Sin is In - Persona 2: Innocent Sin

[Timrod]

Click Here for Update 11

: The following takes place between the hours of around 9:30 at night to just before 11:00. Our story begins in the Abandoned Factory, with me spending almost two hours trying to hunt down a rare boss spawn and not finding it.

: Now that we’ve cleared Aoba Park, a new area opens up in the factory, aptly named “Factory”. This area contains enemies going from Mu to the Concert Hall… as well as an EXTREMELY rare boss spawn that I did not find after two hours of trying. The boss is the Buddha, and you can kill him to be able to summon him. Buddha’s not great, except that he has one of the only spells that does actual Light damage (as opposed to instakills) in the game.

: This is the Persona version of Sakya, aka Siddhartha Gautama, aka Buddha. Why Buddha is only level 29 despite the fact that the head deities of major religions are usually the end-game demons/Personas in the SMT series, I have no idea.

: I stopped because the party was pushing level 25, and I didn’t want to get too overpowered. There IS a way to guarantee a Sakya spawn, and that’s by using Estoma, a spell that prevents encounters with enemies lower level than your party is. Unfortunately, getting Estoma would require me to mutate a Harpy or Pixie and fuck that noise.

: What we need to go in there for (apart from money, because buying new equipment was well over double the cash I had on hand at the end of Aoba Park) is this note.

: Speaking of which, we can open two new shops in Kounan: Jolly Roger and London Clothiers. The “Good but Expensive” rumors come from the Sumaru Genie and Chikarin, respectively.

: The owner of the Jolly Roger, by the way, is a fucking zombie pirate. He’s like this even if you don’t spread the rumor about the weapons shop. Our next destination is Double Slash in Aoba, to meet with..

: Elly! The model of an angel! The best girl from Persona 1, who uh… god that redone artwork kinda makes her look like a gremlin. The reason the character designer did this, by the way, is because the idol they modelled Elly after did it in real life.

: “Sorry to drag you out here when you’ve got work to do, Eriko. These are the guys I told you about over the phone. My partner Maya, Lisa, Eikichi,and Tatsuya.”

: I’ll be using the Eternal Punishment portraits for Elly for the rest of the LP. She only has one in Innocent Sin.

: “It’s nice to meet you all. My name is Eriko Kirishima.”

: “Sorry to cut right to the point, Eriko, but that stuff I told you about…”

: “Sure. I was thinking it over on my way here.”

: What we’re about to see is that entire stupid “square the circle” puzzle from Gabriel Knight 3 done right.

: I dunno, I think we’d better go through a 10-minute sequence of scanning shit into SIDNEY first.

: I realized just now that I was probably supposed to read the riddle in the inventory.

: Are we going to get a revelation that Maya is actually a CIA agent? Or that Eikichi is secretly vampire Jesus?

: “That’s amazing, Eriko! But Hirasaka is a pretty huge place… we still need to pinpoint a location.”

: “All descend with smiles to the netherworld… I get it. The descent into the netherworld is about Yomotsu Hirasaka from Japanese myth… it’s a play on words.”

: “Spoken like a trained journalist! There’s no doubt that the third line is a riddle as to the exact location in Hirasaka. Unfortunately, I’m not that familiar with Sumaru City’s environs. So I can’t deduce anything further as yet…”

: “That’s okay! You’ve done more than your share! We’ll figure out the rest on our own. Grazie, Eriko-san!”

: “You’re quite welcome. I’ll stay here and ponder the Masked Circle and their riddle a little more.”

: At this point, I went to go see if I could find Sakya in the factory, and uh.. yeah I didn’t. I did however find a couple of new fusion spells.

: Atomic Destruction is an instant kill spell that requires three people to perform. I think the idea is it works on enemies that would otherwise be immune to Hama or Mudo, but it’s really not worth doing.

: Low End Breaker is a spell that requires Zanma, which requires levelling Nekomata to Max Rank. It targets the lowest level enemy and attempts to instakill them.

: After spending well over 200,000 yen on armor I didn’t really need, it’s time to go figure out what the riddle means. Even though we haven’t read it, there’s one key line to it, that being “All descend with smiles to the netherworld.”

