Persona Qsday #12 (Contains Persona Q Spoilers)

We're back with week twelve of my Persona Q coverage!

Remember, only plot spoilers from P3/P4 will be tagged! Character names from both games and plot details specific to Persona Q will NOT be tagged. Proceed at your own risk.

When last we left off, I'd just reached the fourth floor of the terrifying and creepy Evil Spirits Club.

Let's plunge back in!

EVIL SPIRIT CLUB

4th Story

A short way into this floor, the same FOE that caused the bathroom incident on the previous floor appears.

I decided to fight it, just for shits and grins.

It's the first time since the first dungeon I've gotten my ass handed to me by an FOE.

I didn't get wiped out, but I was forced to run away. The problem with this one is that it has Evil Smile, hits hard, and when its HP is critical, it casts Diarahan to completely heal itself.

Yyyyyeah bullshit.

Anyway, unlike the previous floor's switch puzzles, on THIS floor, the Old Doll FOE just chases you everyfuckingwhere, and the only way to break its pursuit is to move through sparsely scattered overhead lights. Every time it catches up to you, you can easily run away from it. Every time you make it to a door, you get a brief head start before it comes after you again. Of course, this is a long, roundabout puzzle, by which you simply have to keep escaping the FOE until you find a switch that turns on two lights on either side of the FOE, trapping it.

After a while, you come across a staircase that leads up, into the part of the third floor that was previously inaccessible. Up here, you run into trouble: your support gets cut off, and you fall through the floor! The party gets divided. Everyone except your leader, Zen, and Rei are trapped behind a door that requires three electronic keycards to open. The only other way out is a door that only opens if two people are standing on the panels by the door--and only the leader and Zen weigh enough to trigger the panels. Meaning Rei has to explore the dark, scary room beyond alone, and all you can do is tell her which direction to walk in until she hits a wall or runs into an FOE.

It's a fairly simple mapping logic puzzle. The longest thing about it is the dialogues that come up each time Rei runs into a wall or FOE or finds a keycard/hidden treasure.

Once you're done with this, it unlocks the last clue needed to get off this floor. Like before, there's a four-room puzzle where you have to go through a series of doors in order to unlock the final door. This one's much more annoying than the previous one (not gonna lie, I went straight to GameFAQs...)

After a brief, twisty corridor, we arrive at the stairs to...

EVIL SPIRIT CLUB

Last Story

The third Guardian is a demented doctor and his two demented nurses. It's a buff mook boss. The doctor is the actual boss; one nurse heals while the other nurse buffs.

The doctor's dialogue as his health decreases hints at what's really going on here. I'm going to spoiler this part because (a) it could be a major spoiler for the game's ending, and (b) it's my hypothesis based on everything that's happened in the game so far.

Rei is in a coma. Something happened to her; based on the Kind Doctor's dialogue, it seems she might have been born with some kind of condition that required surgery. Something went wrong during the surgery, and Rei slipped into a coma. Everything that's happening--the festival, the labyrinths, Zen, all of it--is Rei's subconscious battling with the trauma.

BIZARRE BATTLE QUOTE TIME!

(When afflicted with Sleep status)
Mitsuru: "Time...for your execution..."

NEXT TIME: The final labyrinth! What's really going on here...?

(Editor's Note: As I post this, I've actually already cleared the first floor of the fourth labyrinth, but for editorial purposes, I felt it best to end the blog here.)