The Silver River seems utterly miserable. As for not finding Nanjo and Reiji… looking at their art, it might just have been you didn’t notice them because they’re the two that look the most different? It might also be that you needed to find them in the factory first before they show up at Sevens? That’s as much information as I can find, at least.
also speaking of SMT, Nocturne is getting an HD remaster on the Switch next year.
Oh, I know where they are. Reiji is in a room in the factory we can’t get to yet. It only opens up after you’ve done the first half of Xibalba and requires a bunch of demon rumors to open. Nanjo I think shows up at the same time for one brief scene. I’ll get to it in the update after the next one.
I’ve already heard about the Nocturne remaster and SMT V next year. I’m probably going to do SMT V shortly after it releases, because for once I’d like to do an SMT game without Japan spoiling everything over a year in advance. I’m sure Atlus won’t enjoy that, but the only way they’ll get me to stop is if they were to, say, release an English version of the PSP version of Eternal Punishment.
Aah, okay.
Also hey apparently SMT5 is going to have a simultaneous release worldwide, so that might not happen this time around!
This is the best LP now.
: This is it. The endgame. Welcome to Xibalba. I hope you’re ready for what’s basically Caracol 2.0.
: “That’s odd, though. They know we’re after them… so isn’t it a little too quiet? There’s not even a welcoming committee here.”
: “This spaceship can carry an entire city, so I bet it has tons of high-tech traps. Everyone probably fell for them…”
: “Hmm… I doubt they ALL died, but you’re right, there must be some pretty devious traps in there.”
: It doesn’t really matter which one you pick. All that changes is the next cutscene, which I would do both versions of were it not locked behind a godawful 45 minute long autoscroller.
: “Whatever it is, we can’t just stand here. We need to get the Heaven Skull so we can put the city back to normal. Let’s go!”
: You can’t see it because of how blurry the screen gets when stuff’s in motion and also because it’s under Eikichi’s portrait, but Lisa is dancing around the lasers trying not to get hit.
: Xibalba is easily the second worst dungeon in the game after Silver River. The floors aren’t particularly long or complex - but in exchange, the encounter rate is jacked up to the point where in some cases you’re getting encounters every other step.
: Layout wise, it’s pretty much exactly like Caracol - there’s a hallway then a cutscene room, and this repeats until it’s over.
: “Eheheh… I’ll show you some stars, too. Papa knows lots about the stars!”
: “Wow, that’s so cool! My daddy’s always busy with his job. Hey, Jun! What’s your daddy like?”
: “Huh? Um… well… h-he’s really cool and strong and great… really!”
: “Seriously…? I don’t have a dad, so I’m kinda jealous… you’re so lucky, Jun-kun!”
: I wonder who Jun’s mother could be? The game will only barely explain it shortly before the final boss in a cutscene room, because Innocent Sin has some serious pacing issues. It feels like there should’ve been another dungeon between Mt. Iwato and Mt. Katatsumuri where they put some of this stuff.
: “D-don’t worry about those k-kids… they say even m-meaner stuff to m-me…”
: “My papa… he’s… he’s not a deadbeat!”
: Honestly, why ARE we seeing this? The entire childhood plot arc was like five dungeons ago.
: “Jun-kun!? Are you okay…? Hang in there!”
: “I’m… I’m all right… sorry, everyone. Let’s… keep going…”
: There’s some optional dialogue here which I feel I need to show so that something about two updates from now when I finish the game makes sense.
: Can you guess what the final boss is going to be?
: The monsters here are largely the exact same ones we saw in Silver River, with Throne and Fafnir (a Catoblepas recolor I didn’t even realize was a separate demon until I was nearing the 5th floor) being the only new demons. I fought every random encounter in this dungeon without negotiating at all and barely gained a level out of it. Just use the Estoma card.
: Oh, Pascal the Dog is here as well. He’s worth exactly jack shit in terms of EXP and money and only usually appears by himself.
: Xibalba doesn’t have staircases, it has future space elevators. Most of this dungeon is laid out as follows, to the point where I’m not even going to post the map.
: There’s a hallway, a couple of small side hallways with items in them, a cutscene room or two, and then the elevator. That’s it.
: I should mention that around here, I decided to use all the incenses I picked up.
: The reason Tatsuya only has 80 dexterity instead of 99 is because each character’s stats are the average of theirs and their Persona’s.
: The big one here was Maya, who gained about 90 HP from using all the Vit and HP incenses. She’s still got the lowest max HP of anyone.
: I’m just going to summarize the rest of this because it’s about ten more lines that do nothing but tell you that Prince Taurus had his face blown off by a laser.
: Ares is an enemy that showed up in Silver River that I’m not sure I actually got a shot of. Annoyingly, I wound up using God Hand and a shitty water fusion spell for most of this dungeon because Mucalinda (Eikichi’s Persona) wouldn’t fucking mutate. Eventually it learned Malaquadyne so I could do Meltdown and Undine on the same turn.
: Does anyone want to guess what’s in this next cutscene room? Anyone?
: Most people think the microwave hallway in Metal Gear Solid 4 originated there, but it actually had a long and storied career before that.
: All Solid Snake really had to do to make it through the microwave hallway was to believe in himself.
: It’s because, as we’re about to learn, Maya is basically a six year old girl in an adult’s body.
: By the way, I started looking at stuff for my next LP and found a design document from one of the artbooks for Devil Survivor. The notes for all of them are basically “Giant breasts, needs bigger breasts, big breasts.”
: The door opens because the Mayans fucking suck at building traps. It explains why they’re hot garbage in Civ 6 and why the Inca are the superior South American civilization. Seriously I feel like if the Spanish had just left the Inca alone we’d already have a functioning space elevator. Those guys built roads over mountains, it would’ve been a matter of years before they built one to space.
: Right outside the microwave hallway we run into the worst enemies in this dungeon. Hellsehen (and the robots, called Metal Zentaurs) are extremely resistant to magic. Worse, they like to spam both poison and confusion to fuck up fusion spells. You basically need either Take-Mikazuchi or a Persona with Maziodyne to kill them.
: Seriously this feels like it’s some kind of Mayan temple to daddy issues.
: So, this is Maya’s dad. He has a name that as far as I know is only mentioned in the artbooks - it’s Masataka Amano. Remember how I hated Fujii or whatever his name was, the photographer who died outside Caracol? That’s because in Eternal Punishment, we find out that he worked with Maya’s dad.
: Keep in mind that Maya is 23, and I think in this scene she’s 6 or 7 years old, meaning that Yukino is still a toddler. Fujii is working with him at this point. Yes, he’s old enough to be Yukino’s father and then some.
: “Is it more important than me or Mom!? That’s… so selfish, Daddy!”
: “Liar! You promised… you promised you’d come home… when you were assigned to the war zone… do you know how scared I was!? That Daddy might have forgotten about me…!?”
: I like that Atlus went through all the trouble of making what I’m pretty sure is a new portrait for this specific scene. And now we know why she has the rabbit. You know, the one we haven’t seen since the bomb shelter.
: So I’m gonna level with you here, I don’t like the writing for this last part of the game at all. The problem is that the plot kind of didn’t have enough time for actual character development (even though it did) and so what we have is the game throwing a giant mess of plot at us and hoping something’s going to stick.
: I mean, just thinking about, it we basically went from knowing nothing at all to “Hitler has returned and is using his army of possibly robo-Nazis to raise a Mayan spaceship from the ground so he can take over the world” and then back to nothing.
: I think part of it is that up until this point, Atlus was pretty much used to making games that just didn’t have a plot. Persona 1 was, as far as I know, their first attempt at actual writing as opposed to making a dungeon crawler and telling you “there’s demons, kill them all”.
: So I’ll just warn you now, a lot of the stuff at the end of the game will make exactly zero sense if you assume Jun is gay and has no romantic interest in Maya.
: “I went into the same line of work as my dad… maybe I was trying to outdo him…”
: “Dad died pursuing his dream. All he left me was this… that’s why I… I wanted to be a successful journalist who could balance my work with a family, the way he couldn’t…”
: “Have you… ever heard this poem before?”
: As far as I know, unlike Der Doppelganger, this is not an actual poem. At least, the only results when I searched for it were P2 fansites.
