I just can’t say enough about how much I love Persona 2.  It just does so much right.  Massive, MASSIVE step up from Persona 1.  Honestly, there’s literally no reason to play Persona 1, even though Persona 2 takes place in the same world and there are cameos and references everywhere.  That isn’t to say Persona 1 was a bad game… but it’s deeply, deeply flawed.  I already talked about that before, so let’s move on to Persona 2.

Persona 2 is divided into 2 games: Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment.  Both games came out for the PS1, but only Eternal Punishment (the second game and actually a direct sequel to Innocent Sin) was officially translated and released in English.  Makes perfect sense, right?  When the PSP remakes came out, we finally got Innocent Sin.  However, the Eternal Punishment remake was not translated.  That’s just cruel.

Anyway, let’s start with what’s terribly wrong about Innocent Sin.  The difficulty is… not there.  It is laughably, laughably easy, and it only ever gets difficulty once enemies start using multi-target instant KO spells.  The only real challenge is the final boss.

As much as I love seeing battle animations, you’re going to have it on SKIP most of the time.  Battles just take too long otherwise.  Speaking of pointless time-wasters, this game doesn’t have customizable auto-actions.  You can only choose to have everyone attack or everyone do the exact same actions they did last turn.  Even Persona 1 had custom auto-actions, and they were more customizable than most.  You could actually set some of your characters to do specific actions, and some characters to always prompt for player input.  That was amazing.  Sucks to see such a step backwards.  Yeah, imagine that: something Persona 1 did BETTER than Persona 2.

This game has a special new feature called Theater, in which players can customize and share their own custom scenarios and use them for leveling or just fun.  Sounds AWESOME, right?  Well, no.  All that fun stuff was taking out of the western release, leaving us with only the two default scenarios, which have recommended levels of 30 and 70.  BTW, the Theater is unlocked soon after meeting Maya and Yukino, who start out at level 7.  Yeah.  Oh yeah, remember how I talked about how pathetically easy this game was?  I entered the Theater at level 10, basically as soon as I unlocked it.  I cleared the first scenario and got a substantial level boost.  Then I replayed the scenario to level up and moved on to the level 70 scenario.  I ended up spending a majority of my playtime in the Theater, allowing me to easily skip pretty much all random battles in the main story with Estoma.  By the time I left the Theater, I was level 49, and story monsters were around level 12.  THIS GAME IS FREAKING EASY.

Another gripe I probably should have started with is the lack of an instruction manual.  Now, I’m sure the physical version has one… and I hope to buy a copy for display.  But the digital version does not.  In case you didn’t know, most PSN digital copies of games have a digital instruction manual.  For some reason, Innocent Sin does not.  So, I ended up not knowing until halfway through the game that it was possible to use Team Contacts.  More on that later.

Enough of the bitching.  On to the good stuff.  First: the characters.  I love them.  All of them.  They all have unique designs and are colorful and so full of… LIFE.  Another massive step up from Persona 1.  Now, the characters of Persona 1 certainly had distinct personalities, but that was all they had going for them.  I found myself not caring for any of them most of the time, and that especially goes for Maki, who had the most character development by far.  Possibly the ONLY non-NPC character to get development.  Yeah.  That’s right.  The NPCs got more character development than the party characters.  Why?  Because Persona 1 had this “brilliant” idea of giving you the ability to recruit different party members.  These party members would stick with you for the rest of the game with no option to switch out, and you are given no indication that this would be a permanent thing.  And each party member was capable of equipping different types of personas, and only one difficult-to-recruit member was capable of equipping Death-type personas.  I will say this, though: the party members you did recruit at least had unique dialogue and interactions with other party members you chose, which means this is something Persona 1 had over Chrono Cross.  And I don’t care how much Chrono Cross did right (the music… and something else, I’m sure); it fucking SUCKS when it comes to characters.  Wait, where was I?  Oh, that’s right, I wasn’t supposed to be bitching.  Or bringing up Persona 1 again.   Ooookay, moving on…

That’s right, the characters.  I ended up liking every single one of my party members and a good chunk of the NPCs.  Even though, in typical JRPG fashion, the plot got pretty convoluted near the end, the game never failed to suck me into this world of rumors-gone-wild, and I found myself getting invested into character motivations and guessing at what happened in their pasts.

I just realized; you know what this game reminds me of?  Shadow Hearts 2.  It’s just as fun, though the lead is only a silent protagonist, which means he’s nowhere near as awesome as Yuri Hyuga.

