Sin is In - Persona 2: Innocent Sin

[Timrod]

@LaZodiac

Best I can find for this is that Ginko means Bank, and given she has a rich family… well, that follows. I coulda swore the instruction book had a guide of her Chinese and an explanation for the nickname but I can’t find it…

Yeah, I went and looked it up and edited the post. It’s actually a play on her last name, because “gin” is the Japanese word for silver. It’s also a reference to Devil Summoner, which must’ve been awkward for the localizers because Devil Summoner was never translated and Soul Hackers wouldn’t be for several years after the PSP version of Innocent Sin.

[Timrod]

Click here for Update 4

: Welcome to Update 4, in which I realize that Persona 2 is not exactly the best Persona game.

: Right outside the Principal’s Office, I run into Ratatoskr, who is a legendary squirrel from Norse mythology who runs up and down Yggdrasil delivering messages. In this game, Ratatotskr is a furry.

: There’s also Pixie, which we need to encounter a few times if we want some decent spells later.

: The problem with the negotiation system is this. Persona 2 is an extremely slow game - and I don’t mean the pacing. There’s long load screens before and after every battle, and the menus move very slowly compared to Persona 1’s. Negotiations in particular suck because every time you want to negotiate, you have to go through this menu, select a person, then hit “confirm” at the bottom.

: You can use two or three characters at once to negotiate, as seen here.

: This is another problem. The negotiation techniques all have lengthy animations (and sometimes multiple text boxes) associated with them. The animations are also very slow.

: Just like in Persona 1, there’s a free heal spot in the first dungeon which can be abused to grind. Unfortunately, the enemies here give fuck all for EXP.

: Shortly thereafter, we have our first Persona Mutation.

: There are four kinds of mutations, and all of them are things you want. They are:

• Stats Increased - Does exactly what it says, increases all of the Persona’s stats. There’s a cap on how high they can go.

• Two Ranks Up - Increases the Persona’s Rank by 2. Just like in Persona 1, Personas have six “Ranks”, with each one giving higher stats and access to more spells. At Rank 6, you can “return” a Persona to the Velvet Room to get an item.

• Mutation Skill - Every Persona has a hidden “Mutation Skill” that is learned this way. Some are better than others.

• Evolution - Some Personas can evolve into higher forms or into different Personas in the same Arcana tree. I’m not entirely sure how this works.

: There’s seven classrooms we need to enter to smash the clocks inside: three on the first floor, two on the second floor, and two on the third floor.

: Right outside Room 1-A, the party learns their second Fusion spell: Blazing Burst. Fusion spells are pretty much exclusive to Persona 2 (P3 uses them but not nearly to the same degree).

: Fusion spells give you a cut-in image when used (this is something they did in the PSP remake). They’re cast by having two or more party members using certain spells on their turn. Blazing Burst requires two characters to use Agi (the lowest-tier fire spell) back to back. Right now, only Tatsuya and Yukino can do this. Fusion spells will only appear on your list if you’ve cast them once: you basically have to use a guide (or guess) to figure out how to use them.

: By the way, you might ask why in the last update I said we want to level Dexterity in the same way we levelled Agility in Persona 1. Let me explain.

: Most Fusion spells do damage based on how high the Dexterity of the characters performing them is. That’s why.

: I got a bunch of tarot cards off Pixies, and we want to use those, so let’s head to the Velvet Room.

: Christ! What’s wrong with your face!? I mean, I know Igor is supposed to be a bit freaky looking..

: Anyway, the Velvet Room has changed significantly since Persona 1. In Persona 1, Igor fused demons into Personas by calling them on the phone. Here, things are a bit.. different.

: Nameless and Belladonna were both in Persona 1’s Velvet Room, but you couldn’t talk to them.

: The Demon Painter is supposed to be Kazuma Kaneko, the artist who did all of the original artwork for the early SMT games. He has a use if you find blank tarot cards, of which we have none.

: Belladonna is a deaf singer, and Nameless is a blind pianist.

: Anyway, this is the problem with Persona 2. Unlike every other Persona game, you have to grind negotiations to get tarot cards to make Personas. There’s a few familiar faces on the list.

: Pascal the Dog costs 178 Fortune cards. I have no idea where the hell we’re going to find that many.

: Just like in Persona 1, we have the option of giving certain items to a fused Persona. Skill cards give skills, Incense cards boost stats, and I have no idea what Material cards do.

: Is this what a Stevie Wonder concert is like?

Returning Persona: Pixie

Origin: England

First Appearance: Megami Tensei II (NES)

: You’ll notice that none of the Personas in Persona 2 use the old art from the SNES games or Devil Summoner. I have no idea why Atlus did this and then re-used the shit out of Nocturne’s models in Persona 3 and 4.

: We can only hold a total of 10 personas, and that counts the five we have equipped. The guide for this game says you want to equip Pixie to Tatsuya. That’s wrong. You want to equip it to Maya, because her Persona SUCKS.

: Most of the rooms are exactly the same: you go into the room, smash the clock, and either a party member or an NPC will confirm you’ve smashed the clock. 1-D is a bit different though: I think because the developers assumed you would do the rooms starting from the principal’s office on the third floor and working your way down.

: This line is super awkward.

: “No.. just some fatty called Kozy..”

: “Wow… so Hanakouji-san goes to Sevens.. haha… wow…”

: “Aiyah! Stooooop!”

: “H-Hey, Undie Boss! I know Miyabi really well… what was your relationship with her?”

: “Gah! Hold it in.. keep it together…”

: “Sooo… uh… how do you know her?”

: “O-our relationship? Well…”

: "She’s my ex-girlfriend! We were dating in grade school! We broke up eventually, but I still can’t forget her face when she cried and said, ‘Eikichi-kun, I can’t bear to be apart!’ "

: Anyway, I spend most of the next 30 minutes or so running around the school smashing all the clocks. The game is nice enough to put NPCs outside the rooms that do not have clocks in them.

: One thing I also figured out is that you can change the turn order for the party. This is why we don’t pump Agility like we did in Persona 1, because most of the time Tatsuya would just be waiting for the slower party members to be in the right position to do a fusion spell.

: This is why we got that Pixie, by the way. Around the second floor, the Pixie ranked up and learned Garu, allowing us to use Mega Blaze, which consists of two people using Agi and one using Garu. Mega Blaze hits all enemies, and given that a good amount of the enemies we’re fighting are immune to physical damage, this is a pretty good way to take them out.

: Once you go through all the classrooms, you’ll get a prompt to go to the Teacher’s Lounge, which is on the second floor.

: If you haven’t read the Persona 1 LP, Ms. Saeko was Yukino’s teacher at St. Hermelin and also the person who took her out of the delinquent lifestyle. Yukino saved her from getting taken over by Nyx in the Snow Queen route.

: “Y-Yukino…? It really is you, Yukino! I transferred here last year. But never mind me – what are YOU doing here? Don’t tell me you’re redoing high school…?”

: “Oh, no. I’m on assignment! I have a part-time job as an assistant photographer, so I came to cover a story.”

: “Aiyah! Ms. Saeko and Yukino-san know each other?”

: “She was a student of mine at my last school.”

: "Your timing in coming here wasn’t very good, I’m afraid. As you can see, we’re in a bit of a crisis…

: “Yeah, about that, there’s something I need to tell you…”

: There’s three clocks in the teacher’s lounge, each with a convenient cardboard box underneath them Tatsuya can stand on to reach it.

: “Damn Hamya… but if everyone’s like this, there’s not much we can do.”

: Hanya’s nickname in the Japanese version of Persona 1 was “Hannya”, after the Japanese demon of the same name. If you’ve played Yakuza, you’ve probably seen one on Majima’s back. In the PSP re-release, it was changed to “Hamya” for reasons unknown.

: “Anyway, don’t we have a big clock to go break?”

: Chinyan is a Cantonese word meaning “Lover” or “Darling”.

: I’m honestly surprised that Ms. Saeko didn’t develop a Persona at some point. This would be the second time she’s been mind controlled in two games.

: So yeah, here’s the thing about Lisa: despite having American parents, Lisa does not speak English.

: We can also talk to our party members quick, but only Lisa and Yukino have dialog I want to go over because it has a new Cantonese expression.