: “What does it take to prove you were ever alive…? Even if you die, as long as you’re remembered, you’ll live on as a memory.”
: Why the fuck are we going into this NOW!? This is the end of the goddamn game! We’re supposed to be wrapping the plot up, not adding new plot points!
: “But then, if you’re forgotten… that’s really no different from being dead…”
: “No man is an island… so we try to imprint our existence in others. Following one’s dream may be one way of doing so.”
: Hold on I need to contact that artist again and get a picture of Jun as Venom Snake doing the “You’re all diamonds” thing.
: “That’s how it was with me. If you guys had really forgotten about me… I might not be here right now…”
: The way he calls her Big Maya just reinforces the whole Metal Gear Solid thing.
: I’m imagining this as an ad for a fast food restaurant and it’s incredibly amusing. “This… is where my Persona has been guiding me for the last ten years… to Big Jack’s Burger Shack, just five minutes off Exit 39 of I-91. Big Jack’s, where we’ve got the best burgers allowed by state law!”
: I didn’t capture it because it happened in the same battle, but Isis also got a “change form” mutation. I was like “FUCK YES I GOT DAGDA”. Nope, this game hates me.
: Instead, we get the ability to change Isis into King Arthur, who… sucks. Weak to magic across the board, doesn’t even null physical attacks, shit moveset, high SP cost. I think he might actually be the worst Persona in the game, on par with some of the shittier Personas from the first game.
: “You’ve got a point. We haven’t seen Igor’s face in a while, either. I kinda wish we could have a chance to switch out some of our Personas…”
: Yes, I too want to send Mucalinda into the trash pile for being shit and refusing to learn High Pressure.
: “We’re in a real fix… there’s no time to go back to the city and no way to get there if we could. Just hang in there, guys.”
: “No use hoping for a miracle. Let’s just go.”
: “Aiyah! We’re so lucky! Let’s go, Tatsuya!”
: “Oh goddess of destiny, thank you! Thank you! Let’s break on through!”
: “Wait a second, you two…! Doesn’t this seem a little too good to be true!?”
: “Yikes…”
: “Oh man, this has to be some kind of trap! We need to hurry after them! I’ll go after Eikichi-kun. Tatsuya-kun, you and Jun-kun follow Lisa!”
: “Big Maya’s right, I think. Let’s go, Tatsuya!”
: Honestly, I don’t know what the point of this cutscene is. It’s not really advancing character development, because we already know that Eikichi is a complete dumbass who will gladly run face-first into any trap he sees. It’s also not a plot point in the sense that we’re not splitting the party up again.
: “Aiyah!? Where did you two come from? I don’t remember seeing you inside.”
: “We wanted to ask you the same thing… what happened in there, Lisa?”
: “Whaaaat!? Nuh-uh. It really was just a healing spring inside. I know, because I was yelling at Trish about what a ripoff her prices were. Maybe you two were just dreaming.”
: The trap was actually just trying to make Tatsuya and Jun hug.
: “Well, I definitely came out of the Velvet–”
: “Hang on… what’s going on here? When I was in there, it was full of traps… should we go back in and look again?”
: Given how Persona 1 worked, you’d think there would be a different route through the dungeon if you actually tried to go into the Velvet Room, but nope, it’s just a Velvet Room.
: The fifth floor has an elevator on it, but Jun refuses to let us use it. This is where I got really confused because there’s supposed to be a way back to the city from here.
: What this is probably supposed to be, given that the name of the room is “Terminal”, is a Nazi-developed version of the teleportation terminals from the mainline SMT games.
: Eikichi then proceeds to star in Shin Megami Tensei III, where he is merged with a demon and becomes the “Dummy-fiend”, a creature of pure stupidity.
: “E-Eikichi-kun!”
: Honestly though, you’d think there’d be at least some Nazi body parts strewn around here. How would you know when the last person to use the teleporter is off the pad on the other side?
: Somehow, Lisa fails at using a Terminal.
: And now we’re back at Sevens. The game does this ostensibly because there’s new armor and weapons we can buy, but now we can do the “ultimate weapons” sidequest… which I’m not going to do for the most part. For one thing, I never actually wound up buying new armor since uh… I think after Mt. Iwato.
: Between this and restocking on healing items I was down to around 500k yen.
: We were kind of supposed to do Doors 4 and 5 of the Abandoned Factory a long time ago - I think Door 4 opens after the Aerospace Museum and Door 5 opens after Mt. Katatsumuri.
: The process for opening up the two hidden rooms in the Factory is extremely annoying. Before you can do any of it, you need to have read all of the notes in the first five rooms.
: So now we finally find out what happened here: someone started a rumor that made demons appear. We find out exactly what the deal is (and why there are two hidden rooms) in Room 5.
: This is where we get the clues about the hidden rooms - the liquid waste disposal area and the secret boardroom. Here’s the annoying part. Instead of this just being a rumor you can take to Todoroki, you have to spread it via demons.
: There’s one final note we need to get, which is done by going through Room 1 and going into Room 5 from there. It doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know.
: Room 6 has a Crimson Wing in a locker, which allows us to fuse Suzaku. This is only really relevant if you’re trying for that one fusion spell.
: So basically, here’s how demon rumors work. You have to make a pact with a demon, make it happy again, ask it for information until it gives you the rumor you want, and then use a different demon to spread it.
: In the Boardroom, we run into someone who looks… kinda familiar.
: What he’s really asking here is “Do you want Tatsuya’s ultimate weapon for free?” and the answer is yes.
: So in the past three years, Nanjo became a biker. This has to do with his story in Eternal Punishment.
: In Eternal Punishment, Nanjo’s entire storyline is based around a rumor that Kandori somehow survived Persona 1 and is in Sumaru City.
: So here’s why the ultimate weapons aren’t worth it. Right now, we could go buy a weapon from the store that has 143 attack. The ultimates can be powered up through demon rumors, but… yeah, no. The other problem is that if you screw up a negotiation, the demon can curse your weapon and render it useless (1 attack). Next time, we’ll finish the factory and finish the game.
Aah, there we go. I was wondering when Mr Number One would show up, because I read he did show up at the school to, but I guess not.
It’s a shame the legendary weapons are so… volatile.
My guess is that in the manga (which I haven’t read) he probably does show up at the school, but doesn’t in the game because I feel like they had no idea what the plot was going to be until it was too late.
: Hoo boy do I have something for this thread.
: Around the time Eternal Punishment came out, Atlus released a whole bunch of artbooks centered around Persona 1 and the Persona 2 duology. Some (like the Innocent Sin World Guide) have been scanned, but others haven’t. Someone dumped a scanned copy of Persona Club II: Innocent Sin (one of three artbooks in the series) on 4chan today, weighing in at a massive three gigs of scans. You can find it here: https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1Ce_osOwbCP9xvNk81qtu5VroMcdCngdw&export=download
I highly recommend that you do NOT look at the artbook until AFTER the LP is finished as the first page has a picture of the final boss of Innocent Sin. Thankfully there’s only one more story update left.
: Unfortunately, the pages are WAY too big to post here, but I’ll post some of them.
: Here’s a shot of all the ultimate Personas. From the left you have Apollo (Tatsuya), Artemis (Maya), Hermes (who isn’t actually an ultimate), Venus (Lisa), Chronos (Jun), and Hades (Eikichi). Sucks that they put all this time into them when they’re crap in-game.
: Each character also has a massive amount of fanart, except the scanned pages are so big that I can only post a quarter of a page at a time. Seriously they’re like 20 MB each.
: They also do an entire Q&A section in the back about plot points in Innocent Sin. I really, really wish I could read these. Here they do a character comparison chart… where Yukino somehow gets compared to the two worst girls and also Mark for some reason. They got this wrong because Mark was slow and shitty and Yukino is the exact opposite of that. Eikichi is actually the slowest character by far.
: The back also has maps of all the Innocent Sin dungeons, including one of Silver River which I could’ve used. I had no idea the encounters were fixed or that there were dead ends, which might explain why it took forever when I did it. I think I fell for the first one, where you can turn left or right at Maya. According to this, I fought probably 20 encounters (the longest route is 16). No wonder I hated this so much. Can you imagine how bad it’d be if you got all three dead ends?
