Sin is In - Persona 2: Innocent Sin

[Timrod]

Click here for Update 13

: Just as a heads up, the first part of this update had to be re-recorded, so I’m starting it… a good deal in and then kinda working backwards. Just in case anything sounds weird. I also miss a Luck Incense on the third floor but don’t care enough to go back for it.

: “We need to evacuate the children before we can start looking for the transmitter. Let’s tell the teacher and get her cooperation.”

: I honestly thought this was Ixquic again, but it’s not.

: “Tadashi? Tamaki!? What’re you two doing up there?”

: Oh look, it’s the developer self-insert being horny for idols again. Sometimes, I wonder if the devteam had some kind of pool going where they’d see how many days they could go without Satomi Tadashi lusting for idols.

: Clearly, Tamaki lost not only her COMP and level-ups after SMT If, she also lost her dignity.

: You can hear Tadashi’s leg go “crunch” when he jumps down.

: What is it with people and accusing the party of working for Hitler? Hitler’s been dead for the better part of 50 years at this point.

: I don’t even get why she brought Tadashi with her, other than because Satomi Tadashi was presumably hiding the script from the other writers. Let me remind you that unlike Tamaki, Tadashi is not a Devil Summoner. He doesn’t have a COMP or a GUMP.

: Suddenly, King Leo.

: Leo starts by lighting the exit door on fire. You’d think given that we have two water-based Personas it’d be easy to put that out, or that there’d be a fire extinguisher or sprinkler system in this museum.

: Maya immediately goes into oh no help me daddy mode. We’ll see why it is she’s so afraid of fire in just a bit.

: This is actually incorrect. There’s a time limit on this dungeon, but it’s a single time limit.

: “Witch… you will not escape me this time! Everything is destined to perish regardless. You and these brats will be an early sacrifice!”

: “Heheh… heehee…hyahaha! Hyaaaaahahahaahhaha!”

: Maya tries to get over her fear by becoming an anime protagonist. I immediately heard Terra’s Dissidia 012 incarnation when I read this line the first time. It’s really too bad that the PS4 Dissidia game was trash.

: “Listen, everyone! We need to get all the children to the roof!”

: “I remember this place being made up of four pretty big floors… you two, find the teacher and head to the rooftop!”

: “Our job will be to check each floor’s exhibition rooms and make sure there are no kids who haven’t evacuated yet.”

: “Let’s get this done, guys! We need to search everywhere for them!”

: The game puts us right into the dungeon, with a 10 minute time limit. This is all the time we have to search all four floors and get to the boss fight.

: While this sounds worse than Snow Queen in Persona 1, the small time limit is offset by several things. Just like in Snow Queen, the timer only counts time spent walking around - battles, menus, cutscenes, and being in rooms that are not the main hallways of the museum do not count. There are also no encounters on the first three floors.

: We can largely ignore the first floor - there’s no items on it and no kids to save.

: Once you go up a floor, there’s no going back. This isn’t that big of a deal, because you can’t miss any of the kids and there’s only three items that aren’t buyable somewhere.

: The first of these is in a broken display case directly to the right of where you enter the second floor.

: Progress is in the opposite direction. There’s some five exhibit rooms on this floor, and only one has kids to save. The kids are in the third exhibit hall (the right-hand one) on the left from where you enter.

: To get any further, we need to go through this room so we can get into the hallway behind that wall.

: King Leo has tied up Ixquic and left her to die inside the cockpit of a WWII-era Zero.

: “Is that the cosplayer chick from the bathroom!? What’s she doing in the Zero?”

: Well, I’d imagine she’s going to Sam and Ida’s for dinner. Maybe she’ll stop at the Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces on the way. There really isn’t much else to do on the Zero unless you’re really into cryptic bullshit.

: “She’s gonna die if she stays in there much longer! What do we do, Tatsuya!?”

: “I’ll jump down and rescue her!”

: This is another moral choice. We want to let Maya do it, even though she’s extremely pyrophobic.

: “We’ll go find a rope! You look after Maya-san, Tatsuya!”

: Usually when you see this in a game, it takes forever for them to find a rope. Looking at you, Disaster Report.

: Ixquic has her mask off, and I swear she looks like she’s from Lunar 2.

: Eikichi and Lisa find a rope in like, ten seconds flat. I swear, if they were in Disaster Report the game would’ve been over before it started.

: Actually, now I’m imagining a Disaster Day of Crisis remake only with Persona users. Fuck flooding, summon Lucifer to fix that shit.

: This dungeon uses a lot of CGI cutscenes, and even though these were redone for the PSP I think it would be amazing to see a Persona game with the same budget as like, Final Fantasy 7 or 8.

: Welcome to… a scene that really should be fully explained now but isn’t for some reason.

: It should be obvious who this is, but it’s Maya. No one else calls Tatsuya by that honorific.

: You can’t hear it, but there’s a banging noise in the background and the doors to the shrine are moving.

: Meet one of the main villains of Persona 2, though he’s far more important in Eternal Punishment. He’s the reason that you should always use Tatsuya’s canon name of Tatsuya Suou.

: This feels like something out of one of the Clock Tower games.

: In one final act of desperation, Tatsuya’s Persona awakens. He’s one of the characters lucky enough to have this happen when he needs it. This also means that Tatsuya has been a Persona user longer than any of the Persona 1 cast.

: Just as the cutscene fades out, Tatsuya lights the killer on fire. I should mention that this cutscene will be very slightly different if Tatsuya goes into the plane - it’ll be Tatsuya falling and Maya trying to grab him.

: I really, really like every one of the cutscenes that happen in the Aerospace Museum… apart from all the ones where Satomi Tadashi is horny for idols again. Also the boss fight cutscene, but we’ll get to that.

: It’s also real dumb that Ixquic doesn’t get to be a party member. They did it for the dipshit kid in Persona 3!

: It’s okay… you’re safe now. You did a great job hanging in there."

: While we’re in the catwalk area, time is paused so we can talk to our party members.

: The answer is yep, she was in the plane because King Leo put her there and left her to die.

: I went back through the door we came in only to realize you actually want to go through this door. Looking back on the screenshots, you can actually see Ixquic go through this door to get to the roof.

: Once we’ve saved Ixquic, we’re done with the second floor.

: The third floor took me a fair bit, mostly because I was looking for an item.

: At first, I had trouble figuring out what the point of this weapon was. True Force has the exact same stats as the guitar case from the store. The difference is that True Force does Almighty damage (which is unresistable) rather than Eikichi’s usual ranged damage type.

: Not far from the guitar case is the first group of kids on the third floor.

: One thing I didn’t show off on the second floor is that if you haven’t saved all the kids, Tamaki or Tadashi will be at the stairs to stop you going up.

: What really annoys me about this game, by the way, is that if you go into a room in a dungeon, the game will flip your compass on you.

: With that done, we can now go up to the fourth floor.

: Pictured - Yukino’s Persona.

: I’m not sure how this kid managed to avoid being cut in half by the elevator.

: Unfortunately, as soon as we’re done with this cutscene…

: Seriously, this is just Resident Evil at this point. From now until we finish the fourth floor, random encounters will be a thing. The good news is that unlike Thanatos Tower, the timer does not tick down during battles.

: “That asshole…! Is everyone okay!? We’d better be careful… we’ve got demons to look out for now, too!”

: I don’t know why they kept this line, but I know why it’s there. The answer is that in the original version of Innocent Sin, the timer wasn’t as lenient as it is now. In fact, it was more brutal than even Thanatos Tower: the timer would still run even in battles and menus. Eternal Punishment has a dungeon like this that operates on those rules and it sucks.

: There are two new enemies here along with some repeats. Taranis is one of them - they’re incredibly weak to fire, which makes me wonder why King Leo would bother sending them into a burning building.

: A bit south of that exhibit hall, Maya will let us know that the exit is nearby. Unfortunately, we still have one more group of kids that need saving.

: On the way, I ran into the second new enemy type - Kanaloa, who is pretty easy to mistake for the Krakens in Smile Hirasaka and GOLD.

: With about four and a half minutes to go, I find the last exhibit room. I also ran into another fire wall by accident while trying to rotate the compass so that’s why everyone but Tatsuya is at half HP.

: The stairs are now unblocked, but there’s one last thing I want to do here. It’s a fusion spell I want to learn so it shows up on the fusion spells list for the boss fight.

: Just like Fire + Fire makes Blazing Burst, Water + Water makes a David Cage game. This will be incredibly useful against the upcoming boss as it does slightly more damage than Bane Splash.

: I have issues with this scene for more than one reason. The first, of course, is Satomi Tadashi being horny for idols again. The second is that Tamaki absolutely should not lose to a dipshit like King Leo, especially given that she has actual demons.

