Persona 3

- Never ever ignore Elizabeth's requests, no matter how annoying they may be. They're how you get the really powerful Personae, even if they're not a direct result of each quest.

- Get your Academics, Charm, and Courage up as fast as you can. You need them to get every Social Link. The good news is that they carry over on replays, so after the first time you never need to do it again!

- Never go more than two in-game months without doing something with all your contacts. Any longer and they'll go into Reverse, which is a time-consuming pain in the ass to fix.

- Once you make plans with a friend over the phone, never ever cancel on him/her. That's the quickest way to go into reverse.

- When the choice comes up, don't hug Yukari.

- In the beginning you can just use whatever really. As you get farther, you'll probably want to have one guy for each element. One thing that really helps is keeping around a Persona that can use all four elemental skills. A good one to start out with is Lilim. Fuse Pixie x Nekomata to get Forneus (don't get it from Shuffle) then fuse that Forneus (with Bufu) x Angel (with Garu) to get a Lilim with Agi, Zio, Bufu, and Garu. This is a pretty good thing to keep around and update as the game goes on, and can make getting all-out attacks in random battles much easier. For the Answer it's practically required. Other notable personas who can do this easily are Pale Rider and Loki, but experiment.

- Having a healer persona is a good idea later in the game. Saki Mitama and Titania are excellent early healers. Saki Mitama learns Mediarama before anyone else. Titania learns Divine Grace, which significantly increases any healing done, and makes her useful until the end of the game. Transferring Divine Grace and Mediarama from her to someone else makes them a potent healer as well.

- Don't worry too much about resistances and such until later on. Once you get farther in the game, it will definitely pay off to have a persona or two that's immune to light or dark. Most enemies only use one or two elements, and it should be easy to equip one that isn't weak to those through normal play. What I'm trying to say is you generally don't need to pay attention to your own persona's resistances when creating new ones: if you're up against a boss that uses fire, you probably have a persona that resists fire in your inventory whether you planned it that way or not.

- Figure out the 3 people you want to use in your party and don't bother with anyone else. The equipment tax is pretty high in this game. You should try to spread out your elemental strengths, like, don't bring the two fire users to the same party. Also important is spreading out elemental weaknesses: Yukari and Aigis are both weak to lightning, so don't make a party with them both. My favorite party is Yukari, Akihiko, and Mitsuru.

- Once you've figured out this party, fuse weapons that make them resist the element that they're weak to. For example, fusing a nihil bow with a Tower persona gets you a bow that's resistant to lightning, which is perfect for Yukari. You can continually update this weapon with new higher level persona.

- Get as high as you can in the tower before each full moon, and you'll be fine. Other than that, don't try to max out every social link because doing so requires you to follow a daily guide exactly, and that's just not fun if you haven't played through the game before.

- First off, don't bother trying to do everything. Just play through normally the first time. If you decide that you want to max out every social link in a single playthrough, there's a guide for that, and you should probably do it on your New Game+. Don't ruin the fun of the game.

- You WILL get tired the night before a full moon now, unlike P3, however, the party members won't go home, so you can train all you please.

- Try to give resistance accessories for your party members' weaknesses to them. Like give Yukari a 'dodge elec (high)' accessory if you find it. Fairly obvious, I guess.

- Focus on the characters you like. I never once used a few of the characters in battle, and it made no difference. People level up quickly later on, if you change your mind.

- If you find that you can finish all of Elizabeth's requests in a given month, you're probably good to go for the monthly boss.

- There are barely any times when you have to use certain characters in a battle, but if you use Akihiko, Yukari, and Junpei, you'll never need to worry about it. I used Mitsuru for a while, too, but she kept using that damn Marin Karin, so I hated her.

- See school-related social links on school days. Only see your non-school links on days off. There are WAY more days off than are needed to totally max your social links with the non-school folks. I found myself just studying to make Sundays/vacation days pass quickly towards the end.

- Don't spoil the hell out of the game for yourself, if possible. It's a fun one.

- Find a few social links you like and stick to them until they are maxed out.

- Go to Tartarus at least once a week.

- Register your personas every chance you get and fuse them whenever you can, but make sure you have a persona of each element.

- If you're not going to Tarturus, go to the mall in the evening to do character stat-boosting activities (in exchange for $$$), and then study afterwards (unless you're too tired).

- Do all the requests, and check them frequently!

- Don't worry about getting tired, it stops being a problem after the earliest parts of the game.

- Return to the beginning and save at every single boss floor, no matter what. The tower bosses are far and away harder than the plot bosses and will wreck your shit far more often, so don't get discouraged by having to go at them more than a few times.

- Carry a matching arcana persona when you do S.Links, you don't need to equip it, and you can just use/get the lowest level one from the compendium.

- Do S.links during the day, and use night to get your stats up, don't worry about doing them during the day. The Karaoke and Coffee are available at night, and the game center has options for them too.

- Study every night, and if you're tired, visit the doctor at school, it'll buff up your courage.

- There's nothing wrong with fusing before you get the compendium, the first persona's you get are pretty terrible. I don't think you have to wait too long to get it.

- Do every single one of Elizabeth's quests as soon as they become available, especially the ones with a time limit. Not only are the rewards pretty handy, but in general, being able to fulfill all of the timed requests is a good sign that you're making good progress in the game and don't have to grind for the bosses. You should be able to get as high up in Tartarus as possible before each full moon.

- Also, in P3, unlike 4, an enemy uses up a turn to stand up, so make sure to implement that in some of your strategies. A lot of bosses in the game become much easier when you have the ability to make sure that they never get off an attack.

- Though the battle systems are similar on the surface, P3 battles revolve around using elemental weaknesses on enemies, all-out attacks, and making enemies lose their turn by knocking them down to a much larger degree than in P4. You have much more SP available than in P4 so it's more effective to just use every character as a mage at least until you get some of the special fusion weapons. Physical damage kind of sucks. Note that the all-target spells work differently than in P4 for knocking shit down.

- Also you can't control your characters but you can modify their AI. It can be really clunky, especially if you want other people to heal, so keeping the MC as the healer can be useful. But for most characters you can put them on "full offense" (use their strongest spell every turn regardless of the circumstances) or "knock down enemies" (use elemental weaknesses, do nothing if the enemy is down) and they'll be fine. "Act freely" leads to characters using useless status spells sometimes but requires less micromanagement as they generally know what needs to be done.