: Here’s a list of everywhere in Hirasaka. Hmm.. all descend with smiles.. clearly, they must mean the Sakanoue Building!

: Eikichi is going to waterboard someone before the day is through.

: Yeah, of course. I’m sure “Sakanoue” is Japanese for Smile or something. It’s probably just poorly translated.

: Uh… all hail Shadow?

: Anyway, the trick to the next two dungeons is that they’re optional. The game becomes a bit harder if you skip them because there’s more of a level jump going into the next mandatory dungeon, but really you’re not missing much if you let them blow up.

: I’ll do the rest of the alternate dialogue here, but I’m going to purposely leave out the names of the next two possible bomb sites. NEXT TIME, ON TWENTY-FOUR:

: “It’s most likely north-northeast from Sevens. The only things there are ________ and _______ in _________. So the next target is–”

: What’s that, Elly? You’re kinda breaking up.

: “Elly-san, please! Can you be more specific about the location? Which one is King Leo’s next target?”

: “Then.. you… you couldn’t prevent the fire… I-I’m sorry.. there’s not much more I can tell you…”

: “Thanks, Eriko. That’s more than enough to get us started. Contact us again if you figure out anything else.”

: “Look alive, people! This is not the time for moping! We have to get a grip if we want to stop any more deaths! Hang in there! Dig deep! The next target is either __________ or _____________ in ___________!”

: “We HAVE to do this, or there’s no stopping the next bombing! Tatsuya, don’t steer us wrong this time!”

: If Smile Hirasaka explodes, you get this on the world map for the rest of the game. Meanwhile, in the real timeline…

: “We need to evacuate the customers before we can go looking for the transmitter. Can I borrow your lighter, Tatsuya-kun?”

: “A roommate? Ooh.. do you have a Chinyan?”

: “Sorry to disappoint, but my roommate’s a girl.”

: Her roommate is a woman by the name of Ulala Serizawa, who is a party member in Eternal Punishment.

: “Ever since I started at Coolest, I’ve been too busy for a boyfriend. I’m pretty much married to my job!”

: “I don’t think of it as a limitation. It’s been my dream since I was little to be a journalist, so my life’s pretty fulfilling. I live for my work! Right, Yukki?”

: “For work, huh…? I don’t really know what most people live for, I guess. But at the very least, I like to think I’m living to make my dreams come true.”

: “It’s strange.. when I’m with Maya-san, I’m reminded of the “Big Sis” I see in my dreams…”

: “Eikichi, those dreams–”

: Maya somehow finally sets the smoke alarm off. It’s strange that she’d even need a cigarette for that - most smoke detectors would probably go off from the lighter.

: “Pardon them for my sake, sweets. C’mon… can’t you forgive and forget at the request of such a beautiful specimen?”

: “P-Pervert?”

: We are now alone as Tatsuya. This is not a situation we want to be in for any length of time for a bunch of different reasons.

: Almost immediately, we run into Pairika, who we could fuse as a Persona but I didn’t, mostly because it’s really hard to keep fusion combos up. We’re able to buy her off by promising her some special yaoi book.

: The enemies here give insane amounts of cards - we’ve still got well over 500 free cards, and I think the lowest-level enemies give 20.

: There’s a lot of doors up here, but all of them are closed. Kind of makes you wonder how Smile Hirasaka is even in business.

: Around the time I got here, I quit for the night. The next time I loaded the game, I decided I wanted to try something.. which paid off massively. What I did was fuse Gullinbursti.

New Persona: Gullinbursti

Origin: Norway

First Appearance: Majin Tensei II (SNES)

: What I wasn’t sure of was if Gullinbursti’s first skill, Rockfall, counted for the purpose of fusion spells. It absolutely does, and it winds up saving my ass from a prolonged shitfest of a boss fight. Also seriously, what is it with the Norse and magic talking farm animals?

: Lich (who we fought in a box at Giga Macho) and Gandharva show up here as regular encounters. The problem is that they’re very common when you’re alone as Tatsuya but become pretty rare after that.