: Here’s a thing of all the SMT/Persona protagonists up to Innocent Sin. I don’t even know who some of these are. From left:
Right side:
I’m not sure why Aleph (the protagonist of SMT II) isn’t on here.
: Anyway, that’s about all I’ve got. Take a look for yourself once I get around to finishing the LP, which should be fairly soon. Trust me, you don’t want to know what the last boss is. Well, there’s also this (presumably Western-made) fanart I liked.
MT Wiki says the guy you couldn’t identify in this lineup is actually an early official design for SMT 1’s protagonist.
Oh, right! I forgot about the 30-year time skip (at least I think it’s 30 years) in SMT 1 after the world ends. Presumably they put that in there because the SMT 1 protagonist is still alive in the Persona timeline because Thor and Gotoh had their shit put down before they could do anything, so that’s what he’d look like if SMT 1 had never happened and he hadn’t gone full-on late 80s cyberwarrior.
I kind of wish I had a full-sized arm keyboard.
Also I know that someone hadst invoked the processed one earlier (I’m the processed one) but I’ve been either busy or out of it but I didn’t forget y’all so have Shadow Eikichi and Shadow Tatsuya:
I was working on Shadow Maya but the way she’s got her head angled I wasn’t sure how to lazily draw in a pair of sunglasses and have it look halfway right.
: I know, I keep delaying the final update. I wasn’t actually planning to go as far into the legendary weapons quest as I did, but then I did it and I’m kind of glad I did because there’s some good scenes here.
: This is the final note we need. It’s big, long, and only really covers things we already know. The only thing we might not know is that the first worker to see a demon appear was not the one who spread the rumor initially about the liquid waste facility underneath the factory.
: In this locker is the hardest fight of the entire game in the PS1 version. We do not want to do this yet. We do not have the tools.
: Inside the locker… is Alice. Alice is level 80, extremely resistant to magic, and has two different full-party instakills, one of which bypasses resistances.
: Alice opens every fight by using Megidolaon, which three of our five characters reflect back for around 400 damage. Alice has 4,500 HP.
: Megalofire is a fire-based instant kill spell, which theoretically SHOULD work on Alice as she’s not immune to fire. However, it doesn’t work because fuck you that’s why.
: Alice responds by casting Another Dimension, which is a full-party instakill spell. It cannot be reflected and cannot be nulled, even by Makarakarn.
: Once I get out of there without fighting Alice, I get to farming demon rumors. Each legendary weapon has five rumors associated with it once you obtain it - one for each base element and one for making it do Almighty damage. Unfortunately, I didn’t get that one.
: We also pick up the rumor for Eikichi’s ultimate weapon. The problem is that even after I was done escaping Liquid Waste Disposal I only had around a million yen, which would just barely cover Eikichi and Maya’s weapons. Unfortunately, Eikichi’s ultimate weapon has more to it than just a demon rumor.
: After half an hour of getting useless bullshit rumors about demons I don’t give a fuck about, I finally get it.
: There we go.
: For some reason, demon rumors never go away, so you can spread the one about the hidden door in the office even though we already did that.
: Liquid Waste Disposal is easily the worst area in the game. Walking into it is a lot like walking into Thanatos Tower in the first game: you have demons that are up to 30 levels higher than you wandering around in here… in addition to Alice. This entire room is also a gigantic fucking maze with random encounters every three steps.
: HOWEVER, if you’re over level 70, this is where you go to exploit the game. What you do is hit 70 and then use Estoma. You need two characters to do this, because you need to exploit a fusion spell that I never bothered to get.
: The fusion spell is called High End Crusher, and is performed using Zanma and any dark spell. High End Crusher reduces the HP of the highest level enemy in the fight to 1. This works on Alice. With Estoma blocking all demons under level 70, the only thing you CAN run into… is Alice.
: This particular encounter is a pain in the ass. Fenrir is immune to fire, meaning Meltdown won’t work. Adramalech has a physical-based instakill move that he loves using. All in all, it sucks.
: Girimehkala is extremely weak to magic, as is Valkyrie. Valkyrie gives out an ABSURD number of cards if you can make a pact with her - 70 star cards and I think 50+ free ones as well.
: By the way, remember those 1% spawnrate demons? Guess what I ran into! The worst one in the game! Gaia is a giant blob of HP that does nothing but spam Myriad Arrows for loads of damage. In fact, it has the same amount of HP that Alice does - 4,500. I didn’t test Megalofire against it but I probably should’ve.
: Cradle of Creation makes Gaia, a level 72 Empress Persona. I’ll do a quick log of it since we’re never going to make it.
: Gaia isn’t worth fusing. At all. By level 72 you can do far better. Futsuno Mitama is also pretty meh, having a 2x weakness to magic.
: Ouroboros and Ah Puch both die to Meltdown pretty quickly. There’s a palette-swapped version of Ah Puch that I didn’t capture as well.
: Then, something bad happens. I run into Alice, and hadn’t saved since before I fought Gaia.
: I didn’t think to take any screenshots because I didn’t think it was going to end well. What happened was that Alice kept using her other two moves: Megidolaon and Omega Blaster, which is an instakill that targets the lowest-level enemy first and then moves up, killing one enemy per turn. The trick is that Omega Blaster can’t bypass resistances. I only had her use Another Dimension once and it only killed one person. Most of the damage was Alice having her spells reflected at her.
: The entire party levels to 55 off just that one encounter. Keep in mind that this is with everyone alive: if you kill off all but two characters, they’ll get 150,000 EXP each.
: After forever, we’re here.
: Wait, who the hell is this?
: If you’ll recall, comparing him to Kandori was the one thing that would piss Reiji off like nothing else in Persona 1… given that Kandori was Reiji’s half-brother before he got eaten by Nyarlathotep.
: And there we have it. That’s all the Persona 1 cast members accounted for, apart from Mark and Ayase who both died on their way back to their home planet.
: So uh, let me just spoil Eternal Punishment. Just a bit. If you do Nanjo’s route, there’s a rumor that Kandori somehow survived Persona 1, even though the entire P1 cast knows he’s dead. It’s actually Reiji, and this exact scene happens in EP except with the EP cast.
: I bet it’s because people who want to buy from him have to go through a series of sidequests spanning half the game while also spurning the attention of all the other salespeople.
: A… naked… Boss?! We have to defeat him now so Tatsuya can earn a title. Something meant for someone who could defeat even The Boss… we could call him… uh… Double Boss.
: Can we just like, ditch Stinko and pick up Reiji again? Maybe call Elly and see if we can throw Maya somewhere?
: On the way back from Reiji, I noticed that Quetzalcoatl was continuously getting stat up mutations still. He uh… he has higher stats than Lucifer does now, and better resistances to boot.
: Once I got back to Room 6, I kept grinding rumors and got the one I wanted for Tatsuya’s weapon. This rumor is the only way the legendary weapons will ever be better than the store-bought ones: spreading the rumor about “hidden power” raises their attack to 160.
: Note that you’ll always get the weapon rumors in a specific order. The first one will always be the element associated with the character (Fire for Tatsuya, Earth for Lisa, Water for Eikichi) and then the other three elements followed by the “may by the strongest” rumor.
: I also grabbed the rumor for Maya’s legendary weapon. Jun’s is a bit different and does not require a demon rumor - instead, you need to have all the other weapon sidequests done (even if you don’t actually buy Eikichi or Maya’s weapons).
: I accidentally summoned Valkyrie not realizing that her resistances are garbage.
: Then I did something real dumb. I looked at the higher-level Personas and figured that only one is worth it - that being Brahma, who is level 67. I am not grinding that shit, so instead I decided to see one of the five-way fusion spells. This is the one that requires Suzaku, Genbu, Seiryuu, Byakko, and Abe no Seimei. I spent all our remaining cards on this shit.
: Death Spirit is the worst fusion spell in the game next to the one that randomly kills someone (including your party members). The description states that it “raises all allies’ MDEF and targets enemy weaknesses”. In reality, it’s pretty useless.
: 159 damage. 159 fucking damage for an action that took all five characters. Note that it’s not even hitting a weakness, because Death Spirit only hits a weakness if it’s to water/fire/wind/earth. I don’t get why this is so shitty, considering it requires using Genbu and Byakko who both are low level. Time to reload.