: “Kaumena!” means “Help!”

: On the way out, we pick up another Fusion Spell, Kamaitaichi. This is done by using a water spell, an earth spell, and a wind spell in that order.

: We then level up and rank up Rhadamanthus, which allows us to get another fusion spell.

: Wind Slash EX is performed using I think a wind spell and I think any sword-type move in that order. Theoretically, we can now do a ton of single-target damage by using Blazing Burst and Wind Slash EX on the same turn.

: I should mention that there’s also Earth Slice EX and Flame Cut EX, which work exactly the same way as Wind Slash only with a fire or earth spell in place of a wind one. Basically, every single-target elemental spell probably has a fusion spell with a sword.

: This seems weird until you realize that “Hai!” is supposed to be Cantonese… even though it has the same meaning in Japanese, which is “Okay!” or “Yes!”

: We then need to talk to all of our party members. I really feel like Atlus didn’t quite understand pacing when they did this, because at this point we’re well over an hour into the game and most of that has been cutscenes and dialog.

: Oh, right. Now would be a good time to mention that there’s a sidequest I missed. There’s around 14 of them in Innocent Sin, and most of them are not worth doing. In this case, we could’ve gone back to the detective agency and had them spread a rumor about a toilet ghost, which we’d then fight as a mini-boss. There’s not much of a reward for it and the window to do it ends pretty much right here.

: Once we reach the stairs to the clock tower, Lisa lets us know we’re about to run into a boss fight. Thanks, Lisa.

: “Looks like Mr. Hanya’s not here, either. Let’s hurry and break the big clock so we can get outta here.”

: “U-U-Undie Boss! B-Behind! Behind you!”

: “…Huh?”

: “Ugh.. Hamya!? Look, up there!”

: “Principal Hanya! So you were mixed up with Joker! The emblem curse and everyone acting weird is all because you teamed up with Joker, isn’t it!? Fess up!”

: “Foolish girl! How dare you? The emblem curse is a divine punishment brought on by the students’ poor conduct!”

: “You fools forget that you’re students and waste your lives worrying about dating and fashion!”

: If this sounds familiar at all, it’s because this is more or less the same spiel Morooka (the initial homeroom teacher) gives in Persona 4. Atlus recycled a lot of shit in Persona 4 from this game and just kind of hoped no one would notice.

: “You brought this curse on yourselves! Though I didn’t think the rumor Cuss High started would come true…”

: “So what did he give you!?”

: Hanya made a deal with the devil.. to get his hair back. And also to live out his stupid fantasy from Snow Queen.

: “Joker! Weren’t you out for revenge on us!? What’s the point in granting a stupid geezer’s wish!?”

: “Revenge isn’t my only motive. This is between myself, the Giver, and you, the Thief… a battle with Tatsuya Suou for my dream!”

: “I’ll never let you destroy my dream again… I won’t make the same mistake twice!”

: The way I did this boss fight was not optimal because I am an idiot and listened to this dipshit guide author. He claims you can beat Hanya in three hits using Mega Blaze. He was probably playing on Easy.

: Hanya is weak to fire, but you want to use Blazing Burst instead, so that Maya, Eikichi and Lisa can use Kamaitaichi. It’ll do more damage that way. Persona 2 follows the idea that multi-target spells do less damage than single-target spells.

: This is Hanya’s Persona.. which is a Hannya. This would make sense if the localizers hadn’t fucked it up in Persona 1!

: Hanya is mostly about single-target attacks: he has a weak physical attack with his wrench and his Persona has a couple of single-target attacks, one of which has a chance to freeze.

: Dark Young Legend is honestly his worst attack, and also his only multi-target attack. This fight would’ve gone way faster had I used the Blazing Burst/Kamaitaichi setup and not followed the guide.

: “Wh-What the!?”

: “Careful, everyone! It’s collapsing!”

: “Oww… is everyone okay?”

: “Hey! Wait, you bastard!”

: An.. Innocent.. Sin?

: If you’ll recall, this poem plays during the opening sequence.

: “That’s from a poem called ‘Der Doppelganger.’ Have you heard of it, Tatsuya-kun?”

: “Oh, no! I just thought there were some similarities. Ah, ignore me, Tatsuya-kun.”

: “Think positive, guys! You have to, at times like this. We’re not out of leads just yet. Let’s chase the rumors! They’ll surely lead us straight to Joker.”

: “Hey, that’s a great idea! Hamya did say that the emblem curse was started by some students from Cuss High.”

: “Whoa there! There’s no one at Kasugayama High whom the great Michel knows of that would start such a rumor. We’d be wasting our time checking it out. If we’re gonna search, let’s start somewhere else.”

: So, uh… this decision has a pretty big impact on a scene much later in the game. I selected “He’s Dead” here and then realized I forgot to save before I fought Hanya. I can always go back and replay the school dungeon, since I missed the sidequest as well.

: Therefore, I’ll let you vote. But before I do, I need to tell you what this question is really asking. The real question is “Do you want to see the Persona 1 party members one last time?”. If Hanya is dead, we get to see the P1 cast again. If he’s not, we get an alternate joke version of a scene where the P1 cast would be.

[Mraagvpeine]

I’d prefer to see the P1 cast than the joke scene.

[LaZodiac]

Let us see our good good friends from P1 again. Then just tell us what the joke scene is. Fuck Hanya.

Also I’ll be honest, my understanding of why the game is called Innocent Sin makes me really like it as a title, but we’ll talk about that later when it’s relevant and not Atlus trying very hard to foreshadow… something.

[Fefnir]

Hanya dies and we get to see the P1 cast? I fail to see how an Atlus joke scene could beat that.

[CommanderKeene]

Your poll seems to be broken, but my vote is Hannya dies.

[Timrod]

Click Here for Update 5

: It looks like the votes were overwhelmingly to kill Hanya off, so I’ll go with that. Interestingly, I found a translated interview with the Persona 1 devteam about where they got the inspiration for their characters. You can read it here.

: There’s a lot to take away from it. Pretty much the entire playable P1 cast is based off either idols or actors, with Hanya apparently being modeled after someone one of the developers knew. Maki was apparently based off a JAV star, which explains a lot about why she’s so godawful.

: The interview also kind of explains why the P1 characters look so different in P2: it’s because they were made to look more like the actors they were modeled after.

: There actually is a Peace Diner in Renegdai (where Seven Sisters is) but the one we’re looking for is in Yumezaki.

: I know I accidentally missed a sidequest, but there’s another one we can (but shouldn’t) do right now. If we talk to the lucky cat in the Kuzunoha Agency..

: It’ll ask us for 100 yen. Apologies for the different aspect ratio, I’ve been using my capture card to play Animal Crossing and forgot to switch the settings, it’ll be fixed momentarily.

: After talking to it 100 times (thus donating a total of 10,000 yen) the cat will give you an Incense Set, containing one of every stat-boosting incense. It’s probably not worth it, because there’s much better ways to spend money.

: You know what, speaking of Animal Crossing, let’s just turn this into an Animal Crossing LP. It sure is a wonderful day on the island. Roses in bloom everywhere because they won’t stop breeding, the works. Let’s go relax in my house after like 15 minutes of mashing X in front of that cat.

: I love my plant room. So relaxing. Wait a second.. what’s that noise coming from the side room?

: GOD DAMMIT! Fucking cat! Fine, I’ll give you the bells, just fuck off!

: Now, where were we? Oh, right. Somebody spread a rumor that I know how to manipulate turnip RNG, and then my upstairs just kind of became like this overnight. I don’t really mind it, but.. is that the goddamn cat again?

: One incense!? I gave you 100,000 bells! There aren’t even stats in Animal Crossing!

: You want 10 Nook tickets? That’s fucking highway robbery! Fuck it, can’t even relax in Animal Crossing, back to Persona 2.

: Yumezaki has a bunch of places we can’t visit yet. Peace Diner is in the Yumezaki Center mall. Remember malls?

: Maya also loves her some pachinko.

: Tony’s Shop, from the company that brought you Tony’s Arms 9mm ammo in Resident Evil 2. I hated that they got rid of that in the remake.

: Honestly, when this character first came in, before the dialog pop-up I thought it was Hanakouji having become thin again due to Eikichi spreading rumors. It would’ve been amusing.

