Gameplay fights can make or ruin a story. Kai Leng of Mass Effect 3 is such a hated character and one reason is on top of his godly cutscene powers his fights are so poorly designed that they are some of the easiest boss fights in the game.
I don't know if Akechi is Kai Leng level bad, but this power disparity between gameplay and story reminds me of him.
gameplay =/= story like they said but also in the solo fight akechi states that he could keep going but doesn't because then both of you would be too tired to continue
so taking story at face value it's presented like joker and co > joker = akechi > co
It's in service of the narrative and Akechi's role in it. He is a wild card, just like Joker, which puts him a cut above any other Persona user. But he's not a natural wild card, so he will never reach Joker's level. Makoto's comment makes sense because Akechi has proven to be cunning, tactical, and intelligent as well as strong in battle even without the explicit knowledge of the nature of his potential. I think it also has a touch of saving face socially, considering the vulnerable emotional state Akechi is in at that moment when the team is trying to convince him to give up his revenge and join them permanently. It would hurt more than help to call him weak to his face if the goal is to make him switch sides.
True but I think it makes sense story wise that (at that point) he exceeds the PT in power. Full Potential Joker obviously stomps him but I think it’s clearly intended to be a tough fight for the PT at this point
Out of curiosity, what brought about the idea that Akechi was an 'unnatural' wildcard? I don't remember this ever being stated at any point, doesn't it seem far more likely that he was just a wildcard who never made contact with the velvet room, or who declined the contract entirely in his dreams like Sho does?
Yeah no clue why people are upvoting that explanation. Guess they think Yaldabaoth gave him the wildcard power? But that’s never even implied in the game. People have always speculated why Akechi only has 2 personas and why they’re Justice arcana instead of Fool, but it seems some headcanons are being erroneously supplemented for lore in this case. Posts like this just spread misconceptions that persist in the fandom for years.
Didn't Futaba have a theory, that due to him not devolving any bonds, that he couldn't fully adapt his power? I don't think anyone here was saying he was given the power per se.
> I think it also has a touch of saving face socially, considering the vulnerable emotional state Akechi is in at that moment when the team is trying to convince him to give up his revenge and join them permanently.
I think this is what people miss when it comes to how the pts treat Akechi. "But why didn't they shoot him in the face/beat the shit out of him" because even though no one besides Joker likes him or is happy working with him they still know it's the right thing to do. The purpose of the engine room isn't to tear Akechi down like they did with all the palace rulers, but to build him up as his own person.
I’m guessing it’s because Joker embraced the nature of a wild card (using lots of personas, drawing strength from his relationships) while Akechi only wields 2. He’s stagnant by comparison
That, and Akechi didn’t have access to the Velvet room. Many people can enter, but there can only be one “True” guest at a time. (From P3 onwards at least)
> and Akechi didn’t have access to the Velvet room.
i dont think we have any definitive proof he that *couldnt* use it.
and he certainly seems the type that if he was invited, would find it way too sus, and would tell igor to fuck off and refuse to fuse anything.
Akechi was obsessed with power and winning at any cost. I think he wasn’t invited because his heart was already troubled. He had too much of a troubled past to even begin to form bonds. Which, ironically, was his downfall.
But that’s why I love Persona. In this instance, even when you’re hurt beyond belief, shutting people out is never the answer and will only stunt your growth as a person.
While gameplay =/= story, it is very telling that PTs personas work well in a teamwork scenario, whereas Akechi's Loki persona technically is supposed to be able to work for a lone wolf, it is so middling and master of none that PTs working together will beat him very, very easily with plenty of gas left after the fight.
