Sin is In - Persona 2: Innocent Sin

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Click Here for Update 16

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

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

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Why there’s a replica of El Caracol at the top of a mountain in Japan, I have no idea.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The Nazis have taken over the mountain path.

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

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

Normal: “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…”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: According to the guide, choosing the first option gives you more encounters with Nazis.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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)

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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)

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

katatu-b1

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Eikichi’s personal martial art is called Kung Himbo and is about being so dumb that bullets cannot harm you.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

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

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.”

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

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Ordinarily, the Leonids are only visible in November, and even then only sometimes.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The Jumping Geezer is actually the Head Monk. He’s not a demon, it’s just that people think he is.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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)

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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)

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: One more climb up Mt. Catastrophe of Game Design later and we’re ready to take on the peak.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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”.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The Last Battalion drives out the remaining Masked Circle troops with guns and a mech.

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

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

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Also, all of the Holy Lance are named after their numbers: Eif is 11, Zwolf is 12, and Dreizehn is 13.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Yes, that is a laser trained directly at Tatsuya.

Normal: “Scatter, everyone!”

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

Angry: “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!”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Tatsuya is basically the party’s tank, so I had him go alone.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Their spear attacks are basically a silence effect: while you’re hit by it, you can’t use skills.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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”.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: It only takes three Maragions to wipe out the mech… on top of six rounds of dicking around because Tatsuya’s Persona was sealed.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Worse though, this entire scene is character fucking assassination on the level of Metroid Other M.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I’m not sure who Makki is, and I already know the rest of the plot to this game. I have an idea, though.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: We have two options here. Let me tell you what these options are really saying.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

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

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

Sad: “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…”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: 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.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: One last side note. I was trying to go for 100 Nazi scalps, and wound up getting around 60.

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Do robots have scalps?

Probably. There’s apparently a thing in one of the supplementary materials for this game that states that some of the Last Battalion soldiers are human and some aren’t. This also includes the Order of the Holy Lance: all of them are human and they actually have different voice clips depending on which one you fight.

The wiki claims that at one point, all of the Holy Lance pilots were supposed to be women, but it looks like they don’t have an actual source on it. I can believe it because Satomi Tadashi more or less writes characters based on how thirsty he is for idols. I think canonically two or three of them are women: one of the three you can fight (I think it’s the one if you choose to fight with Lisa or Maya) is a woman.

A literal translation would be “sky fire” so I think Heavenly Fire is a good translation for it.

As for the Yukino scene… god, that sucked. That sucked a lot. If you wanted to present a situation where the protagonist has to do something to help her like the other characters, I get that. It fits the theme we’ve seen in every other dungeon so far. But it runs into a problem if you think about it too much.

Mainly, Yukino’s already BEEN through that. She GOT her ultimate persona and fully understands herself. So a scene where the hero helps her through some baggage makes no sense in the first place, so they had to make new baggage. And they made it bad, and worse made a lot of the actual stuff that COULD make it good optional and thus easily avoided.

In a perfect world, after everyone else got their ultimate personas, Yukino would have told them a bit about the Snow Queen scenario, maybe reminisced about how she got a girlfriend afterward because shotgunning her way through demons helped her realize the type of person she is, and talking about it and sharing it with her friends hypes her up enough to summon her ultimate persona again.

Click Here for Update 17

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The following run of Mt. Clusterfuck and the subsequent run of Caracol are not the canon ones for this LP. This run was done using a save I made after reaching the temple but before going back down the mountain to do the Jumping Geezer sidequest. As a result, the party is significantly lower level, lacks several Personas that I fused on the canon route, and is generally a lot weaker than the actual party will be.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I also missed a lot of items as I was basically trying to speedrun Caracol for the cutscenes before doing the canon run of it. The canon run will be in the next update.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: First off, on this run, I picked the indirect route for the start of the mountain. I didn’t actually finish it (this is an even earlier save than the one I used for the Caracol run) because this was before I replaced the Prime Personas and thus this run was fucking suffering.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The other route has you not fight the Nazis (which is of course bad) and puts you on a route with much easier enemies. I’d say this is actually the hard route because you’re getting way less EXP and money than you would be if you picked the other route.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This route is basically a Lost Woods puzzle that involves memorizing (or writing down) a poem and then finding statues that have the correct poetry written on them.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I have no clue what story they’re talking about. This honestly seems like a Resident Evil puzzle and I’m imagining Chris Redfield circa RE5 running through a forest after a BOW and getting confused because I’m pretty sure Chris Redfield is illiterate.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I bet that asshole monk did this.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The Nazis are basically nowhere to be found on this route. Instead, you fight mostly demons from previous dungeons, plus a few new ones. Hunhau is one of those. They’re very flammable.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: There’s a lot of hidden passages in this route, and also it’s pretty easy to miss the statues.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This fight with Demeter is more or less where I gave up. Stuff was taking forever to kill and I didn’t feel like backing out. Taking the wrong route at any point dumps you back where the signposts were.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Okay, now time for the non-canon Caracol run. Instead of picking “Yes! I’d like Yukino to get her ultimate persona back and also have her in the party for Caracol!” option, we pick the “No, I’d like to hear Satomi Tadashi assassinate Yukino’s character some more.” option.