: “Huh…? Oh yeah, you’re on Kozy’s newspaper staff.. umm. Chikarin?”

: Meet Chikarin, our first rumormonger. She’s the other half of the rumor operation: you get rumors from her and can then have Todoroki spread them for a fee.

: “Perfect timing! Have you seen Kozy?”

: “Hey! Pay attention, Undie Boss! Sounds like it was Cuss High students who spread the rumor about that disease! Even Hanya said so!”

: “There’s no way my guys would stoop to that! I didn’t teach 'em to be cowards! Fatty must have gotten some bad info.”

: “That’s two witnesses now! Are you still gonna try and play dumb!?”

: “E-even if it was true, I bet it was just out of jealousy. If I go and yell at 'em, those rumors are gonna–”

: “Alright, that’s enough. We get the point. Let’s just go to Zodiac and learn the truth for ourselves. And if Cuss High students started the rumor, we’ll have Eikichi set them straight. Okay?”

: Anyway, here’s how rumormongers work. We can ask Chikarin about a couple of different things.

: The first two unlock new shops in certain areas. You can influence what items they carry and what their prices are like.

: The third category concerns the magazine sweepstakes and Mu, which is a casino. Unlike Persona 1, where the casino was basically random, there are ways to influence it in Innocent Sin. I’ve read you can also break the game with the magazine sweepstakes but it’s a pain in the ass to do.

: And the answer is no, I am not doing another casino grind. Not after Snow Queen. We can also talk to our party, which, uh..

: There’s also a neat little detail here. Peace Diner actually has a function in this game - you can eat food to get temporary buffs.

: I wonder how exactly you talk like a Victorian maid without speaking English? Unfortunately, the fan translation script doesn’t seem to have the lines for the minor NPCs, so I have no idea how the character talks in the Japanese version (it’s pretty clear the Victorian thing was something the localizers added in). I’m just gonna go with she sounds like Nanjo.

: One thing the fan translators claimed (and I’m not sure if this is true or not) is that Working Designs refused to translate Innocent Sin in the 90s because it was “too dark” for them. I can’t even imagine how bad this game would’ve been if Vic Ireland got his hands on it.

: Zodiac is another mall, but everything that isn’t the club in the back is closed.

: “Aiyah! Noriko’s here too!? Looks like she hasn’t given up on Anna Yoshizaka…”

: I have no idea who Anna is or why she’s even here. Something tells me she’s probably designed after a late-90s pop idol one of the developers was horny for. Just a guess.

: I missed a shot here, but it’s Anna asking Yukino who she is. This game is kind of annoying to take screenshots of, because the text scrolls real slow but trying to speed it up can sometimes outright skip short lines.

: This is what I like about Eikichi. He’s a visual kei punk who intimidates people.

: “S-Sugimoto!? You mean HIROKI Sugimoto!? HE’S the Leader at Cuss High…?”

: “Quit joking around!”

: This is the other thing I like about Eikichi, is that he actually beats the shit out of people. I absolutely hated Kanji in P4 (who is basically Eikichi if he was a badly written character) because of that. How many times did you ever see Kanji do anything other than stand around in a kind of impotent rage?

: “So there’s a new head honcho right under the old one’s nose…? Doesn’t that seem a little sudden? Sounds like the result of another rumor… maybe that Sugimoto’s in league with Joker too.”

: “It’s sure possible. There’s no way he could take over an entire school that quick without something up his sleeve.”

: “By the way, I’m sure you know the rumor about the Sevens emblem being cursed. From what I understand, that rumor started at Cuss High. Do you know anything about it?”

: “We’ll just have to ask him in person! Hey! Where’s Hiroki now?”

: “A secret lounge!? I’ll smack the smile off that cocky bastard’s face!”

: “Hold your horses there, Undie Boss!”

: “Hey, was there a girl called Kozy here? She was investigating the emblem curse rumor too.”

: “WHAT!? Did you just say Miyabi Hanakouji? Hanakouji-san went to see Hiroki!?”

: “I…I gotta go!”

: Just as you’d suspect, Eikichi will not be in our party for this dungeon. It’s fairly short anyway. We can talk to our party here.

: However, what we really want to do is talk to one of the people behind the counter.

: I don’t get how you work in a club and have never seen anything but the reception area, but whatever. This is a rumor we can pay Todoroki to spread - and in fact, I wound up resetting the game because I spent too much money on that cat.

: You have to spread this rumor before going to the second floor of Zodiac. It’s worth doing because while it roughly doubles the size of the second floor, it adds a bunch of items.

: Club Zodiac is basically the same as Seven Sisters: the same demons are here, with a few new additions, such as these Zombie Junkies. Unlike most demons, Zombies cannot be negotiated with - at least not to get cards from. Zombies are very flammable, so Mega Blaze will wipe entire encounters here.

: Persona 2 doesn’t take long to bring on the palette swaps. Blobs are higher-level slimes. Same weaknesses, same negotiation options.

: Finding the second floor is pretty straightforward.

: The second floor introduces the Zombie DJ, which die pretty much the second they touch fire.

: If we hadn’t spread the rumor, there’d be one chest here. Instead, there’s a series of chests containing cards for basic elemental spells: Garu, Magna, Zio, Aqua, Agi, Bufu, and then a Dia card. If you haven’t played an SMT game before, those are Wind, Earth, Lightning, Water, Fire, and Ice respectively (with Dia being a heal).

: If you’re following the “Spoiler-Free” guide on Gamefaqs, it’ll claim that you cannot negotiate with the Harpy. You can, you need Maya to do it.

: The second floor is also the first place we can meet Trish. If you’ll remember from Persona 1, Trish was a fairy who healed you in dungeons but cost probably two or three times what a doctor in one of the malls would charge.

: Trish wants a whopping 5,000 yen to heal us. For reference, she was barely charging that in the final dungeons of the SEBEC route in Persona 1 and the top floor of the Ice Palace in Snow Queen. This is absolutely not worth it when we have two Personas with Dia and Chewing Souls (an item that restores SP) are like 500 yen each.

: The second floor also has an optional staff room.

: The third floor is much smaller than the second one, and includes a couple of new enemies. Phantom is one of them, and I’m not sure I ever saw the other (it might be the Harpy).

: It’s funny because in 1999 this would’ve been seen as strange. The future sucks.

: The third floor also has damage floors, because I’m guessing someone forgot to lock the door to the planning room and Damage Floor Guy got in. Damage floors do way more damage than they did in P1.

: Apart from finding the mask we need to progress, there’s also a missable negotiation technique. To get it, we have to talk to Yukino before we leave the room.

: I’m honestly not sure if she’s talking about Jihei or Elly here, since as far as I remember both were capable of using katanas, though Elly preferred rapiers.

: This gets us access to several new negotiation techniques if we pair up Tatsuya and Yukino. I feel like this is something Damage Floor Guy did just to spite the people who never did any of the optional dialog in Persona 1.

: In a bizarre twist, Hiroki has a Persona but simply chooses not to use it. You’ll see in a bit.

: I don’t quite get how he knows this given that he’s from Cuss High, but whatever. I don’t think I knew a single person who went to one of the other high schools in town when I was there.

: I like how it changes her name back after he figures this out.

: This? This right here? This is why Eikichi is a better character than Kanji or Ryuji. Ryuji bleaches his hair while Eikichi beats the shit out of people.

: This is also why I did not like Persona 5’s writing as a whole.

: If you’ll remember, Persona 1 had a “moral choice” system that determined whether you got the “ultimate” Personas for each character. Guess what this is? The correct answer here is “Wait and see what happens.”

: On the PSP version, this choice matters a bit less because you can get the same reward from it through mutation, but it’s a lot harder to do.

: Eikichi then nearly gets stabbed. At least, I think it’s nearly.

: I don’t quite understand why Hiroki wouldn’t just use his Persona.

: “I’ve got no right to act all superior about what Hiroki did. There’s no difference between that and what I’ve done, not really. I acted like a big hero, ordering my guys not to pick on the weak… but that was all just a front.”

: “Really, it was just an excuse to beat people up with my Persona… and that ain’t how a man should act!”

