Click here for Update 7
: The next few screenshots will be a little off, but that’s because I was messing with my capture card. I left Kasugayama High to go to the Velvet Room and fuse some new Personas, since most of the party’s starter ones were at MAX rank.
New Persona: Minotaur
Origin: Greece
First Appearance: Megami Tensei (NES)
: Despite his garbage resistances, Minotaur has some pretty decent stats and has a fusion spell that is unique to him and two other Personas.
: You might notice that Minotaur is level 15 while Eikichi is only level 11. Persona 2 gives you five levels of leeway when equipping new Personas. I don’t know why none of the other Persona games (not counting 5, which has no limit whatsoever) do this.
New Persona: Kinnara
Origin: India
First Appearance: Megami Tensei II (NES)
: I had a metric shitload of Star cards from negotiating, so I made Kinnara for Yukino. Kinnara’s not a bad Persona: decent stats, decent resistances, and keeps the fire element going so I can keep spamming Mega Blaze to win fights. Persona 2 is also the last game in which Kinnara appears.
New Persona: Surya
Origin: India
Persona 2 Original
: Surya goes to Tatsuya, again so I can keep Mega Blaze up. The fact that it learns Magaru is a nice bonus. I also love that Surya is basically a coat rack. I wish I had a talking coat rack that could light things on fire.
New Persona: Robin Goodfellow
Origin: England
Persona 2 Original
: Oh hey, it’s Robin Goodfellow, only without his ability to steal half the enemy’s money. He’s basically an upgraded version of Lisa’s starting Persona and will be crucial to a new Fusion spell.
: Once we’re done fusing, it’s time to head back to the gym.
: You might ask why everyone has a laser coming out of their heads. This is something that we’ve actually seen before, but that the game expects you know more about than you probably actually do. The lasers are basically people’s hopes and dreams.
: You can’t see it because it’s a flashing effect, but Maya starts emitting lasers until Tatsuya takes the mask off.
: “What the hell is Yasuo doing!? Isn’t that the same kinda skull Joker had!?”
: They really didn’t explain this well enough in the cutscene in Sumaru Prison, or maybe it’s just that it’s been a few weeks, but basically Joker works by draining people’s hopes and dreams which turns them into shadows. Honestly, this sounds more like an episode of some kid’s TV show than it does a JRPG that’s supposed to take itself at least somewhat seriously.
: “Yasuo, you smug prick! What’re you doing!? Quit it with the skull!”
: “Wait! C’mon, Tatsuya, let’s go after him!”
: Kind of a neat reference that there’s students from St. Hermelin here.
: I spent some time inside Cuss High ranking up the new Personas. The guide recommends being Level 13 for the boss, which is complete overkill (and also how you know the author was using an emulator with the speed-up key held down).
: I returned all of the old Personas off-screen, and one of the items I got out of it is an accessory that tells you when you have the ability to cast fusion spells that you don’t know the combination for.
: Stone Rise is kind of garbage unless the enemy is really weak to Earth and immune to fire. It’s activated using an Earth, Wind, and Fire spell in some combination I forget exactly what. This means you’re using three characters to cast one spell when you could instead use Blazing Burst and Pegasus Strike for more damage.
: Our next destination is the roof, on the 4th floor. There is a sidequest we could pick up here but I’m purposely not taking it. Why, you ask? The sidequest spawns a mini-boss called Bukimi (the toilet ghost). Bukimi has Hula of Misfortune and will use it far more frequently than Robin Goodfellow. The reward is some garbage healing items.
: Heading north at the fork bring us to the roof entrance. The south route is more useless NPCs, and I think one of them is the one that spawns the Bukimi sidequest.
: I get that it’s been somewhere between a few hours and a day since we entered the bomb shelter, but where the hell is Yasuo getting all these radios?
: “You bastard… what’s your game, making everyone into shadowmen!?”
: “A service!?”
: I like that Tatsuya just walks around the corner and finds him. He didn’t even try to hide between the building and the fence.