Sad: “Yeah… Yukki? We’ll come back for you later, so wait for us here… come on guys, let’s go…”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Yes, let’s just leave Yukino in the middle of a spot that was just being used as a drop zone by robo-Nazis. I’m sure she’ll be perfectly fine by herself. Actually, if this was still Persona 1 Yukino she probably would be.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I’d like you to keep this in mind. Please remember that Yukino is “canonically” straight at this point. I kind of have to wonder who was responsible for this one scene though. Satomi Tadashi was horny for idols, but according to the wiki, Yukino was modeled after an actress that Kazuma Kaneko (the character designer for a lot of the early SMT games) liked, and if this was some kind of inter-departmental warfare going on.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Caracol is a lot like this one dungeon in SMT 1, where there’s a pretty straightforward route you can take that skips most of it. The other paths tend to have items, and a lot of what I missed are incenses and other valuables.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Case in point, you can basically just take a right from the start of the dungeon and reach the first set of stairs.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: B2F starts with a conveyor belt puzzle. I’d post the Japanese map, but it makes this look a lot more complex than it actually is.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Crowley starts showing up here, yet another demon based on a real person. He’s level 38 (and at this point the party is level 35) and reflects magic. This makes him very annoying when he’s behind a bunch of other demons, but at least reflections aren’t a practically-guaranteed death the way they were in Persona 1.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The one item I bothered to grab was this All Incense, just so I knew how to get to it on my canon run.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Getting to the end is really easy. You go North three times and then West once.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The next room is a miniature teleporter maze (not really much of a maze) that can be completely bypassed by walking around it. The teleporter to Tatsuya’s right takes you to an item box in the middle of the room, but getting the item puts you back in the conveyor belt room.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The Achilles Helm increases evasion but is otherwise identical to the ones bought from the store. Since Tatsuya is already a tank I put it on Eikichi because it’s male-only and we only have one other male character.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Like Mt. Iwato, Caracol has a few cutscene rooms on the way to the boss.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This battle was funny to me. If you’ll notice, in the cutscene there are five nazis, but there’s only four in the battle. That’s because the commander uses a skill called “Run Away” as soon as the fight starts. And to think I only scalped 40-some nazis on this run.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The optional dialogue in this room changes if you didn’t take Yukino with you.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Lisa even calls out the fact that you fucked up.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: B3F introduces a new enemy, Virulenz Kraft. They’re little mad doctor type Nazis who are one of the most annoying goddamn things to fight. They have very high magic defense and like to cast Zanma to do a load of damage to the entire party at once. At one point I wound up fighting four of them at once and it sucked.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Leviathans are very flammable and die in one Mega Blaze almost guaranteed.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: B3F is another teleporter maze: there’s three teleporters on the left side and three on the right. The only one that lets you progress is in the middle one on the right side.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This takes you to a path that leads you directly to another teleporter. This one puts you right by the exit stairs.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: B4F is largely straightforward again. There’s a big initial room with some items I didn’t bother to grab and a door leading to a boss fight… and also the worst cutscene in this game.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Somehow, Yukino has a Shadow. I’d like to point out that the other games in the series have since established that having the ability to summon a Persona means you cannot have a Shadow clone - the Persona is only granted when you’ve accepted that your Shadow exists. This is one of many reasons this cutscene is not canon… apart from one thing.

Angry: “Kehhei! Don’t say that crap with Yukino-san’s face! She’s–!”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I honestly don’t get what the fuck they’re getting at here. It’s stated in Persona 1 that Yukino was a delinquent until she met Ms. Saeko and turned her life around. She was already over this before Persona 1 even started.

Normal: “What did you just say!? Take that back! There’s absolutely no way you’re Yukki!”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Whoops, Maya just said the magic words. Unlike say, Persona 4, she’s right. This ISN’T Yukino, because Yukino was already over this years ago.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: In case you can’t tell, Yukino’s shadow just kissed Anna. I really, really don’t get what this is supposed to be. Yukino was kind of gay-coded since the first game, and now she’s straight, and now she’s vaguely bisexual I guess? I don’t get why this is even an issue for her, and if it was, why they never showed it at any point over two games. The best part is that the reason she has a shadow has absolutely nothing to do with her sexuality.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Shadow Yukino’s Persona, going along with the theme, is Reverse Durga. She’s incredibly weak to Water, but weirdly does not use any Fire-element attacks at all apart from a single melee attack.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Anna, on the other hand, uses water spells and is weak to… I actually don’t know. All I did was spam Undine over and over and it eventually killed both of them.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I don’t know any more than you do.