: Eikichi and Maya’s legendary weapons have two parts to it. The first is getting the rumor from a demon, the second is actually spreading it. For some reason, even though it’s a demon rumor, you can’t spread it through demons. Instead, you need to talk to the owners of Shiraishi Ramen and Claire de Lune using the “small talk” option which does basically nothing throughout the game.
: I mean, we did kind of turn you into a Russian spy, but… yeah.
: Once we talk to Soejima and Ma’am, we have to go to Todoroki and pay to spread the rumors. Now please, sit back and enjoy this footage of Eikichi getting owned.
: I like to think that the ramen shop owner has an old, beaten-up guitar case somewhere and she’s like “Oh man I can sell it to this idiot for money, let’s see how far I can go with this.”
: I’m not sure if this is better or worse than the banana char siu ramen. I mean, assuming it’s fruit yogurt and you don’t put spices or seasoning on the ramen it might not be bad.
: Oh god. I looked it up and apparently, this is a thing people actually do. Notice that last bit there about “can eating ramen kill you” because the answer is yes.
: Picking the second one locks you out of getting the weapon. We don’t want that.
: Strawberry potstickers actually probably wouldn’t be bad.
: And that’s 500,000 yen down the drain. By the way, please note that Eikichi is currently poisoned, so to whoever asked that question, yes ramen can kill you.
: Please also enjoy the following footage of Maya getting owned.
: If you don’t know what kusaya is (because I sure as hell didn’t), it’s dried and fermented herring. It’s kind of like lutefisk, only it’s herring instead of cod. From what I’ve read, it smells like death but has a relatively mild taste. Wikipedia says you’re supposed to consume it with large amounts of shochu or other alcohol, and I can probably guess why.
: I wonder, is Sumaru City like Silent Hill, only for food? You go to a restaurant and they just hand you a phone and there’s a guy like “You want to order food? I’ll give you whatever you hate the most…” and then I get handed one of those “corn potage” flavored snacks I got in a Japanese snack box for Christmas one year. I ate that on stream but I don’t think I ever saved it. It was so bad I had to stop the stream. Corn potage, never again.
: Oh, okay, I think I get the game’s title now. The “innocent sin” is spreading rumors to get things, and the “eternal punishment” is disgusting food. It all makes sense now.
: Welp, Maya’s dead.
: I like that he asks Tatsuya even though Tatsuya never ate it. We want to pick the first one.
: Next to the Eagle-brand Deagle we find the Legendary Gun, which I spend the rest of our party’s funds on.
: Jun’s legendary weapon is both the easiest and the hardest to get. I have no idea how you’d know to find it without a guide. To get it, we need to go back to the Alaya Shrine.
: Behind the shrine is this kid. He will only appear if you’ve done the sidequests for Eikichi and Maya’s weapons (you have to have the ability to purchase the weapons but don’t need to actually buy them).
: Honmaru Park has become a meeting ground for a cult. By the way, there’s a hidden clue here as to who Sudou’s father is - this is something that will come up in Eternal Punishment.
: There’s a bulletin board here which I honestly never noticed before.
: Kaori, by the way, is one of the healers in Rengedai. She runs an aromatherapy business - because weirdly enough, all of the healers in this game are alternative medicine except for Hiiragi Psychotherapy where Maki works.
: How the hell did they find out about that? We bought those not even minutes after spreading the rumors.
: Alucard here has Jun’s weapon… sort of.
: This is directly foreshadowing how we’re going to get the weapon.
: The final part of getting Jun’s weapon is talking to all the rumormongers. Each one has a different rumor about how you get the flower, though I know Baofu has the best one because he’s in the sequel.
: The possible rumors for what happened to the flower are:
: We want that last one because that means we get it for free. I wonder who the short-haired woman could be…
: This is one area in which it’s more convenient to say that Hanya lived. If you did, Maki will be at Tony’s Shop instead.
: I mean, I don’t even know what Maki would do with a flower given that in Persona 1 she used bows.
: And with that, we’ve done all the sidequests in the game… apart from that one at Sevens. And the one in Kasugayama High. And the shitty one post-Caracol where you fight that demon that reduces your Persona’s rank to 1 and don’t get a reward for it. Next time, we finish Xibalba.
: Oh, right. I know we’re not done with Xibalba yet (plus there’s some side scenarios I may or may not do in their entirety) but I think I figured out what my next LP is going to be.
I enjoy the fact that Jun just throws flowers at people. Everyone’s got cool powerful legendary weapons and Jun just hucks a bouquet at a demon and it dies.
There’s a slightly better Shadow Maya from the original version of Innocent Sin, but it’s still got the weird head angle. Those are great, though. Just what Shadow Tatsuya needs. There’s a whole side dialog thing that takes place across multiple shops once you’ve finished the four temples that I didn’t get most of because it’s really hard to find in order.
Well of course you’re the real ones, Jun. The fake ones had the sunglasses on. Classic shadow mistake.
My theory is that all the demons know about the wedding thing where the bride tosses the bouquet and they all want to grab it so they can be the next ones married, except none of them are good at catching things so they just fall flat on their faces and take damage.
“I was weak. That’s why I needed you… Needed someone to punish me for my sins… But that’s all over now… I know the truth… Now it’s time to end this.”
“Sir, this is a Wendy’s.”
: Before we do Xibalba, I tried to kill that Alice in the locker in the factory, because I realized we actually have the cheese combo to kill it. The bad part is that Alice is so fast that she will always go first and will generally fuck up the combo with bad RNG. I actually streamed this and I swear to you that the first time I tried this she used Another Dimension EVERY SINGLE TURN and kept killing either Tatsuya or Eikichi in a loop.
: High End Crusher is performed using Zanma and any Dark spell. Has to be Zanma, nothing else. The game claims this to be an “instant kill on the highest level enemy” but what it actually does is reduces the highest level enemy’s HP to 1.
: The Karma Ring is a great accessory if you’re planning on transferring your save to Eternal Punishment, because it increases attack by 100. The thing is, we have a better one because I cashed in Eikichi’s Persona and got one that, while not necessarily better, allows us to get through the next several boss fights much more easily.
: What the summary doesn’t mention is that Vritra is the Hindu embodiment of drought, and also evil. Vritra has decent resistances, a moveset that’s honestly kinda garbage apart from High Pressure, but most importantly enables us to do a special boss killer fusion spell when I put a Zio card on him at creation.
: Mucalinda returns a Linden Amulet, which increases Defense and Magic Defense by 80. This is another really good accessory to bring along to Eternal Punishment. I gave Tatsuya the Karma Ring and gave Maya the Linden Amulet.
: The last floors of Xibalba are the worst. They’re full of damage floors, have random encounters every three steps (often with enemies who have instant kill spells and are very fast) and just generally feel like the writers realized they had no idea what they were doing and just kind of crammed whatever together at the last minute.
: See what I mean about damage floors? Anyway, you might notice that Eikichi’s portrait is flashing. This is because I got him a food buff - you can do this at any of the restaurants in the game (Shiraishi Ramen, Clair de Lune, Peace Diner) and they buff your stats for a pretty long time. The reason I did this is because I assumed that the food would clear Eikichi’s poisoned status after we got his legendary weapon.
: Inside that box are five Valkyries. As we know, Valkyrie has a 2x weakness to magic. One Meltdown clears them all off the board before they can move.
: While it’s not as good as the Linden Amulet or Karma Ring, the Mysterious Armlet boosts all stats by 8. I give this to Eikichi to make him a bit faster. There is a way to fix his speed issues involving returning one of the 1% encounter rate Personas and getting an item called an Agility Source which boosts his agility every level, but… yeah fuck that.
: Oh right, let me show you our new fusion spell. Dashing Strike is performed with Zio (has to be Zio, not Zionga or Ziodyne) and Tackle. What it does is performs six random physical attacks (I believe the damage is Havoc type) that are randomly split between any enemies on the field. If used against a single enemy, Dashing Strike can do upwards of 1800 damage.
: We very briefly get a glimpse of Tatsuya’s father and Lisa’s mother. We never actually meet either of them, even in Eternal Punishment, though we do get a portrait for Tatsuya’s father in one of the additional scenarios in the PSP version of EP.
