surgeworks | P3P Battle Mechanics, For Those Interested

We can attack with a weapon, guard, analyze enemies, use a skill that our current Persona has, switch to a different Persona, and supply directives to our teammates through the revolver roulette wheel. We can also escape or use items for different effects. As far as standard attacks go, combatants who get up close and personal (like Junpei and we) have better accuracy, but can stumble if we miss. Contrast that to ranged allies like Yukari, who miss often, but won’t stumble if they do.

Persona skills are much more effective than weapons, but they’ll consume a set amount of HP (physical attacks) or SP (magic attacks). Skills are divided into those two groups, and physical attacks are further divided into three types: strike, slash, and pierce. Physical attacks have a small chance to critical, which does 1.5x the damage and knocks an enemy down.

Beyond the physical types, magic attacks are divided into Agi (fire), Bufu (ice), Garu (wind), and Zio (lightning). Bufu and Zio are a little more expensive in SP than the other two, as they can inflict statuses—“frozen” prevents an enemy from dodging the next attack, while “shocked” does that and also turns any physical attack into a critical for its duration. There’s also Hama (light) and Mudo (darkness) which are instant-kill elements. They rely on luck more than a hit/evade stat and are low-accuracy, and don’t do any damage if they miss.

Some shadows will have weaknesses, others won’t. If you strike a weakness correctly, you’ll do more damage and knock the enemy down just like if you critical. If you knock an enemy down, you get “one more” and can move again. Some enemies can also resist (half damage), null, reflect, or drain certain attacks. Attacking a knocked down enemy, or getting lucky when knocking it down, will inflict dizzy status, keeping it from getting up for a turn. All of these same rules apply to Personas as well, and in your case will switch alongside whatever Persona you’ve got. There’s a tenth attack type called Almighty which can’t be resisted, nulled, or blocked in any way, but we won’t see that for a while.

There’s also other things Personas can do, such as heal, buff and debuff stats, inflict status effects, etc., all of which will cost SP.

What doesn’t apply to your enemies are analysis and all-out attacks. In Persona 4, when you analyzed an enemy, you got a popup as soon as you clicked, but it wouldn’t record anything until you figured it out for yourself. In this game, you can see any weakness the enemy has right off the bat, but Mitsuru will need a full round of combat to analyze it first. Thus….I don’t do too much analyzing in this game. I can find out weaknesses faster just by guessing.

Guarding is an option to reduce damage, obviously. If you do so, you're prevented from attacking or dodging any attacks for your turn (and thus you WILL take damage) but it can be worth it to survive large assaults you can't dodge or risk trying to dodge. It also handily prevents you from being knocked down, even if your weakness is struck.

All-Out attacks are available whenever you succeed in knocking down all enemies. Basically, your team goes in and beats the shit out of all the enemies—but you can’t do it if you’re the only one present. It does a lot of damage to all of them, and converts it to Almighty damage so it can’t be nulled.

If an enemy should kill you, it's game over--even if you have other team members (who themselves could be revived if they fall) active on the field.

After the fight, you might get shuffle time, which is when various cards based on tarot appear. You get to choose one for a certain effect—more money, more experience, a small health boost, etc. It’s also how we gain new Personas. There’s also negative cards, however, which will give you the boost just the same but will summon a certain dangerous enemy to the floor. They’re denoted by a skull and cross bones.