SIN'S BACK IN: Let's Play PERSONA 2 ETERNAL PUNISHMENT (PSP)

[Timrod]

Summary

: We now have access to Aoba.

: The available areas are all the same ones that were in Innocent Sin.

: We’ve been to most of the stores here in Innocent Sin. The one change here from IS is that Clair de Lune (Maya’s favorite French restaurant that also sells legendary guns) is no longer here.

: Kuzunoha has moved here from Hirasaka, and Parabellum took over for Clair de Lune.

: And there’s that fucking cat. Unfortunately, I didn’t put in enough money in Innocent Sin - mostly because I didn’t feel like spending forever doing it.

: People who played this on the PS1 must’ve been super fucking confused by this. By the way, note that Tadashi is nowhere to be seen - like I said, Satomi Tadashi was kept on a short leash.

: “Well, no. I want to ask something…”

: I looked, and this is more or less a worse localization of his introduction in Innocent Sin. In case you don’t recall, Todoroki is actually the protagonist of Devil Summoner possessing the real Todoroki.

: Speaking of Devil Summoner, Soul Hackers 2 is coming out soon and it looks like the same kind of garbage as Persona 5. As far as I can tell, it has zero connection to the original or to Devil Summoner.

: I might buy it when it goes on deep discount and dunk on it privately, but I have no plans to LP it. The original Soul Hackers, on the other hand…

: “What kind of person was he?”

: There’s pauses in between a lot of this dialog where the party gesticulates wildly, so if it sounds weird, there was probably a pause. The PSP has serious blur issues in video output mode.

: “That’s the Deja Vu Boy. Ma-ya says so, too.”

: “Tell me a little more. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

: “I see… very interesting. The bizarre serial murders, the rumors of the Joker, the sighting of demons… it all makes sense if the rumors are true.”

: “I’ll accept the request to spread that anti-Joker rumor. It’s a good chance to see if a rumor can become reality.”

: “You seem to have accepted that quickly. You’re not gonna report it to the hospital?”

: “Well, then… a real man goes by his own rules. First, ask me to spread the rumor.”

: Todoroki works just like he did in Innocent Sin, with some rumors having multiple outcomes.

: “The request is now approved. Check the results yourself. If you have any other rumors to spread, get information from the rumormongers. They’re everywhere.”

: “That ‘Deja Vu Boy’ seems to be looking for the source of the rumors… I know of a good underground page.”

: We briefly met Baofu in Innocent Sin - primarily through his website.

: I forgot that I had one of these done back when I still used Mr. Saturn as my dialog pic.

: “So you’re saying I wouldn’t believe it…? Oh, well… I’ll know when I see you. We’ll meet at Double Slash in Aoba, Rabbit. Tell the worker my handle, and do what they tell you…”

: “Sounds suspicious… should we go?”

: There’s some optional dialogue while we’re here.

: “Hm? I thought I knew more, but I guess not…?”

: Can you spot Baofu in this picture?

: Meet Baofu. Baofu is a massive dork. He’s also voiced by the same voiceactor who would later go on to play Sojiro in Persona 5.

: I refuse to believe that he’s not Futaba’s real dad.

: I’m not sure if the term “tap buster” is used in the original script or not, but it refers to him being a phone wiretapper. In the West, he’d probably be called a “phreaker” or “phone phreak”.

: Baofu casually lights a cigarette to look cool, because he is a massive dork.

: This is Parabellum. We’ll learn why it’s called that in just a moment.

: “We said about all we know. Now it’s your turn.”

: “From what I’ve researched, the Joker rumors were taken from some TV show, which then started to spread like wildfire. But before that, not even the ‘J’ in Joker was known to the public.”

: “There’s just one exception…”

: We saw Tatsuzou Sudou’s name a couple of times in Innocent Sin - his name is on a sign at one of the parks. As you can guess by the name, he is Tatsuya Sudou’s father.

: As I mentioned near the end of the Persona 5 Royal LP, Hashino ripped off Tatsuzou Sudou fucking HARD when writing Shido. What Satomi Tadashi creates, Hashino steals.

: “How would you know? A wire tap…? That’s illegal.”

: “Don’t be so stiff… it’s been going around that he’s doing some pretty dirty stuff underground. That 10-year unsolved serial arson-murder case… it’s an infamous rumor between police and investigators that it was his son.”

: This is one of the plot points that kinda doesn’t make sense. The entire reason Sudou was an arsonist in Innocent Sin was because of Nyarlathotep.

: In Eternal Punishment’s world, Nyarlathotep was never able to fuck with things, so what they’re directly implying is that Sudou would’ve done all those things regardless of Nyarlathotep’s influence.