: As it turns out (because I looked it up) you can actually find out about Tatsuya’s father in Innocent Sin, but it requires talking to an NPC at the police department who you’d have no reason to talk to otherwise. Fortunately, I have backup saves but I’ll just summarize because there’s a bit to talk about with these next two scenes.
: The idea is that Tatsuya’s dad (who I’ll call Dadsuya for simplicity) was a cop who investigated the Alaya Shrine fire and subsequently arrested Tatsuya Sudou (which is why Sudou was put into a mental institution). Sudou’s father, Tatsuzou Sudou (who at this point is a high-ranking government official and by EP is Japan’s foreign minister) bribes Dadsuya’s partner to fabricate charges against him. Dadsuya goes to jail and loses his job as a cop, which is why Katsuya is a cop even though he’s wanted to be a pastry chef his whole life. This is also supposedly why Tatsuya is a mute protagonist and kind of a delinquent.
: This is also why there’s the little detail in the Innocent Sin World Guide about how Katsuya wakes up at 4AM to make cakes that Tatsuya refuses to eat because Katsuya makes them too often.
: Somebody’s got a complex. Here’s the thing. We never find out anything about who Jun’s mother is until about five seconds before the final boss, because Innocent Sin is a game with a well-designed plot.
: Okay, so. This cutscene and the following one are a confusing clusterfuck. Allow me to explain. This is Akinari Kashihara, the ghost we met in the clock tower at Sevens. He’s also the guy who wrote In Lak’ech with Maya Okamura and Sudou.
: Jun doesn’t recognize his father. I wonder why?
: This is where it starts becoming a clusterfuck. You’re supposed to recognize that this guy is Kashihara and remember the ghost in the clock tower from forever ago. This is actually his dad, and I can see people who haven’t LPed this game and aren’t constantly checking the wiki forgetting this because the last time we saw this dipshit was at the beginning of the game.
: “Dude… are you okay, Jun?”
: “That’s right… my mother is someone else. I’m all right now. Come on… let’s go.”
: There’s some optional dialogue here which is supposed to remind you about the whole Kashihara/In Lak’ech connection. Let me just go through it anyway.
: “Uncle…? That’s right… my father is further inside… I have to stop him.”
: “Jun’s uncle, huh? He looks a lot like Jun’s dad. Definitely different personality-wise, though.”
: “That guy… didn’t he look exactly like the ghost from the clock tower!? Huh…? Wait… Jun’s dad wrote in the In Lak’ech, right? And the one who died at the clock tower is supposedly In Lak’ech’s author… then Jun’s dad is… no way! The man we knew as Jun’s dad was…”
: “…I need some time to think, Tatsuya-kun.”
: I’m cutting a lot out here, because most of it is just fights against enemies that we saw in the Liquid Waste facility.
: “Indeed… we do have four of the skulls, but the one the Fuhrer holds has quite a lot of Ideal Energy stored within it. If he awakens Xibalba’s inhabitants, it would be a serious problem…”
: “Hmm… what do you guys think? Are we close to the goal or not?”
: “Hm…? Well, given how long it took us to make it this far, I assume they’re much further ahead.”
: “Uhh, hard to say, but… we must be almost caught up with them by now, right?”
: “Okay… so basically, Jun-kun thinks that ‘they’re much further ahead’. Eikichi-kun thinks ‘We must be almost caught up with them’… and Lisa ‘doesn’t really care’. In that case, I’m going to guess they’re just around the corner.”
: “Huh? What’s this about, Maya-chan? You’re acting kinda weird here.”
: “Bear with me just a little longer. Umm, so this might sound vague, but… if I go by our guesses as to the distance left, Jun-kun says far, I say close… and Eikichi-kun is somewhere in between. Now, whose guess do you agree with, Tatsuya?”
: God dammit I really wish I hadn’t already used that DBZ Abridged clip like four LPs ago.
: Have you figured out what the gimmick to this part of Xibalba is? Think about the laser room… and the thing with the Velvet Room… and then the microwave corridor. Yes, we’re in a dungeon powered entirely by people being dumb. Here’s how this works. Right now, we’re on B6F. B7F has three different variants depending on how you answer this question.
: Agreeing with Maya gets you the “A” variant, marked “B7F-A”. This is the shortest route but contains the fewest items that we don’t need. If you agree with Lisa or Eikichi, you get the “B” variant, which is significantly longer. If you agree with Jun, you get the “C” variant which is very long and also a teleporter maze.
: If I’ve learned one thing from this game, it’s “never take the long way around”. It’s a good lesson, kind of like in Ni no Kuni 2 where we learned to never do bossfights on extreme and absolutely nothing else because that was the only moral of NNK2’s plot.
: On B7F, we start encountering two new enemy types: S.S and the Metal Drachen. I assume S.S. stands for “Sunglassstaffel” and was Hitler’s private military branch responsible for supplying sunglasses. This is why Hitler lost WWII, because the army kept getting the two S.S.'s confused and would frequently deliver crates of sunglasses to the front lines by accident.
: S.S. can use Sharpshoot for an instakill, and I believe the Metal Drachen also has one but it’s so slow that I kept killing it before it could go. They’re like the Metal Zentaurs in that they’re heavily resistant to all magic but lightning.
: On the next floor, we start running into Mucalinda and Adramalech. Mucalinda is way better as a demon than as a Persona, being highly resistant to most magic types.
: Phoenix and Kinich Ahau (in the back) also show up. They’re annoying because Meltdown doesn’t work on them and without Mucalinda I can’t do Undine or Bane Splash.
: As soon as we enter this room, the Holy Lance theme starts playing. Clearly, we’re about to fight…
: Oh. No, this is one of like… I think six boss fights before we even get to Hitler.
: You’ve caught on to the gimmick, right? Picking the second option makes an already annoying fight even more annoying. The Holy Lance has no chance in hell of killing anyone, but picking the last one makes the fight more annoying in that it removes their elemental weaknesses. Not that we’re going to exploit those.
: I forget what their weaknesses are, but this is how the fight ends up going. The Lance spam their Longinus Copy and seal everyone’s Persona. I mostly spent the fight just putting out whatever spells I could and using God Hand whenever possible.
: By the way, see that item? That item is going to be very important to a certain boss fight. It stops the effects of the holy lance.
: I honestly laughed at this because it just explodes out of nowhere.
: “What…? Ngh!”
: “Jun-kun, don’t let them get under your skin… you need to focus on stopping your father and returning the city to normal!”
: “Hey, Maya-chan… what’s going on? All this stuff about ‘secrets’… you’re acting weird.”
: “Sorry… I don’t think I should say anything just yet. But I’ll explain myself later. Let’s keep going. I think… no, I KNOW we’ll be catching up with Jun-kun’s father soon.”
: Just outside of the room with the Holy Lance is the other half of the elevator we saw back on B5F. Why the party couldn’t have just used this to skip three floors, I have no idea.
: “Hey, Big Maya? Isn’t it about time you told us about this secret of yours?”
: “Yeah, Maya-chan! Don’t you trust us?”
: “Oh, of course I do! I trust you all, but…”
: “I think you’re right. It’s not good to keep hiding it. Alright, I’ll take the plunge and spill the beans, but…”
: This entire dungeon is just the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. Yes, this is the dumb gimmick Xibalba revolves around.
: “Whoa, whoa! Before you lock me in the nuthouse, think back on everything that’s happened so far.”
: Well okay, let’s see… first there was Tatsuya at high school trying to find his guidance counsellor, and then the scene where Eikichi supposedly abducted Miyabi, and then Joker shows up… and then nothing much happens for a while and then the game turns into 24 and then suddenly it’s Ancient Aliens and Hitler and now we’re here.
: The PSP version of Persona 2 Eternal Punishment was released in English in 2012… the PSP version of Persona 2 Eternal Punishment was released in English in 2012…
: If you answer anything but yes, you lose Lisa’s group contact for the rest of the game, so I did that despite the fact that I have never once used it and we’re in the final dungeon. I said yes if only because I can imagine Tatsuya pretending he’s not gay with Jun laughing in the background.
: “Hoisamuro! This is great! It’s just like Maya-chan said!”
