As with prior games, collecting personas is a critical element of Persona 5. There are more than 100 personas to add to your roster, each with its own stats and skill configuration. Ensuring that your collection is constantly growing and leveling up is a lot of work, but pays off by improving your effectiveness in battle.
In order to add most of these personas to your collection, you’re going to need to master negotiation. In this guide we’ll go over what this is, and how you can become consistent and winning dialog exchanges.
Reaching Negotiations
Before you can speak to a persona, you will need to put it in a weakened state. In order to achieve this, you will need to find and exploit one of its vulnerabilities.
Every persona in the game has at least one vulnerability, which can range from fire, ice, physical, or even guns. By using a skill that exploits one of these vulnerabilities, the persona will be opened up to either an all-out attack, or negotiation.
Learning a persona’s vulnerability requires you to experiment. Sometimes you can determine what they are weak to based on their physical characteristics, such as a water animal being weak to lightning. However, many times it will come down to throwing a variety of magics and attacks at them until you learn what works.
As you experiment, your Persona Compendium will be populated. With this, when you press L1 in battle you will be able to visibly see the strengths and weaknesses of each persona. This menu is called Analysis, and it’s a critical element of combat.
Note that you can tap R1 in battle to automatically employ attacks that exploit weaknesses as long as those weaknesses are learned in the Persona Compendium.
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Upon knowing a weakness, utilize a skill with that attribute to knock that persona down. If no other personas are left standing on the battlefield, you will have the option to talk to the persona by pressing X.
The Art of Negotiating
Dialog with personas can go a variety of directions. Sometimes they will give you an item before retreating. Other times they will give themselves to you without effort. However, most of the time you will have to successfully speak to the persona in order for it to “join you”.
Before you enter negotiation make sure you enter the Analysis screen with L1 to view the personality type of the persona. The personality type will dictate what types of dialog it’s looking for when speaking to you.
You will have the opportunity to select one to three dialog options during the average negotiation. If you answer in a manner that the persona likes, it will join you. If not, it will run away. Joining you means that the protagonist can employ it in battle, or fuse it with other personas to create powerful results.
What a persona likes and dislikes breaks down to the following:
| Personality Type | Likes | Dislikes |
|---|---|---|
| Gloomy | Vague | Serious, Funny |
| Irritable | Serious | Vague, Kind |
| Timid | Kind | Vague, Funny |
| Upbeat | Funny | Serious, Vague |
It is up to you to determine whether a dialog option matches the likes of a given persona. Sometimes this isn’t particularly clear, but in most instances the dialog options vary so differently in style that they can be differentiated easily.
Note that by increasing your relationship with Ann you will gain the ability to have a second chance when you fail during a negotiation. Due to this, it is recommended that you increase your Knowledge to 2 and take her out on a date as soon as possible.
That’s all there is to it. Negotiation is one of Persona 5‘s most enjoyable mechanics, so take your time and enjoy the journey.
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