Dream of Butterfly (Day 113)

I'm still working on Persona, but man some of the dungeons in this game are incredibly frustrating. This particular dungeon is incredibly difficult to navigate and the random encounters are punishingly difficult. One group of monsters will afflict your entire team with the Charm status. Due to some glaring oversight by the designers, status effects can be stacked so when they cast the same Charm spell on you again, you get. . ."double charmed." Essentially, it adds another turn to the effect's duration, which means you're essentially helpless while your characters slowly kill each other.

I shouldn't be surprised at this kind of thing because the series is infamous for having frustratingly difficult and unfair encounters. I wrote about a roadblock I encountered in Persona 4 probably about two years ago involving enemies encountered frequently in one of the final dungeons capable of killing your entire party with one spell. As in those games, I'm sure I can bully my way past these roadblocks with a healthy amount of grinding and persona fusing, but it's pretty frustrating in the meantime. I'm going to have to abandon my usual tactic of going through games underleveled for extra challenge--it's just not going to work in this case.

The most frustrating aspect of this dungeon is the fact that it took so long to find my way down to the bottom level for what I could only assume was the final encounter. However, the devs thought it would be a great idea to reward your hard work by instantly teleporting you back to the dungeon's entrance after a short conversation. After doing some research on the internet I came to the conclusion that I'm apparently expected to traverse the entire dungeon once more so I can fight the final boss. That's just a dick move, Atlus.

On the bright side, that does mean I've made some progress--and while I've spent my entire morning (and part of my afternoon) wandering aimlessly around this labyrinth I've gained a great deal of experience. I can only hope that the levels I've gained will make things go more smoothly in subsequent dungeons. At this point I desperately want to advance the plot and fuse a ton of new personas. Nanjo and Hidehiko are presently saddled with a heap of unusable or out of date spells.