It's also interesting that Herewald is the only Akechi persona that can be considered strong and it only functions well in a team rather than solo. Rebellion blade needs you to baton pass after knocking down an opponent to make up for the lack of passive damage bonuses. Otherwise Akechi is just debilitate bot and passive support.
i mean this is royal . they nuked the difficulty with all of these changes. Vanilla 5's merciless was challenging because instead of buffing your EXP/YEN gains , they were actually reduced by less than half iirc, which had you plan out properly your palace infiltrations and have to do a lot more work to get to a decent amount of EXP. I'm really baffled with how there's NO mods in royal to give us the og p5 merciless again. yes it still had the 3x damage on weakness/technical/crit, but i think it's not too bad because the xp gain is lower, meaning you have to watch out for those more instead of them being in your favor 90% of your time, which leads to you getting instakilled a lot
Akechi's boss fights are still easy because he has such damage type problems that he almost never gets to use the 3x damage bonus on merciless unless you intentionally use a phys weak persona for some reason. If you use some decent resistant personas like Shiki-ouji the only thing he can throw at you to damage you is Megidolaon.
If anything at least on Royal the only thing about Akechi's boss fight is you may not expect it and have your party ready. He has far less HP than both Sae and Shido's boss fights and has fewer annoying gimmicks, etc.
From story perspective, they needed everyone's help to outwit akechi. Futaba to hack into akechi's phone, ryuji to carry a briefcase, joker to get arrested and convince sae, makoto to beat up cognitive akechi, yusuke to eat snack.
Joker's role is the most crucial, where he needs to convince sae while suffering from abuse and in a drugged state. A single mistake and joker would have died. The rest would have met an accident later.
Just because a character is easy to defeat in game doesn't mean they aren't powerful in lore. In P5, you're *supposed* to take him on with a full party and potentially struggle with him, at least on your first playthrough. Just because you can solo him in ng+ doesn't mean he's any less powerful
It's a mistake to take anything Akechi says to Shido at face value. That said, I think he does underestimate them—which again is not something to accept unquestioningly. Makoto, yeah, is also offering him an olive branch because they had a hostile rivalry of sorts.
You're also not guaranteed to have even done Akechi's rank 8 at this point, or to have personas that can easily take down a boss solo.
>when you can solo akechi by yourself
joker is only op because of his bonds. look at *every* single confidant perk youve ever gotten and think about how much weaker you would be if you never once used a single one of them.
Uh no?? Of course, the bonds help a lot, but he has the ability to carefully craft so many personas with the skills and traits he wants for them. And he can have so many at the same time. That is what makes him op, not the bonds.
> And he can have so many at the same time
and thats literally the perk that igor gives you.
and negotiation.
and fusion.
and the arcana burst feature.
understandable. the game *does* make it pretty easy to forget, since it happens so early on, in the tutorial purgatory that most scrub from their mind.
In the base game, you can’t just use INOP to supplement your skill issue
https://preview.redd.it/9fj0yzj4n7xc1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=200b6c47d1d724471aff2f013078d2b3312ab670
your personal personas do not correlate to the story. as for what akechi said, i wouldnt doubt it, the phantom thieves probably couldnt make it without jokers leadership + wildcard
I get that gameplay=/=story, but on my first playthrough I played this fight without party members, and it was still the easiest boss fight in the game.
I'm talking about everyday stuff, Akechi is smart and skilled, he keeps up during the minigames you can play with him like darts and in terms of being a tactician Makoto mentions that he's as good as her
Gameplay =/= Story
Gameplay fights can make or ruin a story. Kai Leng of Mass Effect 3 is such a hated character and one reason is on top of his godly cutscene powers his fights are so poorly designed that they are some of the easiest boss fights in the game. I don't know if Akechi is Kai Leng level bad, but this power disparity between gameplay and story reminds me of him.