: You know what would’ve been a much better cutscene? If they had Taurus and Scorpio show up and had Tamaki and the Devil Summoner protagonist (now back in his original body) fighting them off.

: Meet Tatsuya Sudou, the reason that we stuck with Tatsuya’s canon name. I’m going to refer to him by his last name for the rest of the LP, to avoid confusion with Tatsuya Suou.

: Unfortunately, we don’t really learn most of what his deal is until Eternal Punishment.

: So yeah, Sudou is the guy Tatsuya lit on fire in that flashback. He burned the entire right side of Sudou’s face off, including his eye.

: This, I feel, is also kind of dumb.

: The same cutscenes that we saw when we accidentally blew up Smile Hirasaka and GOLD play again.

: “That’s frickin’ lowdown, man! This isn’t what you promised!”

: The whole point of doing those two dungeons was to prevent the explosion, and I feel like if this was Persona 1 they’d have put in an alternate path where Sudou tries to detonate the bombs only to find out the party defused them all.

: “Kehhei… you coward!”

: “Ngh… I’ve had enough of this! Let go of that girl!”

: “What is the End of Nahui-Ollin!? What is Joker’s real goal!? Answer me!”

: “What are you saying… that he’s planning the evolution of humanity!? I’ve had enough of your delusions! Show us Joker! Who is it really!?”

: I actually thought the Exalted One was someone else, but apparently that’s just what Sudou calls Joker.

: “A summer day… ten years ago!?”

: “And where do you think you’re going!? There’s no escape for you!”

: “Wait! Is Joker… is Joker ‘Big Sis’!?”

: What is this, Metal Gear Solid 3?

: In case you’re wondering, there’s a rumor if you talk to random people on the street that the blimp on the roof of the museum actually works.

: “Hurry, everyone!”

: Someone at Atlus should’ve rigged Satomi Tadashi with an EKG that sets off an alarm any time he gets thirsty for idols. My headcanon is that Tamaki throws him back into the fire with Sudou.

: “Looks like the time has come for the genius driver Maya Amano to show off her skills! Leave this blimp to me! The control room’s probably up ahead.”

: “I don’t mean to be rude, babe, but shouldn’t you let someone else handle this?”

: “C’mon, that was just a little oopsie! I’ve got it now! Here goes the real deal… blast off!”

: Now, you might ask yourself, 'Wouldn’t it be a horrible idea to try and pilot a blimp that’s been sitting over a burning building, since blimps are full of hydrogen gas and that’s kinda how you get the Hindenburg?"

: I should mention that the entire time this is happening, the background music turns into something that would not sound out of place as a Final Fantasy airship theme.

: See? I knew it was a bad idea. Should’ve gotten Ixquic to start up that Zero somehow and blow a hole in the wall.

: “A-About that… I think this thing broke! I can’t control it!”

: “Kaumena! Someone heeeeelp! I don’t want to go down in flames!”

: That last line there sort of explains some of Sudou’s deal - he’s spent time in a mental institution, presumably for burning down that shrine we saw in Tatsuya’s flashback and for trying to kill both Tatsuya and Maya.

: There’s also a thing in the PSP version of Eternal Punishment where Satomi Tadashi says that he wrote Sudou as a protest against a Japanese law that prohibits the courts from finding people who have severe mental illness (ie; that do not have the ability to distinguish right from wrong) guilty. As far as I know, that works like the insanity defense in the United States - ie; even though you’re found “not guilty” you’re still put in a mental institution, possibly for life.

: This is why I’m glad that Tadashi no longer works at Atlus - not because he made a political stand, but because he made about the most dipshit political stand possible. The insanity defense is used in less than 1% of cases in the United States, and only works about a quarter of the time, usually with defendants who were previously diagnosed with severe mental illness.

: There’s also another reasons why Tadashi’s stance doesn’t work in this game, but we’ll get to that later.

: “You sad man… you can’t exist without blaming everything around you.”

: “The reason you can’t live a normal life is because you’re so dependant! Enough of this childishness!”

: Sudou has around 3,500 HP and is very weak to water and to ice. The good news is that we have that in abundance, but unfortunately ice and electric kinda get screwed in terms of fusion spells.

: The one problem is that Tatsuya really doesn’t have much of a role in this fight. Shou Shen has no damage spells right now apart from Fire Breath. Sudou is, of course, immune to fire. Instead, I have him use Shou Shen’s heal move, which is only usable in battle and is basically Mediarama (second-tier full party heal) with a chance to remove status effects.

: Sudou’s nastiest move is Dark Fiery Fury, which hits everyone twice - once for physical damage and once for fire damage.

: It hits Maya, Eikichi and Yukino pretty hard, but one heal from Tatsuya fixes that. Tatsuya has enough SP that he could probably heal for long enough that the rest of the party could take Sudou down with physical attacks alone.

: Yukino does the Mr. X thing again and pops the hatch off the blimp. This would probably be dangerous given the whole air pressure differential, but maybe that’s not as much of a problem at this altitude.

: This looks a lot worse than it actually is - you can’t see it but they’re over water and a lot lower to the ground than it appears.

: Oh the humanity!

: “Sheesh… what did we do to deserve all that? I can’t believe we’re still alive!”

: “No worries! Just promise me one thing. Never throw away your life like you almost did before!”

: “And if you have a dream you want to chase, you can’t follow it on someone else’s steam. Whether it comes true all depends on you!”

: I mean, you can make a popular manga without studying. Just look at Attack on Titan. Dumbest fucking plot in all of anime and yet it sold like nothing else.

: “Dream big, babe! A manga artist is a great choice of career – you’ll inspire dreams in everyone! I’ll even give you some art tips!”

: “Is Joker ‘big sis’? What did you mean by that?”

: “D-did I say that? You’re imagining things, Maya-san!”

: It shouldn’t be hard at this point to figure out who “big sis” is.

: “…”

: “That reminds me, Tamaki said Ms. Okumura’s at the detective agency. She seems to know something about all this… why don’t we go see her?”

: Sure. What could possibly go wrong? It’s not like she thinks Lisa is somehow working for Hitler or anything.

: “Ulala! Thank goodness you’re okay! When GOLD exploded, I thought…”

: The way she says “Ma-ya” makes me think she’s an Animal Crossing villager.

: “Huh? We’re terrorists in the Masked Circle!? And we’re wanted as the culprits behind the bombings!?”

: “Oh no… this must be because of that rumor! The one about the five terrorists going around the city! It was about us…”

: Or because, you know, three buildings and a concert hall just exploded and you were seen in a group at all of them telling people to evacuate because there were bombs.

: “Wh…what the hell, man!? We put ourselves through the wringer stopping those bombings! How dare they treat us like the culprits!”

: You might ask how this plot makes any sense given that the Masked Circle really had no reason to go out of their way to procure a bunch of exposives and rig four different buildings to explode when they could’ve just spread a rumor that Tatsuya is a terrorist and accomplished the same thing.

: Rest assured it does. It has to do with the Oracle of Maia. We’ll see it in full soon.

: "That’s not even the worst part! If the rumor comes true… we really will become the Masked Circle’s terrorists!’

: “This is bad… Lisa’s right. We need to think of something…”

: “I think we do have a solution. You know what they say… fight fire with fire!”

: Dammit Maya, no. You fight fire with water or ice because chances are the fire either absorbs or reflects fire damage. You should know this! You fought one not even minutes ago!

: Next time, we’ll find out what the Oracle of Maia actually is and do a dungeon that pretty much sets the basis for the entirety of Persona 4’s dungeon design.

[Timrod]

@drcakey

I have (or had) an online acquaintance who strongly recommended Persona 2 to me. I never got around to trying it because, of course, Atlus was too cool to release the Eternal Punishment remake outside Japan. Reading the LP, the game does seem interesting, but I’m not really interested in playing it. I don’t think either SMT or Persona are for me, for entirely different reasons.

Hypocritically, now I’m in the mood to try P3P again…

Persona 2 is definitely not the first Persona game you should play. It’s very different from the later games and only really shares some design concepts. If you’re going to try Persona, I’d recommend starting with Persona 4. If you have a PS2 and can get the game running off a hard drive, do that. If not, P4 Golden is fine - personally, I don’t like a lot of the changes Golden made to P4’s plot. P4 Golden is on Steam now. It’s how I got into the Persona series.

[drcakey]

@LaZodiac

And to be fair, Persona 3 Portable is actually pretty good.

@Timrod

Persona 2 is definitely not the first Persona game you should play. It’s very different from the later games and only really shares some design concepts. If you’re going to try Persona, I’d recommend starting with Persona 4.

Oh, I gave the wrong impression. I actually got more than halfway through P3P, then I lost 1+ hours of progress in Tartarus and decided I didn’t actually, y’know, care enough to recover. So I’m familiar enough with it. I’ve also got some other random odds and ends to fill out my resume, like playing a couple hours of Digital Devil Saga, and reading an exhaustingly tiny portion of the Persona 5 LP on the LP Archive. Oh, and I read an LP of Persona 1 by this fellow named “Timrod”.

