Sin is In - Persona 2: Innocent Sin

[Timrod]

Click Here for Update 12

: Previously, on 24, we blew up Smile Hirasaka and then Jack Bauer waterboarded time itself to send him back in time to save it. Just as Elly said, our next destination is Yumezaki.. for a sidequest.

: Fuyuko would be the person you’d get the quest for Hanako from back at the start of the game… if we hadn’t accidentally skipped it.

: Oh god I’m scared already. If hours upon hours of anime are right, Kansai is like the New Jersey of Japan.

: To get the rumor for the sidequest, we need to pick “Not at all”. I mean, I dunno, New Jersey is pretty scary.

: Naturally, we have to go to Todoroki and pay for the rumor. The reward isn’t worth it by any stretch of the imagination, but the EXP and money from fighting the Cursed Taxi definitely is.

: Back in the Abandoned Factory, a new room opens up. This one actually connects to the room we were in before, the one with Sakya in it.

: There’s some uninteresting garbage near where the note in the previous room was.

: It doesn’t take long for us to run into the Cursed Taxi, which I kill with Atomic Destruction in one turn.

: This puts Eikichi and Yukino at level 25. We are definitely a bit overlevelled now.

: Before we leave, there’s a note right outside the room where that Open Door Card was.

: You know your town has issues when there are two different demon taxis running around. The reward for the next part of this quest is definitely not worth it - it’s a card that teaches Recarmdra, a spell that kills the user to revive someone else.

: We then need to go back to Todoroki a second time.

: Same taxi, different hat. Dies in one turn to Atomic Destruction.

: With everyone at 25 or 26 (except Lisa) I decided it was a good time to update the Persona roster.

New Persona: Juanlian Dajiang

Origin: China (Journey to the West)

Persona 2 Original

: Juanlian Dajiang is a character from Journey to the West, who is usually portrayed as a kappa in the Japanese editions. His story’s emblematic of how everyone in Ancient China was an asshole: he gets exiled from heaven for accidentally breaking a vase and cursed to be a sand monster who gets speared by swords every day.

: Journey to the West is fucking wild, by the way. Pretty much everyone in that novel has some kind of divine or otherwise magic powers, so it’s no wonder that Dragon Ball was based off it. I still much prefer The Water Margin.. apart from the ending.

New Persona: Agrippa

Origin: Germany (A real person)

Persona 2 Original

: Agrippa is a very unique Persona for a whole lot of reasons. First, he’s an actual person. and was both an alchemist and a feminist. Second, he has Summon Spirits, which is used in a whole bunch of very specific fusion spells. He also gets Zanma fairly early on which makes him a suitable replacement for Nekomata.

: Now that we’ve got some new Personas, let’s see if we can’t figure out where the next bomb is. This time, I read the riddle.

: I had an A+ in Spanish in high school and it’s because I know that “El Dorado” is Spanish for “Pachinko”.

: Here’s a horrifying thought: what if she and Eikichi had a kid? What would their hair look like?

: Okay, clearly Ulala won the jackpot and found the bomb that was totally inside Pachinko Silver. We’re fine. Absolutely nothing bad’s going to-

: You know, this is why I only took the bare minimum of Spanish.

: So no, the next destination is GOLD. I wish the gym I went to was that big. Maybe then they wouldn’t have to pack the machines in and I could hide from that creepy old lady who practically lives there. I’m not going to post the rest of the scene because it would be difficult to blank out and immediately reveals the next dungeon.

: This time, I mutated Fjalar into Shou Shen for Tatsuya. I’m not doing a Personalog for him because Shou Shen is just Fukurokuju by a different name - sort of like how there’s six different variations of Apsaras in P1.

: Anyway, let’s go to our real destination this update: GOLD, which is an obvious reference to the Gold’s Gym chain.

: “Kinda, yeah. We’re pretty lucky Maya-san’s roommate has a membership.”

: “Looks like Ulala’s here. I should stop by the boxing ring and tell her to evacuate.”

: “Uh, about that..”

: Not yet… wait for it…

: “I don’t blame you for being skeptical, but it’s true! There’s no time! Hurry and get out of the gym!”

: Ulala punches the bag so hard that the sand falls out of the bottom.

: “Aiyah! Isn’t that a detonator!?”

: “Like I said, there’s no time! All I can say for sure is that this organization called the Masked Circle set them!”

: “…There she goes. I hope she remembers to get out of the gym.”

: “Anyway, now that we know this is the next target, we don’t have a second to lose. Let’s find that transmitter!”

: We also have some optional party dialogue

: I don’t know too much about Chinese martial arts, but I know that Jeet Kune Do is the style Bruce Lee practiced. I’m pretty sure it’s not as mainstream as Lisa makes it appear.

