Haven't played 4 yet, but parts of this made me laugh so faps for you.

That's a special attack son, we're talking digit damage here.

I fapped because of the third last picture.

Oh, the rest of the blog was allright too.

I agree with Canti-Sama.

Yeah, but two Primal Forces also cost about twice as much as a Power Charge + God's Fist, for only a bit more damage. Kanji may do overall more damage, but at a much higher cost that ultimately makes him weaker. He also has a worse follow-up attack, the least useful attack element(Especially considering how many powerful Zio casters Souji can get his hands on), and an overall poor selection of skills without the MP to even make use of them.

His larger total damage output was never in question, at least in the places I've visited. It's the fact that his overall usefulness is almost nil that's the problem.

You seem to have forgotten the most important reason as to why Kanji is awesome. His sarting weapon is a steel CHAIR.

As if I needed more reasons to love Kanji.

Also what Canti-Sama said.

@Gen

Higher cost of what? Hp? By the time you get Primal Force you're near the end game and if you're casting Mediaharan or salvation every turn then you're dead.

His follow up attack is the most second useful one as it crits, dizzies and knocks everything down vs every other character who uses single target attacks, even chie's is single target.

As for Zio, that frees up Souji to focus on other elements, its what I tend to do, have the MC focus on the element that's not in the party plus if I have him and Kanji take turns casting zio he doesn't run out of SP, OR I just get him a Moon Potpourri from the void quest dungeon and bam, 30% more SP and don't underestimate the power of of Kanji's regular attack commando which does great damage.

You can also set him in a variety of ways, high agility to ensure he never misses, more SP to cover his weakness, HP boosting armor, its all there, primarily with equipment made from rainy day materials but you can still set him up in many ways.

So to say that his overall usefulness is almost nil is simply a false statement with no basis in reality.

Aurain gets it, Kanji is dealing big time damage ALL the time, with attack, with special skills, Chie needs to spend a turn charging up, you still need to cast tarukaja and chances are she might miss( I can't be the only one who power charged and attacked and she missed) which means you'll have cast Sukukaja on her.

There's also the fact that Kanji gets elec boost and amp along with all the Zio spells vs chie who just gets ice boost and her strongest ice spell is bufula, not to mention that looooooooooooooooooong stretch where her most useful attack is black spot.

Honestly use who you want but Kanji's usefulness is hardly nil, you'll have to come up with actual facts if you want me to believe that Gen, either that or you're simply playing the game wrong.

@squrrelyg

Check reason 2 on why's he's awesome.

I never actually use Kanji, by the time he joined the party I had a good thing goin' with 'myself', Chie, Yusoke and Yukiko. I was a level up nut and kept wanting to try him out, but by the time I got round to it, my main party was too levelled up for me to spend time on Kanji.

Cool guy though.

"Chie only gets Bufula and Ice Boost, but she still out-damages Kanji with Ziodyne and Zio Boost/Amp."

Having a Kanji at level 80 along with Chie I can say safely that is is not true, Kanji outdamages her with Ziodyne, period.

"I'll admit I was exaggerating when I said Kanji's usefulness is "almost nil" but he's still one of the less useful party members overall. His biggest strength is his ability to cast Matarukaja, which IIRC Teddie also has, except that Teddie also brings along healing spells, powerful ice magic, a large SP pool, and other boost spells. "

Teddie also brings along a weakness which he can't get it off and in terms of healing Yukiko is better, having Yukiko and Teddie in the same group is a liability and his other boost spell Marakukaja which the MC can cast with a Persona.

"And although we can argue this in circles forever, Souji's infinitely superior Zio-caster Personas made me feel like Kanji was never really necessary. It's true that for the most part, your party members are around to exploit weaknesses that Souji can't cover, but Souji has so many amazing Zio-casters that it just kind of feels pointless to have another character dedicated to the spell around. Meanwhile, he -doesn't- have all that many great Bufu Personas aside from Loki, who caps out very low, so having Chie along to cover that spell series is more important IMO, assuming you have Yukiko in your party instead of Teddie."

Exactly the MC should be everything but healing but the option should still be there, on expert(the only way to play) its pretty much necessity to have the MC working overtime either buffing or debuffing or nailing the boss with a big hit especially since the MC has early access to powerful spells vs everyone else, having Kanji around frees him up to use those spells but plus the MC can in fact in heal if you decide you want a no character with weaknesses party, my final party in P4 was Yosuke, Chie and Kanji with the MC using Kohryu for salvation casting.