So, my problem with Persona 3…okay, I don’t really like anything in Persona 3 other than the battle system and the music, both of which are great. And that NPC girl who wants Mitsuru to run her over on her motorcycle. She’s good too. But my serious problem with P3 is…weird. I seem to have an issue where there are several popular game franchises I would like, if only they removed their primary game mechanic.

In Persona’s case, it’s Social Links. For reasons I don’t really understand, I find them anxiety-provoking. Like, I start talking to somebody and I start sweating and I get that feeling like my heart is being squeezed. I have moderate social anxiety, so I guess it relates to that. I’m happy making dialogue choices in a game so long as my choices don’t have meaning; playing through Pokemon Moon was some of the most fun I’ve had with a game, because you can play as a clueless dipshit and it’s hilarious.

I have however, in the last couple months, learned how to treat a game as a system to be toyed with instead of an experience to be had, which is why I decided to try P3P again. I can just sort of ignore the words - I’ve seen most of them already and I know none of them are very interesting - and focus on the numbers. It’s a rather cruel way to look at a game, though.

[Timrod]

Click here for Update 14

: Welcome to Update 14. This is going to be a separate update because the next cutscene contains a MASSIVE plot dump and I wanted to get it squared away before we head into the next dungeon.

: When we leave the beach, we’re alone with Tatsuya and Lisa. We’re supposed to head to the Kuzunoha Agency, but instead we want to make a brief detour.

: Just outside of Mt. Iwato is this guy, who will tell us about…

: Oh no. Oh god no.

: Kuchisake-onna was the bane of my goddamn existence in Persona 1, where she spams the fuck out of instadeath attacks in a dungeon where dying seals your Persona until you go fetch it from Tartarus. We want to do this sidequest because it awards a Megido card, the next best thing to Megidolaon.

: And now back to our regularly-scheduled plot dump. I hope you’re ready for some shit that’ll frame the plot for the rest of the game.

: “We keep asking you… what is this… battle…lion…thing!?”

: “I can’t make sense of this woman’s ravings… seriously, what’s going on?”

: “We spread the rumor, like Maya-san suggested, but… the rest is still up in the air. We should brace ourselves for the worst.”

: “Ciaaao… sorry I’m late…”

: “Oh, uh… okay, I guess everyone’s here now, so could you start by telling us what you know?”

: “Before that, I want to know some things from you. How… do you know about the Oracle of Maia?”

: I’m just gonna chime in here, because there’s a whole lot to take in right about now.

: So first off, this is a very common conspiracy theory among neo-nazi and white supremacy groups in the real world. The part about Hitler escaping Germany at the end of WWII, not the part about the Last Battalion.

: If you’ll recall, when I started this LP I said there were a few reasons that Innocent Sin never got localized on the PS1, and this is probably one of them.

: On a side note, I actually interviewed an archaeologist who looked into a skull the Soviets found outside the Fuhrerbunker when I was in college. It wasn’t Hitler’s, but he was adamant that there’s no way Hitler escaped that bunker. The Discovery Channel did a thing on it like they do every few years to get views - I think this one was called “Hitler’s Escape”. Anyway, this isn’t even as batshit as this update gets.

: “Th-that’s impossible… I mean, the Masked Circle is…”

: “The Oracle of Maia was left by the Pleiades aliens who gifted humans with civilization… it’s a message entrusted to us by the Maians!”

: So yes, now we’re moving straight into the “Ancient Aliens” conspiracy theory. You know, the one with that dipshit on the History Channel.

: “Did you really think we evolved from apes on our own!? The answers aren’t in the history books! How did man come so far, so fast!?”

: There’s evidence all over the world of their presence in ancient times! It proves that mankind was guided by an advanced race!"

: I mean, think about it, people! Why do you think Waffle House never closes?! It’s because Waffle House was designed by aliens! They’re using futuristic technology to control the weather and stop storms from destroying the Waffle Houses! The only reason they go on a limited menu is because they need to turn the power to their food replicators down in order to maximize their weather control output! Follow the waffle crumbs!

: I should mention that the “Maian” aliens were used as a plot device in Perfect Dark. They perfected the technology of putting Trent Easton’s head on Elvis’s body to cheese hitboxes in multiplayer.

: “But the ancient Maians that thrived here died in an intergalactic civil war… the victors were the Bolontiku race that controls Xibalba…”

: “The Mayan myths of South America prove it. Though that civilization is an ancient memory now… their ruins were all modeled on Sumaru.”

: Yes, I’m sure the Mayans modelled their cities after a Japanese city a thousand years into the future.

: "Because when the Oracle is fulfilled, Xibalba and the crystal skulls will grand mankind’s ultimate dream… it will end in us becoming Idealians… a transhuman state where we will understand the true meaning of life.

: “Sounds good to me… then we wouldn’t be so upset by trifles anymore.”

: “It’s far from good! In exchange for the evolution of a few, mankind will perish! Organisms evolve when they face extinction!”

: “When the Bolontiku thoughtforms take physical bodies, they will bring destruction to all! That’s why we didn’t go public with this!”

: Don’t worry if none of this makes sense. I’m going to do a summary at the end.

: “No! No! This is all a lie! The Masked Circle is…!”

: "Eikichi! You remember, don’t you!? About playing “the Masked Circle”! "

: “Like I said, that was in my dream…”

: “…! W-wait… what did you just say…?”

: “That reminds me… your actual name is Lisa, right…!? D-don’t tell me, him too…!?”

: “I’ve been desperately trying to convince myself that it was just a dream… but… it was real!”

: Wait. What. The Alaya Shrine was in Persona 1. It’s where the Persona 1 cast meets Philemon for the first time, and is located just outside St. Hermelin High School in Mikage-cho. Anyway, let’s talk to our party quick.

: We can also talk to Ms. Ideal, who has… quite a lot to say. We’re talking probably 50 dialog boxes. I’m going to summarize this with a timeline, which will explain a lot about this game. Any pieces with (According to Maya Okamura) next to them are Ms. Ideal’s crazy alternate history bullshit train. If somehow you’re a kid doing research, this is a Let’s Play of Persona 2 for the PSP and not an actual history lesson. Please do not include me as a source in your research paper, unless you’re writing about how Waffle House is actually run by aliens.

Thousands of Years Ago (According to Maya Okamura)

• The Maian aliens have a civil war between two groups: the Bolontiku and the Oxlahuntiku.

• As the result of the civil war, the Oxlahuntiku flee to the Milky Way, where they contact the Mayan civilization. The Mayans worship the Oxlahuntiku as gods, and in exchange are given technological and evolutionary advancement.

• The Bolontiku hunt down the Oxlahuntiku and wipe out most of humanity in the process. The Oxlahuntiku win, but are forced into hibernation inside their spaceship: Xibalba. Xibalba buries itself beneath Sumaru City.

Mid 1930s to 1945 (According to Maya Okamura)

• Adolf Hitler journeys to South America to learn sorcery from the Mayans and becomes immortal in the process.

• Adolf Hitler starts World War 2 in an attempt to drive mankind to the brink of extinction and force evolution.

• Hitler and the Axis Powers lose WWII despite him apparently being an immortal sorcerer with near-unlimited powers because ???.

• During the final days of WWII, Hitler escapes from the Fuhrerbunker with the aid of the Last Battalion, an army of high-tech super soldiers straight out of Wolfenstein. He flees to South America in order to find Xibalba.

Late 1980s

• Tatsuya Sudou, then a senior at Seven Sisters High School, begins hearing voices in his head. Ms. Ideal claims that he was nervous and afraid of his father, who she describes as “extremely strict” and also a possible pyromaniac.

• Akinari Kashihara (whose ghost we saw at the clock tower), a history teacher at Sevens, meets Sudou. Sudou idolizes Kashihara and sees him as a father figure.

• Kashihara believes that Sudou is a medium who is channeling the voices of the Maian aliens. Believing that the voices in Sudou’s head are the Maians trying to make contact, he works with Maya Okamura to write down Sudou’s ramblings. The book they write is titled “In Lak’ech”, which Okamura states is Mayan for “you are another me.” Wonder where we’ve heard that one before?

• Inside In Lak’ech is a prophecy: the Oracle of Maia, which is supposed to be the method of finding and reviving Xibalba. It revolves around the Maians absorbing “Ideal Energy”, which Okamura describes as “the power of thought held by living beings… a psychological energy emitted when passionate about ideals or when dreams come true”. The skulls we’ve seen the Masked Circle carrying around are vessels for Ideal Energy.