: “I’ve been concentrating this whole time on the city returning to normal, or meeting Jun-kun’s father soon, but no luck so far.”
: “So I’ve been pondering it some more. It could be that fear and other negative thoughts get priority to become real…”
: This would’ve been the perfect time to have someone get horny and Mara shows up as a boss. Such wasted potential…
: “But the healing spring and Velvet Room appeared just like Lisa and Michel wanted.”
: “That’s the thing… I’ve been experimenting, but I just can’t figure out the pattern behind it. Everyone sharing one thought hasn’t done the trick, and it’s not just one strong belief… maybe there’s an outside force at work.”
: “You’re talking about Father, aren’t you?”
: “I don’t know… there would be no reason for Jun-kun’s father to think things that would benefit us.”
: “Still… we can’t rule out the possibility that he’s just toying with us.”
: Here’s the deal with this line. At one point, you can go into Maya’s apartment and find out from Ulala that the only two things Maya eats are ramen and canned crab meat. She also really likes Clair de Lune.
: Meet the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, aka Eikichi’s dad only made of gold.
: Supposedly, “Metal Daddy” has some physical-based instakill skills and likes to target Eikichi with them. He gets off a single themed lightning attack (“Yell”) before Dashing Strike takes him down in one turn.
: How do you even get stuck in a gutter? Is Eikichi like Reed Richards or something?
: “M-Maybe… but… he’s really busy, so…”
: “I-I wish m-my dad didn’t w-work a a sushi restaurant… s-seriously, I have to eat s-s-sushi every day.”
: Let me tell you, sushi’s just a disappointment. I ordered from this Chinese place that also does sushi once, and they gave me the wrong order - it was like $40 of sushi instead of my beef lo mein. I mean, it was a great deal (I paid like $8 for it) and I ate it because I didn’t feel like returning it but still.
: “It’s almost time for your families to start coming to pick you up.”
: I just now realized that Maya is basically an unpaid babysitter for these kids.
: “I wonder if my mommy will be first today? I’m hungry!”
: “Oh, s-someone’s here. I d-don’t recognize him… b-but he looks cool!”
: This entire scene is not going to make any fucking sense until after we fight Hitler. There’s three different explanations for it, one of which is actually pretty cool and would make for an interesting light novel. Yes, the writers are still trying to pull off a plot twist at the last possible second and it’s not going to make any goddamn sense.
: By the way, I had to watch a video of the final boss because the last few floors of this are such a clusterfuck that I had to do it in two sessions. The English voiceacting in this game is godawful and I’m very glad I’m playing an undub.
: Meet the manifestation of Jun’s mommy issues. We still don’t know who Jun’s mother is, and I don’t believe the game explains who she is apart from a VERY brief glimpse during the final boss.
: Jun’s mother is a woman by the name of Junko Kurosu. In either Eternal Punishment or the Innocent Sin World Guide, they explain that she was a former model and also a student of Kashihara’s. She was an idol for a few years, and then married Kashihara because someone at Atlus (looking at you, Satomi Tadashi) had a thing about May-December romances.
: Junko’s career as an idol ended when she got married, and then she had Jun. A few years later, Kashihara starts spending a lot of time with Maya Okamura/Ms. Ideal while writing In Lak’ech. Junko assumes that Kashihara is cheating on her and spreads rumors to drive him to suicide. Basically, both of Jun’s parents are cartoonishly horrible people.
: Metal Mama is immune to magic, so our only option here is Dashing Strike. We also don’t have Jun because he’s busy having an existential crisis, but it doesn’t matter.
: I like that she melts into a puddle when she’s at low HP.
: “Jun-kun, no matter who else says they don’t need you, we need you.”
: No we don’t. Jun is basically useless unless I need to cast God Hand and Maya has a status effect.
: “You would leave us behind…? You’d leave Tatsuya-kun behind…? The boy who’s practically your other self?”
: “Tatsuya… I… I finally… remember everything… we need to hurry… and defeat him…”
: “Him…? You mean your dad?”
: “He’s… you’ll know when you see him. We have to keep going.”
: So here’s what’s up with Jun’s dad. Kashihara is definitely dead, but may or may not have actually died in the clock tower at Sevens. Being crushed by a clock tower honestly sounds like something a crazy bitch of a mother would tell her kid in lieu of “your dad killed himself”.
: Ah Puch is another demon that’s new to Xibalba and I didn’t see in Liquid Waste Disposal. I only encountered it here because I popped a Clean Salt (does the same thing as Estoma) to stop random encounters.
: This is supposed to indicate that she’s completely lost it, rather than that she’s just made the switch from bottom to top.
: This is the game’s only indication about the whole “Jun’s mother drove Kashihara to suicide” bit.
: This is another thing that’s kind of unclear is whether Kashihara and Maya Okamura were actually having an affair. Part of the reason Jun’s mother did what she did was because she suspected he was.
: The greys then emerge from their sleep and punch Maya Okamura to the ground. Who’s ready for another stupid boss fight?
: The aliens are actually just carbon copies of each character’s shadow - they each have the signature spells from the ultimate Personas that the shadows used. Each one has an elemental weakness, apart from the bottom-left one who is immune to magic.
: This fight isn’t that hard as long as you have God Hand and Dashing Strike. Terror Fortune is the absolute worst thing they can do - it targets the entire party with random status effects ranging from poison to instant death.
: And naturally, they get lucky. Thankfully, they only used Terror Fortune once - most of them just kept spamming Asteroid Bomb (a full-party magic attack) and getting it reflected back at them.
: My strategy here was very simple. God Hand the first four to death, and then Dashing Strike the last one.
: “I think… she really was willing to die. The final step in the Oracle is the sacrifice of the Maia Maiden. Father seems to have thought that the Maia Maiden was someone with a strong blood connection to the Maians… fulfillment of the Oracle meant that whoever it was would die. But that was all a delusion. It doesn’t exist…”
: “Jun… a second ago, you said your dad was dead. Then who was that we saw…?”
: “He’s not my real father. It must be–”
: “An impostor born from our beliefs… just like our shadows. Like the other “me” created by the circulating rumors…”
: I mean, apart from that not being at all what a Shadow is, that kind of makes no sense.
: “No way… seriously!? I mean yeah, we had all kinds of crazy theories about Jun’s dad back then, but…”
: “Does this mean… rumors were coming true that long ago!?”
: Honestly, it’s hard to take anything Maya says seriously when you realize she’s a gremlin who subsists on ramen and canned crab.
: “And one of these 'me’s manifested through rumors… talk about a sick sense of irony.”
: “It’s all my fault… I didn’t want you to know who my real father was… so I lied to you all.”
: “It’s not your fault, Jun-kun. Someone’s been watching us all this time, ever since then. I’m sure of it now. It’s a tremendous presence, filled with malice and insincerity.”
: “Whatever that is… is it the real enemy who’s been making rumors come true? But why…?”
: There’s also some optional dialogue we kind of want to do.
: Keep this line in mind for a bit.
: I’d like to point out that from when I re-entered Xibalba B5F to when I got here, roughly two hours elapsed. The final few floors of Xibalba are easily more time consuming than the first five. What I didn’t realize when I stopped was that we’re like… half a floor away from the final boss.
: In an ideal world, I’d have grinded Eikichi’s new Persona up one more rank. I didn’t.
: We’re in… isn’t this Philemon’s space dildo?
: And it’s time for us to fight Jetpack Hitler.
: I uh, I think you’re looking at it. I mean, I think your daddy issues are kind of less important than the fact that Hitler is sitting right in front of you and has not yet been scalped.
: “What a terrible junge, referring to your father that way. You’ll never grow into a fine man if you keep that up.”
: I like that you can read this as Hitler being Jun’s dad.
: “We’ve beat your minions, the Masked Circle executives, everyone who can use the crystal skulls! We’re the only ones left who can use them, aren’t we? So I don’t think it’s much use for you to hold onto it anymore.”
: Hitler then drops the skull like Dracula dropping his wine glass in Symphony of the Night. It just kinda bounces off into space.
: What he means is that the entire plot is a fucking trainwreck. This ending is so dumb that I honestly can see why Innocent Sin would’ve bombed in Japan.