Sad: “It couldn’tve been… I do have a really bad feeling about this… but we need to hurry on ahead for now.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: So yeah, this whole thing is super badly written, and it gets worse. Have I mentioned that Persona 5 takes a LOT of inspiration from this game, in particular the scenes in this version of Caracol? Probably why I didn’t like Persona 5 much.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: After the Shadow Yukino fight, you take a left and you’re more or less at the stairs. There’s an elevator so you can go outside and check on Yukino, but I didn’t think to do that. I probably should’ve. Instead, here’s another cutscene room.

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

Jun: “…”

Lisa: “I won’t let you… I won’t let you go! If we lock Big Sis in the shrine until tomorrow, she won’t be able to go!”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: You can’t see it very well, but there’s a sequence where Eikichi and Tatsuya force Maya into the shrine and lock the door. We already know this isn’t how it happened. Strangely, I thought they were going to do something with the whole “Tatsuya Suou vs Tatsuya Sudou” thing but they never do.

Sad: “No…! That wasn’t it, Jun… what we just saw wasn’t what happened at all!”

Sad: “That’s right… Ta-chan tried to save Big Maya… we’re to blame here! You gotta remember!”

Sad: “Jun-kun! I’m alive, see? Please, you have to snap out of it…”

Sad: “I remember Philemon telling us… we had to save Jun-kun from the clutches of the Crawling Chaos… what in the world is that? I bet it’s what’s making rumors into reality… and controlling Jun-kun too…”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Before I played this game, I had read that Persona 2 has the strongest writing of all the games. Maybe that’s Eternal Punishment more than Innocent Sin, because mind control villains are honestly just a sign of bad writing.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: That’s not to say it’s not possible to do a good mind-controlled villain, but it’s almost never done right.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Just to get an idea, it took until B5F for the non-canon party to reach the same level the canon run party will be when I start that run. This is how long Mt. Katatsumuri is.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: There’s a couple of monster boxes around here, including this one with Orthrus in it. Orthrus is very flammable and is also a regular enemy in Caracol. He’s not a bad one to encounter either: while his negotiations aren’t 100% consistent he drops a lot of cards and also drops Strength Cards, which would be useful if I’d bothered to hunt down one of the 1% spawn rate demons in the Abandoned Factory.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The only reason I’m bringing that up is because the box with Orthrus in it happens to be directly on the path to progress, and also because it’s the only time when a monster box has items in it beyond what you get from killing the demon in it.

MayaSmile: “Hey… you know what a doppelganger is?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Yeah, I shot a few hundred to death in Persona 1. No, really.

MayaSmile:
"The night is still, the streets are quiet, in this house lived my Love
She left the town long before, yet her house still stands in the same place
There I also see a man standing and staring into the heavens
Wringing his hands in violent grief. I shudder when I behold his face.
The moon reveals to me my own likeness. You Doppelganger, you pale companion
Why do you mimic my lovesickness, that tormented me at this place for so many nights in the past?

MayaSmile: “Jun-kun and Tatsuya-kun… your personalities are different, but maybe that’s why you two draw each other together like shadows…”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I uh… I don’t think Maya gets what that poem is about, and I’m not entirely certain the writers did either. The poem is called “Der Doppelganger” by Heinrich Heine, and it rhymes in its original German. Wikipedia tells me that Franz Schubert turned it into a song the same year he died… and the song is nearly five minutes long. The translation they used may also not be totally accurate.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: You know what would’ve made this game infinitely better? If no one understood the flower symbolism. I mean, just think about it. The party confronts Jun, he’s like “I’ve been sending you flower messages for weeks, assholes!” and they’re like “Wait, what?” Seriously though I want to know what kind of person can identify all of these flowers and their meanings on sight and not be like, 90 years old. It’s like the whole thing with the anniversary gifts by number of years you’ve been together.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: So, one other thing I’d like to touch on, since Maya’s alluding to it pretty hard. We haven’t really met Jun yet, but one of the possible interpretations for Tatsuya and Jun’s relationship is that they are in fact gay.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The people who worked on this game have pretty much all but directly said that Jun is gay, and there’s an option you can pick later on that has Tatsuya profess his love for Jun. There’s a couple of other things hinting at the fact that Tatsuya is potentially gay: one being that Lisa loves him but he has zero interest in her.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: If you’ll recall, I mentioned there were a couple of things that were believed to be reasons that Atlus didn’t localize Innocent Sin on the PS1. One of those is that a gay relationship, especially one where the playable character is gay, would be “unacceptable” for Western audiences. This is how the 90s were, and also why the 90s sucked.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This also makes me wonder if Yukino being changed was because they felt there were “too many” gay characters.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I’ll put up a poll as to whether we want Tatsuya to be gay or not. As a warning, the ending does not make as much sense as if Tatsuya is straight, but that’s fine by me.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: On B6F, Maya alerts us to a boss being near.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Right near the boss room, I run into one of the last Nazi enemy types. I think these are either the highest or second highest level Nazis in Caracol. The usual Maxi Tempest/Undine combo takes them out without an issue.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I hope you’re ready for the most ridiculous cutscene of this entire game.