• Believing that In Lak’ech is too dangerous to exist, Maya Okamura and Akinari Kashihara hide the only copy to prevent the Last Battalion from finding it. Why they even wrote the thing in the first place is unknown.

Early 1990s

• Akinari Kashihara dies, crushed in the gears of the clock tower at Seven Sisters High School. The reason is unknown, although Maya Okamura blames the Last Battalion.

: I sure hope that was a big enough wall of text, because it’s even bigger in-game. I’ll probably do another near the end of the game. Anyway, there’s one last thing…

: This is why I wanted to hide the Oracle of Maia. You’ll notice that the first couple of lines refer to things that have already happened: the “frozen time” was the clock tower at Sevens, the “wild dance” and “shadowed festival” were the Kasugayama High arc, and the “foreign song” was the MUSES arc with Lisa.

: Next time, we’ll go to Mt. Iwato and visit the Alaya Shrine, which has somehow moved locations since Persona 1. We’ll also get revenge on Kuchisake-onna for being a piece of shit in Thanatos Tower.

[LaZodiac]

For as nonsensical as it kind of it, I’ve gotta admit the game is at least interesting with its crazy ramblings.

[Timrod]

Click here for Update 15

: Now that we’ve listened to Maya Okamura spout off her crazy bullshit, we get what is basically a plot dump disguised as a dungeon. I spread the Kuchisake-onna rumor off screen.

: By the way, there’s no point to fusing new Personas… provided you did the moral choices correctly. You’ll see why. I also didn’t bother buying new equipment, because there’s better stuff immediately after this dungeon and if we bought stuff now we wouldn’t have enough for later.

: “We can’t hide from it any more, Eikichi! We know who that girl is… we know about Big Sis!”

: “Hmm… looks like there’s some sensitive business here. If you have a sin you’ve been covering up, why not confess and be at ease?”

: And now we’re about to learn why this game is called Innocent Sin… even though if you ask the people at the Megami Tensei wiki they’ll claim it has to do with the ending.

: “A sin…? I…”

: The screen goes white, and then suddenly we’re in Philemon’s giant floating space dildo.

: “You have begun to recover your forgotten past… if you wish to learn the truth, go to the Alaya Cavern behind this shrine.”

: The Alaya Cavern was one of the final destinations in Persona 1’s SEBEC route. It’s actually named after a Buddhist concept, but if I have to fight another giant penis monster I swear…

: “The reflecting pools that show one’s past and inner self shall show you the way to go from there.”

: “Mt. Iwato… where our memories and sins have been buried…”

: This entire dungeon is going to have a plot very reminiscent of Final Fantasy 8. Persona 2 came out a few months after FF8, so it’s unlikely that Atlus had outright stolen the plot, but… yeah. Given a choice between FF8 and Innocent Sin, I can see why a lot of people picked FF8.

: “Man’s understanding of time causes him to be trapped in the past and fear the future…”

: Okay, time for Mt. Iwato. Like I said, we’re specifically not buying any new equipment or fusing any new Personas, even though I could and probably should have.

: As a dungeon, Mt. Iwato is super fucking boring. It’s basically a straight hallway with a bunch of cutscenes in it. Let me post the map.

: See all those rooms with the pink text in them? Every single one of those rooms is a cutscene. They really could’ve paced this a little better.

: “This can’t be… I saw this place all the time in my dreams… it’s really here.”

: Clearly, the half-dozen fake Makis in Persona 1 were not enough. We needed a Fake Maya too.

: “N-N-No way! That was…”

: “Tatsuya…! Even now, you don’t remember!? Then let’s go deeper… I’m sure you’ll remember who that was…”

: There’s a lot of optional dialog in Mt. Plotdump, so I’m bringing back the Optional Dialogue header.

: “But if that really happened… I’ve got no choice but to go…”

: “Why… why did that happen…? Why…”

: I start walking into Mt. Iwato, and it takes a bit to get into a battle.

: Most of the enemies here are recycled from GOLD and the Aerospace Museum. We have plenty of cards and I wanted to get the party’s level up a bit so I stopped negotiating and started nuking.

: Lisa’s accessory alerts us to a new fusion spell. It’s called Loiseau de Feu, and is the fire equivalent of Sonic Wave. Everything in Mt. Iwato (apart from a single enemy) is very flammable.

: Wait a second! Hold it! Look at Maya! If you’ve played Persona 4 or Persona 5, you’ll have a clue as to what’s going on here. Yes, Maya has an entirely new cut-in image for this dungeon.

: There are enemies here that go up to Level 31, meaning we’re a few levels behind somehow.

: Right near the next cutscene room is an HP incense.

: The hilarious part about this is that they animated Tatsuya with a yo-yo, and the animation is exactly two frames.

: If you’ve played Persona 3 (or Persona 4 or Persona 5) you’ll know what this mask is. This is a Phoenix Ranger Featherman R mask, which will pop up in all of the subsequent Persona games in some form.

: In Persona 3, it’s on the TV in the dorm room. Persona 4 Golden has an entire Featherman costume set you can unlock. They show up in Futaba’s room in Persona 5 as well.

: “Papa and Mama were fighting today, too… and they promised they’d go to the festival with me. Why are grown-ups always so mad?”

: Yes, Eikichi was the fat kid… even though he’s not really that fat. This is part of the whole thing between him and Hanakouji.

: sniffle sob “Y-Yeah… Wh-who’re you…?”

: “Umm… I’m Black Falcon. And this is… Red Eagle, I guess?”

: “Th-then I’m Y-Yellow Owl.”

: “M-my dad’s r-really scary… h-he’s like, eighteenth rank in k-k-karate and judo…”

: “My papa’s nice to me. He reads books to me and shows me the stars. But he doesn’t get along with mama…”

: Meet Lisa’s dad, who is a reference that did not at all age well. Lisa’s dad is straight up Steven Seagal, who uh… is kind of a gigantic asshole these days. There’s a good reason the other 80s action movie stars get roles in good movies and he doesn’t. In a way, it fits though, as Lisa’s dad is a colossal asshole.

: “Hey! C’mon over. Wanna play with us?”

: “A justice hero would never pick on anyone! Come on!”

: Eikichi spending most of his time on the ground is apparently nothing new.

: “Hahahaha! Oh man, what’re we gonna do with you, Yellow?”

: “Whew… I’m tired… I haven’t laughed this much in a while…”

: “Hey, um… will you guys keep being my friends?”

: “Of c-course! W-we’ll always be p-p-pals! R-right!?”

: “Oh, I know! We’re missing one, but we do have four rangers here. Let’s come up with a name for our group! It’ll be just between us. We’ll be secret friends who never take off their masks when they meet!”

: So yes, this is another case of the whole “Erusaer Tsymmom” thing that Persona 1 did.

: “Now do you remember, Tatsuya!? We all met each other a long time ago!”

: “We’re the ones who formed the Masked Circle! And… and…!”

: Yukino is totally thinking “Wow, I’m glad the Persona 1 cast wasn’t that dumb. Apart from Ayase.”

: “Yeah… that’s right, Tatsuya… that was us back when we were kids… it wasn’t just a dream… we met for the first time that night at the festival at the Alaya Shrine!”

: Right near the cutscene room is a secret room. You can see it on the map, it’s between the first and second cutscene rooms. There are five of these rooms in Mt. Iwato, and we ABSOLUTELY want to visit all of them. Why?

: So, remember in Persona 1 how you got the “ultimate” Personas by picking the moral choices correctly, and you got the totem items at the end of the game? The masks here ARE those totem items. If you miss one, there’s no coming back for it and you are permanently screwed out of each character’s ultimate Persona. Yes, they’re just sitting in a random-ass midgame dungeon.

: It’s entirely possible that unless you’re using a map, you could miss one or more of the masks. The worst part is that unlike Persona 1 where the ultimate Personas were all kinda garbage (except Elly’s), the ones in Innocent Sin have a unique fusion spell in addition to multiple top-tier damage spells. The fusion spell requires all five ultimates.

: If you haven’t read the Persona 1 LP, Yukino is talking about Snow Queen, which starts when Ms. Saeko (who we met earlier) puts on a cursed mask.

: “This… is where I hid my mask… back then… hiding my face made me feel like a different person. I didn’t have to worry about the color of my hair or eyes.”

: “That’s right… we came here afterwards and hid our masks… and forgot all about it ever since…”

: Get your stuff, people, time to trundle along to the next cutscene.

: Camazotz and Principality are two of the new enemies here. Camazotz isn’t that bad, Principality randomly casts instant death spells. Somehow, that makes him less bad than in Persona 1 where he reflected practically everything.

: By the way, Maya won’t negotiate with demons for… some reason. I wonder why? This locks us out of making pacts with about half the demons here. I made one with Camazotz for some cards since that only requires Eikichi and Tatsuya.

