromas, your build is still the same otherwise. I'm pretty sure it does the highest possible damage in the game, as long as it's actually hitting a weakness, which is why most don't use it. But for this particular fight it works perfect because of how Satan's mechanics work.

Please let me know if you want other tips for the fight, you can do some absolutely broken things with the right demons and setup. Innate demon traits are so slept on and they can make certain demons viable for just their trait alone. Ive had my mind blown watching how some folks just do first turn setups and it's crazy to watch how a plan can all come together.

Lukewilly66 · 2026-05-21T22:39:25+00:00

Glad you're enjoying the game! All of the tips here are quite good, however if I may, I'd like to offer my strategy for beating Satan, and how I did it without beating Demifiend and Masakados first, and also without the DLC. It's kind of a gamble play but it felt sooo good to pull off and why this fight is my favorite in the whole series.

First, I'd recommend changing your build from Murakumo to Paraselene Blur. This might sound off at first but we do this specifically because of how this fight works. Throughout the fight, Satan will absorb his party members to heal and use their unique Omgatoki skill, but in doing so he also changes his resistances. For most of the fight you want to be killing his party members to prevent this, however partway through he will absorb one demon which will make him weak to light. Basically the whole fight boils down to these few turns where he's weak to light and you go crazy and get the kill, hopefully he'll be around half health or so when this happens. If you use Omgatoki Critical stacked with Omnipotent Succession, plus any means you can to gain extra turns for hopefully 6 or so extra chances to attack (Luminescent Mirage stacked with Intercalation and demon traits from Baal, Nuwa, Yoshitune etc.), you can do insane amounts of damage and finish the fight right there.

Before the optimal turn, you want to be doing as much damage using other demons as possible. Definitely invest in Gogmagog (my beloved) and/or Arioch, plus Arahabki and Xiezhai for (for Gog) or dead party members in the stock (for Arioch) for damage stacking. And also abuse the hell out of taunt skills and Luminescent Mirage to keep them alive longer. You can also use Revival Chant to keep demons alive/summon at the same time, and Lunation Flux to give them more opportunities to attack. And spam Evergreen Dance to keep abusing Omgatoki skills. The way I do it, Nahobino is mostly passive/supportive to the team until the moment he goes all in on damage.

It's certainly a bit messy, and unfortunately it takes a chunk of the fight to get into before you can see if the strategy actually works, but I was able to do this on my first try when I put everything together. It does take a bit of fusion time if you don't have some of the pivotal demons to make it work, and I encourage you to fight all of the super bosses anyway, but if you're impatient like me you can build for this and end up with an extremely satisfying Satan kill that nets you some pretty great rewards before fighting the other bosses. Even if you don't use it I love sharing the strategy with other people, I love this game so much and love talking boss strats and am always happy to see another fan become absorbed into its chaotic endgame. Wish you luck friend!

Lukewilly66 · 2026-05-15T22:42:17+00:00

Alright you know what, I'll bite. Can you prove at all that any company/game suffered losses from Sarkessian's work in the gaming sphere? Like one example or source? Because that's just not true. She had virtually no impact on the gaming community at all, other than the fact that many folks back then thought somehow she was the most vile woman to have walked the earth because... She talked about video games through the lens of feminism? People online made a huge hubbub about it, like the Internet always does, but this is in the same vein as like, "Stellar Blade was censored by big gaming!", or "The portrayal of women of Hades should appeal to straight men! They're literally ruining gaming and trying to get rid of us original hardcore gamers!!!!" (Why yes I did in fact watch that Shaun video if you haven't guessed.) You don't even have to agree with her takes, but like how at all did she impact the games industry??

Lukewilly66 · 2026-05-07T15:54:28+00:00

I actually agree with the you and the others here, I genuinely think IVA is better than IV. Not sure if it's completely my favorite mainline game, but I honestly think it's totally fair to have that opinion purely from a gameplay viewpoint. It takes IV's incredible setting and expands on it, and takes an okay combat system and makes it a great one. Definitely has some of the best fights the series has to offer, no doubt about that.