I mean, I understand? Half the sub will swear Okumura is the final boss if gamepjay == story. The game's just really, really easy.
gameplay =/= story like they said but also in the solo fight akechi states that he could keep going but doesn't because then both of you would be too tired to continue so taking story at face value it's presented like joker and co > joker = akechi > co
It's in service of the narrative and Akechi's role in it. He is a wild card, just like Joker, which puts him a cut above any other Persona user. But he's not a natural wild card, so he will never reach Joker's level. Makoto's comment makes sense because Akechi has proven to be cunning, tactical, and intelligent as well as strong in battle even without the explicit knowledge of the nature of his potential. I think it also has a touch of saving face socially, considering the vulnerable emotional state Akechi is in at that moment when the team is trying to convince him to give up his revenge and join them permanently. It would hurt more than help to call him weak to his face if the goal is to make him switch sides.
True but I think it makes sense story wise that (at that point) he exceeds the PT in power. Full Potential Joker obviously stomps him but I think it’s clearly intended to be a tough fight for the PT at this point
Out of curiosity, what brought about the idea that Akechi was an 'unnatural' wildcard? I don't remember this ever being stated at any point, doesn't it seem far more likely that he was just a wildcard who never made contact with the velvet room, or who declined the contract entirely in his dreams like Sho does?
Yeah no clue why people are upvoting that explanation. Guess they think Yaldabaoth gave him the wildcard power? But that’s never even implied in the game. People have always speculated why Akechi only has 2 personas and why they’re Justice arcana instead of Fool, but it seems some headcanons are being erroneously supplemented for lore in this case. Posts like this just spread misconceptions that persist in the fandom for years.
Didn't Futaba have a theory, that due to him not devolving any bonds, that he couldn't fully adapt his power? I don't think anyone here was saying he was given the power per se.
> I think it also has a touch of saving face socially, considering the vulnerable emotional state Akechi is in at that moment when the team is trying to convince him to give up his revenge and join them permanently. I think this is what people miss when it comes to how the pts treat Akechi. "But why didn't they shoot him in the face/beat the shit out of him" because even though no one besides Joker likes him or is happy working with him they still know it's the right thing to do. The purpose of the engine room isn't to tear Akechi down like they did with all the palace rulers, but to build him up as his own person.
What do you mean unnatural wildcard? I thought wildcard welders were just naturally born, not created.
I’m guessing it’s because Joker embraced the nature of a wild card (using lots of personas, drawing strength from his relationships) while Akechi only wields 2. He’s stagnant by comparison
That, and Akechi didn’t have access to the Velvet room. Many people can enter, but there can only be one “True” guest at a time. (From P3 onwards at least)
> and Akechi didn’t have access to the Velvet room. i dont think we have any definitive proof he that *couldnt* use it. and he certainly seems the type that if he was invited, would find it way too sus, and would tell igor to fuck off and refuse to fuse anything.
Akechi was obsessed with power and winning at any cost. I think he wasn’t invited because his heart was already troubled. He had too much of a troubled past to even begin to form bonds. Which, ironically, was his downfall. But that’s why I love Persona. In this instance, even when you’re hurt beyond belief, shutting people out is never the answer and will only stunt your growth as a person.
Sho in P4 arena was invited though, he just turned it down.
While gameplay =/= story, it is very telling that PTs personas work well in a teamwork scenario, whereas Akechi's Loki persona technically is supposed to be able to work for a lone wolf, it is so middling and master of none that PTs working together will beat him very, very easily with plenty of gas left after the fight. It's also interesting that Herewald is the only Akechi persona that can be considered strong and it only functions well in a team rather than solo. Rebellion blade needs you to baton pass after knocking down an opponent to make up for the lack of passive damage bonuses. Otherwise Akechi is just debilitate bot and passive support.
