'Persona 5': How to capture Personas — tips, tricks and guide

Persona 5 is rife with demons you'll need to recruit to your side. They're Personas, of course, and you'll need them to help you complete the various tasks ahead of you in the game. To capture them, you won't be getting them at random from a deck of cards after battles like in Persona 3 or Persona 4. 

This time around, you've got to negotiate with Personas and answer a series of questions to convince them. It's a fun twist on the normal format. So you'll want to read up on how to capture them, based on my personal experience in the game. 

Persona 5: Learning to negotiate with Personas

To get a Persona ready to negotiate, you'll want to first use an ability or attack that the Shadow form is weak to. When you find out a Persona's weakness, you can use the R1 button to automatically select and initiate the move that will make an enemy weak. Doing this will knock them down and you'll be able to perform a "Hold Up!" technique. From here, you can choose to use an All-Out Attack by your group or negotiate with them. That's your best bet if you're looking to grow a menagerie of Personas you can fight with in any situation. 

While speaking with a Shadow, you can either try to get it to join you or request money and items from it. You'll have to enter negotiations to get them to remember their true forms as Personas and now Shadows, and that means answering their questions. These questions will be related to the Persona's individual traits. Make sure you know about their traits as a whole and figure those out before answering questions. You can wing it, but you may miss out on a Persona you really want if you mess up while answering the questions. If you do answer the questions successfully, you can add your Persona to your party and it will be ripe for fusion later on to create new Personas and register the rest. 

You can also kill almost all the Personas in a group battle and leave just one alive, which makes them legitimately fearful of you. That way you'll be able to recruit the Persona without having to go through a drawn out negotiation process.

Sometimes, Shadows will beg for their lives when nearing death. Some Shadows with a Timid nature will do this more readily, where those that are Irritable will simply never beg. 

That's pretty much all you need to know about adding Personas to your cache. Happy hunting.

More Persona 5 news, updates, tips and tricks

For more on the latest entry in the Persona series, check out the rest of what Mic has to offer. Here's a guide to building relationships with the game's Confidant system, and a guide to when and how you can name your main character.