Masaru Tsugami's Persona 3 mods (partially lost Persona 3 mods; 2006-2007)

The mods of the RPG game Persona 3 and FES that Masaru Tsugami AKA SoulHacker90, the perpetrator of the Kirishima High School shooting on December 5th, 2007, created. Most of his mods surfaced on the internet around late 2006 and 2007, mostly on his website and other gaming sites. It is believed that he created a total of 47 mods during this time and before the shooting, however, all of his mods were seized by the PSIA shortly after the shooting but 32 of the 47 mods were leaked on the internet and are playable, with the rest surfacing in stills and two of them being partially found.

Persona connection
Masaru Tsugami was an avid fan of the Megami Tensei series, he started playing the games at age 14 and first played Persona 3 at age 16. Tsugami would record footage of himself playing the game and post it on his YouTube account and other gaming websites. He was also known for being the first gamer to speedrun the game, finishing at under 3 hours and 32 minutes. He’d also have a similar speedrun with Persona 3 FES in The Answer, finishing at 4 hours and 45 minutes.

He also owned the Persona 3 manga, light novels, and dramas CD. He also named his shotgun “Mitsuru” after Mitsuru Kirijo, one of the main characters in the game. Around August of 2006, Tsugami had been making and sharing mods and unofficial patches of Persona 3, he mostly posted these mods on his website and made them on his computer or the school’s computers. He showed off these mods on his YouTube and Nico Nico Douga accounts.

Mods
Tsugami’s mods contained comments; mostly during the game over screen. Such as, “No real man should lose at a game at this level. MAKE SURE YOU GO ALL OUT ON THEM!!!!!”, in the copyright section of every mod, it reads, “The following mod(s) were made by SoulHacker90, do not change anything about my mods or else I’ll send you to North Korea!!” Some mods, mostly the ones for FES had two additional difficulties those being: a very easy mode called “Training Wheels” which lowers the amount of shadows, increases EXP and rewards after an encounter, and removes the Reaper from the game. Next is a very hard mode called, “Fucking Psycho”, which higher the number of shadows in Tartarus, making enemies go first in every encounter and boss fight, making certain Personas and skill cards more expensive and harder to fuse, and health, shuffle times and HP and SP healing items become harder to come across. The difficulties have also been changed, easy mode is now "Serenity", normal mode is now, "Standard" and hard mode is now, "Akihiko's Fists".

Copies of the following mods are known to have been found and exist:

Playable Party (P3 mod #1/Data Evidence File 01) Dated: September 26, 2006 Status: Released and Playable
The first known mod made by Tsugami was simply called, Playable Party, it’s also nicknamed P3 mod #1 in his file folders and codenamed, Data Evidence File 01 by the TMPD and the PSIA. The mod allows the party members to be playable in battle, being made an option in tactics called, “Follow Directions,” with the tactics on, the player can control their party members and command their movesets. In addition, the player can command Fuuka for certain items during battle by pressing triangle and circle and pressing up and down on the d-pad twice. In PC it’s F3 and F2 and the latter.

Use cheats during questions (P3 mod #2/Data Evidence File 02) Dated: November 19, 2006 Status: Released and Playable
The second called, Use cheats during questions allows the protagonist to use cheats while answering questions during class and during a test. He can also give tips and hints to other students. But this leads to consequences as the protagonist can get caught with the notes and his academics stat will decrease. The way to obtain the cheats is either by Junpei or Kenji who with give to MC during rank 4 of their social links. In addition to getting caught with the cheats, he would be able to talk with Mitsuru for a while and will be suspended from doing after school clubs.