I’ve finished Persona 1 Revelations and am now on to Persona 2 Innocent Sin. Working my way up to eventually getting Persona 4, haha. I’ve been told that it’s totally unnecessary to play the previous Personas, but screw that, I’m doing this and in order.

Persona 1 had a lot of problems. I absolutely hate first person dungeons. Others seem to like them. I’ll never understand them. Every single dungeon was a boring maze with different wallpapers. Fucking terrible. The battle system had its ups and downs. It was not uncommon to have a Persona setup where you can easily take down most random battles, then you get ambushed by a new encounter and utterly wiped because half your team is weak against the enemy’s hard-hitting spells, and the other half only has spells that do little damage or get reflected. It’s pointlessly cheap. Also, there’s a certain balance with battle positions that is impossible to strike. Every character has a specific range for their attacks, and no matter what you do, there doesn’t exist a setup where every single character is capable of maximizing their weapon and gun ranges so they’ll always be able to hit something. Finally, unlocking Reiji or the Snow Queen Quest requires steps that are so out of the way and subtle that it pretty much requires a guide. The story’s nothing to write home about either, though I was considerably more entertained by the Snow Queen Quest story than the SEBEC story.

That all said, I liked quite a few of the characters. My favorites were Yukino and Nanjo. Once I got a hang of how Persona acquisitions worked, I liked the system. But fuck the randomness of moon phases and praying for bonuses. IMO, the less randomness involved in… well, anything, the better. The music was… well, it was unique. Almost every track had vocals. Even the regular battle music.

There are times I like it, but it’s just a weird choice. It sometimes puts me to sleep because of all the time I spend in battles attempting to level up my Persona ranks. No battle music should put you to sleep. I am a big fan of the boss battle music, though my favorite track is quite possibly the Velvet Room.

I literally could not find a video of the PSP version of the Velvet Room track. The original PS1 version is both close enough and undoubtedly better. I don’t know what it is about it, but it just has more… something. Also, the PSP version loops the first part of the track rather than go into that piano solo… which is a major negative.

Once I started Persona 2, I was pretty much blown away. It was immediately so much better than Persona 1. The story caught my attention right away. Also, the character portraits ACTUALLY CHANGED TO MATCH THEIR EXPRESSIONS. Seriously, this was a major departure from Persona 1. When a character was angry, IT LOOKED ANGRY. Holy crap! In Persona 1, a character’s portrait would be shown above their dialogue, and it would ALWAYS BE THE SAME GENERIC PORTRAIT. Every. Single. Time. I’m sorry, but when I put more effort into .hack//Proximity than a professional level game, that’s sad. That’s downright depressing.

Moving on, there are a LOT of recurring characters from Persona 1. I was not expecting Ms. Saeko at all. There were quite a number of NPCs and references to some of the player characters. A returning party member is FREAKING YUKINO, and I freaking love it. Amusingly, even though I had just finished Persona 1 a few days ago, I got hit by a truck of nostalgia when I first entered the Velvet Room and heard a remix of the first game’s song.

The jump in quality was substantial – the opera voice, the piano’s sound quality… WOW. I literally had to savor that the first time. Even though Persona 1 was such a chore for such a long time for me, I was immediately grateful that I started from Persona 1. What I experienced made it worth it.

Character-wise, I’ve only scratched the surface, but both Lisa Silverman (a white girl fluent in Japanese, speaks Cantonese, and has a father who is an expy of Steven Seagal) and Maya Amano (perky magazine journalist that dual wields pink pistols) are already two of my favorite characters now (period).

Combat-wise, things are a lot simpler. You no longer have to deal with formation and range (a stupid, pointless pain in Persona 1), and you now have team attacks. Also, there is an indicator in the menu telling you how many more Persona summons you need to rank up, which is a welcome addition. The thing I found most interesting was how Demon Negotiating was bulked up. I actually cracked up at some of the options possible (ALL of Lisa’s options, for example), and I quite like the Pact system over Persona 1’s Card system, though being limited to 3 Pacts at a time is a bit frustrating. At least with Persona 1 you could have 12 Demon Cards at a time. Overall I guess Demon Negotiating is just different. Battle-wise, Persona 2 is laughably easy compared to Persona 1. I barely even have to think – just select Auto. Of course, I AM only in the first dungeon of the game and grinding just for the hell of it. Call it a bad habit from Persona 1. I just absolutely NEED to max rank my Personas as soon as I acquire them.

I guess I should cover the story. I have to say, the concept got me hooked: for some reason, “rumors” are becoming reality. The key to this phenomena is probably a being known as Joker, and for some reason he has a grudge against you and your friends, but whether it’s a case of mistaken identity or gaps in your memory, you simply don’t know what his deal is. Either way, you now have to deal with a host of demons, using your Personas to fight them off, while also navigating through the reality of rumors made real.

Rarely am I immediately interested in a game with high hopes this early into it. Persona 1 I put off for months at a time several times. I swear, it took me at least 2 years to beat it because of how much it bored me. It could only take me a couple months to clear Persona 2 and would be less if I didn’t have classes.