Part 237: Yukari in P3P

Welcome to the Velvet Room: That Girl's A Real Cow

Much as with The Answer, I'm going to occasionally post about game mechanics alone with witty titles. Tonight's discussion will mainly focus on Yukari and of course Io (hence the title).

So, may I first point out that technically the skill list OFS posted isn't quite right because in P3P Yukari actually gets Diarahan at 52 and not 57 (though there's still issues with long spans where you don't get skills that plague Yukari).

With that out of the way, let's talk about how Yukari stacks up stat-wise first.

Physical Offense: Worst. Yukari's got the worst strength stat for her level of any ally and it'll show when you are reduced to Attacking with her. Her bows are Pierce type (more useful when your MC is stuck with Slash for the whole game) but she's definitely the weakest at normal attacks of the party members with that attack type.

Magical Offense: Great. Yukari's actually got the highest Magic stat of any party member, but as noted her lack of passives that improve elemental damage (and another skill the absolute best magic attacker has) hamper her. Still, in the mid-game she's a very solid magical attacker.

Defense: Average. Yukari's Endurance is very middle of the road, she doesn't particularly take more or less damage than most of the party. However...

HP: Low. Yukari tends to have noticeably less health than other party members of her level, so she's still less able to absorb damage than them.

SP: Great. Yukari makes up for having poor HP for her level by having a lot of SP. SP is a lot more expensive to recover at the clock and converts very favorably to HP with healing magic so having a strong store of SP is a great selling point for Yukari.

Skillset: As noted by OFS, Yukari focuses on Wind magic and Healing. While her ability to knock things down with Wind and get decent damage on bosses that Wind hits is always helpful, her Healing abilities are the best thing she has going for her. She's one of two party members who can revive and one of two who can group heal, except in both cases the other character gets those abilities substantially later in the game than Yukari. Her high Magic stat also makes her much better in general at healing until Diarahan/Mediarahan become the standards.

Elemental Properties: Yukari resists Wind and is vulnerable to Lightning. This can be a bit of a net negative because Zio attacks feel more common than Garu which leads to more fights where Yukari is at risk of getting Downed.

Now let's get to the tricky part, talking about what changes in P3P for her. This mainly comes down to comparing how she operates with Direct Command versus AI control of the party. In original P3 and The Journey/The Answer Yukari was sort of clearly one of the best party members and the AI was the biggest reason for this. You could stick her on Heal/Support and the AI would heal injured people and throw out a Wind spell when it could work it in, and everything was great. You'd eventually have the headache of Wind Break maybe getting used at the start of fights but otherwise the AI was pretty solid at playing as Yukari, especially compared with some of the people we'll get to later. What this sort of means in practice is that Direct Command actually doesn't do much to improve Yukari's performance. Her skillset is simple enough that there's really nothing to using it right.

Final Assessment: Yukari, while no longer almost mandatory, is still a very solid role player in the party and is pretty indispensable in the early game for her group healing and revival skills. Unlike the prior incarnations of this game though, your ability to intelligently use the skills of party members the computer was particularly bad at can lead to her being overshadowed later on.