OK here’s something new. Let’s write a blog post about a part of a game I haven’t actually played yet!

I’ve been really focused on Persona 4 Golden since writing the November recap post. At the time I had about 70 hours into the game and estimated I’d be finished with it at around 100 hours and I hoped I could do that by the end of December. Since then (I actually wrote the post a few days before it published) I’ve been playing P4 whenever I had a free moment (thank you, Xbox Quick Resume) and thanks to a dreary, rainy weekend I’m already at 90 hours. I’ll definitely hit 100 hours well before the end of the month; however I’m no longer confident I will have finished the game by the 100 hour mark!

My next challenge is The Hollow Forest. I won’t spoil any story elements but this is a unique dungeon with some added challenges. (When P4 warned me that my choices would start having large consequences I started glancing at guides since I didn’t want to miss anything; I can’t see myself re-playing a 100+ hour game.) When you enter the Hollow Forest, all your gear is lost and you are given starter gear. While you can find better gear in chests to aid you, it remains to be seen how much better. I have pretty epic gear on most of my characters so losing access to it is going to hurt, and my physical attacks are going to be pretty weak.

But what is more concerning is that after every battle, your mana is reduced by half. This is huge. After just a couple of fights against trash mobs you’ll be basically out of mana and with physical attacks nerfed by losing your good gear, I am just really curious how this is going to go. Once again, there are items you can find that will restore mana that can help but still…after basically one-shotting enemies with powerful magic spells in the previous dungeon, this seems really scary.

A few other bits and bobs: you stumble into the Hollow Forest after a fairly long sequence of story events where there’s no opportunity to save, and once you get in there you can’t really leave. So if you are under-leveled I think you’d have a hard time. You CAN save in there but you can’t go back to earlier dungeons to level up. And you only have 1 (in-game) day to beat the dungeon. If you don’t beat it you won’t get to experience certain parts of the game. I’m not too worried about my levels. I have my party member social links maxxed out and my active party is all in the high 80s (99 is cap). If I need to draw on my second stringers, though, they’re much lower level and could struggle. Hopefully I won’t need them.

Anyway I arrived at this point pretty late in the evening and only did a couple of levels of the dungeon. So far the mobs aren’t too tough but the fights can take a while once your mana is gone which, of course, happens very quickly. I guess the trick is to avoid fights, open chests for better gear, and once you find a boss, warp out of the dungeon, get the fox to replenish your mana, then jump back in and do your best to avoid any fights until you find the boss again. The Invigorate skill which replenishes a bit of mana after every turn is going to be super useful, and if you have Rise leveled up and her Social Link maxed she has skills that will help, too. Thankfully I pushed hard to get her social link to max over the winter.

I initially considered just blowing off this dungeon since I’m kind of eager to move on to other games, but after sleeping on it, I’m kind of excited for this challenge.

Looking forward to seeing how it goes tonight!

I’m REALLY glad I finally made the effort to “get into” a Persona game for the first time. It did take a little while to get its hooks in me but now I am LOVING this game and I’m glad to know there are several others waiting to be played!