Finished the true ending. Died on the boss from full health right before it died the first time this morning. So I ended up not playing it until much later in the day to finish it. I did decide to use a guide to level Strength up so I had all confidants maxed when I beat it too. In case anybody wants to know what I used to make sure I had stuff to fuse together, I used
this page here.
Here's some tips for newer players of the series and possibly some for others:
1) Having a persona associated with your confidant (Ryuji is Chariot for example) will increase the amount of points you get in conversation by 1. So if gain 2 points from a conversation choice normally, you'll gain 3 if you have a Chariot persona in your inventory. However if you gain 0 from a choice, it will still be 0 afterwords.
2) Guns are actually
very useful in the later half of the game. Particularly once you start leveling up two certain confidants. Starting a battle in an All-Out Gun Attack can take off half the health of every enemy in the battle and it happens somewhat often. If your Gun damage is shit, you won't do shit for damage. Plus you gain the ability to instantly knock down an enemy with a clip of ammo that later gets changed to 6 ammo. As well as increasing the amount of ammo you carry (to 32 for MC).
3) Charge and Concentrate are EXTREMELY useful. Normal attack? 200 damage roughly. After using those mentioned abilities? Around 700. It will vary from enemy to enemy, but they are extremely useful. I think the highest damage I did was with Concentrate, which hit for around 1900 damage with a -dyne ability. That's not even the highest damaging spell either.
4) Buffs and debuffs are also very useful in this game. Especially on bosses. They can sometimes mean the difference between life or death if a boss or enemies gets an advantageous attack in and continue laying on the damage.
5) The more Persona you have in your compendium, the cheaper it costs to summon them. Certain milestones will make mention of this I believe (Like 50% and 75%).
6) Negotiation is insanely more useful than other Megaten games. When you ask for an item or money, you
still get experience. I believe it's lowered to around 50% (?), but when paired with confidant abilities you can get rare items and a lot of money this way. It's very worth using, especially after you've unlocked confidant abilities that boost these things. Sometimes you'll get less money than they drop, but often you'll get a good amount. I think my max was around 25k.
7) Always make sure to carry a persona that can crit with a physical (and gun) ability on you. This can come in handy to knock down enemies without weaknesses and is very useful to half after you're a little ways into the game. Treasure enemies are particularly notorious for not having weaknesses after so far in the game, so it's essential to capture it unless you get lucky on starting the battle in an All-Out position.
8) Make use of things that cost money which will assist you without having you use game time. This varies from things like making items, washing clothes and increasing friendship with confidants. These things are invaluable.
9) Using All-Out attack is not always the best option for enemies with tons of health if you have more party members turns prior tot he enemies turn. A downed enemy takes significantly more damage and will sometimes be
significantly greater damage than an All-Out attack. Useful for sub-bosses and some of the tougher normal enemies.
10) Like the previous one, passing the baton to another party member will increase their damage for that attack. So if you chain baton, you can increase your damage output a hell of a lot if you're able to target multiple enemy weaknesses one after another. Then at the end you could unleash a more devastating attack if All-Out wouldn't finish them or do enough.
Also since a lot of Soma questions have been thrown around, I ended up with 5 Soma by the true final boss. I used one in the battle because I was just leaking SP right and left and you can't use curry or tomatoes in battle. One of those is of course from the free DLC too. I know one was from a request while another I "bought" per say. Rest I'm not sure where I got them off hand. I played on normal though, so it may be useful to use multiple on higher difficulties.