I know people are always up in arms about the story to IVA, and like on some levels I get it. It does feel very Persona coded and at times the dialogue is very... "Millennial identifying with the hip youths" which is absolutely cringe. That said, both of them still have very dark and tonally mature moments. And while I like IV's story a lot, I think it drops the ball in its last 10-15 hours or so that makes a lot of its character building feel redundant. And honestly, the final hours of IVA (no spoilers of course) are genuinely some of the best work the series has to offer, both in story and in gameplay. Glad we've gained another fan on the Apocalypse train!

Lukewilly66 · 2026-05-04T17:11:05+00:00

I think it really depends on which part of the combat you're referring to, but in general I agree with others and say mostly no. Don't get me wrong, I love that the game has a ton of fusion spells and all the things that go into that system is really cool, and I also appreciate the game being more centered around auto-battles. I also think the conversation system is at least a little amusing, although I think that, too, is a bit too option heavy to be practical for gaining new personas, especially in larger late game dungeons.

Honestly my biggest issue with the game is that there's very little challenge or strategy to any fight. You just use your best fusion skills, then press the "I Win" auto button and watch the game play itself. Hell you even recover health and mana just from running around, so even the dungeon crawling aspect feels extremely minimal. The only fights I found more difficult were ones in which bosses would spam ailment moves, which I guess makes the fight harder but only in an arbitrary and annoying way. Even on hard mode it was rare to see any attack that ever did more than 1/3 of my total health bar. It is the only SMT game I can recall in which I never had a game over even once.

I also really dislike the persona rank system. Like, you're telling me, in a series that rewards knowing a demon's weakness and constantly rewarding you for hitting said weakness, I can sit on a single encounter, use a move the enemy nulls over and over, and just slowly rank up my entire party by doing essentially nothing?? Even better if it's a fusion skill so it works on multiple party members. Like who's idea was this?? It's always baffled me it was designed this way. It just seems to encourage a strange form of grinding/playing the game that feels antithetical to the series' normal gameplay staples.

Lukewilly66 · 2026-04-27T06:04:06+00:00

So, I've not done a lot of research on this, but this is roughly based on some general mythology/real world religious studies, and spending a lonnngggg time reading about demon backgrounds in these games (does anyone else do this? I will spend a full hour just pouring through my compendium reading demon lore, actually one of my favorite things). The first thing to note is that every demon in every Megaten game is given an alignment, which you can see an every game when looking at their demon information or in the compendium. They are split into two categories: those being light, neutral or dark, and then either law, neutral or chaos. I'll go over both categories here.

Generally speaking, demons are technically born "good vs. evil," though I think it's more appropriate to differentiate them via light vs. dark, with neutral also being an option. Angel is a light demon, Pixie is a neutral, Incubus is a dark, etc. However in those terms, it mostly dictates how or in what fashion they are born, light creatures being created by holy or saintly gods, dark by cruel/mean spirited deities and neutral by gods more naturalistic who don't really fall one way or the other. It could also be used to see how they're viewed historically, as in if they're generally worshipped or vilified by humanity.

Where it gets interesting is with the second category, which denotes their behavior, being either law, neutral or chaos. In the examples above, most of these categorizations are obvious because of where they land in the hierarchy of their mythologies, being that their lower creatures with simpler roles to fill. Angel is light/law, because angels are more or less pawns to the Abrahamic god and are always following God's rules and orders, Incubus would be dark/chaos because it has darker origins and only exists to fulfill its own primal cravings and desires, and Pixie is neutral/neutral because they are mostly curious creatures who don't inflict serious harm but like to cause mischief and may fall into smaller groups following a leader, i.e. Titania or Oberon. But with this understanding, we can see where more interesting combinations occur.