Sad: “Jun-kun! Please stop this nonsense!”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The camera then pans over to seven of the remaining ten Holy Lance mechs… and a person in the front. I’ll give you exactly one guess as to who that person is.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Meet one of the other reasons people gave for this game not being localized. In the initial release, Hitler was of course referred to by name and didn’t have the sunglasses.

image

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I prefer the version without the sunglasses. He looks like he lives in constant fear of being scalped, which is the natural state all nazis should be in.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: By the way, I should mention that the given reason they censored Hitler has to do with CERO regulations - apparently, CERO put a rule into place sometime after the PS1 era that makes it verboten to show depictions of real people in games. It’s apparently still around, since I looked up Pro Evolution Soccer (aka Winning Eleven) and the 2019 version had a “David Beckham Special Edition” in the US and Europe that was renamed “Legend Edition” in Japan.

Fuhrer: “Only those born under the constellation of the Grand Cross can control the five skulls.”

Joker: “Ha… and what would a ghost from the past, resurrected by rumors, wish for?”

Fuhrer: “The same as you, marionette of the Wheel of Fortune. Destruction and progress… these contradictory impulses are constantly at war within men.”

Fuhrer: “It was your fears and expectations of them which summoned me. And now that I am here, I must live up to the, nein?”

Joker: “True… but that’s my duty. I wish you’d leave, old man… along with that trash over there…”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Jun then sends his clones of Tatsuya, Lisa, and Eikichi to attack the Holy Lance.

Sad: “They only have meaning when you achieve them under your own power! If man wants to evolve, then…”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This is a theme Persona 5 Royal explores a lot, and it’s one of the reasons why it sucks.

Joker: “Foolish girl… do you believe that all humans have such a sugarcoated view of the world?”

Fuhrer: “Indeed… the rampant illusion of freedom causes man to worry over petty matters. The masses will always desire a leader who decides everything for them… anxiety over the future only causes them pain!”

Joker: “That is why I, Joker, will lead mankind into a new era! Humanity will be freed from the suffocating chains of raison d’etre!”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Hmm… three colored lights. You can’t see it, but each one of these is a tower. Does this remind you of anything? A certain alternate (yet canon) story route in Persona 1? Yes, we’re about to go into what is basically an exact copy of Snow Queen.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: You know, it’s too bad Yukino isn’t here, because I know EXACTLY what she’d be thinking.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: A city being demolished as a giant stupid-looking dungeon arises from it. Oh look, it’s Deva Yuga all over again. This game really is just Persona 1 with a new wrapper on it.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The light pillars roughly correspond to the last few dungeons we did. The southern one is the Aerospace Museum, the Western one is Aoba Park, the Eastern one is Smile Hirasaka I think, and the northern one is GOLD.

Fuhrer: “Wunderbar…! Such a dignified appearance is worth of the true city for a Fuhrer… the Fuhrer Staat!”

Joker: “Hahaha… aaaahahahahaha! Look! What Father said was true!”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: You know, I have to wonder, where’s Taurus? Anna/Scorpio is dead, Sudou/Leo is dead, but Taurus is still alive.

Joker: “Ngh…!? No… what… I wanted… wasn’t… this horrible… thing!”

Sad: “Jun-kun!”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Queen Aquarius pushes Jun out of the way just in time to take a bullet from a Holy Lance mech.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Jun then summons Nyarlathotep, who kills the mech.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: It’s hard to tell, but Hitler has a jetpack.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The Holy Lance then fly off after him.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Remember the last time we were midway through the game, fought a guy whose Persona was Nyarlathotep, and then he transformed into a stupid looking monster under almost exactly the same circumstances? It seems like the writers really only had one story in them.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The first phase of the Joker fight is basically “put it on autobattle and take a nap”. If I had Yukino, this would’ve been much faster because I could’ve done Blazing Burst and probably Undine as well.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: There’s a way to kill Joker in two hits, but it involves a 1% encounter rate demon in the Abandoned Factory. If you get it, you can fuse a Persona called Nezha that has a fusion spell which does around 1500 damage to a single target. The problem with this is that I didn’t feel like grinding for it and even if I did, you have to rank Nezha up to 6 for it.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: In this phase, Joker likes to use Abortive Slash, which poisons on hit. Don’t bother curing it. What I did was had Tatsuya and Lisa use Blazing Burst, Eikichi on heal duty (since whatever Persona I gave him learns Mediarama, the second-tier full party heal spell) and Maya using Zanma and generally being useless.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: He also has a couple of full-party attacks that don’t hit for a lot of damage and sometimes dumps the “illusion” status effect on you. Illusion, as far as I can tell, is equivalent to Blind in Final Fantasy.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The nice part is that you get a pretty much guaranteed level up after that fight, so everyone’s HP and SP will be topped off.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: No, that’d be Elly. Elly is the model of an angel.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: So yes, we’re dealing with God Kandori Angel Joker. He turned himself into an angel. He’s Angel Joker. Funniest shit ever.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: You’ll notice my entire party is poisoned. This is fine, and you’ll see why.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Where regular Joker liked using status effects, Angel Joker’s thing is spamming instakills. Holy Sword hits two people and is a guaranteed autokill, though Quetzalcoatl (who we’ll have on the canon run) might be able to reflect it.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This, by the way, is why we don’t want to bother curing the poison. Getting autokilled removes the poison status, so you’re just wasting turns.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Angel Joker also uses Hamaon (full-party instadeath), which is theoretically capable of wiping the entire party in one go. It’s very unlikely, though.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The instakills tend to just be really fucking annoying. Here, he used Holy Sword, and then as soon as I revived Tatsuya he followed up with Hamaon and a second Holy Sword.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This is where that 1500 damage fusion spell would come in handy, except there’s a good chance that he’ll just interrupt it with an autokill. There’s a trick you can do where if you have the entire party guard at once they’ll shift around the turn order so they’re all clustered together (which would stop him interrupting mid-cast).

