Just completed one of the hardest parts of the Maximum Ambrosia Challenge in Persona 1.
Boring details for those who careBasically when you activate the Snow Queen Scenario, you have to challenge three towers of varying difficulty: Hypnos (Easy), Nemesis (Medium), and Thanatos (Hard) in order to collect mirror shards before the time runs out. Yes, the dungeon are timed, and failing to collect all the shards before the time runs out nets you the bad ending. Now, whenever you beat a tower, you get an item called Ambrosia, which can be traded with a Jack Frost NPC in the Frozen School for one of the items needed to unlock your parties ultimate personas, but what the game doesn't mention is that the amount of ambrosia you get is based on the order you tackle the dungeon. By now, I'm sure you've figured out what that means. In order to obtain all of the Ambrosia needed for the Ultimate Personas, you need to tackle Thanatos Tower first.
This Tower is a bitch for four reasons:
1) Obviously, the enemies are really powerful. If you don't do any prep work beforehand, you'll be about level 10-12 by the time this quest gets unlocked, the enemy level range varies from 35-42. This means that pretty much everything can one shot you. The key to survival is talking your way out of a fight but sadly, the group you're stuck with in the Snow Queen Scenario is not exactly the A-Team of negotiation abilities, and since your party is so low level, you can't even forge contracts to trivialize the harder enemies. Throw in the fact that if you accidentally get the enemies angry (and it's super easy to do thanks to how complex the talk command actually is in this entry) the enemy gets a free round to wreck you.
2) The Ghost of Yuriko who guards the Tower loves to play games with you, the first one forces you to have either have your MC or one of your party members lose their Persona in order to even enter the tower (I'll go into further detail below) and the other one has you choose between two chests, one contains a mirror shard and the other is a trap. If you fail to grab the mirror shard on the first try, it's lost forever and you can't get the good ending.
3. Not having your Persona sucks in this game. Part of the reason is because unlike the Social Link entries which don't bother to distinguish the character from their personas in terms of stats, your characters have their own separate stats and simply add a Persona's on top of it, allowing you to take a character with low agility and giving him a speedy Persona can make them as fast as your speedy party members and so on. So losing your persona not only strips you of your magic ability, but severely weakens the character to the point they will die from even the weakest of abilities despite their armor and they do pitiful damage as well. Losing you persona in this dungeon also prevents healing items from working on that character as well.
4. I's possible to get your Persona back by traveling to a special section of the tower which leads to Tartarus and finding a special room room where they resides. Thankfully it's not terribly far from the entrance way but it's still a hassle to get their. Now here's the serious rub: If a character dies in battle, even if they are revived before the battle ends, they will lose their Persona, meaning you'll have to backtrack to this place every time someone does just so you can survive, and you will die... a lot.
I also forgot to mention that their are no real save points in this dungeon, you can only do a quicksave type feature which erases itself once it's used, and that save point is only on the second floor and pretty far from where you need to be going. So after several nasty attempts where I couldn't get past the first floor, I finally conquered Yuriko and her Thanatos Persona. I entered the fight with two characters without Personas because I simply could not risk backtracking, and the fight was mostly doing well until she transformed halfway through and spammed a move that literally one-shotted every one but my main character, who may have been immune thanks to the Lilim Persona he had equipped. I had to finish the boss off with machine gun fire because my character couldn't be repositioned to use his main weapon and I ran out of SP halfway through the fight.
The damn thing is done, and I'm feeling super accomplished. I'm now, most likely over-leveled for the reaming towers, so it should be smooth sailing assuming their isn't anymore "lost forever" key item puzzles. Also, mad props if you spotted all of the elements Atlus and Team Persona used from this game to make Persona 3.
Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno
Just completed one of the hardest parts of the Maximum Ambrosia Challenge in Persona 1.
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