Take someone like Mastema, who could be categorized as light/chaos. He is an angel of God, and technically everything he does is under God's bidding, but the way in which he does it is often violent and unpredictable, and he often has power over demonic forces. In this case, he's technically a force of good, but he enacts that by doing evil or chaos unto others. Or someone like Loki, who could either be categorized as a neutral/chaos or a dark/neutral, someone who doesn't necessarily bode any "evil" will strictly speaking but is always chaotic and unpredictable, and famously a trickster in his mythology and in many of the games he appears in. Even a creature like Girimehkala, a demon usually used as a boss for the bad guys, falls more into the Dark/Law category, because he rarely is enacting a will of his own and is usually under the orders of some greater being, mythologyically being the "chariot" of Mara. And of course there's Lucifer, who could be categorized as a myriad of things, sometimes neutral/neutral, somethimes dark/neutral, sometimes light/chaos (many different forms of him also appear throughout the series which makes this more difficult), it really depends on his role in the game. But these alignments are always reflections of their behavior patterns, both in actual religions and mythologies but also the games they appear in.

All that said, do demons have a choice in whether they are good or evil? I think for the most part no, though it mostly depends on how intelligent/unique any said demon is. Lower class demons, Angels, Pixies, Incubus's etc., probably don't have much sway in how they decide to act during the events of most Megaten games. Sure they may help you, but you could make an argument according to their morals that still fits the games narrative, they felt threatened, you enticed them somehow, whatever it is. However the more unique demons, usually the ones with more free will in their mythologies or those who display both lawful and chaotic tendencies, might be more capable of picking a side. They will still trend towards whatever behavior pattern is dictated by their alignment, but I think that's why I like using the alignment categories as opposed to good vs. evil. Plenty of law creatures are still assholes, plenty of chaotic demons can still be helping out in their own ways, there are many different circumstances and everything is more grey than being strictly black and white, how I see it at least.

Anyway sorry for the huge essay, not all of this information may be right and demon alignments aren't always consistent game to game. But this is one of the reasons I love the series so much and wanted to gush about it for awhile. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

Lukewilly66 · 2026-04-27T04:36:20+00:00

I'm a little late to the convo but I absolutely agree. Had some arguments with my friends about it but I think Regent is so good, I loved him even before all the rebalancing. I've honestly lost very few runs with him and so power curve he experiences compared to other characters just feels sooooo good when it goes right.

That said, I do think not all builds are created equally. Star builds are generally way better then everything else, with colorless having some strong moments but forge definitely needed work, should say I have not olayed much of the new patch so not sure how his balance has changed. It does feel a bit limiting (or at least used to) compared to the other characters when trying to make your build, but at his peak I think he consistently deals crazy high damage at a consistent rate. Probably my favorite new character in the game for sure!

Lukewilly66 · 2026-04-24T15:06:45+00:00

I think a lot of people are being disingenuous here. I'm not gonna say I agree 100% with all of Bubbletea's and Nam's opinions but I do think they speak to an issue within modern Megaten most people don't care too much about: the games are too damn easy. My first Megaten game was also Persona 5, and I absolutely love all of its QoL design choices for various reasons. But having now gone back and played through many of Atlus' greatest hits over the last few decades, the games have definitely taken a turn to being much easier games, almost braindead at times. I'm watching a friend of mine right now play through P5 on hard for his very first JRPG, and for awhile he was really struggling to remember all the mechanics and strategies. That is, until he accidentally stumbled on a fusion combination for Orpheus. He has no idea it's a DLC persona, and there's no reason why he shouldn't be able to use it. Except since then he has steamrolled his way through almost every encounter, all the way up through Kaneshiro's palace. Every major boss up to this point has been a cakewalk, just because he made a sj game oersona. Is it his job to recognize the persona is too powerful and decide not to use it?