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The good news though is that according to the wiki, Angel Joker doesn’t get any kind of stat downgrade if you only have four party members. This means he’ll go down much faster with two fusion spells per turn instead of just one.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I like that his clothes just suddenly change color. Judging by his outfit, Jun is most likely a Cuss High student - you can tell because his jacket’s the same color as Eikichi’s.

Sad: “A Nemophilia flower… I’m sorry… Big Sis… I’m so sorry… Tatsuya…”

Sad: “I…I… sob

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Meet Jun’s father. You might recognize him if you’ve been reading the LP in one go, because he’s the ghost in the clock tower.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: You’ll also notice he looks a lot like Kandori from the first game.

Sad: “Father… we need to stop this… I… I just wanted to be like Big Sis and lead everyone to their dreams!”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: In case you’re wondering what that was, Kashihara just took Jun’s Persona. Though, as we’ve established in Persona 1, Nyarlathotep is actually an SMT demon masquerading as a Persona.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Are you ready for the worst scene in the game? I hope you are, because I wasn’t. I thought I knew what happened here, but no, it’s worse than that.

Philemon: “To escape the eternal suffering that comes with understanding one’s existence, man has summoned from the abyss that which should not exist.”

Philemon: “What awaits you from here on will be a crueler fate than even that which the Crawling Chaos has woven…”

Normal: “The Crawling Chaos again… what exactly are you talking about? There’s still too much we don’t know. About Jun-kun’s father, and that Persona… or why rumors started to come true.”

Philemon: “Eventually, the time will be right for you to learn everything. If anyone can stop him… the darkness from thriving, it is you.”

Philemon: “The power amassed by the feelings which have been fostered over ten years… show him the potential that lies within you.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: And here it comes. Three, two, one…

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Fuck this scene. Fuck this scene in its entirety. Yukino is now braindead because her Shadow died. This is kind of important to remember for the later games - if your Shadow dies, you go braindead.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I’m just going to call this a non-standard game over. It’s dumb, it sucks, and it makes no sense. I’d like to remind you that if the SEBEC route in Persona 1 as shown in the game is canon, Yukino was the protagonist for Snow Queen. I prefer to think that the Snow Queen route (as shown in the P1 LP) is canon and that Yukino actually laughed at Nyx as she took a nap and let Nyx defeat herself with her own spells.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Next time, we’ll do the canon run of Caracol and see the end of this cutscene.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: By the way, since the “Hide Details” thing breaks polls, I’ll post it here, outside the update. Don’t reveal the text until you’ve read the update.

Is Tatsuya gay?

  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

Wow, they… really treat Yukino like shit in this game. And I have a feeling the canon route won’t be any kinder…

At least we have Tatsuya. I made the only correct choice on the poll, and I hope you all join me on that one.

Hitler The Fuhrer is just wearing his pair of fashionable Dictators sunglasses. :smiley:

jrpg :clap: writers :clap: stop :clap: reading :clap: nietzsche :clap: please

1 Like

Okay, I stopped reading to laugh my head off at Literally Steven I’m Just A Lowly Cook Seagal being Lisa’s father.

I nearly spat my dinner out laughing at Smug Ass Cool Shades Jetpack Hitler Fuhrer.

I am still laughing at Shadow Lisa.

The worst part of it is that Nanjo and Elly are playable in Eternal Punishment, and absolutely nothing bad happens to either of them. I do know that Innocent Sin received some backlash in Japan when it released, so I wouldn’t doubt if they changed that because of people’s reception to how Yukino is treated in IS.

Yeah, well, he’s not the only one who can do sunglasses out of nowhere.