: Mt. Iwato really feels like that dungeon in YIIK. There’s a few items hidden around, but most of them aren’t necessary. That incense we got earlier is one of the ones worth picking up.

: Time for the second of four reflecting pools.

: “Paaaaper!”

: “S-S-scissors!”

: “…”

: “Okay, then today… we’re gonna play house!”

: It’s not lupus. Oh boy, time to go abuse pain medication. There, I played House.

: “W-whaaat!? C-c’mon… let’s d-draw today, I-I brought my c-c-crayons…”

: “Sorry, Yellow. She’s the boss, so we have to listen to what she says no matter what. That’s the rule.”

: Incidentally, this was the plot of one of the worst episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

: “Umm, Red will be the daddy, and I’ll be the mommy, of course. And you’ll be my big brother, Black!”

: “A-Am I the b-baby again…? F-fine…”

: I read this and all I could think of is how Eikichi totally should’ve responded like that one water commercial people kept turning into a Youtube Poop years ago.

: “Daaarling! The kids are all tucked in now, so let’s take a bath together!”

: I think the black-masked kid lost the plot somewhere.

: Culebre is another new enemy. He’s water-based and technically resists fire, but Loiseau de Feu and Mega Blaze will still oneshot them.

: Nearby is Eikichi’s mask. That makes two. I’m going to skip the optional dialogue because it’s not really important.

: It took me almost two full floors to find Kuchisake-onna, but I did.

: She tries the old sleep-lock tactic that wiped my party in the Alaya Cavern in Persona 1, but that doesn’t work with five people. Two Loiseau de Feu later and she’s gone.

: “We must’ve sealed everything up so that our sins wouldn’t catch up to us… including our memories… I’m sorry, Tatsuya.”

: Oh! I know! It’s “There’s no line, just come on in.”

: “There’s no more disgusting phrase in all the world. It’s used to displace your suffering onto others so you can escape your sins… the moment you employ it, your suffering becomes the other person’s. A thing can be unforgivable, but oh, if they apologize…”

: “I say there’s no reason to accept that suffering. You don’t have to forgive them. Cast aside the mask of your conscience.”

: “The Ta-chan I knew then was a lot more energetic… it’s probably our fault that you became so distant. I know that words can never be enough… but there’s nothing else I can do now besides apologize. I’m so sorry…”

: This was optional dialogue, but I’m going to cast aside the mask of my conscience and not mark it because it’s the first real instance where something’s clearly wrong with Maya… assuming you haven’t played Persona 4 or 5.

: Finally, we reach B2F. B2F has something ripped straight out of the Ice Palace in Persona 1, and this was where I got the map out.

: Here, we run into Cwn Annwn. I looked up how you pronounce it and it sounds like “Coon a-noon”. “Coon A-Noon” sounds like a lunch hour radio show hosted by a raccoon furry. Anyway, Cwn Annwn is easily the most annoying demon in this dungeon.

: They’re very fast, usually going before the party does. They also have a spell that causes them to explode and instakill a single person. When they’re not using that, they have a bunch of group-target spells that take forever to resolve even on “skip” mode.

: The second floor starts with a small room that looks like a dead end. It isn’t. You just kind of clip through this wall and keep going. This is the intended route.

: This room here? With the ice crystals? This room is an annoying piece of shit. It’s basically a minefield, only the mines are pit traps that cause you to drop down a floor.

: What you want to do here is sort of make a route shaped like a backwards question mark. I’ll show you the in-game map.

: I intentionally fell down this hole because there’s a few items and a unique demon in a box on the floor below.

: This guy is… I actually don’t know. The game refers to him as “Demon King” and I think he’s supposed to be some kind of ancient Chinese or Japanese general. He’s really nothing special except that he has gravity-based spells. I don’t think we’ve seen a single Persona with a gravity spell yet.

: By this point, everyone in the party is pretty close to level 30… apart from Lisa, who is still behind.

: The only other treasure worth getting in here are these Miracle Eggs. Everything else is common healing items we can buy at the store.

: Agrippa can spawn here as a regular enemy. He’s level 31 and resistant to magic, but vulnerable to physical damage.

: Back on B2F, I use the map to get around the pit traps.

: Here’s the route to get around all of that. You mostly want to stick to the right wall, make a slight left around the big crystal formation, and then stick to the north wall.

: The third reflecting pool is on B3F, but on a different part of it that we can only access through the staircase that’s past all the pit traps.

: I didn’t do the math until now, but at this point, Maya is 13 and the rest of the cast are either 6 or 7 years old. It just seems weird to me that you’d let kids that young play by themselves, even in the late 90s.

: “Whatcha doing, Big Sis?”

: “I’m visiting the shrine. I’m praying to become what I want in the future… like that!”

: “Ohh, neat! But if you join the Masked Circle, you can be what you want right now!”

: “Wh-whatever the b-boss of the Masked C-Circle says goes. Th-the boss gets to decide what everyone d–does and b-becomes.”

: Sound familiar at all? Not like that’s what we’ve been going through for the past several hours.

: “Wow! Then will you make me what I want to be too?”

: “Wh-what should we d-do? I-I wouldn’t m-mind letting her j-join our group…”

: “Yeah… are you okay with it, Red?”

: This is a retcon of Persona 1. In Persona 1, it’s established that the only reason the Persona Game works is because of the DEVA System interfacing with Maki and overwriting reality with her dream world. Theoretically, once the DEVA system blew up at the end of Persona 1, that should’ve been the end of it. Nevermind that this scene is happening in 1989 and the DEVA System wasn’t built until 1996.

: This also means that the Persona 2 party have had their Personas since before the Persona 1 cast.

: “Yeah… Yeah! That’s right! We loved Big Sis! She was beautiful… energetic… kind… she taught us to follow our dreams… and then… I…”

: “We played the Persona Game together. Big Sis watched us with a huge smile on her face the whole time… she told us that whether our dream comes true depends on us! But then… I… I…!”

: Mt. Iwato really is just a cutscene hallway.

: There’s one last secret room on B2F - it’s on the other side of B2F from where the minefield is. Technically this isn’t the last secret room. There’s one more, but it should be obvious why we don’t need to go there.

: I’m going to skip most of the optional dialogue in this room, except for Maya’s and Yukino’s. Most of it’s stuff we’ve heard before.

: “But don’t you think the one who was forgotten would feel horrible? Real life isn’t a video game. You can’t just press the reset button. The sins you’ve committed will never disappear.”

: I mean, unless you’re Takahisa Kandori.

: I had to turn back from the final area because I forgot this chest with 30,000 yen in it. Where did a bunch of elementary schoolers get $300?

: B3F is boring. It’s a straight shot to the boss with very little in it.

: Picollus is another new enemy who only seems to show up near the end, despite being level 30 to Agrippa’s 31. They’re extremely slow and extremely flammable.

: B3F has one last secret room. This one is not required to get all of the ultimate Personas: if you think about it, we’ve already found masks belonging to all of the characters in our party. The last one would be the boy in the black mask… who we haven’t met yet. Or have we?

: Finally, outside the secret room there’s a new weapon for Lisa.

: "But members of the Masked Circle will always be together… that’s our rule… you promised us!’

: "…Liar! You lied to us, Big Sis!’

: “Ta-chan! You’re the boss today, right!? Order her not to go!”

: “…”

: “Jun! You gotta say something! Are you gonna just let Big Sis go away!?”

: We know his name now. Jun is the boy that exchanged gifts with Tatsuya in that flashback in the bomb shelter.

: And now we know how Maya got locked in that shrine. Of course, we also know what happened after. I feel like this is kind of just bad pacing. There’s no reason we couldn’t have had this revelation at the Aerospace Museum, or even before that.

: “Don’t… please stop!”

: “I get it… I didn’t forget… so please, no more…”

: “It wasn’t you… this is all my fault… I… I’m such an idiot! I was so scared of what I did that I tried to convince myself it was all a dream…”

: “I knew. Ever since I heard the name Masked Circle… I started to remember that was happened was real…”

: “The last ten years… I had hoped it was all just a bad dream. Eventually, I couldn’t tell what was real anymore. I began to think it had all been in my head.”

: Now, here’s something strange. If you’ll recall, Tatsuya was outside the shrine when he met Sudou and burned his eye.

: “We thought if she spent one night there, she wouldn’t be able to move away… we were such dumb kids. It didn’t make much sense…”

: “When we came back the next day, the shrine had been burned to the ground. I was scared… I thought I had killed Big Sis and Tatsuya…”

: “Jun, Ginko, and me… we hid our masks in this secret hideout, crying our eyes out, and made one last rule never to meet again.”

: “Way later, I heard a rumor that Tatsuya had been stabbed by the arsonist, but lived… still, I didn’t dare show my face.”

: “You tried to protect our Big Sis to the very end… but I… killed her…”

: “So that’s why you were so confused… you were just a kid. Then this ‘Big Sis’ is still alive? That’s good to hear.”