: “Screw that noise! Who would want in on a plan that shady!? If you have time to waste blabbering about crap like that, hurry and turn everyone back to normal!”
: “Just hand over the skull and that’ll be enough. We’ll figure it out ourselves.”
: I killed Yasuo so fast that this is the only attack he got off. I killed him so fast that I actually forgot to take a shot of his Persona.
: Yasuo’s Persona is Shax, or more precisely “Reverse Shax” since Persona 2 digs further into the whole tarot theme than most of the other games.
: Yasuo is extremely weak to fire and to earth, meaning we can spam Stone Rise to do ridiculous amounts of damage. I would’ve used Blazing Burst and Pegasus Strike instead, but Eikichi got put to sleep and didn’t wake up before the fight was over.
: Once he takes enough damage, Yasuo will heal himself.. for around half of one Stone Rise. He has way less HP than Hanya did.
: “Hey, Yasuo!”
: “You’re in Joker’s organization, right? Why’s he harvesting people’s ideals?”
: “That’s… from some kid’s game that shows up in my dreams…”
: “…!?”
: “And Lady Scorpio is an executive of this ‘Masked Circle’?”
: “Stealing dreams for personal advancement… I’ve got no sympathy for this asshole.”
: It’s weird to me how much this game, as a direct sequel to Persona 1, focuses on the whole ideals thing when it wasn’t in P1 at all.
: The game goes through every character’s portrait in the inverted colors here, but I couldn’t capture it all.
: When we were in Zodiac, there were a few NPCs who mentioned Lady Scorpio. Guess we know who she is now.. though why she’s still bothering to wear a mask when we know who she is underneath, I don’t know.
: Anna then starts teleporting around and whipping people.
: “This skull can only be controlled by those bearing the constellation of the holy cross.”
: “… Is this all?”
: “Wh…Who the hell are you!?”
: You can’t see it, but Leo just disintegrated Yasuo when he appeared.
: “For one so lowly to confess Masked Circle business to outsiders and abandon the shadowed festival… You deserve death!”
: What is this, an ICP concert?
: “I could say the same thing about you, Lady. What do you have to say in your defense after the recent debacles? Not only did you let the wild dance slide, you abandoned the shadowed festival to vermin.”
: “If you wish to be present to witness the fulfillment of the Oracle of Maia, I suggest you accept the Exalted One’s punishment…”
: Leo honestly sounds like if you took an AI and fed it the scripts to a couple of fantasy RPGs.
: “…Yukino is mine. Leave her alone.”
: “…Very well. But you will deal with the consequences of the party’s interruption.”
: Why is that Leo and Scorpio can teleport? As far as I know they’re just Persona users who also are vampires that eat people’s hopes and dreams. Seriously, I want a JRPG where the party can teleport just to fuck with villains that pull that shit.
: “Cursed Star… I will see you and the witch sent to Purgatory, just as the lowly one was a moment ago.”
: It really seems like the game expects me to have read something or played Eternal Punishment beforehand, even though Innocent Sin comes first in the duology.
: “So this King Leo guy has been stalking you for years, Maya-san!?”
: “My Persona told me so… it’s him! There’s no mistaking it!”
: “A pyromaniac… Kehhei! That’s the worst!”
: I also don’t understand how they know he’s a pyromaniac.
: “Don’t worry.. I’m okay now. we need to think about what to do next..”
: “Remember how that King guy told Anna to ‘deal with the consequences’? That’s been bugging me ever since…”
: “Let’s go back to the gym. I have a bad feeling about this!”
: “Kehhei! This is terrible! What is this Oracle of Maia anyway, that makes the Masked Circle do such horrible things!?”
: “Yasuo’s dead, too… does this mean we’ve hit a wall in our search for Joker!?”
: “Guys, wherever rumors are, Joker’s there too, right? Let’s go out in the city and ask people for rumors about the Masked Circle and Joker! I’m sure we’ll learn something new!”
: There’s now a bit of side content we have to do before we can progress the plot.