Alternate villain version:

Honestly, I knew Fuhrer was in the game but I had no idea that scene existed and it was goddamn hilarious when it happened. I kind of wish I had recorded it, because I’m pretty sure my exact words were:

“Wait, does Hitler have a jetpack?”

followed by

“Why is that everyone in this game can fly except the people you play as?”

2 Likes

When I saw a playthrough of this game years back, I think I had a higher opinion of it because they never did that optional route.

Click Here for Update 18

: Okay, now it’s time for the canon run of Caracol. What? Do I have something on my face? First, I stopped and fused Abe no Seimei. Abe no Seimei kinda sucks by itself, but it has Summon Spirits which I wind up using to great effect.

New Persona: Abe no Seimei

Origin: Real Person (Japan)

Persona 2 Original

: Anyway, Abe no Seimei is great for one reason and one reason only: he reflects magic. He has a unique fusion spell, but here’s the problem with that. Byakko is level 33, Genbu is level 40, Abe no Seimei is 41… and then Suzaku and Seiryuu are 58 and 59. By that point, you’ll have the Ultimate Personas who have a better 5-way fusion spell.

: Once you scalp the Holy Lance trio on the mountain peak, you can take the cable car to and from Caracol. I had to stop and buy healing items shortly after going back in, but that’s not a big deal.

: Most of the items we missed aren’t all that important. There’s a Strength Card right near the entrance, but regular enemies drop those now.

: The only other chest worth grabbing on the first floor is 45,000 yen on the opposite side of the map from the Strength Card. We’re going to need a lot of money very soon, because there’s new equipment after Caracol but also because we’ll need, uh… 2.5 million yen to buy everyone’s ultimate weapon if I bother to do that.

: Because this party’s level is so much higher than the non-canon run, I made a pact with Crowley straight up. He gives you 55 magician cards and 41 free cards, and is 100% consistent to negotiate with. By the time I finished the canon run, the party had something like… 950 free cards in stock.

: We make it to the first Nazi battle in one of the cutscene rooms. This time, the commander opts not to flee and gets scalped with his men. Between the two runs, we’re now well over 80 scalps, and I believe we hit 100 by the end of the canon run.

: There’s one other piece of optional dialog here because we have Yukino, but other than that there’s no real changes.

: On B3F, there’s an encounter I missed with Succubus, who is in a box with an HP incense.

: When we get close to the spot where we fought Shadow Yukino, Yukino jumps in to let us know she’s coming for her girlfriend.

: Now that we’re on the canon route, things are a little bit different here. I still can’t say I like this version.

: They say that, but then they never see the knife coming for their scalp.

: Seriously, what is with this pseudo-intellectual gibberish? It’s like I’m watching Evangelion all over again.

: Now THAT’S the Yukino we know and love. This line is voiced, and Yukino’s Japanese VA absolutely fucking nails it (I’m playing an undub).

: Anyway, there’s three Holy Lance mechs. The middle one is weak to fire, the one on the left is weak to earth, and the one on the right is weak to wind.

: With this party combination, we can get a Blazing Burst, a Gnome, and a Garudyne off every turn. This equates to roughly 800 damage per turn on the fire-weak and earth-weak ones, and a bit less on the wind-weak one.

: The nazis respond by casting full-party target spells and Geisteblitz, which is basically Mazionga (full-party lightning damage + shock).

: What they forget is that half the party reflects magic. Unfortunately, as I find out a bit later, reflection does not work against their Longinus Copy (which seals the target’s Persona).

: They hit Maya with it, sealing her Persona. At this point, it doesn’t matter. They’ve wasted so much time on damage spells that are ultimately getting reflected back into their faces that they’re all dead before the seal wears off.

: As you can see, the party is already significantly higher level than the non-canon one. At this point, we can negotiate with all but about two or three demons.

Normal: “Because you remind me of how I was once. I had no idea what I wanted or why I should go on living. I wished everything would disappear.”

: No, that was Maki.

Normal: “I was being a baby. You can’t figure stuff like that out when you want it too bad. You have to calm down and take your time…”

: They had to find some reason to bring Shadow Yukino in, dumb as it is.

: What. When is this EVER shown in Persona 1, or even vaguely alluded to? She’s been over the whole delinquent thing for like four years at this point!

: This whole thing fucking REEKS of bad writing or some kind of inter-departmental spat between Kazuma Kaneko and Satomi Tadashi. Yukino was modeled on an actress that Kaneko liked.

: Fun fact, I got fired when I worked as a reporter because I suck at taking photos. It was probably for the best, because the place I worked got eaten by a big national media company and everyone was fired maybe a year later. That place was a shithole.

Angry: “You bastard… you’re just a frickin’ fake–”

: Honestly, it would’ve been better if Tatsuya insisted on staying behind and devil busting Yukino’s shadow.

: Apart from that, Caracol is mostly the same as the non-canon run. There’s a couple of skill cards on this floor, but only one of them is really important.