: “King Leo said Joker was “as beautiful as a goddess”! Big Sis was like that!”

: All of a sudden, Maya starts strangling Tatsuya before throwing him backwards.

: Maya pulls out her Persona, Reverse Maia. This is Maya’s Shadow, which also happens to be the upcoming boss.

: She casts another spell to try and kill the party off (despite the fact that Tatsuya and Yukino could beat her by themselves) but…

: “Ciao, everyone. Sorry I’m late. That Maya’s an impostor, probably caused by those terrorist rumors… she’s a spy from the Masked Circle!”

: “Leave now. That is, if you value your life.”

: The only person in the Masked Circle who isn’t in our party is Joker! Who could’ve guessed?

: “I’m alive… you don’t have to suffer anymore…”

: “Stop! That’s impossible! Tatsuya killed you!”

: We have a new possible fusion spell. Four of them, actually. Agrippa has learned a move called Summon Spirits, which combines with any of the basic element spels (fire, earth, water, wind) to make four fusion spells called Sylph, Undine, Gnome, and Salamander. These are okay replacements for things like Mega Blaze and Maxi Tempest that only take two people to perform.

: Our party starts at half health. Shadow Maya opens with Aquadyne, which two of our five party members null.

: So here’s the problem. Shadow Maya is extremely resistant to magic. Blazing Burst does like 90 damage to her, and even Loiseau de Feu struggles to break three digits.

: To make things worse, Shadow Maya has a move called Diamond Dust, which is basically Mabufula with a higher freeze chance. She also has a poison attack.

: So how did I handle this fight? Well, like this… sort of. Everyone but Tatsuya on auto-attack, Tatsuya using Shouchikubai, which heals the entire party for a good chunk of damage and can also remove status effects. I set this up and then went and had lunch.

: “All this time, my Persona’s been telling me you were Big Sis! I’m sorry… I…!”

: “I…I did something so terrible… I’ll understand if you hold a grudge over it…”

: “No… this is all because of an unfortunate misunderstanding that started that day… if anything, I’m glad to be able to see you all again. I’d never resent you! On the contrary, it’s you who should…”

: “You’re… also a false me born from a rumor…”

: “I am honored that you remember. You have all grown splendidly, yet you have not lost the shine in your eyes from those days.”

: “In homage to your strong will, I grant you power… the strength of your hearts and kindness has awakened your true Personas.”

: This is one thing I really don’t like about Innocent Sin. When Persona 1 did this with the ultimate Personas, it would tell you exactly why you got (or didn’t get) them. Here, we have no idea why. In each case, it’s because we made a choice before a boss fight: one in Zodiac, one in Aoba Park and one in the Aerospace Museum. Tatsuya gets his if (and ONLY if) everyone else gets theirs.

: These, by the way, are the Prime Personas. They’re basically everyone’s starter Persona levelled up to around 35 and given a better move set.

: “He sought to use rumors for his own ends, but has been swallowed by them, and is acting to fulfill mankind’s ultimate dream…”

: “Such was not Jun Kurosu’s original desire… his mind is snared in rumors and is slowly becoming something inhuman.”

: “The holy cross is the Grand Cross, and Nahui-Ollin is the world of the fifth sun. There is no time to lose before it perishes.”

: If you’ve ever read Lovecraft, you know who the Crawling Chaos is. If not, you might’ve seen him in the Persona 1 LP under his proper name: Nyarlathotep.

: In Persona 1, Nyarathotep was Takahisa Kandori’s Persona… though really, it was more the case that he was being controlled by it. Nyarlathotep was basically a throwaway villain: it eats Kandori…

: And makes him into a monster. It then dies when Jihei and the Persona 1 cast riddle it with bullets. You can actually fuse Nyarlathotep as a Persona for Reiji, but it sucks.

: Persona 2 also retcons this. Now, Nyarlathotep is a major villain and also the one pulling Jun’s strings. He apparently exists as an SMT demon in the Persona universe, the same way that Nyx did in Snow Queen.

: I hope you’re ready for this, because the bullshit rocket that is the plot is about to hit outer space.

: War planes. Futuristic Nazi warplanes.

: I’m pretty sure the original version of this cutscene had swastikas on all of the planes, rather than the Iron Cross. This was a change made in the PSP version.

: Yes, Persona 2 is now Wolfenstein. Giant Nazi mechs.

: Where’s BJ Blazkowitz when you need him?

: The Last Battalion has invaded Sumaru City. Next time, we kill some Nazis.

[LaZodiac]

Pacing aside I think this part of the game is pretty cool. There’s still some degree of mystery, as to how Tatsuya and Maya survived being locked in the shrine and why we saw Tatsuya outside when he’s supposed to be inside, but I imagine we’ll find out eventually.

Anyway, hell yeah time to murder some fucking nazis. That sounds great.

[Timrod]

@LaZodiac

Pacing aside I think this part of the game is pretty cool. There’s still some degree of mystery, as to how Tatsuya and Maya survived being locked in the shrine and why we saw Tatsuya outside when he’s supposed to be inside, but I imagine we’ll find out eventually.

So uh… here’s the thing about that. Apparently, they never really address it in the game - it’s something that’s in supplementary material that never got translated and also in Eternal Punishment. It’s also kind of a plot hole. I’ll probably do an entire side update containing spoilers for EP that will just be titled “What’s the fucking deal with the shrine cutscene?”

[LaZodiac]

… damn. Persona 2 is a oddly put together game.

[SpammyV]

Okay so you had me with the saving Ixquic and dramatic revelation about King Leo, and then you lost me with the ancient aliens, and then you had me with the kids trying to bury traumatic memories (also lol Steven Segal is her dad just a lowly cook)… And you lost me with the jetpack capital-N Nazis. What? What? How many rumors do you have to start about how Wolfenstein is a documentary before the Nazis invade Japan?

…

What?

[drcakey]

You compared the flashback stuff to Final Fantasy VIII and…this is more compelling than how it’s done in FF8. FF8’s stuff is a big shrug, whereas this is…still pretty rough, but it had my interest. I say this as a (weird) fan of FF8, by the way.

And then…

@SpammyV

Okay so you had me with the saving Ixquic and dramatic revelation about King Leo, and then you lost me with the ancient aliens, and then you had me with the kids trying to bury traumatic memories… And you lost me with the jetpack capital-N Nazis.

This is the same rollercoaster I was on.

Also why in a story where there are literal actual demons walking the streets should I be compelled by like…some dudes with planes. Even if they’re future planes, this is clearly a step down on the narrative hierarchy.

[LaZodiac]

Given they’re made by rumours, I think the idea is that they are literal nazi-demons using schizo-future tech.

[Mraagvpeine]

When I first saw this, I wondered what was even a “rumor” at this point and how this whole thing works. Is it like those Gods that need prayer to exist, only scaled down so just a few believers is enough to cause nonsense like this to come to life?

[LaZodiac]

Rumours spread quickly. As long as it is interesting enough to catch someone’s attention it’ll probably cement itself in the collective human consciousness to some degree.

[Timrod]

@SpammyV

Okay so you had me with the saving Ixquic and dramatic revelation about King Leo, and then you lost me with the ancient aliens, and then you had me with the kids trying to bury traumatic memories (also lol Steven Segal is her dad just a lowly cook)… And you lost me with the jetpack capital-N Nazis. What? What? How many rumors do you have to start about how Wolfenstein is a documentary before the Nazis invade Japan?

@Mraagvpeine

When I first saw this, I wondered what was even a “rumor” at this point and how this whole thing works. Is it like those Gods that need prayer to exist, only scaled down so just a few believers is enough to cause nonsense like this to come to life?

The idea is that Sudou sent out a bunch of copies of In Lak’ech to pretty much every media outlet in the city. You can see people talking about it on the TV in the detective agency. It’s sort of like how in 2012 everyone was talking about the whole “Mayan end of the world” thing, or how every so often you’ll see a news story about some fringe group that thinks the world is going to end.

My guess is that they used the ancient aliens thing because that theory was experiencing a spike in popularity in the late 1990s. That idea’s nothing new - it’s been around since the 1950s if not earlier.

@drcakey

Also why in a story where there are literal actual demons walking the streets should I be compelled by like…some dudes with planes. Even if they’re future planes, this is clearly a step down on the narrative hierarchy.

I explained this a little in Persona 1, but the first two Persona games are kinda weird in regards to demons. This is one of the reasons why the later games all have the action happen in a separate dimension.

Theoretically, as of SMT If, people know that the demons exist. That’s how the SMT If timeline diverges from SMT 1 and 2’s: SMT If happens before SMT 1, and by the end the world governments know that demons exist. The Americans figure out that “Ambassador Thorman” is actually a demon and alert Japan’s SDF in time for them to stop him from ending the world.