: I mean, you’d think he’d use a knife and a gun. You know, weapons Hitler would’ve actually had access to.
: I got VERY lucky with this Hitler fight. Hitler spends his first few turns being as useless as his art career and using Holy Ark, which does jack and shit.
: We reply with Dashing Strike, because as everyone knows, the only way to scalp Hitler is to pummel him into submission and then take the scalp.
: We get two Dashing Strikes in before Hitler decides to use the Spear of Destiny. Unlike the Holy Lance mechs, the Spear of Destiny does not go away on its own - you have to use the Spirit Rib you go from the Holy Lance.
: I used it three times, and it never worked.
: At this point, using regular spells will out-damage fusion spells, so I just use those until Hitler dies.
: I was really afraid that the Holy Lance status would carry over to the final boss, but it doesn’t. The key here is to have all of your characters at a point where they need under 60,000 EXP to level up. Hitler gives exactly the same amount of EXP Alice did. I also like that he crouches down when at low HP to get into an ideal position for scalping.
: Everyone levels up except for Jun. I really should’ve done a few more fights.
: Holy shit! Jun’s dad really was Hitler! So, remember when I said that the cutscenes with Jun’s dad were bad? Here’s the thing about them: they’re wrong. Maya is wrong when she said that Jun’s dad was affected by rumors.
: When we see him with the black coat, that’s actually Nyarlathotep. That’s right, Jun’s dad is a Great Old One, which actually could make for an amusing light novel where a couple of Cthonic entities decide to disguise themselves as people and raise a normal family.
: “Collective… what…? This isn’t outer space!?”
: “This is the place where the guinea pigs known as humans are born. What appear to be stars are what you call consciousness.”
: “All human egos are born here and return here. Into me, who is like a father to all…”
: I really, really don’t understand why this isn’t an actual mythological being instead of Nyarlathotep. This kind of isn’t what Nyarlathotep does at all in the Cthulhu mythos: he just kind of exists to be a dick. The worst part is, there’s several entities that would’ve fit the bill better.
: “The crystal skulls and Xibalba are only a fragment of me, manifested by your kind’s yearning for such things. An alien spacecraft will lead to you becoming gods? You guinea pigs are such fools. You cling to fantasies by desperately rationalizing them.”
: This sounds like the most generic JRPG villain ever.
: “Guinea pigs!? Then what the hell are you!? Show us who you really are!”
: Given that most of the Great Old Ones more or less instantly cause anyone looking at them to go insane, it’s probably a good thing that he’s not in his true form.
: “That’s rather harsh. You’re the one who desired that I exist. You hated your mother who wouldn’t love you and insulted your good-for-nothing father… all while embracing an illusory ideal…”
: So yeah, this pretty much all but confirms that for some period in Jun’s life, his dad was a Great Old One.
: “You’re lying… I never wanted this chaos… I just wanted everyone’s dreams to come true…”
: “Why do you persist in deceiving yourself!? Your only reason for terrorizing the city was to make amends to your father.”
: Kashihara then appears on a cross, because we haven’t had enough pointless religious symbolism in this trainwreck of a plot.
: “It’s the touching reunion you’ve been waiting for! Now hurry and repent! Your last wish has already been granted, after all.”
: I don’t get how this is supposed to be effective. It’s clearly not actually Kashihara, because if Nyarlathotep had the power to raise the dead he’d have actually resurrected Hitler instead of just disguising himself.
: It’s here, minutes before the end of the game, that we find out that Jun’s mother was Queen Aquarius. The game won’t even refer to her by name, because of course it won’t this plot is a fucking trainwreck.
: By the way, there’s one thing that Eternal Punishment points out that I didn’t know because I never talked to him, but the Count at Time Castle is also Nyarlathotep.
: “Don’t you recall that woman telling you her dreams of staying young and beautiful? Her face when she found out her son was Joker was a real sight to see!”
: When I streamed this, I think it was here I was like “Can we cut the pseudo-intellectual bullshit already?”
: Lisa tries to punch Nyarlathotep in the face, and he just kind of makes like Naruto and teleport-slaps her. Clearly Lisa needs to go back to her village and become the hokage first.
: Eikichi, you’re the slowest person in the party.
: You know what would’ve been way more effective? Have Nyarlathotep just take the bullets. Go full bad RPG villain and just be like “I’m a fucking Great Old One, do you really think a couple of bullets are going to do anything to me?”
: “This is my world. If I wanted to end your measly existences, I could do it without lifting a finger. Still hot on taking me on here, knowing you have no chance at winning? The contradictions keep piling up…”
: Honestly, the way Nyarlathotep is written sounds more like a fanfiction by an edgy 12 year old instead of, you know, the way he’s written in the Cthulhu mythos.
: Anyway, who’s ready for the dumbest final boss in any SMT or SMT-adjacent game?
: Remember when I did that update on the artbook and told people not to look at it? This is the front cover. Meet the Great Father, a beast consisting of each character’s dad in the form of a single monstrosity. I’m not sure which is supposed to be which because of how the artstyle changed from the PS1 version. I know Kashihara is the one on top, and the top-right is Maya’s dad.
: The Great Father is a glitchy piece of shit largely defeated by the fact that three of our party members reflect spells. The legs have 5,000 HP each while the top part has 13,000. Here’s the problem though: Meltdown doesn’t work. I don’t know why, but it just won’t hit them. I had to resort to God Hand, and this is why I wished that I had ranked up Eikichi’s persona one more time… because then I could’ve double God Handed each turn.
: The most deadly attack it has is Master 18, which is launched from Eikichi’s father. This is a physical attack that hits 18 times and has an extra status effect (I think it’s Panic) if it hits Eikichi. Each one of the Great Father’s attacks works this way. The one for Jun charms him, the one for Maya puts her to sleep, and I forget what the one for Tatsuya does.
: Right as it stops mattering, Eikichi’s Persona levels up, allowing me to double God Hand. Most of the fight I spent just using whatever spells I had handy, because Meltdown refused to work.
: The legs die one by one and it gets easier each time. The reason they didn’t all die at the same time is that I did Dashing Strike a few times on the assumption that Meltdown wasn’t working because even though there’s five targets, only one actually counts. That’s not accurate: in reality there are five targets and this game is glitchy piece of shit. By not working, I don’t mean the boss nulls it, I mean Meltdown straight up does nothing.
: By the way, there’s a trick to this fight where you can have all your party members guard and then cancel the guard after the boss has attacked but before your turn comes up.
: “Ha… you were right that these humans may make for good test cases…”
: “What is he saying…? Philemon!?”
: “We are the sources of people’s souls. Incarnations of the collective unconsciousness, indivisible from one another… we have watched man’s strivings for eons. I lead those with strong hearts, and the Crawling Chaos drags the weak into the abyss.”
: So yeah, Philemon is kind of an asshole. Nyarlathotep’s entire motivation is that he’s in a bet with Philemon about whether or not humanity will destroy itself.
: He then teleports in Maya Okamura, who for some reason has the Spear of Destiny on her.
: I’m trying! But… but… the bleeding won’t stop! Why… why aren’t my spells working!? Philemon!’
: They’re not working because the only spell you’ve had since like, Mt. Iwato is Maragidyne. Tatsuya has Diarahan and Samarecarm on him.
: “Nyarlathotep… this was your reason for creating the legend of the Spear of Destiny…”
: “They say that when Jesus Christ’s corpse was pierced with that spear, blood continued to spill endlessly. You humans have passed that legend down for 2,000 years. It’s one hell of a strong rumor. A fatal wound would take effect immediately.”
: It’s too bad that the whole Gabriel Knight 3 rule of “touching anything that had Jesus blood on it makes you a vampire” doesn’t apply here.
: Is it being stabbed? Because I would think it’s being stabbed.
: Remember that line in the alien room? Maya knew there that she was going to die.
: So, I get why they did this. They did this because in Cthulhu stories, there is no winning against Cthulhu. But still, this entire game feels fucking pointless. You don’t kill Nyarlathotep, you don’t even stop him the way the P1 cast did with Nyx, you just kind of… lose.
: This whole thing just feels stupid. Nyarlathotep has already admitted the Oracle of Maia was a farce, so why the hell did he ever bother playing along in the first place? What was the point of the whole crystal skull thing? What was the point of this entire fucking game?