Oh, the main character… Unlike Persona 1, he actually has a default name: Tatsuya Suou.  He also has a character and backstory, and likes and dislikes!  Egads, how revolutionary!

I already touched upon the main cast last time, but it bears repeating that Yukino from Persona 1 returns (WHOOOOOO!), as does almost everyone else as cameos (except Yuka, who was a dumb bitch anyway, and Mark, who was great in combat and horrible in everything else).  Elly even seems to hint that she and the P1 MC were involved, which makes me squee since that was something I kinda aimed for (despite the fact that I had pretty much no opportunities to forge a relationship with anyone outside of being railroaded into being Maki’s love interest).  Yukino returns and actually gets development, Elly actually hints at being involved with the MC and Maki doesn’t mention him at all?  Yet more reasons for me to love this game!

As for the original characters, I freaking love everything about Lisa Silverman (Ginko).  Blonde American girl with a Steven Seagal expy for a father, speaks random Cantonese and can’t speak English, uses Kung Fu and wants to be a pop idol?  I dare you to find a better package than that.  Eikichi was unexpectedly a very solid and entertaining comedic foil.  Yukino and Maya were both different flavors of big sis figures.  And as much as I loved Lisa and Yukino, I found myself drifting towards pairing Tatsuya with Maya, and the game actually leans towards that pairing strongly despite your best efforts.  The villains are all quite memorable as well, even if I can’t quite remember all of their names.  You’ve got your loners, your pyromaniacs, your naive cosplayer brats (wait, what?), your megalomaniacs, your mad scientists, your mecha-piloting Nazis led by a Longinus-wielding sunglasses-wearing Nyarlathotep-Persona-having Adolf Hitler…

That’s right: Adolf Hitler is in this game.  Not just that, he and his Last Battalion have got one amazing theme:

The music is just perfect.  It’s remixed from the PS1 version, and unlike Persona 1, it’s not an extreme change like completely removing tracks and replacing them with pop.  It’s the same tunes, just upgraded.  Or not.  But y’know what?  If you like the old versions, you can go into the Options menu and switch from Original to Remixed.  And it changes just like that!  Unlike my sarcastic remark before, this one truly is revolutionary.  It’s a wonder we don’t see more of this kind of feature.

While we’re still on music, let’s move on to the map music.  Even though it changes from time to time, it’s still the same basic theme.  In fact, a handful of other tracks are just variants of this main theme.  But it really pays off thematically by the end, because the ending theme uses this main theme, and since you should be VERY familiar with the melody, the effect is that you get hit with a ton of nostalgia.  Couple this with the fact that you know this is the end, and all the FEEEEEEEEELS from the ending sequence itself, and man… it’s something you really just have to experience to understand.  I’m providing the theme here just because it’s a good listen, but you wouldn’t appreciate the full experience without actually playing through the game yourself.

The battle system is pretty standard fare most of the time.  Gone is the pointlessly complex Persona 1 system of navigating around different attack ranges and party formations.  Contacts are… well, just different.  Somewhat better, somewhat worse, but definitely less frustating and easily abusable.  They’re also a lot more entertaining.  My favorite new addition is the Team Contacts.  Rather than having a single character negotiate with a Demon, you can have two or three characters team up, often with hilarious results.  You get new Team Contacts depending on some choices made during the story, and it is possible to somewhat increase Tatsuya’s relationship with other party members and change how their Team Contact operates.

The plot starts out promising, then it kinda goes into monster-of-the-day territory, but it quickly heats up, and then all the mindfucks start bombarding you and you wonder WHAT’S REAL ANYMORE?  But all the clues are there from the very beginning, and I found myself making new connections only possible because of the nature of the world.  I don’t want to spoil any more than what little I have spoiled, so that’s about all I have to say about that.  I will say that the major themes are memories, dreams, perception and ego, with some swell parental issues sprinkled in just because.

In a word, this game is IMMERSIVE.  Yes, it has a number of mechanical flaws, but the execution of what matters was perfect.  I am utterly amazed that Persona 2 doesn’t have a bigger following.

So, with Innocent Sin down, I’m moving on to Eternal Punishment.  Not starting yet, though.  I’m gonna wait it out and see if Atlus has another sale this season.  Since the PSP version was never released stateside, I’m forced to buy the PS1 Classic.  And while $10 is a perfectly reasonable price… imma see if I can’t get it cheaper.

In Eternal Punishment, we enter an alternate reality where the events of Innocent Sin never happened.  Maya Amano is now the main character (and mute) while Tatsuya Suou is an important character and capable of speech!