: This brings up the entire question of why Nyarlathotep needed him in the first place and didn’t just… you know… start talking to Jun’s father directly.

: “Is that… true!?”

: “What… you don’t know? Either way, about this incident, you don’t think it was a coincidence, do you?”

: " ‘We’ are going to find out about that now. Take me with you. I know where Sudou’s son lives. You guys get clues on the Joker. As long as I’m by the next target, I will get closer to the truth… not a bad deal."

: “…What do you plan to do with the truth? Your objective is blackmail, huh?”

: “Hehe… my intentions are honorable, I can assure you. I can’t let evil prevail…”

: “…What should we do? You’re being targeted, you decide.”

: “You understand what I’m talking about. Well then, let me test something first…”

: Baofu just gets away with turning Parabellum into a weapons shop without having to undergo food torture, which honestly feels kinda unfair to the Innocent Sin cast.

: “Hey… what are you trying to do?”

: “I don’t believe that rumors can come true… so I’m testing it out.”

: “T-Then, does that mean the rumor about the emblem is now true!? Then you’re alright, Ma-ya!!”

: “So whatcha gonna do with the emblem? If you keep it, the Joker will just stay away. You don’t think you’ll run into the Deja Vu Brat anymore…? Think of why he gave you that…”

: Naturally, our first real dungeon is the return of one of the worst dungeons from Innocent Sin, where absolutely nothing bad happened to Yukino whatsoever.

: One thing I learned after the IS LP is that “katatsumuri” is Japanese for “snail”, which made sense given that El Caracol (which is Spanish for “snail”) was on top of it.

: “I see… Amano-kun, let’s check it out.”

: “Hold on! There’s a place called the Velvet Room around here. It has something to do with demons… considering the situation you’re in right now, you’ll need all the help you can get.”

: “Let’s go in and take a look…”

: When I was recording this, I went “What’s the point? I didn’t even negotiate in Seven Sisters…” and then I remembered we have all our spare cards from Innocent Sin.

:“What is that? What does that have to do with anything?”

: I like to think that Katsuya’s Persona is actually his gun. His Prime Persona is a second gun, and his ultimate is another two guns with triggers in his shoes so he can fire with his feet.

: If you equip Lucifer to him, he gets a secret fifth gun that sits on his shoulder that he triggers using eye movements.

: “I don’t even feel like explaining… just follow me…”

: The Velvet Room is now open, for all the good it’ll do us.

: There’s a bit of a tutorial to introduce Igor, Nameless, Belladonna, and the Demon Painter. It’s nearly identical to Innocent Sin.

: There is, however, some optional dialog here I’d like to show.

: I see a stupid-looking boss fight in Baofu’s future. I know that’s at least the second time I’ve linked that video but they just keep giving me the opportunity.

: “Followers of Philemon…? Then, that was not a dream at all… I dreamt about this as a kid… a golden butterfly… masked man… blue room… the night I played Persona with Tatsuya…”

: Satomi Tadashi kind of ran into the same exact problem Araki did with Jojo, in that he kind of ran out of ways to explain how it is that all these people with no connection to St. Hermelin have Personas.

: As it turns out, we don’t actually keep our entire card stash from Innocent Sin - all we get to keep is the free cards we had. While we have enough to do whatever, there’s nothing really worth making.

: There’s no new armor in the armor store, but Parabellum has new weapons. Baofu throws coins because he is a massive dork and probably actually read the Zenigata books.

: Mount Katatsumuri is open now, and it’s every bit as bad as it was in Innocent Sin. Actually, it’s probably worse.

: Unlike Innocent Sin, there’s no chair lift up to the top - only that one road. Let’s take it.

: “Accident? Have you contacted the police?”

: “There’s nothing we can do… I understand, thank you.”

: “What do you think?”

: “This is suspicious. There’s another road down at the bottom of the hill. It’s longer, but it leads to the back.”

: “Alright, let’s take that.”

: In Innocent Sin, we fought a shit-ton of nazis to get up to the top of the mountain. There was a really high encounter rate and an enemy called “SS” that was extremely fast and had an instakill.

: Meet Zombie Solder. Zombie Soldier is essentially the SS… with a twist. It’s still rather fast and has a shit-ton of HP for being level 7.

: Yep. It’s got an instakill move called “Kamikaze”, where it blows up and kills whatever it hits.

: The enemies are also worth basically nothing in terms of experience. As you can tell from Baofu being level 8, we’re a little underlevelled. This is still the time period where Atlus balanced games around how much they expected you to get lost.

: We haven’t seen Baofu’s Persona yet, so let me log it while we’re here.