: “Aiyah!? What happened to the usual, self-centered, heedless goon we all know? If nothing else, that stuff you said a second ago was.. uh… i-it was pretty cool!”

: “Sorry for being so mopey… anyway, I’m done being Boss, starting now.”

: “Uhh, Hanakouji-san? Are you… well, I guess you’re not okay, huh…”

: “Okay, time to spill it all. If you don’t, you’re gonna find there’s way worse than having your pants pulled down.”

: “Why’d you order your stooges to spread a rumor that the Sevens emblem was cursed?”

: “That Yasuo… I turned him down, so he went with the next name on his list!”

: “The people here said something about a ‘gathering’ going on today. What did they mean by that?”

: Next time, we raid Cuss High, and hopefully the site doesn’t eat my update like it did this one. Twice.

[SpammyV]

Snow Queen route: The end of adolescense can be scary, but you shouldn’t be afraid to move on with your life.
Persona 2: Punching people solves your problems!.

[LaZodiac]

@Timrod

I’m just gonna go with she sounds like Nanjo.

If I had to hazard a guess, she probably sounds like one of those demure ugu maido archetypes you see in anime.

Anna there, at least according to the wiki, is a tie-in novel protagonist. I’m sure she is otherwise unimportant.

I realize it’s a dance club but every time they said “Zodiac’s” my head is like, “please get these animes out of my apartment please”.

Eikichi’s reaction to learning that Kozy is Miyabi is a very, very good “oh, I should have been nicer to her. Time to shatter some fucking skull to save her” and that’s so refreshing.

[Timrod]

@LaZodiac

Eikichi’s reaction to learning that Kozy is Miyabi is a very, very good “oh, I should have been nicer to her. Time to shatter some fucking skull to save her” and that’s so refreshing.

The only thing I don’t like about it is knowing that if it had been “modern” Atlus doing it, they absolutely would’ve turned Miyabi into a joke like they did with Hanako in P4. For a company that was trying to make characters that felt more like real high schoolers, they sure did turn Persona into a giant pot of anime stereotypes as soon as EP was out.

@SpammyV

Persona 2:

It absolutely does. You’ll see. There is one scene I absolutely cannot wait to get to.

[Timrod]

Click Here for Update 6

: We’re on our way to Kasugayama High, also known as Cuss High.

: Cuss High is largely the same inside as Seven Sisters, with one exception that we’ll see a bit later.

: Right away, we encounter two new enemies: Empusa and Agathion. The guide says that you should be making pacts with the demons around here, and it was here I finally found out what pacts do.

: Unfortunately, the developers caught onto the whole “party member catchup” thing from Persona 1 and got rid of it. Eikichi is only level 6, which makes us basically unable to make a pact with anything.

: So anyway, here’s what making a pact does, apart from being a bad game mechanic. When you make a pact with a demon, it doubles the number of tarot cards the demon gives on a successful negotiation. It also causes the demon to give you Free Cards. Why is this important?

: The answer is that there are certain arcanas that demons do not drop cards for. To get Personas of those arcanas (Emperor is one) you need to use Free Cards. The sole exception are Fool Personas, which were a pain to get in P1 and are even more of a pain to get in P2.

: Apep here is one demon the guide recommends making a pact with for Strength cards. Unfortunately, we need Eikichi to do that.

: Even though Eikichi has told us where to go, we don’t want to go there just yet. Most of the rooms in Cuss High are blocked off, but 1-2 isn’t.

: This gets Tatsuya another pair negotiation technique with Eikichi. I think the cutoff point for this is actually a bit after where we are.

: This student gives us a hint about where we’re going next. It seems Cuss High has a bomb shelter built underneath it. I looked it up, and this actually wasn’t unheard of in the US: a bunch of schools had bomb shelters built underneath them in the 1960s, during the height of the Cold War.

: Interestingly, a lot of these bomb shelters were built by civilians and to no one’s surprise a lot of them were both poorly planned and probably not all that effective against a nuclear bomb. One article I saw had a piece about a school with a population of 1300 students in the 60s. The municipality wanted to make it a fallout shelter.. that could hold a total of 340 people. How did they plan who’d get in and who wouldn’t? They uh.. didn’t.

: Most of these shelters were meant to be decommissioned after the Cold War ended, but in a lot of cases that never happened and they were simply forgotten because there was no centralized recordkeeping system indicating where they all even were. There was even one under a high school in my home state of Connecticut, found in the early 90s.

: Japan apparently has the same problem, only theirs are even more of a problem. For one, they’re much older (dating back to World War II) and also tend to come with the problem of unexploded WWII-era bombs.

: If you walk by the rooms, you can see that some of them are decorated for the festival. Unfortunately, we can’t go into any of them.

: The encounter rate is absurdly high, and we run into Puck. Puck was in Club Zodiac, but I don’t think I ever saw him. The guide recommends making a pact with him to get Lovers cards, and I did but it broke before I could get anything out of it.

: You know what I’m not already tired of? Running around a building chasing after someone. Not like we’ve done this twice already.

: Now we get to go all the way back to the stairs and climb back up to the third floor.

: I’m pretty sure that by the time I got here, I had already put in more time than I did in Thanatos Tower in P1 because of how slow everything is.

: 2-4 is just down the stairs from 3-1, so it’s not much of a walk.

: Now we get to go all the way to the bomb shelter. I took a break and went to see what I could fuse at the Velvet Room. Unfortunately, everything there was either no good or would break the ability to use Mega Blaze. I could’ve replaced the Pixie we made with a Harpy, but there wasn’t much of a point.

: The stairs to the basement are right near the gym on the west side of the school.

: It’s kind of strange to me that the school has such a small basement. I know the one in Connecticut was only part of the basement and not the entire thing.

: “Forgive you? Forget that! There’s a whole laundry list of stuff we gotta ask you! There’s no way we’re just letting you go!”

: “You’re gonna tell us about the emblem curse whether you like it or not!”

: Welcome to the worst part of the game. This is where the guy who designed Thanatos Tower was like “You know what’d be even less fun than Thanatos Tower?”

: Tatsuya carries around a lighter at all times. The game never explicitly tells you this as far as I know, but this fact is very important.

: This radio is a goddamn plot hole. If you’ll recall, the student in 2-4 told us that the rumor is that once you enter the bomb shelter you can’t get out. How the hell did he get the radio in here?

: If this was the Persona 1 party, Reiji probably would’ve figured out they could’ve just spread a rumor that Yasuo is dead.

: “What did you just say?”

: Except it failed because no one is stronger than Bruce Springsteen.

: “Kehhei! Come out and face us!”

: Has that ever worked in anything ever?

: You’d think he’d ask for Chie, since she’s Lisa but Asian. Or for Ann, since she’s Lisa but devoid of any personality whatsoever. Seriously, Atlus has this unhealthy obsession with Lisa. She was even modelled in one of the PS2 games for some reason.

: “Raaaaaagh! That scumbag!”

: “Eikichi! What the hell!?”

: “Yeah, what she said, you moron! Why’d you go and break our only contact with the outside!?”

: For reference, Eikichi threw the radio at a wall and smashed it.

: “Whaaa…? B-But…!”

: “Oh, well. No use crying over it now. It’s at times like this that you gotta remember to think positive, guys! Together, we can find a way out!”

: Once we’re done talking, we can go through this door next to Lisa and enter what is undoubtedly the worst part of this game thus far.

: Not only is the entire bomb shelter a dark room, but it also has damage floors.. AND you can’t pull out your map. There’s some hidden shit here but I had a run end because I touched a poison damage floor and had nothing left to cure it that I ran into while looking for said stuff. It’s not worth your time anyway - most of it is skill cards that are dropped by enemies around here.

: Just like in Zodiac, we have more zombie enemies. We can’t negotiate with them for cards, so all they’re good for is EXP.

: Anyway, the guides on Gamefaqs will tell you to hug the left wall. Do this. Eventually..

: You’ll find a secret passage that goes into a room with an item. I found three out of the four items in this dungeon and didn’t care to look for it because fuck this dungeon.

: Gee, this’d be useful.. if I could make it to the Velvet Room. For those not familiar, Posumudi is the poison cure spell.