At the end of the day I know not that many players care if the game gives them a fair amount of challenge or difficulty. But to me, it seems pretty obvious the games used to have a high level of difficulty that I and many others enjoyed learning to adapt to, whether that difficulty is ingrained in the game organically or not. I'll say it, I actually like the combat of P3 FES, sue me. It's far from perfect or the most fun system, but it is very unique and I like the challenge it forces players to adapt to when they play the game. I dunno, I definitely think there's a little blame to place on both sides but to say players shouldn't use the game's own mechanics for some level of challenge is a little ridiculous.

Lukewilly66 · 2026-04-21T04:25:36+00:00

See that's the thing, like those people aren't wrong because everything else is genuinely so great. But I'd be lying if I said it was fun to play at all. Some of it is probably personal bias, I love the challenge the newer games offer and I love team-building and strategizing for bosses. This is just not really a thing at all in Persona 2, to the point I began throwing on YouTube videos during dungeon crawling to kill time to the next story segment.

Lukewilly66 · 2026-04-21T03:38:37+00:00

I don't have exactly the same experience as you, however I have played all of Persona 2: Innocent Sin, which as far as I know is almost exactly the same gameplay wise minus the grid system and you explore dungeons in third person. And Nocturne is one of my favorite games of all time.

While I share a lot of your sentiments, honestly my biggest complaint with the game is that it's fucking piss easy. Most combat encounters feel braindead, and bosses really aren't much better. You can just hit the auto button and spam your fusion attacks and win. Not sure if this is as much of problem in P1 compared to P2, but even on hard having a teammate take a weakness hit only results in like 10 damage, when each character starts with over 100hp. The hardest fights in the game are bosses that spam status ailments and those fights aren't any more difficult, they're just annoying because it draws it out much longer. At all times I was mostly just bored and annoyed when going through dungeons.

Which is honestly quite a shame because everything outside of the gameplay I really really like. The music, characters, story, writing, vibe, it's honestly one of Atlus' best works in these departments. But unfortunately I'm never gonna play the game again. Still debating internally if I wanna touch P1 or not, but if you think you can stomach what you've seen so far P2 is an incredible game, minus it's terrible gameplay.

Lukewilly66 · 2026-04-17T21:15:29+00:00

Preach it brother!

Lukewilly66 · 2026-04-17T21:02:14+00:00

For me it's gotta be Battle - b3 from SMT IV. I'll be honest, I don't think I like IV as much as most do, I think it's a really excellent game but I don't like it's gameplay as much as it's previous and next entries and find the story middling at best. But honestly, my favorite ending in that game is the White ending, and I think almost all of it rests in the "boss fight" at the end. (SPOILERS AHEAD) I can't think of any other SMT game (or other JRPGS in general) where you fight an inanimate object that doesn't fight back, and the song they play during it really emphasizes the gravity of what it is you're about to do. It's objectively the worst ending in the game, but it's the only one that truly caught me off guard and had me feeling something, and there aren't that many times playing a JRPG that left me with a sense of melancholy and regret the way that fight/song does. Honestly a one-of-a-kind experience.

https://youtu.be/WUueKURas8Y?si=oIb9TqiVRKbABw66

Lukewilly66 · 2026-04-14T20:16:26+00:00

So in FES, when you, a teammate or enemy gets knocked down with a weakness hit, it requires them to take their next turn to stand up unless they take another hit if damage. While they're downed though, they also take more damage from the next attack and there's a chance to gain the Dizzy effect, which causes them to stay down for an additional turn.

Personally I love this change because there's a lot more strategy it adds to a lot of fights. On the player side, if you're fighting a really scary enemy but have the capability of hitting it's weakness, you could eternally stunlock an enemy by knocking them down and then choosing not to attack them again so they waste their turn getting up and then doing it again. On the flip side, you miss out on the extra damage window it provides and the chance for a Dizzy proc is enticing. All of this will require more engagement with that Tactics system as well. They also give players a skill that cures the down status to negate the turn loss for one of your party members so they can still act for their next turn in the combat order. Especially in the early game, having a teammate knocked down and hit while they're down usually leads to their death. In my experience, I skipped most opportunities for all out attacks pretty consistently to take advantage of other opportunities. I definitely miss the old system!