NEW PERSONA: Odysseus

Origin: Ancient Greece

Eternal Punishment Original

Legendary Greek hero who fought in the Trojan War and masterminded the Trojan Horse plot. Spent ten years coming back home, which is chronicled in the Odyssey. Descended from Hermes.

: Odysseus kinda sucks.

: Puck shows up here, though we’re not going to negotiate with it. Speaking of which, you can’t negotiate with zombies because fuck you, that’s why.

: I’ll take a second and show off all the negotiation skills, however.

: Unlike Innocent Sin, each character only has one negotiation skill. You can still combine them, but it makes negotiating a pain in the ass.

: In this fight, I ran into a Harpy, so I tried using the negotiation guide on GameFAQs… which only lists the name of the negotiation skill, not who has it or what combination of people make it.

: Let me also post the map of Mt. Katatsumuri - there’s a person on Gamefaqs who just made new ones for the PSP version.

: Speaking of maps, there’s something I should mention that the game won’t tell us about for a while. Eternal Punishment has a side quest involving them.

: The side quest is to fully map out every dungeon - you get a reward for each dungeon you fully map out. Some of the rewards are garbage, others are VERY IMPORTANT to get.

: Eventually, we reach a river with a chest on the other side that we can’t reach.

: The enemies on the other side of the bridge are slightly harder, including Ogre and Empusa. And now, one of the two most dickish rooms in this dungeon.

: On the left of the bridge is a hidden area with an item we should probably pick up. The only problem…

: Every encounter in this room, so far as I can tell, is four Zombie Soldiers. If you get bad enough RNG, it is entirely possible that they can wipe you.

: We get a Strength incense, which gives 10 points of Strength when used in a Persona fusion. I could use this to make Katsuya even more overpowered, but I’ll wait.

: There’s also a hidden area we can use to reach that chest, which has a fusion item in it. I’m not sure what this makes, but we might as well grab it. There’s one final dickish secret here.

: Right before the final area, there’s a hidden trail that doesn’t show up on the minimap or the regular map. This leads to a hidden area that, unless they changed it for the PSP, you can only access now.

: Both of those names sound… suspicious.

: Remember the fucking cat in Kuzunoha’s office? The one you had to stand in front of and mash X for like five minutes to donate 10,000 yen in 100 yen increments? Yeah, that’s what this is.

: Donating 10,000 yen unlocks something later in the game, and as I mentioned before, this is the ONLY TIME you can do this. By the time you know why you’d want to, it’s too late.

: I found out after recording how you’re supposed to figure this out. If you make a pact with a Harpy, one of the demon rumors it can give you is about the shrine.

: And done. I timed it, and this took around 6 minutes. On an emulator, I could’ve done it in about thirty seconds. It’s too bad turbo controllers don’t work with the PSP Go.

: And now we’re at the sanitarium. You might notice that Baofu is green - this is because of these assholes.

: Phantoms will attempt to possess a party member before dying. This acts like a confuse effect, but it only procs very rarely. We don’t have a cure for it - the only cure is death.

: Fortunately, just like in Innocent Sin, death fixes itself after battle so you can simply heal up and move on.

: I’m not sure what’s with that expression, and I’m not entirely certain the artist knew either. It’s kind of YIIKesman-esque.

: “Don’t make such a loud fuss…”

: Well, at least we know it’s not Sudou, because he would have set them on fire.

: “They tried, but got killed by demons. Guess that about sums it up. They’re not Japanese.”

: You might ask how he can tell that from just a cursory examination. It’s because of the gun. As far as I can tell, “Kuroboshi” is a mis-spelling of “Kurohoshi”, a word meaning “black star”.

: The Black Star is a kind of handgun manufactured in China, also known as the Type 54. It’s a knockoff of the Soviet Tokarev pistol - which is what Joker used in Persona 5.

: “It’s the Tien Tao Lien… the Taiwanese Mafia. I recognize one of the faces…”

: I also looked this up. There is a real Taiwanese Triad group known as Tien Tao Meng, or “Heavenly Way Alliance”. They’re partially the result of some godawful policies put into place by the Kuomintang.

: “Your buddies…?”

: “Say that again, I’ll put a hole in your face.”

: Whoa there Baofu, casually threatening to shoot people is Kusabi’s thing. Not that I’m saying a Suda51-written Persona game wouldn’t be good…

: This choice doesn’t matter, you get the same dialog either way - at least, going from a copy of the PS1 script.

: “Ch… these guys are dogs of Tatsuzou. He’s been on good terms with them for 5 years when he was the Minister of Justice.”

: “…Wait a second. Why would Tatsuzou and the Mafia attack the very sanitarium his own son was in?”

: Probably the same reason Shido violated the rules of how the Metaverse works to make a sentient clone of his son that can use a Persona for no good reason.

: “How the hell should I know? We came to find that out.”