: GOLD is actually a very short dungeon - the developers made it with the intent that you’d get stuck trying to find your way around to pad out the length, but if you know where you’re going it’s pretty short. Our first stop is in this hallway directly north of the boxing gym.

: Tatsuya pushes Maya out of the way of the falling bar just in time.

: It’s kind of ridiculous how much explosive material the Masked Circle apparently has access to.

: Unlike Mu or Giga Macho, which had items everywhere to try and coax you into not just speedrunning them, GOLD only has two items. One of them is in the men’s dressing room, which is on the other side of the hallway from the storage closet. Weirdly, you don’t use the door to get in.. you just walk around the wall.

: Most of the demons here are repeats, but I had a bit of a time with the first few fights. This is because upgrading all the Personas at once kind of broke most of the fusion spells.

: No Mega Blaze, no Maxi Tempest, no Craggy Fang, and no Sonic Wave.

: Fortunately, we can use the combination of Eikichi, Lisa, and Yukino to perform Bane Splash. Bane Splash is water → earth → water, the inverse of Craggy Fang. I never got an actual shot of it but meh.

: This particular encounter is very common and also very annoying. Kraken is weak to fire but either reflects or absorbs water, I forget which. Gandharva absorbs fire and is weak to water. Without Maxi Tempest or Sonic Wave, this is quite annoying.

: Inside the men’s dressing room is an Agility Incense. I really should start using these.

: The women’s dressing room next door has 50,000 yen in exactly the same spot as the men’s dressing room. This is the final treasure in GOLD.

: One demon that I somehow didn’t encounter in Smile Hirasaka is Hel, who just kinda exists.

: Onto the second floor, where I immediately get into an encounter.

: Kabhandha was a box demon in Aoba Park. On the right is Rasputin again, and on the left is Pyro Jack. Pyro Jack has a rumor skill the same way that Jack Frost did, which is called Dynamic Agilao. We don’t really have a reason to fuse Pyro Jack at this point so I didn’t bother getting the skill.

: Our next destination is another closet on the second floor.

: Eikichi gets hit with a chest fly machine because he’s the joke character.

: This is what, the fourth or fifth time we’ve seen Eikichi on the floor like this?

: We actually want to talk to Lisa.

: Doing so causes her to get knocked onto the ground as a locker explodes in front of her.

: By the way, the demons here give INSANE amounts of cards if you negotiate with them. We have almost 700 free cards and that’s after doing all those fusions.

: Next stop, the third floor.

: One more bomb rejected. I have to ask though, if the bombs in all the other rooms were on timers.. why did they need a transmitter?

: Suddenly, a strange person walks in and then leaves after he spots the party.

: We now need to go all the way back down to the first floor.

: Pretty much all the demon encounters get replaced by Masked Circle troops. This is REALLY annoying without Maxi Tempest, because the blue cultists reflect water and the red ones reflect fire, so I can’t just Mega Blaze/Bane Splash them to death.

: The guide says to grind to 28, but that’s because the guide is trying to have you learn all the fusion spells. There’s no reason to do that. Trophies didn’t even exist on the PSP when this game released. The fusion spell in question requires you to have four Personas who needed special items to fuse in Persona 1 and were also useless - those being Suzaku, Genbu, Byakko, and.. whatever the fourth one is, I forget.

: I’m not doing that for several reasons, the biggest being that Agrippa is going to learn Maragion soon and that’ll get us access to what’s basically a better Mega Blaze.

: I grinded to level 27, mostly because the encounters here give a lot of money rather than because I wanted more EXP. This is how you’re supposed to afford the new equipment at the stores in Kounan rather than grinding the abandoned factory.

: Meet Ulala’s ex-boyfriend, Youichi Makimura. He’s based off a Japanese actor who scammed a bunch of money off his girlfriend to start an (ultimately failed) business venture and then had an affair with another woman. The actor in question, Kenji Haga, was arrested in 2007 over a blackmail scheme involving the Yakuza.

: “How considerate of you. If you behave yourself and answer our questions, this should be a short chat.”

: “Ulala! You’re still here!?”

: “I had no idea Ulala was a Persona-user!”

: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scored… who knows what girls a beautiful man like me has wrought tears from…? We should both be careful, Tatsuya.”

: “So then, Tatsuya. What kind of riddle did we get this time?”

: Oh man, I totally know the answer to this one.

: “It’s not a riddle! The next target is written here plain as day!”

: “I don’t like this at all… we’re dealing with King Leo here. Couldn’t it be another trap?”

: Next time, we get to see what happens when Innocent Sin takes on Thanatos Tower from Persona 1.