Starting Your Second Playthrough
When you finish the game at 100%, a new option appears on the main menu called New Game +. Selecting it carries over your level, stats, skills, inventory, weapons, items, and accumulated yen. It does not carry over palaces, Mementos progress, or the calendar. You start at the beginning of March again with all previously unlocked Personas and social link ranks intact. The carry-over is mostly straightforward, but there are things the game doesn't make obvious. Social link ranks that are already maxed stay maxed. If you didn't max any bonds during your first run, you won't have anything to rebuild, which actually saves you a lot of time because the entire mid-game is dominated by grinding social links. The calendar resets. All scheduled social events vanish and new ones appear for the second playthrough. Takemi, Masuzu, and the Councillor of Seido are gone entirely in NG+. This matters more than most people realize because these three are locked behind story progress in specific ways that some players spend 15 to 20 hours trying to work around before accepting they can't be maxed.
The real structural change is in the late game. Once you reach the third semester content, difficulty jumps noticeably. Several enemy sets have higher defense thresholds and new elemental resistance patterns that weren't present in a first run. Your first instinct will be to farm more levels, but that path hits a wall around level 90 because the experience curve flattens out past that point. You're better off focusing on skill inheritance and weapon reforging. I spent an entire playthrough ignoring weapon reforging because I assumed the base stats were fine. They aren't. By the time I hit Okumura's Palace on NG+, my weapons had no elemental bonuses and none of my party members were hitting past 40 percent critical rates on strong enemies. Reforging the top weapons with elemental stones cost roughly 80,000 yen total across the party and added two to four elements per weapon. That single decision cut my dungeon clearing time roughly in half for the remainder of the run. The cost scales with the number of elements you're adding, so doing it all at once is cheaper than spreading it out. Another thing nobody warns you about is the bonus run unlock condition. After finishing NG+, a third playthrough option becomes available. This version strips you of most carry-over rewards except for a few preset weapons and an additional costume set. The purpose of this run is to complete specific challenges and unlock the true ending's extra content. If you're looking to see everything the game has, plan for three complete playthroughs minimum, not two.
The challenge mode in NG+ also introduces enemies with hybrid elemental weaknesses that require setup spells before you can capitalize on them. A single Castigation spell won't break a fusion weakness unless the target is already weakened. Using an elemental skill first, then following up with a break attack, works consistently across all fused Personas in the late game. This isn't covered in the in-game tutorials and most players figure it out through trial and error, which costs time and resources. There's also a small issue with the confidant system where some story-locked bonds can technically be started earlier if you know the exact timing, but the game doesn't indicate this anywhere. The third semester routes have their own scheduling constraints that don't overlap with regular social link windows, so you need to manage your days differently than you did in a normal run. Plan your days around confidant availability before committing to dungeon crawling or part-time jobs. One practical tip that applies specifically to NG+: the Velvet Room offers fusion bonuses that scale with your current game progress, not your total playtime. This means you should push through story content as fast as possible in your second run to unlock better fusion modifiers earlier. Rushing through the early palaces instead of exploring side content fully will actually help your progression speed more than most players expect. The trade-off is that you miss optional money and item sources, but those are trivial compared to the fusion advantage you gain.
Get the Full Details
The system works as intended for players who understand its quirks. It rewards planning rather than brute force grinding, and the second playthrough feels fundamentally different from the first even though the story is the same. Most people treat it as a replay with more power and call it a day. That works fine if you don't care about seeing everything. If you want the full experience, learn the confidant limitations upfront and build your strategy around what you can actually carry over.