: And now, optional dialogue time.

: God… dammit… I filled the last LP with Deus Ex clips and I can’t… I even used that one already… god dammit.

: Why is it that both of these games do this to me?

: There’s a Velvet Room here, as well as Trish’s stupidly overpriced healing fountain. At this point, Maya is nearing 200 SP, and a Media from her Persona only costs 3.

: I ran around grinding for a bit, and got an Aques card off a demon. This allows us to get our first real negotiations in, because I want to show you how that works in case you don’t have 700+ cards lying around.

: This is Erinys, one of the first demons we’re capable of forming a pact with. It’s here I learn something really, really dumb about Eternal Punishment’s negotiations.

: Each of the combination negotiation techniques in Eternal Punishment is unique. Costing a Fortune is a combination between Ulala and Baofu… in that exact order.

: Doing it the other way around (selecting Baofu first) actually won’t do anything because we don’t have that technique unlocked yet, but it’s not the same as Costing a Fortune.

: Some of these are a pain in the ass to remember, including “Persuade” and “Advise”, which are Maya/Katsuya and Katsuya/Maya, respectively.

: There is, however, one major change from both the PS1 version and Innocent Sin. In the PSP version, you only need one person in the party who meets the level requirement to make a pact. That person does NOT need to be the one doing the negotiation.

: Tell that to the Persona 5 LP, where we spent… god only knows how much money on fortune telling to avoid permafucks.

: Here’s the annoying part. We have to sit through that dialog four times, with no way to skip it or speed it up, before we get to making a pact.

: We can then use Baofu’s Wire Tapping to get cards.

: What sucks is that there’s one negotiation called 100 Stories, which is only available on Elly’s route because Elly is and will always be the best girl in this entire series.

: 100 Stories has a HUGE amount of optional dialog, and I imagine a lot of it was changed in the patch because you could tell they butchered some in the PS1 translation.

: The Sanitarium is three floors, all shaped like a U. Each arm has a staircase, with one being the “progress” staircase and one being a dead end that usually has an item in it.

: The second floor has exactly one room we can enter out of the like… fifteen pairs of doors that exist on it. All that’s in here is some dialog.

: Well yeah, I mean… that sounds like Tatsuya Sudou, though I’m surprised he didn’t also light a bunch of people on fire.

: Just before we get to the third floor, we run into the worst encounter in this place. Cockatrice is a pain to negotiate with and has a full-party attack that hits twice.

: It’s probably best to just run away from this one, as even with Maya healing every turn I couldn’t keep up with the damage.

: The third floor features a chest you can see from the “progress” side but can’t actually reach without going all the way around. It’s like that one scene with Pyramid Head in Silent Hill 2.

: On the way to that chest, I run into Robin Goodfellow. This is the second demon we can make a pact with, so I do. I then accidentally run into progress.

: You know, why is it that you never once see the party do this in Persona 5? They all have guns, but never think to just clear rooms with them.

: “What… is… this…?”

: In case the blonde hair, single eye, general body shape, knowledge of Innocent Sin’s plot and connection to the Masked Circle weren’t enough clues, Sudou is the Joker.

: In Eternal Punishment’s timeline, Nyarlathotep never had Jun’s father write In Lak’ech with Sudou.

: “The seven Pleiades set the frozen time free. Wild dance, shadowed festival, foreign song ensue. As flames of expiation light the heavens, the lion’s roar echoes far and wide…”

: “Five skulls glow in the depths of the earth… the holy cross shines high up in the sky… once the star comes to a complete halt… the Maia Maiden’s heart stops with it…”

: “What then remains is paradise on earth… marking the end and a new beginning… what does all that crap mean?”

: I can only imagine how confusing this would have been for people playing this in 2000, without having Innocent Sin for context or knowing why the Oracle of Maia is important.

: “Heaven’s cross… is it the ‘Grand Cross’ that occurred this summer? Is… this… some sort of prophecy?”

: “You mean where all the planets in the solar system align in a cross formation…? But nothing happened…?”

: “Does your chest hurt again, Ma-ya?”

: “Again…?”

: You know, I also get this weird thing when I go near my PSP where I remember that horrible dream I had where I LPed that broken version of this game.

: Admittedly, this game looks a lot better on an emulator.

: “This place ain’t normal… this room’s vibes can’t be trusted. Let’s move on.”

: There’s some optional dialogue here, especially if we examine the Oracle of Maia again.

: “I see why Sudou was hiding him… I guess you can’t blame him with such a crazy son. Like father, like son…”

: From what I’ve heard, Satomi Tadashi has some… interesting takes on mental illness - and by interesting, I mean bad.