: Eventually, we find the “Small Room”. Now, here’s the part that’s a kick in the dick. This room has two doors: one on the West side (shown here) and one on the East side. It is possible to reach the East side door from the start of the maze. If you do, it’s locked.

: We then continue out of the door and continue following the left wall.

: Then we run into Robin Goodfellow. Robin Goodfellow is the cherry on top of the shit sundae that is this dungeon. He has a move (that he didn’t use on me and I suspect they made less frequent than the PS1 version) called Hula of Misfortune. In Persona 1, Hula of Misfortune was basically a free turn because it did nothing. In Persona 2, Hula of Misfortune STEALS HALF YOUR MONEY.

: Basically, this dungeon is two halves connected by the Small Room. What we’ve effectively done is a loop.

: I hope you like this dungeon, because you get to do THREE LAPS OF IT. I made the mistake of trying to follow the right wall for items. Do not do this.

: The right-hand side of the first room has a giant gauntlet of damage floors leading to a chest.

: Aques is.. I think it’s the second-tier water spell in single target form. Eikichi’s persona already knew it by this point, as almost everyone had maxed their Persona out.

: Our last new demon here is Nisroc, who is remarkably easy to negotiate with. He’s immune to fire, so it’s worth doing.

: I was honestly about to just drop this game, and suddenly understood why one of the people who tried to LP this on Something Awful quit like a third of the way through. Persona 2 has some godawful design decisions.

: When we come back to the small room a fourth time (out of six) we get some dialog that’s actually important for once.

: Let’s make another lap and come back.

: On my last run, I happened onto this room. It’s kind of hidden in a corner on the second half of the lap. You can see the sparkles on the minimap indicating items.

: One’s a Dormina card, which is a sleep status spell. Kind of useless.

: The other is a fight with a Tengu. Tengu might be kind of a challenging fight.. if it wasn’t for the fact that the party was almost level 12 at this point from the frequent random encounters. Have I mentioned I spent almost 90 minutes in just this part of the dungeon?

: When we get back to the Small Room, there’s a cutscene.

: “Hey, Lisa… do you have a mirror? Eikichi-kun mentioned a rumor that the one person who got out used a mirror, right?”

: “Ng Hai. I don’t have one with me now… I usually keep it in my bookbag.”

: Houshounah is a Cantonese word meaning “Sad” or “Pained”, but it’s not romanized correctly. Ng Hai is a “no no no” but not in the Nathan Drake sense.

: “My my, hey hey… three ladies here and none of them has a mirror!? Good thing I’m so beautiful…”

: If you’re wondering whether Eikichi pulls out a mirror, the answer is yes, because of course he does.

: Gotta love how laughably inept Lisa is. Or not.

: “Ai..yah… what now!? You better take responsibility for this, jackass!”

: “Me!? This is your fault! You better pay me back for it! That’ll be 1,000,000 yen!”

: “That’s enough! Thanks to you two, we just lost what might be our only hope of getting out of here!”

: Yukino deserves so much better than this. Remember Persona 1, when our party was generally competent?

: “Think positive, guys! This isn’t over until we decide it is. Let’s brainstorm! There has to be a way!”

: “Maya-san… we’re all exhausted. Let’s rest a while to cool down a bit. We’ll take turns keeping watch.”

: This is a horrible idea! Don’t you remember Hypnos Tower!?

: “I couldn’t sleep for some reason… mind if I sit here?”

: “You really think… we can get out of here…?”

: “Oh, sorry, sorry! Gotta think positive!”

: I’ve known people like this and I can’t stand any of them.

: “That’s the first time I’ve seen you smile. You’ve got a great one!”

: “This guy’s my good luck charm. When times are hard, like now… I always ask him what to do.”

: “So many terrible things have happened… rumors are becoming reality, and we’re under attack from actual demons…”

: “But it hasn’t been all bad. I got to meet you and your friends…”

: “I’m having so much fun with you all. It’s like.. being a kid again…”

: “I just can’t bring myself to believe that Joker really is a bad guy. It was like he was a child crying after having a nightmare…”

: “It’s like how you guys get into fights and try to act cool, but my Persona tells me you’re a bunch of good kids. I sense it the same way…”

: This quote is from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. I really don’t know what it is with Atlus and European children’s literature.

: “True indeed… sometimes, I wonder if what we think of as real could just all be a dream.”

: “That I’m watching a dream go by while forgetting something important to me.. Joker, too, maybe.”

: “Oh, sorry. Didn’t meant to get into such heavy stuff with you. Well, leave the lookout to me and get some rest.”

: “Goodnight, Tatsuya-kun. Sweet dreams…”

: I’d like to point out that when I started recording the bomb shelter segment, it was about 8:30 at night. By the time I reached this cutscene, it was well after 10. The bomb shelter took me longer than the final run of Thanatos Tower did.

: “Oh yeah!”

: “It’s okay. I mean, you’re practically me. And I’m you. It’ll be like I still have it!”

: I don’t know why he’s using the line most of the Personas use to introduce themselves, but whatever.

: It’s strange, though. We’ve seen Tatsuya as a high schooler, but who’s this other kid? He almost looks like a younger Yusuke out of Persona 5… even though Yusuke was supposed to be Goemon from Lupin III and not a Persona 2 reference.

: “Ahahahaha! You’re the greatest, Tatsuya! No matter what happens, we’re gonna keep our promise to each other! Forever and ever!”

: Hoi oi dik is a Cantonese phrase meaning “cute” or “lovely”.

: “We’ve all been too focused on the idea that there’s no exit. You know what they say: ‘what’s most important can’t be seen with one’s eyes.’ right Tatsuya-kun?”

: “Hm!? What’s going on with them…?”

: “There’s probably a loophole we’ve been overlooking. The key to cracking this rumor’s logic is the mirror. Now let’s sort through what we know one more time and think of a way out!”

: Maya is going to quiz us on the plot, and answering correctly will get us a new negotiation technique with Tatsuya and Maya, which is necessary to get a pact with at least one demon in this very dungeon. I’ve highlighted the correct answers, but seriously what is this, Dagger of Amon Ra? Can we somehow pin the blame for the bomb shelter on the Irish?

: If only Jihei had given Yukino the Spiegel mirror after Snow Queen.

: "Correct! No one knows where the exit is, so you can’t get out… but rumor has it that one person got out by using a mirror.’

: “Now here’s our problem, since we don’t have a mirror anymore… what do mirrors really do? They reflect things, right?”

: This is seriously feeling like something out of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, like the ten pages they spend in Part 3 trying to figure out the smashed clock.

: “Yes! That’s it! You’re not the only thing that appears in a mirror. Think about when you drive a car or ride your bike! Okay, and what do you mean by ‘everything in range’!? Keep going…”

: “Bingo! That’s right, Tatsuya-kun! That’s the importance of the mirror!”

: “I think whoever escaped in the rumor managed it by accident, but they did it by finding an exit reflected in the mirror!”

: “I get it.. if the rumor is that no one knows where the exit is, then the exit does exist!”

: “Right! Not knowing isn’t the same thing as not existing… that was just us jumping to conclusions.”

: “Ahaha! I had my suspicions that would be the case right from the–”

: “But with no mirror, there’s no way for us to indirectly look for it! If we can’t see it, we still can’t get out!”

: Next time, we finish Cuss High and hopefully don’t run into any dungeons this bad for the rest of the game.

[LaZodiac]

@Timrod

Tatsuya carries around a lighter at all times. The game never explicitly tells you this as far as I know, but this fact is very important.

If I recall it’s in your Important/Key Items menu, which is a cute detail.

@Timrod

How the hell did he get the radio in here?

Opened the door and threw it in. At no point did Yasuo go IN to the Bomb Shelter. That’s my guess anyway.

… I’ve played this game and I do NOT remember that scene with the emo hair kid exchanging items at all…

The good news I’m FAIRLY sure Cuss High Bomb Shelter is the worst dungeon in the game and thus it’s all up hill from here. The bad news is I’m fairly certain it’s around just after this point that I stopped playing myself to play other video games so I can’t be sure…

[SpammyV]

How the hell is a radio working in a bomb shelter?

Also, Maya and Yukino’s “These freaking kids, man…” faces are rapidly becoming my favorites.

[LaZodiac]

I don’t know if this is you or not but if it is… jeez.