: This is the Estoma Card. I believe it’s the only one you can get in the game without either negotiating with very high-level demons or returning Personas for items. Estoma as a skill is INCREDIBLY difficult to get in this game.

: So, remember those 1% spawn rate demons in the Abandoned Factory? Estoma is how you find them, but we can’t do that now. What Estoma does is it blocks random encounters with any demon lower than the level of the person who cast it.

: How is this useful, you ask? Well, the 1% demons are always several levels higher than the rest of the area they spawn in. By popping Estoma, you effectively make it so only they can spawn. This can be used to great effect near the end of the game and is in fact one of the only ways to reach Level 99 and summon Lucifer without spending years grinding.

: There’s a couple of earlier-game Personas who can learn it. Pixie can mutate into a Persona called Budai that has it, and Nemesis can learn it at Rank 8 but is otherwise a garbage Persona.

: The last floor has a couple of items I missed, including the Achilles Armor and Achilles Boots. I… don’t think I’d ever use a pair of boots named after a guy who was invincible except for the back of his foot.

: The cutscene where Fuhrer appears is the same, and we still fight Joker with only four characters. This time, we’re a lot better equipped and able to do two fusion spells: Blazing Burst and Gnome.

: I also got really lucky in that instead of spamming his poison attack, Joker instead chose to keep using Megidola, which both Lisa and Maya reflect. Tatsuya basically no-sells it with his high magic defense, leaving Eikichi as the only person who actually takes damage from it.

: Before Joker can turn into God Kandori Angel Joker, Yukino and Anna show up. I kind of wish you got to use Anna in this fight as a sixth party member just to shit on Joker.

: With this party setup, Angel Joker is a joke. Three out of our five party members - Maya, Lisa, and Yukino - are straight up immune to instant death spells.

: The only part where things get a little dicey is when Angel Joker uses Alpha Blaster. He actually tried his instadeath a few times only to find that he couldn’t hit anyone with it. Alpha Blaster is pretty nasty - it hits for a lot of damage and then also does damage over time.

: The party almost dies because I kind of forgot to take the game off auto-battle, but Angel Joker went down before anyone else did.

: You might be wondering what happens now that Yukino isn’t braindead. I hope you’re ready for the worst writing since Fallout 3’s original ending!

: We saw most of this cutscene in the non-canon run, so I’m gonna skip to where it changes.

: See this? Remember how Philemon can just kind of grant people the ability to use a Persona, so there’s absolutely no reason for Yukino to need to do this? Yeah, that’s all out the window now. I hate this.

Sad: “What…? But then… what will you do, Yukki?”

Normal: I don’t need Personas anymore. I can keep my head high and walk on my own now… it’s time I passed these feelings on to someone else."

: Translation, Yukino is too good for this game and is asking her agent for a role in a different one.

Philemon: “Understood… but there aren’t many who can remember their identity when in this domain. Can you state your name?”

Sad: “My name… is Jun… Jun Kurosu! That’s… all I am now!”

Philemon: “Well done. I can indeed vouch for the strength of heart you possess to reflect on yourself and your kindness towards others.”

: Wait… what? What kindness? He’s spent the last several months stealing people’s hopes and dreams to make a magic city for Hitler.

New Persona: Hermes

Origin: Greece

Persona 2 Original

: There’s one major problem with this apart from that it sucks and that’s that it makes no sense in terms of Jungian psychology. Hermes isn’t a bad Persona at all, apart form the fact that most Personas in the same level range have -dyne or ma-dyne spells by now.

Sad: “It’s so warm… thank you, Mayuzumi-san… I won’t waste your feelings.”

: I hate him already. Jun inherits most of Yukino’s Persona compatibility, with a few exceptions. He can use Durga, but Durga only has “good” and not “best” affinity with him.

Philemon: “It seems the others have also found their true Personas that caused such changes in them when they were young… these will grant you power.”

New Persona: Apollo

Origin: Greece

First Appearance: Kyuuyaku Megami Tensei (SNES)

: So yes, with just a single dungeon between Mt. Iwato and Caracol, we’ve already gotten everyone but Jun’s ultimate Persona. Hermes is not his ultimate.

: Continuing the tradition from Persona 1, Apollo is trash. His moveset’s great, but his stats and resistances aren’t. Also, there’s the small matter of the fucking 72 SP cost, which would blow through even Tatsuya’s massive SP pool very quickly.

: You might also notice that fusion spell lists Chronos. Chronos is Jun’s Ultimate Persona. There’s a stupid theming thing going on here where Tatsuya gets Apollo because of Jun’s lighter (even though Apollo is the god of the sun and not the god of fire) and Jun gets Chronos because of Tatsuya’s watch.

New Persona: Artemis

Origin: Greece

First Appearance: Kyuuyaku Megami Tensei (SNES)

: Just like Tatsuya’s Persona, Artemis is another bonus demon from the remakes of Megami Tensei I and II. She’s SIGNIFICANTLY better than Apollo is. If it weren’t for the completely ridiculous SP cost, I would stick Artemis on Maya and never take it off.