: This feels like they put it in purely for people who hadn’t played Innocent Sin. It was kind of obvious from the get-go that Nyarlathotep is back at work.

: “He seemed to know about you… but what about you does he know…”

: Just up the hallway, Katsuya’s boss fight senses start tingling again. It’s at this point that I go back.

: This is going to be helpful for making Katsuya less slow. There’s also a chest if we go up the “wrong” way to the fourth floor.

: Another fusion item.

: Going up the “progress” path gets us almost immediately to the director’s office, where we have our next boss fight waiting.

: You might be wondering why Sudou has both eyes, and honestly, I’m wondering the same thing. I wasn’t even sure if the shrine fire incident happened in Eternal Punishment’s timeline, and clearly it didn’t.

: “I see… I feel sorry for that brat.”

: “You’re… Tatsuya Sudou, aren’t you? This serial killing… the killings 10 years ago… you did these, didn’t you…?”

: “You mean back then? Ah… how nostalgic. The voices won’t let me off with just arson. They said they needed a sacrifice. With the chest all carved out alive… with the tendons cut so they can’t escape.”

: “You piece of garbage… how the hell did you get that kind of power being locked up for 10 years?”

: " ‘Kotodama’, y’know, Kotodama. Y’know? You say something, and it’ll happen? The voices tell me anything… that poor excuse for a dad did this to me."

: “Kotodama…? The rumors…? You said that your dad did this to you. Then, why is he after your life?”

: A cell phone starts ringing in the background.

: “Shhhhhhh… it’s from the guys outside.”

: Yep, Baofu just ditched us.

: “I’m free, you got that? ‘I’m coming for you soon!’ Give that message to my fuckin’ dad!”

: “What do you hope to accomplish!? To keep on killing!? To get revenge on your father!?”

: “Hyahaha! I used to kill for pleasure, but now I only kill because people give me a call… right?”

: “…”

: “My real purpose is… to right the wrong. ‘This Side’ is wrong, and the ‘Other Side’ is right. My fuckin’ dad doesn’t understand that… you understand, don’t you?”

: Clearly Sudou doesn’t, because he’s dead on the other side along with everyone else.

: “Ch… how long are you gonna keep up this act!? I’ll make you remember… if this guy doesn’t eat you, come to the Aerospace Museum!”

: One thing I should’ve mentioned is that Eternal Punishment has a LOT of post-consumer recycled Innocent Sin in it.

: Sudou teleports out, and Katsuya shoots at him as he does so. I bet if Katsuya was in Persona 5, he’d have arrested Maruki while Maruki was doing one of his dumbass monologues.

: This fight can be INCREDIBLY annoying, depending on how the boss chooses to act. Hellhound here is immune to fire and repels gun attacks.

: Ulala now knows Magnara, so we can use that to do around 40 damage.

: Meanwhile, a single Aqua from Maya does over 100 damage, because Hellhound is also incredibly weak to water. You might notice how fucked up Katsuya is.

: The Hellhound has two attacks - Venom Bite and Fire Breath. Katsuya nulls Fire, but Fire Breath takes off about half of Maya’s HP due to her being kind of a glass cannon right now.

: What you want to do is have Ulala and Katsuya heal Maya while Maya shits on the boss with water spells. If we had used that Aques card, this would be a stomp.

: I also found out that there’s apparently a link between what Persona you have and what you get at level-up for bonus stats, so we can find a Persona that gives Agility and slap it on Katsuya.

: “You seem to have a reason… did you know him?”

: “Knock it off. They’ll find out without a report from us. Besides, how are you gonna explain this?”

: “I am an officer of the law. I can’t just let it go…”

: Not without a bribe, that is.

: “Heh… you can’t look the other way, huh…? You’re too soft…”

: Next time, we’ll go back to the Aerospace Museum. How much do you want to bet it’s going to catch on fire again?

[SpammyV]

Katsuya should take notes from The Sundown Kid from Live A Live and make his special techniques just shooting faster.

I’m going to bet Nyarlathotep somehow makes the aerospace museum flood this time because something something chaos something.

[Timrod]

Summary

: We’ve unlocked Kounan now, but before we move on, there’s a bunch of rumors we can spread. Some of these I probably should’ve spread before we even did the sanitarium.

: Our first destination is Gatten Sushi in Rengedai, where we can meet up with one of the Persona 1 cast.

: Just like in Innocent Sin, Toro is a rumormonger. He only has one rumor we really care about.

: …He’s asking this, and he has a Persona. His Persona is Mara, just in case you forgot. Anyway, we need this to fix Katsuya’s stats later. I think I’m gonna go for that just to see how long it takes.

: There’s also some… rather important optional dialogue in here.

: And now we know she’s done the Joker curse.