"As for the HP cost, I think at my worst I had to cast Mediarahan once every other turn, but with Kanji it becomes necessary to cast it every turn -period- because of the huge HP cost of his skills. And given that the only members of your team who can cast Mediarahan are all better off doing something else (Yukiko and Teddie would be better off spending their turns casting for big damage, Souji should be doing just about anything BUT healing), freeing up those extra turns is a boon."

At your worst? Late game you have no choice BUT to cast healing every turn unless you want to get utterly decimated by bosses, even grunts can kick the living shit out of you and Kanji can cast at least 2 primal forces and still take heavy damage do his high endurance.

There's also the fact that the big damage you speak off is done via Kanji using his phys skills, besides its not a race, who cares who's doing what? If you prepare properly the MC shouldn't even come close to dying.

Why don't you try using Kanji cause it seems you never have and let's drop this please, to each his own I guess.

"Teddie also brings along a weakness which he can't get it off and in terms of healing Yukiko is better, having Yukiko and Teddie in the same group is a liability and his other boost spell Marakukaja which the MC can cast with a Persona."

Yukiko is only better at healing because of Prayer, but it's also a lot more expensive to cast and status ailments aren't as prevalent in P4, so ultimately she isn't really "better" at all. Teddie trades Prayer for two buff spells and anything that takes that much of a load off of the MC's shoulders is good by me. And who said anything about using both Teddie and Yukiko? That would be a waste of a party slot, since they essentially fulfill the same role. You either bring Yukiko/Chie or you bring Teddie and have Souji deal with Fire.

And of course Souji can cast Marakukaja, he can cast anything, the point is that he has a lot of roles to play in P4 and the less he has to deal with personally the better. Souji is the ONLY character who can debuff, and so you want your party to have as many buffs spread among them as possible, in which case having Teddie and Yosuke covers all the buffs while having Kanji means Souji needs to cover a buff, leaving him less turns to attack.

"
Exactly the MC should be everything but healing but the option should still be there, on expert(the only way to play) its pretty much necessity to have the MC working overtime either buffing or debuffing or nailing the boss with a big hit especially since the MC has early access to powerful spells vs everyone else, having Kanji around frees him up to use those spells but plus the MC can in fact in heal if you decide you want a no character with weaknesses party, my final party in P4 was Yosuke, Chie and Kanji with the MC using Kohryu for salvation casting."

You just contradicted yourself. You first claim that Souji needs to be able to heal (which is obvious) but then claim that he shouldn't be healing because he could be making big hits. And then you say that you played with him healing instead of attacking. Make up your mind!

But you do raise an excellent point, that Souji isn't the all-powerful god of destruction that Minato was, and so it's entirely plausible to devote his time to healing/debuffing without losing too much on the damage side of things. The only issue you run into is that Souji has a much lower SP pool to draw from, so if you want him on healing duty you're going to be burning off a lot of SP regen items, which you likely wouldn't if you left healing to Yukiko or Teddie and focused Souji on attacking/debuffing. Should he be able to heal? Hell yes, of course he should. You should strive to have the MC able to do anything so that you can respond to any situation, but just because he should have healing spells sitting around in his persona list doesn't mean he should focus on them, especially when he has access to things like Hassou Tobi or (the watered-down but still super-strong) Ragnarok-level elemental spells.

And if mobs were hurting you that much, even in the endgame, you were doing something wrong. Hell, random mobs shouldn't even be TOUCHING you most of the time thanks to the knock down.all-out system, and the fact that status spells like Tentarafoo actually work in P4. So the HP-use thing only really comes up in boss fights, where Chie's ability to make a single big attack every other turn means you don't need to heal as often as with Kanji sloughing huge 200+ HP chunks every round.

Kanji isn't bad, he's just not as useful as the rest of the team. He covers the least amount of bases for Souji, and he's usable in the fewest number of effective team patterns. He's not really a good SP battery because of his limited pool(Unless you force him to keep Mazio in which case he's really no better then Chie), and the cost of upkeeping his HP attacks in the boss fights they're truly helpful in is too high unless you're willing to sacrifice another character's every turn to keep him healed.

Yes, next to Souji, he deals some of the best damage in the game. But that doesn't matter when he doesn't really do anything else particularly well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afViRNSr5wg

I have never felt less nerdy.***

Man, and just as the argument was getting good too.

And it has nothing to do with Atlus, I just like to analyze good games.