- Player starts game waking up in a train car, moving to a new city for unclear reasons. Address for lodgings are in your bag.
- Elevator attendant in the apartments (oddly, pretty poor apartments so why would they have one...?) says something odd about "being able to begin now" when you head up to your apartment.
- Next day, getting lay of the city. People in the city seem oddly unresponsive, except for the baristas and patrons of one cafe.
- On the way back to your pad, people seem to have emptied out of the city. In the street in front of your pad, what people there suddenly turn into shadowy monsters, and assault you. You escape into your building (they can't/won't come inside).
- Attendant seems to know what happened, and takes you down to a floor that probably isn't on the building plans.
- Floor is one room, inhabited by a man who introduces himself as Igor, calls place The Velvet Room.
- Explains that you have entered a competition, but fails to mention what the prize is. All you have to do is be strong enough to claim the prize, though. Simple!
- Gives you a blank card and tells you that it will help you claim the prize. You are then kicked out of the room.
- Next day, head out into the city to try and find more answers. Attacked by a mysterious stranger who happens to look almost exactly like you (minor differences, mostly clothing/cosmetic). Attacker summons what he calls a "Persona" to attack you.
- The card Igor gave you glows, allows you to summon your own Persona, but you are still beaten, left unconscious.
- People from cafe grab you off the street, offer to help you figure things out, and have a place to hang out, some friendly faces.
- As you progress, you find 20 other of these doppelgangers around the city. Some antagonistic, some friendly, some in-between.
- Hints dropped about the prize - something about becoming real, being the one allowed to ascend, grow. Paradox mentioned - you have to grow to claim the prize, but the prize is to be allowed growth, becoming more?
- People in the cafe imply that they know something more about what's going on, but either can't be pinned down on that subject or refuse to talk about what they know, or why they help you (they don't help any of the others). Eventually, you find out that apparently nothing is real, that the city is a dream.
- Regularly fight shadows, their remnants being absorbed into you (you're assured that's normal).
- Persona gets stronger/upgrades as you make friends/enemies with your doppelgangers (though skills/abilities of each Persona are assisted in being learned by the people in the cafe).
- The doppelgangers start to dwindle as you either defeat them, or befriend them completely.
- Eventually, only one doppelganger left, and the two of you are on relatively equal power (he's the one who beat you up at the start, is permanently antagonistic to you).
- He tries to claim the prize. It's guardian is a 21st doppelganger, who describes itself as "what [your other doppelganger] could be, and what he was". Completely wins, doppelganger can't even fight it. Guardian doesn't destroy utterly, though, so it's still around.
- Friends at the cafe reveal more information: All the doppelgangers are you, but they are now part of you or your other surviving doppelganger (implied before, now directly stated).
- Realization that all these doppelgangers are you - why shouldn't this guardian be you as well?
- Face the guardian, accept that they are you ("I am thou and thou art I"), they are absorbed into you. City around the falls apart into shadows.
- Wake up in the Velvet Room, Igor says that you have become whole, congratulates you on the achievement, and tells you that it's time to wake up.
- Wake up again in a hospital bed, surrounded by the people in the cafe, wearing various sciency/doctory-outfits.
Right. Time for spoilery stuff that I don't know how to work into a coherent narrative sense, sorta.
- You were a coma patient whose mind was completely wiped. You were chosen to be used in an experiment to used to figure out how to construct a consciousness from more-or-less scratch.
- City is an "Inception"-style construct designed to take the various fragments of consciousness and merge them together into one.
- People in the cafe are scientist overseeing the experiment, and they see you as the best fragment to form the "base" of the personality, thus helping you forward.
- Social Links have two dimensions - "Normal", which represent how close and friendly you are to another doppelganger (another fragment of consciousness), and "Reversed", which is basically the same, just showing progression on the antagonistic scale. Completing the Reversed Link leads to a boss battle where you defeat the fragment and absorb it, completing the Normal Link leads to them fading away off-screen sorta. Either way, you gain a new Persona for completing a Link.
- Partially completed Links provide a skill/passive ability for your base Persona, kept after you complete the Link.
- Personas are actually not entirely necessary, and this could be an entirely non-Persona game, but I thought of it as a Persona game, and it seems to fit with the series' tone, sorta maybe?
- Each fragment of consciousness in personality and behavior fits one of the 22 Arcana. You are the World Arcana, the guardian at the end is the Fool Arcana.
F