I think in Persona 2, they were taking a lot more inspiration from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, which explains how stand users can have giant fights in public by saying that no one can see the stands except other stand users. My guess is that’s how they explain it away in the game: people who aren’t persona users or devil summoners can’t see the demons.

[LaZodiac]

Also correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t the divergence point related to Raido Kuzunoha’s first game as well? Like I’m pretty sure I read. Which I think also has some… minor ties to the Last Battalion, or something along those lines?

Yeah this raises too many questions. I’m glad P3 onwards stick to just kinda dipping our toes into the collective human consciousness.

[Timrod]

@LaZodiac

Also correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t the divergence point related to Raido Kuzunoha’s first game as well? Like I’m pretty sure I read. Which I think also has some… minor ties to the Last Battalion, or something along those lines?

I honestly have never played the Raidou games, and apparently the Megami Tensei wiki hasn’t either.

[Cornix_Argentus]

@LaZodiac

Also correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t the divergence point related to Raido Kuzunoha’s first game as well? Like I’m pretty sure I read. Which I think also has some… minor ties to the Last Battalion, or something along those lines?

I think so? I know that the main antagonist is basically going back in time trying to stop SMT1 from happening and I heard from somewhere that SMT IF is set in the Devil Summoner timeline. So yeah, it sounds like it is if I’m not getting either part of that wrong.

[Timrod]

Click Here for Update 16

: Because In Lak’ech, that’s why. Welcome to Update 16, where I learn that the Prime Personas are all garbage and had to reset.

[ Image Credit: https://www.exploratorium.edu/ancientobs/chichen/HTML/caracol.html]

: El Caracol, which does in fact mean “The Snail” in Spanish, is a ruin in Chichen Itza that was used as an observatory by the Mayans. This is how we know that the “ancient aliens” theory is bullshit: any alien worth a goddamn would’ve taught them how to convert that thing into a home theater. The whole dome on that thing could be one giant screen on the inside.

: Why there’s a replica of El Caracol at the top of a mountain in Japan, I have no idea.

: Some new areas in the Abandoned Factory have opened up, but even selling all the old equipment I didn’t have enough money to get everyone fully armored.

: I went to go fuse new Personas, and realized the game auto-equipped the Prime ones. They’re all godawful. You can have a maximum of one fusion spell, which is more or less determined by what Yukino has since she doesn’t get one. Yukino learned that shit was bunk in 1996.

: Mt. Katatsumuri is basically just a dungeon. There’s a cable car going up, but it only unlocks once you’ve cleared the first part.

: The Nazis have taken over the mountain path.

: “What should we do? I could go either way.”

: “No time to waste! We go through the front!”

: “The direct route would be a shorter distance… but I don’t think it’ll be easy, necessarily. Taking a slight detour to avoid them might be faster in the end…”

: According to the guide, choosing the first option gives you more encounters with Nazis.

: The fight consists of a Kommandant and four Sturm Soldiers, who are very fast and like to spam full-party gun attacks. The problem here is that without Mega Blaze or Loiseau de Feu, they take two rounds to die. During that time, they dish out a lot of damage.

: I got to about the first screen of this dungeon before realizing that the Prime Personas were not going to cut it. We need something stronger.

: Two new enemies, both three levels higher than the party. Shoggoths can possess people and it’s really annoying and god dammit I want my fusion spells back fuck this garbage. Only problem was… I had already cashed in the old Personas for items. Reset time.

Returning Persona: Baal

Origin: Unknown, possibly Canaan

First Appearance: Megami Tensei (NES)

: This time, I start fusing Personas. Baal here is basically a straight upgrade to Rhadamanthus Prime. He was one of my mainstays in Persona 1 as well. The profile about him is a little off: as I explained when I Personalogged him in the first game, Baal isn’t a single deity but rather a Semitic word for “Lord” or “Master” used to describe a bunch of pagan deities.

New Persona: Stymphalides

Origin: Greece

First Appearance: Devil Summoner (Saturn)

: Stymphalides was a mistake. His stats are amazing, but he’s 2x weak to Ranged. That means guns. I used a Garu card on him and really didn’t have anything better so I gave him to Maya because Maia Prime is trash. He actually proves useful.

New Persona: Hoenir

Origin: Norway

Persona 2 Original

: Hoenir’s stats are pretty meh. We don’t give a shit about that. What we do give a shit about is that he nulls gun damage and has Garula, and eventually learns Garudyne. He goes to Yukino.

: This setup is SO much better than the Prime Personas. Less SP-intensive (the Primes use 27 each) and more access to fusion spells. I now have a one-turn nuke consisting of Maxi Tempest and Undine, which uses any water spell and Summon Spirits from Agrippa. This combo will kill any random encounter. The only problem is I have no healer anymore, but that’s fine because the enemies here drop a shitload of money.

: I scalp roughly 20 Nazis just grinding for money so I can buy the rest of the armor and healing items. I also find one minor problem with the two-nuke setup. In addition the Last Battalion, there’s also groups of Masked Circle troops wandering around.

: There are several problems with this. The first is that the blue ones are immune to Water and the green ones are immune to Wind. The blue and green ones can also cast Bufu and Zio, respectively. This does virtually no damage but has a chance to freeze or shock, which can ruin the fusion spell combos. Even with those in play, this combo still works a lot better than the Primes. Having one attack-all fusion spell sucks.

: Tatsuya reaches 98 dexterity, basically maxing out his casting stats and SP. He is now by far the most powerful caster in the party, and at 674 SP he can do that all day. His attack and defense stats are low in this shot because after I reset I opted to wait on buying new gear until I could test the Persona setup.

: Anyway, it was around this time that I realized I had no idea what I was doing, so I looked up the map. Let me explain how this works.

: If you choose to “bust right through”, you get this nice straightforward dungeon. Move forward, find staircase, items are basically unmissable. The idea is that the hard part is getting through that first fight.

: If you choose the other option, you get a Lost Woods style teleporter maze that you’re supposed to solve by interpreting a poem. I don’t feel like re-grinding so I’m not going to show this off. I’m just glad the developers did not allow Damage Floor Guy to design this because you know he’d have made you do the fight then do the teleporter maze.

: Any way you look at it, Mt. Katatsumuri is kinda boring. The developers kind of do a weird thing balance-wise here, too. From pretty much Smile Hirasaka to Mt. Iwato, the demon list is largely the same without levelling up all that much. This area is way more like Persona 1, where as soon as we’re done with this part the enemy levels start jumping significantly.

: The game threw a couple of dick encounters at me with two blue and two green Masked Circle troops. Since the usual Maxi Tempest -> Undine combo won’t work on them, I used Salamander instead. Salamander is any fire spell + Summon Spirits.

: In the 9th map out of 12, there’s a side area with some healing items. There’s an area just like this in the teleporter maze version, only you get… one more of each item. It’s not worth it.

: Eventually, after 12 maps of an area that is way longer than it has any right to be, you get to the bridge. This is the sign that you’re pretty much done with the first part of Mt. Katatsumuri.

: Here’s what I really don’t get. Why didn’t they just make GOLD and Smile Hirasaka required to progress and even out the level curve a little? To get an idea, the party is about level 35 right now. By the time we go into Caracol, the highest level enemies in random encounters are 46.

: This reminds me of this one kung fu movie a friend showed me once… I think it was called Seven Legendary Weapons of China but I might be wrong on that. It starts with the villain trying to create a style of kung fu that is impervious to bullets.

: Eikichi’s personal martial art is called Kung Himbo and is about being so dumb that bullets cannot harm you.

: One thing I didn’t notice up until this point is that some or all of the Last Battalion are robots. You can tell because some of them rotate their heads in a complete circle. I’d say it’d be impossible to program a robot to be a Nazi, but 4chan did it once. Seriously, they did.

: This is a pretty straightforward fight - it’s basically the exact same thing we fought at the start of the dungeon, only now we have the Maxi Tempest/Undine combo.

: This is one scene I really, really do not like. At all. It kind of does the same thing to Yukino that Metroid Other M did to Samus Aran. You’ll see.

: “No… why’d he let his photographer’s instinct take over NOW!? Why didn’t you stop him!?”

: This guy’s a fucking asshole! “It’ll be okay, just follow your dreams and chase after those heavily armed robo-Nazis with nothing other than a camera. You’ll be fine.”

: “Thank you very much. You really helped us out!”

: IN WHAT WAY!? “Oh, your mentor/boyfriend is probably dead. I did nothing to stop him charging in on a suicide mission. Here’s a camera.”

: The Leonid meteor shower? At this time of year, at this time of day, localized entirely within one city in Japan? You know what I want now is fanart of Seymour Skinner with a Persona that’s just a giant Krusty Burger.