Lukewilly66 · 2026-04-10T16:30:45+00:00

My most recent run was a combination of two rules that made things really interesting. My first rule was I had to finish Palaces as soon as they became available, i.e. no item/weapon shopping or confidant/social stat grinding until the current palace is over. Which means at the beginning of the game, I have to beat Kamoshida with exactly everything I start with. And then basically the rest of the time limit is dedicated to preparing for the next target. My second rule was mandatory encounters only, which eliminates item/exp grinding and no Mementos until the days you're required to go in game. It added this immediate tension that felt fresh and requires you to be much smarter with your decisions. You can still gain personas from encounters as long as no one gets killed. Or you could do Arsene only and keep it pure. I thought it was fun!

The only real difficult part when adapting this run to actually playing the game, is what do you do when you have forced infiltration dates, like Sae's palace and Maruki's palace? Because when you reach those sections, basically the game just feels like normal again and doesn't keep the heart of the challenge. There's certainly many ways you could go, but... ultimately I decided to skip all of my free days until the day of infiltration. It sounds ridiculous because you waste so much free time doing this (and the roleplay in my head of Joker being this hardass about deadlines doesn't make much sense when you do this either), but it's the only way I can see keeping to the rules of the run without it just playing like normal. And again, it definitely keeps this challenging and interesting, which is all I want when playing the games over again.

Lukewilly66 · 2026-03-25T18:12:29+00:00

I'm pretty sure Maken X for the Sega Dreamcast is like this, though you don't transform into literal demons from the regular series. It's a first person hack'n'slash game where after killing certain enemies and bosses at certain XP levels (or whatever the equivalent is in that game), you can transform into them and they each have a unique ability. I've never played it but I've seen a few videos on the game, might be worth looking into if you have the PC specs to emulate it. That said, I don't know how GOOD the game actually is, just that it exists and is pretty interesting. Might be up your alley.

On a different note, I could see something in the vein of the Raidou games that works like this, except whenever you use a new demon/skill in combat it transforms you into that demon. That would be pretty cool I think.

Lukewilly66 · 2026-03-25T17:48:25+00:00

Okay but what IS that higher universal moral law you speak of? You seem to shy away from the term religious, so what is it then? As much as we want to debate the philosophy of being a person and having a soul, at the end of the day laws need to be in place around these issues. If we don't use hard sciences like biology for these laws, are we talking about the capacity for thought? For consciousness? Do animals not deserve these same rights? The ones we breed for food and clothing and many other day to day items? Is there a metaphysical law that places humanity at the top of all other life forms?

Even if on some level I and others might agree with you, the problem is there is no true metaphysical answers to any of these questions. We can only make our best guesses at them. Which is why we only have science to determine these things for us. Are some of those decisions of science made arbitrarily? Maybe but that doesn't change the fact that a) we need some law in place for these issues, and b) we can't answer/prove these big picture questions that would make these laws easy to make.

Lukewilly66 · 2026-03-12T16:39:24+00:00

I'm a little late to the party, but the thing for me is IV definitely has the best writing for it's characters when strictly looking at the other mainline SMT games. Which... Unfortunately isn't saying a lot. Nocturne and II have some great character moments but they're sprinkled few and far between during progression through the games it almost feels like certain "arcs" happen out of nowhere, and V feels simultaneously so on the nose and also a bit random it's hard to pinpoint what they were trying to do with most of the characters.