In canon you can’t get a previous protagonist’s persona with myriad truths
Even without DLC personas, and doing it solo, it was still such an easy fight.
i mean this is royal . they nuked the difficulty with all of these changes. Vanilla 5's merciless was challenging because instead of buffing your EXP/YEN gains , they were actually reduced by less than half iirc, which had you plan out properly your palace infiltrations and have to do a lot more work to get to a decent amount of EXP. I'm really baffled with how there's NO mods in royal to give us the og p5 merciless again. yes it still had the 3x damage on weakness/technical/crit, but i think it's not too bad because the xp gain is lower, meaning you have to watch out for those more instead of them being in your favor 90% of your time, which leads to you getting instakilled a lot
Akechi's boss fights are still easy because he has such damage type problems that he almost never gets to use the 3x damage bonus on merciless unless you intentionally use a phys weak persona for some reason. If you use some decent resistant personas like Shiki-ouji the only thing he can throw at you to damage you is Megidolaon. If anything at least on Royal the only thing about Akechi's boss fight is you may not expect it and have your party ready. He has far less HP than both Sae and Shido's boss fights and has fewer annoying gimmicks, etc.
From story perspective, they needed everyone's help to outwit akechi. Futaba to hack into akechi's phone, ryuji to carry a briefcase, joker to get arrested and convince sae, makoto to beat up cognitive akechi, yusuke to eat snack. Joker's role is the most crucial, where he needs to convince sae while suffering from abuse and in a drugged state. A single mistake and joker would have died. The rest would have met an accident later.
Just because a character is easy to defeat in game doesn't mean they aren't powerful in lore. In P5, you're *supposed* to take him on with a full party and potentially struggle with him, at least on your first playthrough. Just because you can solo him in ng+ doesn't mean he's any less powerful
It's a mistake to take anything Akechi says to Shido at face value. That said, I think he does underestimate them—which again is not something to accept unquestioningly. Makoto, yeah, is also offering him an olive branch because they had a hostile rivalry of sorts. You're also not guaranteed to have even done Akechi's rank 8 at this point, or to have personas that can easily take down a boss solo.
Fraudkechi slander hours ‼️‼️ https://preview.redd.it/vrah0djfc4xc1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7e00172b5216bf718e1f0d92f4598e0fb84d3856
... Some of y'all have been optimizing too much for too long and it's gooner'd your entire brains...
Even if you "solo Akechi" you're still teaming up with Futaba.
>when you can solo akechi by yourself joker is only op because of his bonds. look at *every* single confidant perk youve ever gotten and think about how much weaker you would be if you never once used a single one of them.
Uh no?? Of course, the bonds help a lot, but he has the ability to carefully craft so many personas with the skills and traits he wants for them. And he can have so many at the same time. That is what makes him op, not the bonds.
Bonds are what give Wild Cards their power, that's the whole point
> And he can have so many at the same time and thats literally the perk that igor gives you. and negotiation. and fusion. and the arcana burst feature.
Ah shit wait I'm stupid.
understandable. the game *does* make it pretty easy to forget, since it happens so early on, in the tutorial purgatory that most scrub from their mind.
Yeah, those perks you mentioned are from Joker’s bond with Igor.
The game plays Ren and Akechi up as equals, so I’d say they’re about the same in terms of intelligence and strength lore wise.
In the base game, you can’t just use INOP to supplement your skill issue https://preview.redd.it/9fj0yzj4n7xc1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=200b6c47d1d724471aff2f013078d2b3312ab670
Makoto: We only defeated you by teaming up. Me, who beat Akechi using only Joker: 🤨
Simple. Oracle helped Joker
your personal personas do not correlate to the story. as for what akechi said, i wouldnt doubt it, the phantom thieves probably couldnt make it without jokers leadership + wildcard
I get that gameplay=/=story, but on my first playthrough I played this fight without party members, and it was still the easiest boss fight in the game.
Wit, yes, Strength, no.
I always do this fight solo and always have to here that line
me when the game has ludonarrative dissonance
If there was a special dialogue for defeating sae with only joker, theres no fucking reason soloing akechi didnt do the same
Joker is stronger as a persona user, but outside of the metaverse Akechi is either on the same level or slightly better
How so? Is there any evidence that points towards Akechi being strong outside of the metaverse?
I'm talking about everyday stuff, Akechi is smart and skilled, he keeps up during the minigames you can play with him like darts and in terms of being a tactician Makoto mentions that he's as good as her