[Fefnir]

That is… certainly an interesting pile of words they wrote there. I can’t believe I read the words, “the devil is a wimp” outside of a shitpost or a different SMT walkthrough.

[Timrod]

@LaZodiac

I don’t know if this is you or not but if it is… jeez.

Oh no, that’s definitely not me. My twitter is http://twitter.com/TimrodDX. I know exactly which guide he’s talking about though - it’s the “spoiler-free” one that’s full of bad information. That guide is actually the reason I missed the Hanako sidequest at Seven Sisters, because he doesn’t mention you have to do it before you fight Hanya.

At least I know if the Christian fundamentalists hate it, I’m playing the right game.

[Timrod]

Click here for Update 7

: The next few screenshots will be a little off, but that’s because I was messing with my capture card. I left Kasugayama High to go to the Velvet Room and fuse some new Personas, since most of the party’s starter ones were at MAX rank.

New Persona: Minotaur

Origin: Greece

First Appearance: Megami Tensei (NES)

: Despite his garbage resistances, Minotaur has some pretty decent stats and has a fusion spell that is unique to him and two other Personas.

: You might notice that Minotaur is level 15 while Eikichi is only level 11. Persona 2 gives you five levels of leeway when equipping new Personas. I don’t know why none of the other Persona games (not counting 5, which has no limit whatsoever) do this.

New Persona: Kinnara

Origin: India

First Appearance: Megami Tensei II (NES)

: I had a metric shitload of Star cards from negotiating, so I made Kinnara for Yukino. Kinnara’s not a bad Persona: decent stats, decent resistances, and keeps the fire element going so I can keep spamming Mega Blaze to win fights. Persona 2 is also the last game in which Kinnara appears.

New Persona: Surya

Origin: India

Persona 2 Original

: Surya goes to Tatsuya, again so I can keep Mega Blaze up. The fact that it learns Magaru is a nice bonus. I also love that Surya is basically a coat rack. I wish I had a talking coat rack that could light things on fire.

New Persona: Robin Goodfellow

Origin: England

Persona 2 Original

: Oh hey, it’s Robin Goodfellow, only without his ability to steal half the enemy’s money. He’s basically an upgraded version of Lisa’s starting Persona and will be crucial to a new Fusion spell.

: Once we’re done fusing, it’s time to head back to the gym.

: You might ask why everyone has a laser coming out of their heads. This is something that we’ve actually seen before, but that the game expects you know more about than you probably actually do. The lasers are basically people’s hopes and dreams.

: You can’t see it because it’s a flashing effect, but Maya starts emitting lasers until Tatsuya takes the mask off.

: “What the hell is Yasuo doing!? Isn’t that the same kinda skull Joker had!?”

: They really didn’t explain this well enough in the cutscene in Sumaru Prison, or maybe it’s just that it’s been a few weeks, but basically Joker works by draining people’s hopes and dreams which turns them into shadows. Honestly, this sounds more like an episode of some kid’s TV show than it does a JRPG that’s supposed to take itself at least somewhat seriously.

: “Yasuo, you smug prick! What’re you doing!? Quit it with the skull!”

: “Wait! C’mon, Tatsuya, let’s go after him!”

: Kind of a neat reference that there’s students from St. Hermelin here.

: I spent some time inside Cuss High ranking up the new Personas. The guide recommends being Level 13 for the boss, which is complete overkill (and also how you know the author was using an emulator with the speed-up key held down).

: I returned all of the old Personas off-screen, and one of the items I got out of it is an accessory that tells you when you have the ability to cast fusion spells that you don’t know the combination for.

: Stone Rise is kind of garbage unless the enemy is really weak to Earth and immune to fire. It’s activated using an Earth, Wind, and Fire spell in some combination I forget exactly what. This means you’re using three characters to cast one spell when you could instead use Blazing Burst and Pegasus Strike for more damage.

: Our next destination is the roof, on the 4th floor. There is a sidequest we could pick up here but I’m purposely not taking it. Why, you ask? The sidequest spawns a mini-boss called Bukimi (the toilet ghost). Bukimi has Hula of Misfortune and will use it far more frequently than Robin Goodfellow. The reward is some garbage healing items.

: Heading north at the fork bring us to the roof entrance. The south route is more useless NPCs, and I think one of them is the one that spawns the Bukimi sidequest.

: I get that it’s been somewhere between a few hours and a day since we entered the bomb shelter, but where the hell is Yasuo getting all these radios?

: “You bastard… what’s your game, making everyone into shadowmen!?”

: “A service!?”

: I like that Tatsuya just walks around the corner and finds him. He didn’t even try to hide between the building and the fence.

: “Screw that noise! Who would want in on a plan that shady!? If you have time to waste blabbering about crap like that, hurry and turn everyone back to normal!”

: “Just hand over the skull and that’ll be enough. We’ll figure it out ourselves.”

: I killed Yasuo so fast that this is the only attack he got off. I killed him so fast that I actually forgot to take a shot of his Persona.

: Yasuo’s Persona is Shax, or more precisely “Reverse Shax” since Persona 2 digs further into the whole tarot theme than most of the other games.

: Yasuo is extremely weak to fire and to earth, meaning we can spam Stone Rise to do ridiculous amounts of damage. I would’ve used Blazing Burst and Pegasus Strike instead, but Eikichi got put to sleep and didn’t wake up before the fight was over.

: Once he takes enough damage, Yasuo will heal himself.. for around half of one Stone Rise. He has way less HP than Hanya did.

: “Hey, Yasuo!”

: “You’re in Joker’s organization, right? Why’s he harvesting people’s ideals?”

: “That’s… from some kid’s game that shows up in my dreams…”

: “…!?”

: “And Lady Scorpio is an executive of this ‘Masked Circle’?”

: “Stealing dreams for personal advancement… I’ve got no sympathy for this asshole.”

: It’s weird to me how much this game, as a direct sequel to Persona 1, focuses on the whole ideals thing when it wasn’t in P1 at all.

: The game goes through every character’s portrait in the inverted colors here, but I couldn’t capture it all.

: When we were in Zodiac, there were a few NPCs who mentioned Lady Scorpio. Guess we know who she is now.. though why she’s still bothering to wear a mask when we know who she is underneath, I don’t know.

: Anna then starts teleporting around and whipping people.

: “This skull can only be controlled by those bearing the constellation of the holy cross.”

: “… Is this all?”

: “Wh…Who the hell are you!?”

: You can’t see it, but Leo just disintegrated Yasuo when he appeared.

: “For one so lowly to confess Masked Circle business to outsiders and abandon the shadowed festival… You deserve death!”

: What is this, an ICP concert?

: “I could say the same thing about you, Lady. What do you have to say in your defense after the recent debacles? Not only did you let the wild dance slide, you abandoned the shadowed festival to vermin.”

: “If you wish to be present to witness the fulfillment of the Oracle of Maia, I suggest you accept the Exalted One’s punishment…”

: Leo honestly sounds like if you took an AI and fed it the scripts to a couple of fantasy RPGs.

: “…Yukino is mine. Leave her alone.”

: “…Very well. But you will deal with the consequences of the party’s interruption.”

: Why is that Leo and Scorpio can teleport? As far as I know they’re just Persona users who also are vampires that eat people’s hopes and dreams. Seriously, I want a JRPG where the party can teleport just to fuck with villains that pull that shit.

: “Cursed Star… I will see you and the witch sent to Purgatory, just as the lowly one was a moment ago.”

: It really seems like the game expects me to have read something or played Eternal Punishment beforehand, even though Innocent Sin comes first in the duology.

: “So this King Leo guy has been stalking you for years, Maya-san!?”

: “My Persona told me so… it’s him! There’s no mistaking it!”

: “A pyromaniac… Kehhei! That’s the worst!”

: I also don’t understand how they know he’s a pyromaniac.

: “Don’t worry.. I’m okay now. we need to think about what to do next..”

: “Remember how that King guy told Anna to ‘deal with the consequences’? That’s been bugging me ever since…”

: “Let’s go back to the gym. I have a bad feeling about this!”

: “Kehhei! This is terrible! What is this Oracle of Maia anyway, that makes the Masked Circle do such horrible things!?”