: Ordinarily, the Leonids are only visible in November, and even then only sometimes.

: If we try to leave (which we have to in order to progress), Maya finds a nemophilia in a flower patch. Unlike the other flowers we’ve picked up, the nemophilia does not appear in our inventory and so we don’t know what it means in flower language.

: This update’s going to be a bit on the short side anyway since Mt. Dipshit is a bad dungeon, so let’s talk about that a little. Nemophila (the correct spelling) is a family of flowers who are almost all blue. The common name for them is “baby blue eyes”. Interestingly, Nemophila are almost entirely native to the United States and Canada, meaning that these would almost certainly be imported.

: There’s a fan of the game who did an entire blog post on the flower language in Persona 2. Most of it uses the French system, though some of it uses the Japanese one. In both, a Nemophila flower means only one thing: “I forgive you.” I’m not going to link the blog post for a myriad of reasons, mostly that it contains spoilers for both Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment.

: We could go on, but our party’s a bit underlevelled for Caracol and there’s a dumbass sidequest we can do. You can only do this after visiting the temple but before fighting the next boss, which is about four screens from now.

: The Jumping Geezer is actually the Head Monk. He’s not a demon, it’s just that people think he is.

: We gain about two levels going back down the mountain, and I stop at the Velvet Room to try and fuse some better Personas.

New Persona: Seiten Taisei

Origin: China (Journey to the West)

First Appearance: Shin Megami Tensei (SNES)

: Seiten Taisei, better known by his Chinese name of Sun Wukong, is one of the only demons to be a Persona in all five Persona games, plus Persona Q. He’s not amazing, but his stats are comparable to Vulcanus Prime, he has a lower SP cost, and he can mutate a spell that’s basically Magarudyne (third-tier attack-all wind spell). Despite only having “good” affinity with Tatsuya, he ranked up way faster than a lot of “best” affinity Personas during this run.

Returning Persona: Quetzalcoatl

Origin: South America (Aztecs)

First Appearance: Megami Tensei (NES)

: This is where I’m very, very glad I fused that Persona for Maya. It mutated into Quetzalcoatl, though I couldn’t actually mutate it until a bit later. In Persona 1, Quetzalcoatl was a decent Persona I used for a while because I didn’t have many other choices.

: In this game, he’s a fucking beast. If you’ve read the Persona 1 LP, you’ll remember Lilim. Lilim reflected everything and was weak to physical attacks, and for her crimes of being overpowered she was subsequently nerfed to the ground. Quetzalcoatl takes that position in this game. He has a decent moveset, good stats, and reflects EVERYTHING.

Returning Persona: Barbatos

Origin: Ars Goetia (country of origin unknown)

First Appearance: Persona 1

: Another familiar face from Persona 1. Barbatos was a beast in the same way Lilim was in that game: he reflected everything but had no real weaknesses apart from spears and light/miracle damage. He was in my final party for Snow Queen.

: He’s lost a lot of what made him a beast, but in exchange got a moveset that doesn’t suck. Magnadyne (the highest-tier single target earth spell) is nothing to laugh at, and he can also learn his own version of Mamagnadyne. Great Magnus (a mis-translation, it’s supposed to be Great Magna) is trash.

: One more climb up Mt. Catastrophe of Game Design later and we’re ready to take on the peak.

: The Jumping Geezer is pretty easy, apart from the fact that he has an instant kill move that can fuck up your fusion spell order. Even then he’s not a tough fight.

: The next four screens are straightforward apart from the fact that the exits are hidden. You can tell where they are because the area name will change to “Mt. Katatsumuri: Animal Trail”.

: The demons in the back are Lilim, which are a lot weaker than in Persona 1. By this point, I had Loiseau de Feu back (thanks to switching Eikichi’s Persona) and was oneshotting encounters with it.

: The only other new demon here are Satyrs, which rarely show up. I’m told they can be annoying if you let them survive a few turns, but I never did.

: The Last Battalion drives out the remaining Masked Circle troops with guns and a mech.

: “It wasn’t here last time I came… you think Shunsuke-san’s in there!?”

: “Those robot things over there look like the same ones that were flying overhead a few minutes ago.”

: God dammit they had to bring out the long German names. Usually, that’s a sign that the people making a game are creatively bankrupt. “Himmelsfeurer” means “Heavenly Fire” in German… at least, that’s what the wiki says.

: Also, all of the Holy Lance are named after their numbers: Eif is 11, Zwolf is 12, and Dreizehn is 13.

: Yes, that is a laser trained directly at Tatsuya.

: “Scatter, everyone!”

: “We’re surrounded! Form groups of two to take them out! The third one’s mine!”

: “What kind of a gentleman would I be if I let a lady do all the hard work!? Leave the solo to the great Michel!”

: You’d think this would be a moral choice, right? It’s not. You fight basically the same boss no matter what you pick: the only difference is what they’re weak to. If Tatsuya goes alone, the boss is weak to Fire. If he goes with Lisa or Maya, it’s weak to Water. With Eikichi or Yukino, it’s weak to Earth. They also get a little more HP if you fight them with someone else.

: Tatsuya is basically the party’s tank, so I had him go alone.

: Their spear attacks are basically a silence effect: while you’re hit by it, you can’t use skills.

: One thing I want to mention that is very surprising about this game, by the way: in the PS1 version, the fights against the Holy Lance mechs have their own boss theme. The theme sounds very much like a World War 2 era marching song, complete with voices in the back chanting “Heil Hitler”.

: With the PSP version, Atlus was VERY careful to scrub out all mentions of Hitler’s name, instead opting to use the word “Fuhrer”. However, when they rearranged the song for the PSP version, they left the “Heil Hitler” bits in. I have no idea why.

: I would link the songs, but there’s uh… two problems with that. The first is that all the Youtube videos I could find of it contain spoilers (this is also the reason I haven’t been doing music links like I did with Persona 1) or have the usual edgy kids acting like neo-nazis.

: This is why you don’t want to fight the Holy Lance mech alone. Longinus Copy pretty much always hits and seals your Persona for 3 turns. Yes, they can chain this ability as soon as the seal is over.

: It only takes three Maragions to wipe out the mech… on top of six rounds of dicking around because Tatsuya’s Persona was sealed.

: This scene. I fucking HATE this scene. This is Satomi Tadashi at his absolute worst. We could have met Shunsuke if we had gone to the Kismet Publishing building earlier, but you never have a reason to. He is Yukino’s mentor and also her boyfriend and I fucking HATE THAT.

: For one thing, he’s way older than she is. Yukino is 20 in this game, and he’s old enough to be her father. Second, I’m pretty sure they intended Yukino to be gay (or at least bisexual) in Persona 1: the only person she ever talks about in that game is Ms. Saeko and she’s the only female character not romantically interested in the main character. There’s a scene later that will only reinforce this.

: Worse though, this entire scene is character fucking assassination on the level of Metroid Other M.

: I’m not sure who Makki is, and I already know the rest of the plot to this game. I have an idea, though.

: This pisses me off to no fucking end. In Persona 1, Yukino (then 17) watches as the only person she cares about is possessed by a cursed mask and then gets frozen in a block of ice. Does she have a breakdown and start crying? No, she grabs her goddamn shotgun and devil busts her way through three crazy bitches (well, two crazy bitches and one girl who really didn’t deserve to die in the first place) and then laughs at Nyx.

: But no, some asshole we literally just met dies and she’s suddenly a crying waif. The Yukino in this game may as well be a different person from the Yukino in Persona 1, and I fucking hate that. You know what would’ve been a better scene here? Not having it at all. I thought Aranella’s death scene in Ni no Kuni 2 was dumb, this tops it.

: This, by the way, is why I’m pretty sure Atlus won’t let any of their writers use any of the stuff from Persona 1 or Persona 2 in the later games, because they don’t want to fuck it up any worse than the original writer did.

: We have two options here. Let me tell you what these options are really saying.

: The top one is “Yes! I’d like to keep Yukino in the party, pretend this scene never happened, and let Yukino get her old Ultimate Persona from the first game back.”

: The second one leads to a different story path (essentially a bad ending) in which Yukino does not recover Durga. You can guess which one I picked. I will do the bad ending (and the hard route through Mt. Badwriting) in a separate update.

: “That’s…! Chinyan… you’re being too hard on her…”

: “Tatsuya-kun’s right… Fujii-san wanted you to achieve your dream, Yukki…”

: “The world is on the verge of being swallowed by rumors. If that happens, Fujii-san’s last wish and your dream will never come true…”

: I did a little more Velvet Room stuff after this, but it was only to mutate one of the other Personas I had into Cu Chulainn. I’m not using him yet so I won’t log him until I do.

: One last side note. I was trying to go for 100 Nazi scalps, and wound up getting around 60.

[Mraagvpeine]

Do robots have scalps?