: The thing is, it’s possible to write a Cthulhu plot that still feels satisfying. There was game in the mid-2000s called Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. It wasn’t 100% accurate to the Cthulhu mythos, but it ends with the protagonist driving a Navy destroyer directly into Cthulhu at ramming speed… which actually works to stop Cthulhu.
: So if you’re wondering what the fuck is going on, Nyarlathotep is stopping the rotation of the Earth. I’ve seen screenshots where Jun mentions this being part of the Oracle of Maia, but I couldn’t find the room where he says it.
: I didn’t capture it, but there’s a shot I missed of Earth being destroyed. Basically, the scientific concensus is that if the planet’s rotation was suddenly stopped, the planet’s surface would be wiped out because the atmosphere is still moving at thousands of miles per hour.
: This is more or less word for word what Nyx says at the end of Snow Queen. Can’t have anything original.
: Tatsuya even tries to hit Nyarlathotep.
: This is why Philemon is an asshole. Not only did he basically cause the end of all life on Earth, he also had the power to just straight up make a new world the entire time and didn’t for some reason. He’s outright lying about the “I’m only an observer” thing.
: So here’s the thing. Philemon could outright go back in time and make it so Maya never died in the first place. But he doesn’t.
: This is dumb as fuck.
: “There is none here, in the seat of his power. He draws strength from the negative emotions of people unconsciously desiring destruction… if you are to stop him, then mankind itself must change. You must create this new world.”
: “I’ll never forget… I don’t dare to…”
: “Damn straight… I’m not gonna let myself forget any of this! If that bastard set all of this up, then let’s do this… we’ll show him that not everything goes his way.”
: “We’ll… meet again, won’t we?”
: This is basically YIIK now and I’m starting to wonder why the Allansons didn’t list Innocent Sin in their bibliography.
: Lisa insisting on kissing the gay guy.
: A long time ago, at the end of the Persona 1 LP, when Philemon takes his mask off at the end of the SEBEC route, I said that his appearance there was not canon. It isn’t. At the time, the character designer planned on making Philemon look like Zhuang Zhi, the guy who wrote the “Dream of the Butterfly” poem.
: Anyway, let’s just thank Philemon for being an asshole and…
: Tatsuya punches him in the face, taking his mask off. You don’t get to see him maskless if you pick the other option. Trust me, if we ever do Eternal Punishment, you’ll understand why Philemon deserves this. As it is, he deserves it for trying to kill Yukino off.
: THIS is Philemon’s canon appearance as far as I know. Under the mask… he’s you. This works way better than making him Zhuang Zhi.
: There’s voices in this cutscene, which was added for the PSP version. Unfortunately, I didn’t get them and I was talking over it when I streamed it, because the person who did the undub forgot to undub this part and the English voices hurt.
: From what I remember, Eikichi says something like “You’re gonna join my band, right?”
: Lisa’s was something like “Chinyan… I’ll always love you, no matter what”.
: By the time it got to Jun’s I had removed my headset, disconnected it from the cord, and tossed it across the room to stop the godawful English voices from getting out.
: Now that we’ve reached the ending, you probably have a lot of questions. The first is probably “Wait… what was the innocent sin?”. The answer is that it happens in a fucking mobage from 2007.
: See, I know how Eternal Punishment ends, but I thought that ending actually happened in Innocent Sin. It doesn’t. In fact, as far as I’m aware, the ending for Innocent Sin isn’t even canon. The events get basically retconned immediately after they happen, but are brought up again in Eternal Punishment.
: So anyway, what is the innocent sin? In the mobage, which was never translated and only works on pre-smartphones, it’s explained that there’s a second part of the ending we don’t see, where the party have to fight their shadows one last time with the help of their “Ideal Selves” in order to fight Longinus to make the new world. Tatsuya doesn’t defeat his shadow, and as a result doesn’t lose his memories. This is the innocent sin. Eternal Punishment has a SLIGHTLY different explanation but as far as I know the mobage one is canon.
: This is a major clue to a plot point in EP that I’m going to spoil. As a result of not killing his shadow, the Tatsuya Suou we know is stuck forever on the “other side”, in the postapocalyptic world left over after Nyarlathotep kills everyone who wasn’t in Sumaru City. The Tatsuya we’re seeing here is a different person, who spends most of EP being possessed by Innocent Sin Tatsuya.
: Yeah, I think he already decided he’s going to marry Jun, since the thread decided he’s gay.
: By the way, this is what happens to the rest of the party members in EP. Lisa and her friends form MUSES in EP, but this time aren’t a front for Joker and the Masked Circle.
: Eikichi has an actual role in Eternal Punishment, but isn’t playable. He shows up for a few scenes, but in EP he’s the leader of his band and looking to scout Tatsuya (not knowing he already did this in IS).
: Miyabi gets to be thin because Philemon decided to make a world where everyone but Tatsuya gets to be happy.
: Jun doesn’t have much of a role, other than near the end of the game and a brief scene outside of that. In Eternal Punishment, his name is Jun Kashihara, since In Lak’ech was never written and his mother never drove her husband to suicide. Jun’s mother also uses the Kashihara surname.
: This scene… I think it happens in Eternal Punishment, but I only read a bit of the LP for that because the PS1 localization bothers me.
: I know for a fact this CG is in the start of Eternal Punishment. And with that… Innocent Sin is over. It’s time to move on to Persona 5 Royal, where we’ll see a lot of the same themes IS had. In a lot of ways, P5 was a re-telling of Innocent Sin, only done in a slightly more coherent way.
: After the credits, this happens. Let me explain what this is. I think I did once earlier, but I’ll do it again.
: In the Japanese PSP version of IS, Atlus included a mission editor that was available through the “theater” option on the world map. The mission editor was stripped from the US release, but three (non-canon) side stories written by Satomi Tadashi are still available.
: The first two take place at St. Hermelin with a villain who looks a lot like Yuriko from P1, and the third is a re-telling of SMT If where Tatsuya visits the high school from that game. The reason I didn’t mention this earlier is that the first side story at St. Hermelin opens with Maya’s death portrait and a line about her “not doing that again”.
: We can do these if people want, but… I don’t know if I want to. They’re kinda bad, and I think I’m ready to move on. Plus, a lot of what made the theater work (you got ranking points for clearing custom scenarios and could carry EXP and items over to the main game, which is probably why they got rid of it) was stripped out of the US release. As far as I know, the servers are no longer up for the Japanese version so I couldn’t do that either. Otherwise, I’ll wait a couple weeks and move onto Persona 5 Royal.
: That’s Innocent Sin. The game was kind of a trainwreck in a lot of ways, and I know Eternal Punishment fixes a lot of the issues (including the godawful load times)… but I really don’t want to play it until I can do the PSP version. I still don’t think it was necessarily a bad game, but it’s nowhere near the instant classic people said it was and I can see why it never got localized on the PS1. I’ll put up a poll for the side stories, I guess.
0 voters
I’d say that even if I am curious about the side stories, if you’re feeling done with the game, it’s probably time to move on. I’d rather have an LP the creator is enjoying rather than one they’re doing out of a feeling of obligation, it generally leads to a more entertaining LP. If you’re feeling better about P2 after Royal, you could come back to the LP, but even if you don’t it’s still a finished product.
So, I waited until you finished the LP because I didn’t want to disrupt it with the following. On the SA forums someone brought up Yukino and I mentioned your LP and your thoughts of how she was portrayed in this game. Then people refuted those thoughts and I thought some of the comments might have discouraged you from playing the game. If you want to see what was said, here’s a link and it goes on to the bottom.
I’m not really burned out on it so much as it is that the last three floors of Xibalba took probably longer than the rest of Xibalba and the Abandoned Factory combined. I probably won’t post the streams I did of them since there’s a lot of me fucking up in it, but needless to say by the end I was groaning every time I hit a random encounter.
Oh, I don’t even have an SA account. I’m old /b/. I think that person is kind of over-reacting and I’m going to let the LP speak for itself.
One thing I do want to clarify is that I absolutely believe bisexual people are valid and that it’s entirely possible that any of the characters in this game (except for maybe Jun who is said to have no interest in women whatsoever) could be bisexual.
