Part 116: Yosuke

All right, since we finally have our first party member (and it'll only be another hour or so until we can freely explore!), I can kick off the first edition of Tactics Chat, where I'll break down the strengths and weaknesses of each party member and their respective skills similar to the blurbs Feinne did himself during the Answer LP. Unlike Persona 3, where characters had very distinct and specified roles (Akihiko with lightning and debuffs, Mitsuru with ice and status effects, etc.), the party members in Persona 4 are a little more amorphous in their skill sets and won't necessarily learn every skill in a given category. The player also gets to choose which skills party members forget when leveling up, another improvement over Persona 3. This is important because there are only 8 skill slots per character in Persona 4, so I'll be adding a section on which are the most valuable skills to hold onto.

The nice thing about Persona 4's characters is that just about every party setup is viable (with one semi-exception which we'll get to much, much later on): it just depends on what you want Souji to cover himself. So, let's get started with our first ally.

Yosuke Hanamura

Arcana: Magician
Persona: Jiraiya (Strong against Wind, Weak to Lightning)

Initial Skills: Garu, Bash, Dia
Skills Learned: Sukukaja (Lv. 6), Dekaja (Lv. 10), Sonic Punch (Lv. 14), Magaru (Lv. 18), Tentarafoo (Lv. 23), Garula (Lv. 29), Diarama (Lv. 34), Magarula (Lv. 40), Wind Boost (Lv. 44), Wind Break (Lv. 49), Garudyne (Lv. 53), Masukukaja (Lv. 60), Magarudyne (Lv. 64), Brave Blade (Lv. 69), Wind Amp (Lv. 73)

Suggested Endgame Skillset: Garudyne, Magarudyne, Wind Boost, Wind Amp, Brave Blade, Masukukaja, Dekaja, Tentarafoo OR Diarama

Stat growth: Above average Strength, Magic, Endurance, and Agility, low Luck. 3rd in HP, 4th in SP.

Combat Role: As his stat growth suggests, early on Yosuke is a fantastic jack of all trades: he can heal, cast, buff, and use physical attacks and do well at all of them. Unfortunately, that does not hold up for the whole game. He learns no mid-game physical skills at all, and the damage enemies do will outpace Diarama by the late mid-game as well. After finishing the August dungeon, Yosuke's basically stuck solely as a Wind caster for nearly 20 levels, which is especially rough considering he doesn't have as large an SP pool as the more dedicated caster characters. However, Masukukaja is a very useful buff once he gets it, boosting the entire party's chances to dodge attacks and also ensuring that you lose fewer attacks to misses. Wind Boost, as the name implies, adds a passive 25% damage bonus to all Garu spells, and Wind Amp adds 50%. What might not be obvious to new players is that these skills stack, so keeping them both around nearly doubles the power of Yosuke's magic attack. Brave Blade is one of the more powerful physical attacks in the game and restores his usefulness on the physical side towards the endgame as well, although he will obviously never be as useful in that role as the characters built around physical skills.

The good news is that Wind is actually one of the more useful elements in Persona 4. After Shadow Yosuke there is no storyline boss that innately resists Wind, only one midboss (which also resists all other elements), and one optional boss. His other ace in the hole is a skill he gets very early on: Dekaja, which negates all enemy buffs (except for a Power/Mind Charge) at the cost of only 10 SP. As SMT veterans will already know, buffs and debuffs are an extremely important part of combat in Persona 4, and many bosses (including one we'll meet before too long) are built around buffing themselves before they put you in a world of hurt. This makes Dekaja especially useful because often enemies will re-apply their buffs if you cancel them, meaning that they'll spend fewer turns attacking you, healing themselves, or hitting you with status effects. Yosuke is the only party member that learns Dekaja, making him worth bringing along for a few specific encounters for that use alone.

Regarding endgame skills, Garudyne, Magarudyne, and their associated damage boosts are pretty obvious no-brainers. Masukukaja and Dekaja are also extremely useful support skills and should definitely stay in his repertoire. Brave Blade is a little less essential, since unless you're fighting an enemy resistant to magic or trying to conserve SP Yosuke will usually do better damage with a Garudyne, but it's a pretty powerful skill to give up and there's no glaringly obvious thing to replace it with. That leaves Wind Break, Tentarafoo, and Diarama competing for the final slot. I'm not particularly enamored with the Break skills in Persona 4: they're hardly ever worth using on regular encounters, and if you know a boss is going to resist an element you should probably bring a different party member in the first place rather than wasting turns nullifying the resistance. This is especially true in Yosuke's case, since as previously mentioned Wind is one of the more consistently useful elements in the game. So eliminating that, we're left with Tentarafoo and Diarama. Status effects are useful in Persona 4 against high-level mobs and the occasional midboss, and confusion is one of the more useful ailments, but in tougher fights you'll usually want to stick to dealing damage or buffing. On the other hand, Diarama won't do much to heal you from the kind of damage late-game enemies deal, but having the ability to heal minor wounds and freeing up the dedicated healers to do something else can be useful in certain situations. It's more or less a toss-up, but I generally lean towards Tentarafoo.

On the whole, Yosuke is one of the more consistently useful characters in Persona 4. He'll always do good magic damage throughout the entire game, he has a couple of invaluable support skills, and he'll hold his own physically both early on and towards the end. He'd be better if his Magic/SP growth were a little higher considering how long he spends as a caster, and if he learned Diarahan, but there are very few situations where having Yosuke in your party will actively hinder you. His Social Link is also one of the easiest to raise since as the 'buddy' character plenty of pop quizzes and story events will give you free boosts. If you're persistent you can max Magician as early as June or July. Overall, I give him a solid B+.

Hopefully that wasn't too long-winded for everyone, I'll try to keep the ones after this a little shorter, except when I'm specifically breaking down the differences between two characters with similar combat roles like  Chie vs. Kanji  and  Yukiko vs. Teddie .

Edit: Wow, that looked a lot longer in Word than it does on the forum itself. I guess I was being paranoid about writing too much. There are a couple more mechanics that I deliberately omitted because we haven't been introduced to them yet, I will make sure to edit them in after we get there.