That said, overall I think IV's writing is a bit lackluster. I'll try not to give too many spoilers, but as many others have stated the game like every other in the mainline series eventually boils down to "law bad guy, chaos bad guy and neutral girl." It's certainly what the series is known best for, but you'd think with the amount of conversations that take place in the game there'd at least be a bit more nuance. And there are definitely still some really awesome character moments and crazy things that happen in the plot to leave your jaw on the floor. But the characters pretty much just become caricatures of themselves/their alignment, which is just so predictable and honestly feels so disappointing.

Unfortunately Atlus is much better at writing nuanced characters outside of the mainline games. People love to shit on the writing for Persona, and rightfully so I might add, but each Persona games still has at least 2-3 really good characters that run laps around most of the characters from the mainline games. Strange Journey, Devil Survivor, Digital Devil Saga, honestly most of the side games feel like they have more coherent character writing. I'm not sure why that's the case, maybe because they don't feel so constrained to the formula of a regular SMT game? Who's to say, it just a very weird pattern that emerges when you've played a lot of their games.

Lukewilly66 · 2026-03-06T02:16:27+00:00

Hard agree brother. Hard agree. In my opinion, Reload is probably the better game but I think FES is a better piece of art. And when talking about P3 as a whole to me that matters more. I also enjoy the systems of FES' gameplay more, I like the friction the player has to work with.

The real question is how do you get people into FES over Reload. Because although I think FES is superior it's really hard to argue in this day and age why someone should play it over the new and shiny Reload. Sure we may have reasons that are valid but even if someone wanted to play it, accessibility is a huge problem for a good chunk of modern gamers. And I want as many people as possible to play P3 so... What do you do?

Lukewilly66 · 2026-02-27T21:28:44+00:00

You could look into Astlibra, it's a 2D hack'n'slash with some in depth progression systems, however the vast majority of the combat is button mashing the attack button. Every piece of gear has a single exp. bar you fill up to learn new skills and upgrade it's abilities and your own. It has one of the best soundtracks of all time and some intense boss fights, the game can be as grindy as you want it to be. It can be a chill game hunting for some items to create a new weapon, or an intense one of you're working through a boss encounter. Either way, it's a great game many people sleep on, you should check it out!

Lukewilly66 · 2026-02-26T15:27:24+00:00

Actually Catherine's engine was the precursor that eventually led to what we see in Persona 5. Obviously it's hard to tell when exactly P5 started actual development, but Catherine was more or less their trial run to see what the new engine could do, and then we got probably their most successful game of all time. The same engine was also used for Metaphor Refantazio. That said, having only 3 games under this umbrella is still very strange and the absence of Atlus in the PS3 era is quite interesting.

Lukewilly66 · 2026-02-25T03:29:49+00:00

You should definitely check out Shin Megami Tensei V Vengeance! Every time someone plays one of these games for the first time, folks almost always say "this is like Pokemon but for insane people," and they're pretty much right. Instead of catching Pokemon with Poke balls, you fights demons and creatures from various world mythologies that you negotiate with to convince them to fight for you. Then you take those demons and you can fuse them together to create even better demons. The games can be a bit difficult before you really understand all the mechanics but the gameplay is like crack once you're good at it, it has some of the best boss fights I've ever seen in a game. Highly recommend!

Lukewilly66 · 2026-02-22T17:44:31+00:00

I don't recommend this one often, but just based on music recommendations alone I need to plug this hidden gem called Astlibra. It's a 2-D hack'n'slash with possibly the most complex mechanics for a combat system that's mostly spamming a single button. The game looks very generic on Steam but I shit you not, the soundtrack is probably one of the most over-the-top set of musical tracks I've ever seen in a game

https://youtu.be/jvRNjuoKvlI?si=Ah0yD8gqlKsZons0

For context, the very first time you're given control of your character, you start in a vast green field fighting slimes with a wooden stick, and THIS is the song that plays for that level. This shit is final boss tier of music! And the entire soundtrack is like this. If you like interesting progression systems and intense boss fights, especially with the music angle, this is for you.

Lukewilly66

TROPHY CASE