: “Yasuo’s dead, too… does this mean we’ve hit a wall in our search for Joker!?”

: “Guys, wherever rumors are, Joker’s there too, right? Let’s go out in the city and ask people for rumors about the Masked Circle and Joker! I’m sure we’ll learn something new!”

: There’s now a bit of side content we have to do before we can progress the plot.

: The first thing we want to do is head to Gatten Sushi in Kameya Alley, where we’ll meet up with a familiar face from Persona 1.

: Meet Eikichi’s dad. Eikichi’s dad is a gigantic asshole.

: This is another thing that makes Eikichi SO MUCH BETTER WRITTEN than Kanji was. How many times did you ever see Kanji getting made fun of for liking sewing? Zero, that’s how many.

: “Y-Yes, Sir!? D-Daddy-o… I-I mean, Dad… hear me out! Th-there’s a good explanation for this!”

: “I was practicing for a costume party! R-right, Tatsuya!? It’s for the school festival! It’s not like I always dress like this!”

: I don’t quite understand how he explains the blue hair - I’m pretty sure his hair is dyed and not one of those anime things where it’s actually that color.

: “Ha! Hahaha…! C-Come on, Dad… d-don’t be ridiculous…!”

: “Let’s GO, Tatsuya,kun. We gotta get the hell outta… I mean, get back to practice!”

: This actually isn’t as impressive, nor does it make quite as much sense as it sounds like it does. Karate has a pretty universal ranking system where you have 10 lower belts and then 10 ranks of black belt: but the top two ranks are pretty much reserved for the master of any given school of karate and students they’ve personally taught.

: Capoeira has 11 ranks, but only 10 of those are attainable (and realistically, it’s probably fewer than that). Just like with Karate, the highest rank is reserved for the head of the school.

: Judo has eleven grades of black belt, but the eleventh grade is reserved for the head of the school and only fifteen people have ever been awarded a 10th-degree black belt in Japan. Most of them are dead, and some were only awarded that honor posthumously.

: We can therefore come to the conclusion that Eikichi’s dad really isn’t as much of a badass as he says he is. I used to take Taekwondo back in middle school and there were like, 14 year olds with black belts in that. I stopped after I found out the guy training everyone was an avid gun owner. Never take martial arts lessons from a gun owner. Anyway, right near the counter…

: Meet Kenta Yokouchi, aka Toro. Toro was a minor character in Snow Queen back in Persona 1. It’s funny that he’d be a good salesman because his Persona is uh…

: “Hey folks! Great to be back in yet another Persona game!”

: Anyway, Toro is our second rumormonger, and he has a couple of useful ones.

: This one in particular. Each store in the game has.. four sets of rumors I believe. There’s “prices are high but they’re high quality”, “prices and quality are both average”, “prices are low but the quality is bad”, and one about “they have a wide selection but terrible buyback prices”.

: This one is BY FAR the most useful. Why, you ask? It gets you the best weapons at a price that’s not all that much more expensive than usual. That, and once you’ve spread a rumor about a shop, you can’t un-spread it or spread a different one.

: Once we’re done with that, we have to go talk to Chikarin again.

: Kounan is a whole new area we can visit, so let’s do that.

: The Abandoned Factory is a particularly interesting location. It’s basically Innocent Sin’s equivalent to the Mikage Ruins or Devil’s Peak in Persona 1 - that is to say, a giant dungeon where you can fight every demon you’ve run into before. While it’s not nearly as important here (because demons give generic tarot cards instead of spell cards) there’s still some good stuff in there.

: Chikarin told us to go to the fortune teller, which is in Sumaru Genie. Before we do that, we’re going to head to the healer - the neat thing about P2 is that rather than all the healers being doctor’s offices, they’re different types of what I guess you could consider self-care: the one in Hirasaka near Cuss High is a tanning salon.

: If you haven’t read the Persona 1 LP, Maki is a major character in the SEBEC route who also shows up briefly near the end of Snow Queen. Because Hanya is dead, we’ll see some more of her later.

: This also confirms that the Snow Queen route is canon, because Maki is never in the same party as Yukino in the SEBEC route. I like to think that Jihei is sitting in an office somewhere with a trophy for doing Thanatos Tower first.

: Our next stop is the Kounan Police Department, where we meet with this guy. He’s one of the reasons you want to stick with Tatsuya’s canon name.

: Katsuya absolutely looks like he’d be in one of the early SMT games as a demon disguised as a human trying to tempt you into going down the Chaos route.

: He’s not the reason we’re here,though. One thing I missed in this update is that if you look behind where Yukino is, there’s a dog statue. That dog statue works like the lucky cat in the Kuzunoha Agency except it’s better because you get two sets of incense for 10,000 yen instead of just one.

: This is. Talking to the little boy next to this old homeless lady starts up the “Dresser Hag” sidequest.

: You then need to leave the police department and come back in to talk to him again.

: I’m going to skip over some stuff for now. We can’t actually go to Kuzunoha right now without going to Sumaru Genie and one other location, but I want to put this all together.

: This is the Abandoned Factory. You’ll notice the piece of paper on the floor ahead. The factory has notes scattered throughout it and you’ll want to read them all.

: So yeah, the implication is that the factory closed not because of poor performance but because it’s a breeding ground for demons.

: The only place we can get to right now is the service entrance, so let’s head there.

: There’s an Agility Incense right near the entrance, in a red toolbox. This honestly looks like half the maps in City of Heroes and is giving me horrible flashbacks.

: The Dresser Hag is something we want to do because it’s a level 35 miniboss, which guarantees a free levelup for the entire party.

: While it’s got 75% resistance to pretty much everything, the Dresser Hag only has 1 MDEF. For some reason, Atlus cut its stats in half for the PSP re-release.

: The hag mostly attacks with “fire breath” and “ice breath” which are just reskins of Agilao (second tier full-party fire spell) and Mabufula (second tier full-party ice spell), respectively.

: The Dresser Hag is a pretty easy fight, and also gives more than enough EXP to make up for not fighting the boss in Zodiac.

: South from the entrance is another incense in a cabinet.

: What happened when I recorded, by the way, was that I went right to the factory forgetting that you have to spread the rumor first.

: I also picked up a couple of rumors off the genie, including these two which I wind up spreading as soon as we can reach Todoroki again. It’s probably a good idea to do that and go shopping before fighting the Dresser Hag.

: Next up is Honmaru Park.

: Eikichi’s just asking for it.

: And he’s on the ground for the uh… it’s been at least three times since we met him. I wonder if you can get owned so hard your Persona breaks.

: No guesses on what the theme of the next dungeon is going to be.

: Right now though, what we’re interested in is this guy.

: Toku-san is our last rumormonger, and only really has one rumor that might be worth it.

: If you really want to cheese the game, what you can do is spread this rumor about the magazine sweepstakes. This gives you the best possible prizes. What you can do is abuse the hell out of savestates to get some very good equipment (just remember to save BEFORE buying any sweepstakes magazines as the RNG is calculated when you buy them) especially if you’re using savestates on an emulator.

: I’ll get on that as soon as someone can tell me where the savestate button is on this thing.

: “Tamaki-san doesn’t know either.”

: I don’t know if Lisa is modeled after an idol of some sort or not, but given how horny Atlus was for idols in the 90s (especially Satomi Tadashi) I wouldn’t be surprised if she was and Eikichi saying this is some kind of in-joke.

: If you hate Satomi Tadashi’s self-insert character as much as I do, the next few seconds after this are pretty good.

: In the background, you can hear Tamaki beating the everloving shit out of Tadashi.

: “Heheh… an idol, eh?”

: “Lisa, this is no joke! Did you forget that rumors are coming true? You could actually end up debuting for real!”

: “Something’s odd about this poster. It’s like they put these up specifically to make people speculate that Lisa’s the third member…”

: “Another rumor… you think it’s the Masked Circle?”

: “I don’t know why they’d do it, though… guess we should look into this.”

: I don’t think he ever learned anything. I spread the rumors about the shops - always using the “expensive but good quality” modifier.

: Our last stop this update is Tony’s Shop to get weapons that roughly double our party’s attack strength. The best kind of omerta is being too dumb to know what omerta even is. Next update, we’ll go to Mu and watch as an idol is born.