: The first thing we want to do is head to Gatten Sushi in Kameya Alley, where we’ll meet up with a familiar face from Persona 1.
: Meet Eikichi’s dad. Eikichi’s dad is a gigantic asshole.
: This is another thing that makes Eikichi SO MUCH BETTER WRITTEN than Kanji was. How many times did you ever see Kanji getting made fun of for liking sewing? Zero, that’s how many.
: “Y-Yes, Sir!? D-Daddy-o… I-I mean, Dad… hear me out! Th-there’s a good explanation for this!”
: “I was practicing for a costume party! R-right, Tatsuya!? It’s for the school festival! It’s not like I always dress like this!”
: I don’t quite understand how he explains the blue hair - I’m pretty sure his hair is dyed and not one of those anime things where it’s actually that color.
: “Ha! Hahaha…! C-Come on, Dad… d-don’t be ridiculous…!”
: “Let’s GO, Tatsuya,kun. We gotta get the hell outta… I mean, get back to practice!”
: This actually isn’t as impressive, nor does it make quite as much sense as it sounds like it does. Karate has a pretty universal ranking system where you have 10 lower belts and then 10 ranks of black belt: but the top two ranks are pretty much reserved for the master of any given school of karate and students they’ve personally taught.
: Capoeira has 11 ranks, but only 10 of those are attainable (and realistically, it’s probably fewer than that). Just like with Karate, the highest rank is reserved for the head of the school.
: Judo has eleven grades of black belt, but the eleventh grade is reserved for the head of the school and only fifteen people have ever been awarded a 10th-degree black belt in Japan. Most of them are dead, and some were only awarded that honor posthumously.
: We can therefore come to the conclusion that Eikichi’s dad really isn’t as much of a badass as he says he is. I used to take Taekwondo back in middle school and there were like, 14 year olds with black belts in that. I stopped after I found out the guy training everyone was an avid gun owner. Never take martial arts lessons from a gun owner. Anyway, right near the counter…
: Meet Kenta Yokouchi, aka Toro. Toro was a minor character in Snow Queen back in Persona 1. It’s funny that he’d be a good salesman because his Persona is uh…
: “Hey folks! Great to be back in yet another Persona game!”
: Anyway, Toro is our second rumormonger, and he has a couple of useful ones.
: This one in particular. Each store in the game has.. four sets of rumors I believe. There’s “prices are high but they’re high quality”, “prices and quality are both average”, “prices are low but the quality is bad”, and one about “they have a wide selection but terrible buyback prices”.
: This one is BY FAR the most useful. Why, you ask? It gets you the best weapons at a price that’s not all that much more expensive than usual. That, and once you’ve spread a rumor about a shop, you can’t un-spread it or spread a different one.
: Once we’re done with that, we have to go talk to Chikarin again.
: Kounan is a whole new area we can visit, so let’s do that.
: The Abandoned Factory is a particularly interesting location. It’s basically Innocent Sin’s equivalent to the Mikage Ruins or Devil’s Peak in Persona 1 - that is to say, a giant dungeon where you can fight every demon you’ve run into before. While it’s not nearly as important here (because demons give generic tarot cards instead of spell cards) there’s still some good stuff in there.
: Chikarin told us to go to the fortune teller, which is in Sumaru Genie. Before we do that, we’re going to head to the healer - the neat thing about P2 is that rather than all the healers being doctor’s offices, they’re different types of what I guess you could consider self-care: the one in Hirasaka near Cuss High is a tanning salon.
: If you haven’t read the Persona 1 LP, Maki is a major character in the SEBEC route who also shows up briefly near the end of Snow Queen. Because Hanya is dead, we’ll see some more of her later.
: This also confirms that the Snow Queen route is canon, because Maki is never in the same party as Yukino in the SEBEC route. I like to think that Jihei is sitting in an office somewhere with a trophy for doing Thanatos Tower first.
: Our next stop is the Kounan Police Department, where we meet with this guy. He’s one of the reasons you want to stick with Tatsuya’s canon name.