: I spent some time dicking around on the 4th floor. There’s items in the building, but you can mostly wait until you have your full party to hunt them down. I did it solo as Tatsuya because I could.

: The 4th floor has the Pipe Fox and an incense. The Pipe Fox is actually kind of useful in that it does less physical damage than Maya’s current gun but increases her magic attack and magic defense by 10 each.

: There’s an elevator prominently placed in the center of the map that goes to all but the 3rd floor. Unfortunately, we need to go there to get Maya back.

: The 3rd floor is basically one gigantic string of hallways, with Maya on the far side from the stairs. What I didn’t know is that there’s actually two sets of stairs here. I’ll explain how I found that out in a bit.

: Here’s what I missed. There’s a box here with 30,000 yen in it, which I absolutely want because I just spent all our money on equipment. Right next to it is the second staircase, which I completely miss.

: I wander around the 2nd floor for a while, and Tatsuya nearly levels up. I was looking for a couple of item boxes, but couldn’t find them. Then I decided to check and see if any maps existed.

: If you read the Persona 1 LP, you’ll know how much I love this Japanese site that did maps for all of the old Shin Megami Tensei games as well as Persona 1 and the Persona 2 duology. You can find the site here.

: I figured I could just take the elevator back to the 3rd floor and decided to grab the items that the map said were in here. This was before I knew the elevator does not go to the 3rd floor.

:There’s another new enemy here - the Kraken. You can fight one in a box, but I’m not sure why because it’s a regular encounter.

: This is also where I discover that there’s a wall between this part of B1F and where Yukino is on the other side.

: Here’s the staircase I missed. You can see how - it doesn’t look like a staircase and it’s just far enough from the chest with the 30,000 yen in it that you wouldn’t see it on the map from there.

: I stopped on the second floor’s back side to get a Maragi card, because why not.

: The other side of B1F is a box maze, albeit a very simple one.

: No, Tatsuya can’t simply walk between the boxes, you have to go all the way around.

: As soon as you get Yukino back, the encounters change from one enemy at a time to a bunch of Aoba Park enemies at once. Not pictured: me running all the way back to the 3rd floor so I could switch from the back staircase to the main one so I could go back down to the 1st floor so I could find Lisa. I pretty much did this dungeon in the most back-asswards way possible.

: Not pictured: me backtracking all the way from the 1st floor back to where we started outside the women’s bathroom on the 4th floor.

: Little transphobic there, lady?

: “What’s the matter, Tatsuya? Huh? That sound…”

: “How much time do we have!?”

: “Um… F-Five minutes!?”

: “How did you not notice this!?”

: “H-H-How was I supposed to know!?”

: “E-Excuse me! That transmitter in your pail… where did you find it!?”

: "That’s not a clock! It’s a timed detonator for a bomb! You need to give that to us right away!’

: I am absolutely never going to get tired of doing that, and the best part is I still have one more dungeon to do it in.

: “This is an emergency, so we have no choice. We’ll have to resort to force!”

: Like Mara, Belphegor is kind of a joke demon that for some reason is associated with toilets. This is the only game in which he gets to be a boss. By Persona 5, he’s demoted to trash demon in the first dungeon.

: Somehow, he summons a bunch of masked circle troops who never actually show up in the upcoming boss fight.

: Ixquic is a 13-year-old girl, which is kind of funny because that makes her slightly older than I am.

: “Heyyy, everyone! The evil demon tamers are here, just like the great King Leo’s oracle said they’d be!”

: “You fiendish demon tamers who seek to destroy the world! You… uh… umm.. hm? Hold on a sec.”

: Fun note about this fight. Belphegor is not Ixquic’s Persona. He is a random ass SMT demon, which actually makes HER the demon tamer.

: “Hey, um, Belphie? What does this say?”

: “The magical warrior Ixquic, reincarnated since time immemorial, will whoop your ass with divine retribution! Demon tamers, be banished to the darkness from whence you came!”

: I love how the party just totally ignores her. The Leo Mask guys are cannon fodder at this point.

