Persona 3: Tricks

A list of tips and tricks that people may find useful when first starting out playing P3 or P3 (FES). I don't know if the advice outlined below will work on P3 Portable though. That being said here are some useful tricks that I found a little too late into the game, there shouldn't be any spoilers here.

1. Use the P3 fusion site to find the correct recipe for the Persona you are trying to create, this won't work in The Answer since you don't have access to the compendium.

https://arantius.com/misc/persona-3-fes-fusion-calculator/#/list/level

2. When a shadow is facing you, you can backtrack far enough away from the shadow until it's orange dot in the mini-map disappears. This will cause the shadow to turn it's back to you once you reach it again for an easy preemptive strike. Alternatively: you can also go to the menu screen and then exit out of it, and the shadows will immediately change direction. (OdysseyRPG)

3. When fusing personas in the velvet room, especially with 3+ personas the final persona result will inherit some abilities from the original persona. If you don't like the "inherited" abilities you can re-roll them until you find a combination you like by deselecting them and re-entering them as part of the recipe.

4. If you can't go to school for a length of time you can go to the shrine and use the fortune box to refresh or increase the social link relationship. This is important for social links involving some of the female characters.

5. If you find the stairs early in the dungeon and are too lazy to level or explore the floor, you can get your team to explore and pickup equipment for you. The trick is to make sure there is no shadows on the mini-map otherwise, your teammate may get aggroed by shadows and waste time.

6. Be careful if you choose to overwrite personas in the compendium, this is because if you use the P3 fusion calculator, some final results may be different from what was calculated because some of the preceding personas may be too high of a level to create the desired persona.

7. Save your money, the equipment found in dungeons are usually always better than the ones bought from the police station.

8. When fusing personas always tried to at least inherit Growth 2 or Growth 3, this is very helpful especially in The Answer.

9. Don't be afraid to switch up your team if a boss is too difficult, this game needs you to be adaptable.

10. On the shuffle victory screen, if the cards move off-screen, I find that 70-80% of the time the second card is an EXP card.

Cards will reorder in the order they were taken off the screen from left to right. (OdysseyRPG)

11. Use the tactics combat menu to control your team's SP usage, you will need it.

12. If an item says, it is "valuable", just sell it, it has no important use.

13. Switch your team to "Stand By" when the enemy is down if you need to buy time, this means that the enemy can't act for the entire turn.

Edit: Additional tricks and info from OdysseyRPG