: Katsuya absolutely looks like he’d be in one of the early SMT games as a demon disguised as a human trying to tempt you into going down the Chaos route.
: He’s not the reason we’re here,though. One thing I missed in this update is that if you look behind where Yukino is, there’s a dog statue. That dog statue works like the lucky cat in the Kuzunoha Agency except it’s better because you get two sets of incense for 10,000 yen instead of just one.
: This is. Talking to the little boy next to this old homeless lady starts up the “Dresser Hag” sidequest.
: You then need to leave the police department and come back in to talk to him again.
: I’m going to skip over some stuff for now. We can’t actually go to Kuzunoha right now without going to Sumaru Genie and one other location, but I want to put this all together.
: This is the Abandoned Factory. You’ll notice the piece of paper on the floor ahead. The factory has notes scattered throughout it and you’ll want to read them all.
: So yeah, the implication is that the factory closed not because of poor performance but because it’s a breeding ground for demons.
: The only place we can get to right now is the service entrance, so let’s head there.
: There’s an Agility Incense right near the entrance, in a red toolbox. This honestly looks like half the maps in City of Heroes and is giving me horrible flashbacks.
: The Dresser Hag is something we want to do because it’s a level 35 miniboss, which guarantees a free levelup for the entire party.
: While it’s got 75% resistance to pretty much everything, the Dresser Hag only has 1 MDEF. For some reason, Atlus cut its stats in half for the PSP re-release.
: The hag mostly attacks with “fire breath” and “ice breath” which are just reskins of Agilao (second tier full-party fire spell) and Mabufula (second tier full-party ice spell), respectively.
: The Dresser Hag is a pretty easy fight, and also gives more than enough EXP to make up for not fighting the boss in Zodiac.
: South from the entrance is another incense in a cabinet.
: What happened when I recorded, by the way, was that I went right to the factory forgetting that you have to spread the rumor first.
: I also picked up a couple of rumors off the genie, including these two which I wind up spreading as soon as we can reach Todoroki again. It’s probably a good idea to do that and go shopping before fighting the Dresser Hag.
: Next up is Honmaru Park.
: Eikichi’s just asking for it.
: And he’s on the ground for the uh… it’s been at least three times since we met him. I wonder if you can get owned so hard your Persona breaks.
: No guesses on what the theme of the next dungeon is going to be.
: Right now though, what we’re interested in is this guy.
: Toku-san is our last rumormonger, and only really has one rumor that might be worth it.
: If you really want to cheese the game, what you can do is spread this rumor about the magazine sweepstakes. This gives you the best possible prizes. What you can do is abuse the hell out of savestates to get some very good equipment (just remember to save BEFORE buying any sweepstakes magazines as the RNG is calculated when you buy them) especially if you’re using savestates on an emulator.
: I’ll get on that as soon as someone can tell me where the savestate button is on this thing.
: “Tamaki-san doesn’t know either.”
: I don’t know if Lisa is modeled after an idol of some sort or not, but given how horny Atlus was for idols in the 90s (especially Satomi Tadashi) I wouldn’t be surprised if she was and Eikichi saying this is some kind of in-joke.
: If you hate Satomi Tadashi’s self-insert character as much as I do, the next few seconds after this are pretty good.
: In the background, you can hear Tamaki beating the everloving shit out of Tadashi.
: “Heheh… an idol, eh?”
: “Lisa, this is no joke! Did you forget that rumors are coming true? You could actually end up debuting for real!”
: “Something’s odd about this poster. It’s like they put these up specifically to make people speculate that Lisa’s the third member…”
: “Another rumor… you think it’s the Masked Circle?”
: “I don’t know why they’d do it, though… guess we should look into this.”
: I don’t think he ever learned anything. I spread the rumors about the shops - always using the “expensive but good quality” modifier.
: Our last stop this update is Tony’s Shop to get weapons that roughly double our party’s attack strength. The best kind of omerta is being too dumb to know what omerta even is. Next update, we’ll go to Mu and watch as an idol is born.
