Sin is In - Persona 2: Innocent Sin

[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.