help on Persona management?

Quote from: Himuro;4693

I guess it's time to fuse and get a new batch of Persona. I think I need to concentrate on getting my S. Links up or something

Bingo. If you're sticking with Orpheus and Pixie you're wasting your time. Leveling up Persona, particularly early on considering you get very little experience (this will change, particularly as experience cards during Shuffle Time will be larger), is a pain in the ass and it's not a worthwhile endeavor.

You need to build up your Social Links and then try to fuse Personae within that Arcana. It's the quickest way to level any of them. Level these up, fuse some Personae (who will probably go up a few levels and learn at least a few moves) and use those until you're powerful enough to summon (or find) other ones.

Essentially, you're going to be dropping ones all of the time for better ones that come along. The game lists all the moves they're going to learn on the right (either by name or with a ?), once that's gone they're not going to learn anything new unless an old skill changes to something else (which is entirely random).

Quote

I'd like to fuse a demon that's got all the basic elementals: Agi, Bufu, Zio, Garu, with a couple buffs and debuffs. That way I won't have to have so many Persona for every little thing and I can save space for experimentation and fill up my Compendium.

That's not really possible, at least not early on. You can transfer over skills (and if you're not happy with what's being transfered, try redoing the fusion -- the skills might change), but to get an all around demon like that would require absolutely perfect skill transference, which basically is impossible because some will always be dropped. My best luck with this was a Power Persona, which had Hama, Garu, Zio and Agi.

A lot of the best Buffs aren't even really carried by some of the Persona early on naturally... but they can be brought over through fusion. Orpheus is mostly useful early on for Tarunda, for example.

That's kind of a lot of the point of letting you carry several Personae around with you. You have to switch them and you have to have them complement each other. You won't need a Persona that knows fire and ice if you have one that's extremely suited for ice and one that's extremely suited for fire.

Remember that your character can switch Persona during battle without ending his turn. So you can, for example, knock down a few enemies with Jack Lantern's Agi and then switch to King Frost to Bufu the rest and then do an all out attack.