Part 239: Social Link and Characteristics Basics

Welcome to the Velvet Room: How to Win Friends and Influence People

So, let's talk about Social Links and our personal characteristics a bit for those who aren't familiar with the series. Characteristics are simpler so let's do them first.

We have three personal characteristics, Charm, Academics, and Courage. Each characteristic starts at level one, and has six levels. We raise them by spending time at various activities and doing things like answering questions and staying awake in class. They're required for various in-game events and for starting certain Social Links, and starting with them at your prior game's level is a big part of why it's much easier to max all the links in a second round since you get the one-two punch of being able to start things earlier and not having to spend time raising things.

So Social Links. How do they work? We start a social link by both being past whatever story point we need to be for it to trigger and having whatever stat level it asks for by talking to the person in question (generally you know a link can start because the person is suddenly chilling in a place). Whenever we do a level that advances the link, we get points towards being able to do the next one based on our responses to choices in that level, and to advance to the next level we need a certain number of these points (how many we have at any given time isn't visible). If we didn't get enough just from the prior scene, we'll need to use a day Spending Time with the link, which just gets us points but no advancement. This is where having a matching arcana on a Persona in our stock helps, because we get bonus points as a result of this. Always make sure as best as possible to have an arcana match, because it can cut full days of spending time out.

We do social links for three reasons. The first is that they're fun character development and hilarious or horrible. The second is that, as noted, we get bonus experience when we fuse that arcanum in the Velvet Room. The third is that completing links gets us access to some really nice high level personas we otherwise couldn't fuse. I'll talk more about specific links and what we should consider with respect to them and the priorities when we have choices of links to advance in a later update.