: Before I go off to Time Castle to visit Nyarlathotep, I stop by Kaori to heal because half the party is poisoned.

: It’s never mentioned anywhere in Innocent Sin, but I think one of the world guides tells you that the Count is Nyarlathotep in disguise.

: The Count has two very important functions. The first is that he sells skill cards. If you spread that rumor, then come back and talk to him, you get a second rumor that he duplicates cards.

: Duplication works a little differently than Persona 5 - in this game, you have to give him the card at which point he’ll start selling it. You don’t get the original card back.

: We can also go to Double Slash to get rumors from Baofu’s message board. This one you can actually get before going to the sanitarium, I just… didn’t think to do that. Now let’s head to Kounan.

: Lunar Palace Kounan is where Maya lives. Unfortunately, the Abandoned Factory is no longer this game’s grind dungeon. That has been relegated to one of the worst areas from Innocent Sin and reworked.

: The first thing we want to do here is visit Sumaru Genie. The Sumaru Genie was in Innocent Sin but didn’t really do much. In this game, she’s far more useful… if you’re willing to reset a lot.

: We have to meet her first, and then go next door and… how much do you want to bet there’s a mini-boss rumor surrounding her? Anyway, off to Jolly Roger.

: This guy can give us a rumor about the Sumaru Genie.

: There’s also a rumor you can get in pieces from Toro, Baofu’s website, and the Jolly Roger guy about the magazine sweepstakes. I didn’t touch that in Innocent Sin and won’t here either.

: Rosa Candida now has uh… cowboy outfits. Everyone can wear them. I like to think that Maya and Katsuya are fully into it and Baofu is looking out from under his big dumb cowboy hat with a scowl.

: Anyway, let’s talk about what the Sumaru Genie does now that we’ve spread a rumor about her. She’s this game’s equivalent to Disgaea’s cheat shop… only you can’t pick which cheats you want.

: For 3000 yen, she’ll give you a fortune. You could do this in Innocent Sin but it really wasn’t worth bothering to do it. Speaking of which, there’s some optional dialogue about the genie in IS I missed.

: In IS, you can find out that the genie is actually a trans clubber who started telling fortunes due to a rumor.

: Anyway, there’s six different dragons you can get, with each one changing something. These are permanent until you change them (at least as far as I know). Blue Dragon is the worst one.

: They are:

• Light Dragon (Double exp, half money)
• Black Dragon (Double money, half exp)
• Yellow Dragon (Increases luck, which I think only matters for the sweepstakes)
• Red Dragon (Higher mutation chance)
• Blue Dragon (Changes how demons react to negotiation techniques)
• Silver Dragon (Negotiating takes longer, this is used for grinding Fool cards)

: Most guides will recommend resetting until you get Light Dragon. We’re not going to do that… yet. The reason is that we want to stop levelling the second we hit 23.

: Well, that’s certainly an ominous warning. Let’s go in anyway.

: Damn right! Get these kids out of this museum! We can’t have them learning anything, or else Persona 5 Royal will never sell!

: It’s blurry, but… is that… Jun?

: Oh man, I bet I know what he’s doing here. He’s going to spread a rumor that aerospace museums are a great date spot and then take Tatsuya out.

: What he doesn’t see coming is Tatsuya sitting by all the engines and making airplane noises like he did in Innocent Sin. This is why no one dates at aerospace museums. The temptation is too great.

: “Eh…? Ah… that time! You bumped into a tall guy from Seven Sisters High School, right? I knew I saw you somewhere… so that’s where… then, did you give me this letter…?”

: “Hey, that stuff doesn’t matter now, hurry up and bail! What are YOU doing even listening to him? You’re so vulnerable to younger men! We don’t know where the Voice Man is…”

: You have no idea how hard I groaned when I saw this shit was going to happen again.

: “You remember, it’s just like the Other Side. If you don’t take the kids up here, they become barbecued!! …Hee… ihi… hyaha! Hya-----hahaha-------!”

: This kind of thing is why I say that Eternal Punishment feels less like a sequel to Innocent Sin and more like a remake. So far, all we’ve done is explore the same areas in a different order.

: There is a plot reason for this, but it’s kind of a weak one. The real reason is that Eternal Punishment was made without a budget. I’ll talk about that in a bit.

: At least Satomi Tadashi had the common sense to not make a Marie or Kasumire. We all know if he did, it’d just be Tamaki except with a different hair color and a more revealing outfit.

: “Ch…! Hurry up and get the kids upstairs! You’re Jun-kun, right? Find the teacher in charge and head for the roof! Let’s go check all the floors and make sure no one failed to escape!”

: You might ask if this works exactly like Innocent Sin, with the time limit and the first few floors not having enemies on them. It absolutely does. It is a carbon copy of Innocent Sin.