: “YO! DEMON TAMERS! Don’t turn your back on a reincarnated warrior of the Masked Circle!”

: In 1999, the idea of a Mayan warrior getting reincarnated as a 13 year old Japanese girl would be a joke. In 2020, it’d be the next big isekai anime once they run out of ideas for all the other isekai anime.

: "Be a good girl and don’t get in our way, m’kay, sweetie? You should hurry out of here too!’

: “Did you hear that, Belphie!? This old hag is treating a magical warrior like a plain ol’ little girl!”

: “O-old hag…!?”

: I like the idea of Eikichi going full on Jack Bauer and waterboarding the detonator until it talks. That’s my canon for how they disable it.

: “Stop that right now! If this building goes, you’ll die along with it!”

: “Psh, I don’t care. My family and classes are all just a pain… there’s nothing good about being alive!”

: “The reincarnated warrior Ixquic lives for justice, and she’ll die for it too! Only that will satisfy me!”

: You might not be able to tell, but Maya just slapped her.

: “Don’t… don’t you EVER treat death like a joke! You have the power to change your own environment! Your own future! Shrugging that off and saying you’d rather die just shows how immature you are!”

: I feel like that one guide author who went hardcore Christian fundamentalist kind of missed this entire exchange when he said the game promoted death and suicide. Anyway, this next part is kinda wild if you think about it.

: So you might think “Oh, Ixquic’s a zoomer”.. only this is taking place in 1999. Maya (born 1976) and Yukino (1979) are both firmly Generation X. Tatsuya (1981) and Eikichi and Lisa (both 1982) are both borderline depending on whether your cutoff date for Gen X is.

: Ixquic is a millennial. Atlus was making boomer jokes about millennials YEARS before anyone came up with that term. Incidentally, Ixquic is a few years older than I am (she’d be 33 or 34 today).

: It was this fight where I was very, very glad I fused Gullinbursti. You’ll notice we have a couple of new fusion spells available.

: One of them (which I did capture later on) is Craggy Fang, which is the Earth equivalent of Mega Blaze. Belphegor is very weak to Earth (something the wiki gets wrong) and so we have our primary tool to use against him.

: Ixquic’s Persona is Reverse Pairika, and she spends most of her turns casting Magarula on the party for 20-30 damage each time.

: Incidentally, and I kind of forgot to mention this up to now, most of the enemies in this game have had their stats cut from what they were in the PS1 version. Belphegor and Ixquic were among the most heavily nerfed, having their magic stats cut in half and then some.

: Oh right, here’s Craggy Fang in action.

: Here’s my auto setup for this fight. You’ll notice that Yukino and Eikichi have been hit much harder than everyone else. This is because at this point, Belphegor was mostly using his single-target physical attack (which hits for about 30 damage) as opposed to using Magryva (second-tier gravity spell) which hits the entire party.

: I did have to stop to heal at one point, because Belphegor decided to start using Magryva and nearly killed Maya off. One interesting touch is that like your characters, Ixquic has a different idle animation when she’s low on HP.

: We were already a bit overlevelled coming into Smile Hirasaka, and now we’re even moreso. The enemy levels don’t change a whole lot in the next dungeon.

: Maya somehow casts a healing spell, which is funny because the only person in the party with a heal spell right now is Eikichi.

: “Is it okay to let this chica be? She didn’t seem very sorry… I wouldn’t be surprised if she came back to harass us again.”

: “She must never have had any proper adults play with her… Don’t worry! If that ever happens, I take full responsibility.”

: “Hmm… the first line is the same as before, so the only question is the rest of it. Going by the same logic as before, the sign of water that presides over death and rebirth…”

: “That would be Scorpio. In other words, head north by northeast from Seven Sisters High, so the next target is Yumezaki!”

: “Good job, Eriko! We can take it from here now that we have an idea where to go.”

: “The way to El Dorado opens from dream’s cape.. El Dorado, huh? It translates to “golden one”… is there anywhere in Yumezaki with a name like that?”

: Next time on 24:

https://youtu.be/HqsSvgC1uhA?t=6