New Persona: Venus

Origin: Rome (technically Greece as Aphrodite)

First Appearance: Ronde (Sega Saturn)

: And of course, Atlus had to fuck up the theme of the Greek pantheon with Venus, instead of using her Greek name of Aphrodite. She’s got the same deal as Apollo - great moveset, SP cost that’s way too high ,meh everything else.

New Persona: Hades

Origin: Greece

First Appearance: Ronde (Sega Saturn)

: Hades is fucking trash. Why the fuck do you have Malaques AND Malaquadyne and no other elemental coverage? Why is your SP cost the highest of all of the ultimates? Why are you fucking Discount Pyramid Head?

: Needless to say, all the ultimates are going in the trash except for Artemis. I’ll probably use Artemis for bosses so I can do the “everyone reflects everything” strat I did back in Snow Queen.

Happy: “Don’t worry, leave it to us! We’ll thrash those bad guys in no time and make sure you get your parents back!”

Sigh: “Hey, Big Maya… I don’t think now’s the time to ask stuff like that…”

Happy: “Well, guess what? These guys are going to teach you a chant that’ll make your dreams come true!”

: Is it “Let me play a better game! Let me play a better game!” because I’ve been doing that since the air raid shelter and it hasn’t really been working.

: Great idea, let’s give these kids the ability to light people on fire with their brain ghosts so they can experience their own childhood trauma.

Normal: “It’s a flower of hope.”

Sad: “If the Ideal Energy stored in the five skulls is released, the people I turned into shadowmen may be returned to normal…”

Sad: “The skulls are the key and the power source for activating Xibalba. If we take back all the skulls and bring down Xibalba before the Grand Cross happens, we can prevent further tragedy…”

Sad: “By now, they’ll have placed the skulls of earth, water, wind, and fire in their respective shrines to control them there. Our goal should be to take back these four skulls, and then take over Xibalba.”

Sad: “My father should be chasing the Heaven Skull and the Fuhrer to the center of Xibalba.”

Normal: “The battle between the Masked Circle and the Last Battalion is spilling over into the city. People might get caught in the crossfire. And I thought if that happens, it’d be best to have someone who can fight there to handle it. I don’t want anyone else to die…”

: I’d like to point something out. Yukino knows what happens when you try to fight demons without a Persona. The answer is you get slaughtered the second anything casts magic at you because you have no way to resist it - we saw this in Snow Queen when Jihei got his Persona sealed and spent the entire first floor getting destroyed by anything with a full-party target spell. Giving her Persona to Jun was the LAST thing she should’ve done if she wanted to go off alone.

Normal: “I see what you mean, but… it’s crazy to try and fight them alone and without a Persona, even for you!”

Happy: “Then there’s nothing to worry about! Take good care of Yukki for us, Anna-san!”

: And with that, Yukino leaves for a better game.

Sad: “Please, Tatsuya, I’ll need your strength… I have to stop Father! It’s the only way I can atone for what I’ve done.”

: Next time, we’ll uh… wow. So yeah, we’re on a floating island now. Anyway, it looks like the vote from last time is overwhelmingly for Tatsuya being gay, so next time we’ll let Tatsuya profess his love for Jun.

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I mean you’d think in that case said boots would be really strong. He has exactly one weakpoint, gotta cover that shit up with diamond or something.

I wish the entire like, back half of this game was better, because there’s a lot of stuff coming here that could be cool. Like if Yukino actually just straight up accepted her shadow, which she basically does here, and it just fades away because she IS good. If Jun was added to the party in a way that wasn’t stupid. If the ultimate personas were actually… you know, good. But instead it is all sort of lack luster, and that’s just a shame.

Jun you can lose the whole possessed red eyes thing you’re on Team Protagonist now.

Also is there no world where Akari joins? I dunno it’d make me laugh seeing her trying way too hard to be the Big Hero Champion of Justice. brb drawing Akari’s superhero vision of herself in her head punching Jetpack Hitler’s cool shades off his face in his moonbase.

Unfortunately, no. Akari is in Eternal Punishment, but by that point she’s basically an ordinary teenage girl. She hangs out in Giga Macho and I think that’s the only place you ever see her in that game. In fact, I’m pretty sure that portrait she has in that scene is a new one that was done for the PSP remake and wasn’t in the PS1 release.

The closest she ever comes to becoming playable is in Persona 4 DAN, where she’s a DLC costume… for Nanako. Nevermind the fact that Akari is 13 and Nanako is… I think 7 years old in DAN. I could only take DAN for a short time on the Vita before I dropped it.

The problem is that the whole plot is kinda dumb.

Handy advice for all you writers out there!

Make a list of all the things that happen in your story, in order. Is there an item on your list that reads “Then the Third Reich appears in their giant robots”? This is an indication that your story likely has issues throughout and may need to be thoroughly rethought.