[SpammyV]

Wow, who would make a bunch of video game inserts to gush about the public figures they’re most attracted to? kicks old fanfics into the closet

[LaZodiac]

@Timrod

I also don’t understand how they know he’s a pyromaniac.

I don’t know if a guy starts screaming “burn, bun!” I’d just sort of assume he’s a pyromaniac.

@Timrod

I don’t quite understand how he explains the blue hair - I’m pretty sure his hair is dyed and not one of those anime things where it’s actually that color.

Definitely playing it off as a wig.

I feel like Mu is about where I stopped playing this game, cause I definitely actually remember all of this… but then, who can say.

[Timrod]

Click Here for Update 8

: Welcome to Mu, where the front room is a casino even though I never actually spread the rumor about there being a casino.

: “Looks like they’re arguing over something.”

: It’s strange that the AD doesn’t recognize Lisa as being the third member of Muses. I guess he could be feigning ignorance.

: I wish I was doing videos for this because as soon as this text box goes away, Eikichi runs off-screen.

: “That idiot!”

: “Well, this does save us the trouble of sneaking in! C’mon, guys! Next stop, Muses!”

: I’ll probably spread the rumor about it eventually just to show it off, but the casino in Mu is very different from Judgement 1999 in Persona 1. The machines are numbered, and you can talk to people on the street to find out which machines are the easiest to win on. The only problem is that your win chance depends on Tatsuya’s luck stat, which is pretty low because we’re pumping Dexterity for fusion spell damage.

: I’m glad that Atlus largely got over the whole “everything has to be a maze” thing by the time Persona 3 came out. What I didn’t know going into this is that Mu is actually a really short dungeon.. but at the same time is the start of what is basically a filler arc.

: Surprisingly, our first random encounter is with actual demons. This is kind of a rarity in Mu. Nekomata is the one demon you want to negotiate with here: she’s easy to negotiate with and gives 15 free cards every time you do so once you have a pact.

: Ixtab isn’t worth negotiating with. I made a pact with it and had it immediately broken, and it gives pretty much the same amount of free cards Nekomata does.

: Layout wise, Mu is a lot like the SEBEC building from Persona 1, in that it has staircases that are cut off from the rest of the building. Going the wrong way on the first floor gets us a couple of Rattle Drinks, which are the mid-tier heal item.

: On my way back to the correct route, I got into a fight and Tatsuya’s Persona got a form mutation. Form mutations are basically a special kind of fusion which generally suck. Let me show you why.

: We can see here that Surya can mutate into Fukurokuju, who is a minor arcana Persona. The problem is that unlike regular fusion - where we can fuse and equip Personas up to five levels higher than the corresponding character - we can’t do that with a mutation. By the time we reach level 20, we will have access to Personas way better than Fukurokuju.

: When I said demons are rare encounters in Mu, this is what I meant. Probably a good 60 to 70 percent of the encounters in Mu are with mask cultists. They come in various colors to signify what element they are: blue are water, yellow are lightning, and red are fire.

: Once you reach the second floor (you want to do this from the side that didn’t have the rattle drinks) there’s two sets of stairs you can take. The middle’s totally skippable but has a few items in it.

: Hallways with stairs in them is pretty much the entirety of what Mu is. This one will bring us to the 4th floor.. but not the right part.

: Inside is a St Card, which is used at fusion to give a Persona 5 extra points of strength. It’s not great given that we have an All Incense from the Dresser Hag quest (which gives us 5 in all stats) but it’s there.

: Once we take the staircase further down on the second floor, we wind up behind a rope barrier a few feet from the reception desk in the front. Why they even have this up when the cast are trying to get through, I have no idea.

: It took me practically half the dungeon to run into a Minotaur, notable only because he takes two Mega Blazes to go down instead of just one. This is part of the reason why I was trying to farm cards, because apparently Mega Blaze starts falling off hard around this point of the game and needs to be replaced. I think that might be because the guide authors (including the born-again Christian “dying is not cool the devil is a wimp” guy) never bothered upgrading their Personas.

: Anyway, we go in a loop around the back staircase and now we’re on the franchise floor. This box here is special.

: Faust is a unique encounter who should probably be a mini-boss but doesn’t exactly qualify.

: He opens with Mephistopheles, an attack that causes random status effects to each party member. If he had managed to hit Tatsuya and Eikichi with sleep or charm, this might’ve been a bad time.

: For some reason, Faust’s physical defense is incredibly low. One Pegasus Strike takes him out without further issue.

: Faust drops a Miracle Egg, which is complete overkill right now. I never mentioned it in the Persona 1 LP, but in both Persona 1 and the Persona 2 duology your party recovers SP as they walk. I don’t know why they left that feature out of the rest of the games.

: Faust gave me just enough EXP to level Eikichi to 14. I really don’t understand why Eikichi is the source of like, 90% of all negotiations in this game. I think I’ve used Yukino all of once for that. This one in particular is annoying because Eikichi’s “sing” tactic has a roughly 10-second unskippable animation attached to it. Thankfully, we only need to do this to form the pact.

: I got to the final room of Mu without even encountering all the demons on the encounter list. This was with me getting here and then turning back because I forgot a couple of chests.

: There’s a door on the third floor I passed that leads there.

: We get a pretty good supply of free cards, which we’ll need in just a bit to fuse some Personas.

: Finally, just as I got to the door on the fourth floor, I ran into two of the demons we hadn’t seen yet. Moh Shuvuu is a returning demon, and Ochre Jelly is yet another Slime recolor. Both guides recommend negotiating with Moh Shuvuu, but I didn’t because making them Eager to get cards requires using Lisa’s “dance” tactic, which is another 10-second unskippable animation.

: There’s another demon we didn’t run into, but it’s the least useful one because it gives World cards (not usable for another 20 levels or so) and only a handful of them at that.

: I wonder what’s going to be behind this door? A boss?

: Nope! This is going to be a recurring theme for the next couple of dungeons: we go in, go through some floors, and there’s no boss at the end.

: There’s a cut between these two scenes, so I’m not really omitting anything. You can’t see the animation, but Tatsuya is in fact playing DDR in the background. I forgot how big DDR was in 1998.

: The nickname doesn’t even make any sense beyond being a dumb reference. They’d sound exactly the same.

: I honestly don’t know why anyone would want to be an idol in Japan. There’s the toxic fanbases, the need to keep up a very specific image at all times.. and thirsty game developers making elaborate self-insert characters to ship themselves with you.

: This is one thing I think Persona 2 does really well is showing off the actual hardships the characters are going through. Remember, Lisa doesn’t speak English - she was born in Japan but everyone assumes she does because her parents are non-Japanese.

: Mami also looks really, really off-model in this scene. I’ll show you at the end of the update.

: Giga Macho is our next stop, which I’m doing in the next update because I may or may not have spent my entire weekend getting sucked into Terraria again. Even with the “final update” it still has crazy pacing issues.

: Before we end the update, I made a quick stop at the Velvet Room to fuse a couple of new Personas.

Returning Persona: Nekomata

Origin: Japan

First Appearance: Megami Tensei (NES)

:

: Nekomata is a pretty average Persona, apart from the fact that she learns Zanma. As you can see, the Zan spell line (which did Blast-type damage in Persona 1) now does Almighty damage. This is as close to Megidolaon as we can get.

Returning Persona: Angel

Origin: Christianity

First Appearance: Shin Megami Tensei (SNES)

: Meet the Persona 2 Angel design, also known as Elly from Persona 1 if she was in a mainline SMT game. This is well before SMT Nocturne and the infamous “bondage angel” that has been in every SMT game since the PS2 era. We want Angel for one reason and one reason alone: I had to change Maya’s Persona and without Pixie we’d have no source of healing.

: What I had to change Maya’s Persona to is Fjalar here, not to be confused with Vidofnir. I don’t know how Norse mythology manages to have more than one magic rooster in it. We need Vidofnir for a fusion spell, and that’s about all we need him for.

: I did record a bit of Giga Macho (really just the entrance) so let’s go in.

: Oh no. Next time, we’ll go into a record store. In 1999. I’ll be spending the next week recovering from the YIIK flashbacks. In hindsight, I’m thankful that the Allansons probably never played Innocent Sin.