Persona 2: EP regenerates your SP (MP) slowly as you move around, and at the beginning of the game it’s almost like your SP fully regens after battle. It’s not until you start using Baofu (who does not put points into his magic stat) that you really notice it’s only regenerating over time. It’s really frustrating that this game has a very heavy focus on magic and the only characters that will dump points into TEC (Magic) are Maya (because you distribute her points) and Elly. Everyone else puts focus on things like STR or AGI, which is just like, useless when you summon your Persona in damn near every single battle. You can try to correct this by equipping characters with Persona that award a TEC bonus on level-up, TEC sources, or TEC incense, but those are primarily later game solutions and not really the same as being able to dump 3 points into TEC per level-up.
Left is Maya, whose points you distribute, and right is Baofu, one of your party members but whose points you don’t touch. He distributes his points sort of evenly (Balance type)
except he ignores fucking TEC! Why!? (I’m guessing the canon explanation is that “everybody in your party are normal people and the only person with a big interest in the occult is Elly, so it only makes sense for her to dump her points into magic” but that doesn’t work too well in your game where everybody is casting all of the time)
This feels like a holdover from Shin Megami Tensei if…, like Atlus R&D1 never got comfortable with how you balance out permanent human party members vs a constantly rotating roster with the only constant being the hero. In SMTif…, you answer a questionnaire at the beginning that determines your initial build type (and I believe it also affects the build of your partner?) and they’re just basic things like STR type, SPD type, MAG type, LUK type, Balance type, but when you go and play things like Persona 2 or even Digital Devil Saga, you notice that most of these characters are following the same build types established in if…, except most of these build types aren’t suited for Persona 2 or DDS (SMTif… has 2 human party characters (including the hero), and the rest of your party is filled out with demons, so even if you have a really shitty build, it’s really easy to compensate with your constantly rotating party of demons who outclass the protagonist anyway, but Persona 2 are all human characters with predefined stat builds and the big focus is Magic (Always Be Casting) but only two characters are suited for that at all and there’s no good method of changing the direction of these builds that doesn’t cost way more time than it’s worth)
When people say Persona 2 is a long game it’s actually just this shit that you’re going to be spending time on if you want to bother at all. This goddamn asshole can only be acquired via using a low-level Persona, getting a Mutation, and then getting the mutation modification ability from that Mutation (it’s usually the incredibly frustrating “Parameters increased”). That can take however long the game decides it wants to take, it might take less time if you have Mutation Gear equipped, but you wouldn’t have that this early.
You need to fill this shrine up with 10,000 yen if you want to get a strong Persona later on and this is your only chance, but you only insert 100 yen at a time. Ughh.
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