: I’m starting to think that maybe Satomi Tadashi peaked at Innocent Sin.

: I’m going to skip the majority of this dungeon, because it is 100% identical to Innocent Sin. You can see for yourself: here’s the map of Eternal Punishment’s version and here’s the one from Innocent Sin.

: There is one small difference from Innocent Sin in that the time limit is now 30 minutes instead of 10 - and it now counts down during battles, but not in menus. This is presumably so you can get the full map.

: There’s one room of kids to rescue in the first area, and it’s not particularly hard to reach.

: From there, we run across to the other side and to the exhibit room.

: In Innocent Sin, this is where Maya saved Ixquic from the Zero hanging from the ceiling and overcame her fear of fire. In Eternal Punishment, it’s just another room.

: Nope, no Ixquic here.

: Here’s what I don’t like about this scene. Imagine you’re playing this in 2000 on your PS1 or PS2. You have no idea why the hell this scene exists because Innocent Sin wasn’t localized.

: On the other hand, someone who has played Innocent Sin already knows what the deal is and this scene isn’t going to mean a whole lot.

: On the third floor, we need to stop at Trish’s Fountain.

: We have to talk to Trish first, and then talk to Katsuya and Baofu.

: This is a step to unlocking a negotiation that only appears on Elly’s route. It’s one of the most in-depth negotiations in terms of text.

: On the third floor, we grab a Damascus Steel. It’s another fusion item.

: Since there’s not a whole lot going on here, I figured I’d talk about why this dungeon is recycled. We’re going to see a lot of this throughout the game. The reason can be boiled down to one word: sales.

: There’s a Persona fansite called Persona Central that made graphs of a bunch of sales data from Famitsu. Famitsu only tracks physical copies, and only in Japan - but that’s fine in this case because all of the games we’re looking at came out before digital copies were a thing.

: As you can see, Innocent Sin didn’t even come close to Persona 1’s sales. This is probably for a number of reasons, but mostly that the PS1 was an oversaturated market for JRPGs.

: There’s no hard data on it (at least not that I could find) but as far as I can tell, Eternal Punishment was Atlus trying to get more of a return on the investment they’d put into Innocent Sin.

: “I know… that this sound, this color, this heat is the way it’s supposed to be!! I don’t care if the Grand Cross has passed!! I’ll kill, burn, and destroy everything! The hell with this fake world!”

: “If you still don’t understand what I’m saying, I’ll make you go through the same shit again. From this floor, there’ll be demons… just like the ‘Other Side’, remember? Hyaaaaahahahahahahaha!”

: Moh Shuvuu shows up here, and I got a forced negotiation so I made a pact. I probably should’ve made new Personas for everyone, but it doesn’t matter and you’ll see why.

: Near the stairs to the fifth floor, Katsuya’s boss senses start tingling. Personally, I think Katsuya just has a copy of Innocent Sin’s script.

: We run into Kinnara, and Ulala gets possessed by a ghost. Honestly, I kinda turned my brain off for this dungeon - it’s stupidly easy and I’ve already done it once before.

: Just like last time, the boss is on the fifth floor. Would it have killed Atlus to, I dunno, maybe change up the dungeon a bit? Maybe have you start on the roof instead and go down to the first floor?

: Oh shit, it’s fucking on now. No one grabs Tatsuya’s boyfriend.

: “Guide us like you did on the ‘Other Side’… I won’t screw up like the ‘Other Me’…!”

: Again, I’d like to point out that this makes ZERO sense unless you’ve played Innocent Sin. Also… did Sudou just try to use flower language on Tatsuya’s boyfriend? I’m surprised he’s still alive at this point.

: “Wh… Tatsuya!?”

: “Wh… who is this tall kid over here? Huh!? This is the Deja Vu Boy!?”

: “What!? What’s going on…!?”

: “Hyaha… at last, you’re here, Maya Amano!! Don’t you remember this scene…? Hurry up, rememberrrr!!!”

: Stop. Do not remember that Persona 1 or Persona 2 exist. The series began with Persona 4.

: “Dumbassss! You can’t resist your destiny… 5,4,3…”

: Not quite. In Innocent Sin’s version of this scene, Tatsuya jumps out of the way and Ixquic is the one who winds up hanging from the ledge.

: I’m going to be very real here: this dungeon sucks. It sucks ass. The Innocent Sin version was good because it was a major plot point. This just feels like it’s here to be a call-back.

: “Even if you remember now, it’s too late… die, bitch!”

: And now it’s time for my least favorite thing about this dungeon, next to the boss fight. Oh, there’s a boss fight alright.

: Another thing I hate about this. Jun had a portrait for the exact pose he’s in from Innocent Sin.

