Part 238: Junpei in P3P

Welcome to the Velvet Room: That's Not How You Use A Katana

Okay, let's continue on to good old Junpei now!

Physical Offense: Great. Junpei ties for the best Strength stat of a party member, so his physicals are always going to hit very hard. This also makes his normal attacks quite strong, but in practice they're not really ideal due to their poor accuracy until the very top end and tendency to leave him on the ground when he does miss.

Magical Offense: Terrible. The only characters worse than Junpei with magic are those that don't get offensive magic at all, and he has the worst Magic stat of the party. His magic is really only useful for exploiting weaknesses or if his physicals are just absolutely useless in a fight, and even then he's almost as bad as not having a character at all.

Defense: Very Good. Junpei has well above average Endurance, so he takes significantly less damage than most party members for the same armor.

HP: Great. Junpei has a really solid HP total which complements his high Endurance quite well. Just remember that he'll be below max quite often thanks to using physical skills.

SP: Terrible. Another reason why Junpei is bad with magic, he runs out of SP extremely quickly if he's having to cast frequently and doesn't have any multi-target abilities to help him conserve against groups.

Skillset: I'm really terribly unimpressed by Junpei's skillset. OFS went over the goods and bads pretty well, so I'll try not to duplicate his efforts too much in this discussion. As far as physicals, he takes quite a while to get the first real bread and butter in my estimation (Kill Rush) and while Vorpal Blade is of course pretty awesome when you're in Great condition his single target move, Brave Blade, is the weakest of the three possible high end physicals he can get both in cost and in power. His access to defensive buffs is nice but we'll have better options for buffs from other characters. That get gets Agidyne is actually sort of a bad thing, in a way. He'll never do good damage with it, and it's much more expensive than Agilao. I'd much prefer he got Maragi and Agilao and never even saw Agidyne (sort of like Chie).

Elemental Properties: Junpei is resistant to Fire and vulnerable to Wind. This isn't so bad of a weakness later but early on there are numerous strong Guardians that focus on Wind and make Junpei a liability as much as an assistance.

So how does P3P change things for Junpei? Well, it makes anyone with versatility more useful because Direct Command lets us use our own knowledge of what enemies are weak against without relying on analysis. So in some ways, Junpei is a lot better than he was once he gets some skills and can unleash a wide range of physical types and Fire. The first problem is, though, that it takes him along time to really develop that ability. It takes him quite a while to provide more than one more attack type than the MC could do without any Persona at all (since they share an Attack type, Slash) and as OFS notes he'll eventually actually lose some of that diversity. The second problem is that the other characters who focus on physical attacks are even more improved by P3P's changes than he is, which makes him less attractive at those high levels compared to them.

Final Assessment: Junpei is a decidedly okay character. He's not great at magic and while he should be great at physical attacks in practice it takes him a long time to reach the point where he really excels at them. If you stick with him he could be good but I never do.