: Most of the portraits in Eternal Punishment (apart from characters who weren’t in Innocent Sin) are the Innocent Sin portraits mirrored and slightly re-drawn. How hard would it have been to recycle that?

: I’d say this is another example of Hashino using the forbidden catchphrase from The Silver Case, except this isn’t even a Hashino game. I don’t think Hashino was even on the team for this game.

: “Don’t worry… it’s not your fault…”

: “Tatsuya! Where were you!? What is this all about!?”

: “Deal with it later! We’ve got bigger problems…”

: “But how do we get out of here!?”

: The same way we did in Innocent Sin. I forgot to take a pic of it, but there’s a couple of NPCs in the Satomi Tadashi store in Kounan who will mention the rumor about the blimp on the roof being real.

: “Follow me…”

: “Hey, you don’t think a model will fly… a rumor!? You’re making it fly by using a rumor, huh!?”

: It’s no surprise that they recycled the cutscene for this from Innocent Sin as well. It’s shot-for-shot identical, except for two very brief shots early on.

: “I saw it once…”

: It’s true. Tatsuya didn’t pilot the blimp in Innocent Sin - Maya did, which is presumably why it crashed.

: “Phew… anyways, we seem to be safe for now.”

: “Not yet… Jun, take the controls.”

: As soon as I saw Jun say this, I immediately contacted Salty Vanilla. That’s all I’ll say.

: “Hey, heyyyyy!? What’s this all about!!”

: You can’t see it due to Katsuya’s portrait, but Tatsuya leaves the room.

: I’m not really a fan of this scene. This feels a lot like the Silent Hill movies, where they started shoving Pyramid Head in everywhere they could, even though Pyramid Head had no meaning in that context.

: Sudou is more or less an embodiment of Maya’s fears, and he dies here because this is where Maya’s fears die. In this game, he’s kind of meaningless, especially when you know about Nyarlathotep.

: “Stupid fools… everyone’s wrong… you! That bitch! And my fuckin’ dad!! You’re supposed to correct mistakes!!”

: We’re up against Sudou, two Minotaurs, and two Shax. This boss fight sucks unless you ranked Apollo up in Innocent Sin… and I never used Apollo because his SP costs were way too high.

: Now, let me explain why this fight sucks. This fight is balanced around you having Tatsuya, meaning that none of your other characters matter. In fact, you’re likely going to have everyone die.

: Let’s talk about one thing that absolutely sucks, and that’s this game’s battle inputs. In this fight, Sudou nulls Gun and ABSORBS fire. The game loves to forget what you were targeting between rounds.

: Shax is weak to fire, and Minotaur is weak to magic in general. You might notice that Maya and Katsuya are dead - this is because the enemies tend to focus on one person.

: Here’s the game forgetting about targeting again. I should mention what happened - at the start of the fight, I was using Blazing Burst (Agidyne from Tatsuya, Agi from Katsuya) on the Shax.

: Unlike Innocent Sin, which would break up fusion spells if someone died and then ask you for a new set of commands, Eternal Punishment will assign everyone to a random target without warning.

: Now here’s why this fight is fucking stupid and bad. This is an attack Sudou has when alone called Old Maid. What does Old Maid do, you ask?

: Old Maid randomly “infects” a target with an invisible status effect that replaces their next attack with an attack that hits everyone in your party. If this hits Tatsuya, the entire party will die.

: There is a way around this if you IMMEDIATELY stop combat and have everyone defend… but I assumed the game would tell you if someone had the status effect. It does not.

: This is one thing the later games MASSIVELY improved on. Sudou can and will use Old Maid up to every turn - there’s no cooldown or limit on it. If Tatsuya is alone, it’ll just waste his next turn.

: This shit sucks. It’s a lot like that dumbass sleep-lock dungeon in Persona 1.

: And Sudou’s dead. Again. I mean, I guess he’s right in that Joker makes it all the way to Persona 5.

: In Innocent Sin, the party carried the kids out while jumping. I guess they kinda forgot the kids were there.

: You know, I never thought about how weird it was that Jun’s dad gave him a lighter at the age of… what were they, 7 years old at the time?

: Clearly he’s saving the watch for their wedding.

: There’s another recycled FMV… and then my PSP froze. I hadn’t saved since before fight Sudou, and didn’t bother to check to see if it’s an issue with the hack. I’ll try that when I record for the next update. We may need to go over to an emulator.

[SpammyV]

You think Sudou already knew what the flower meant or did he have to look it up? Was he just really disturbing some flower shop employee or perched like a gargoyle on a chair in an internet cafe trying to find a website?

Also when I was seven I probably would’ve thought a metal lighter that both goes “clink” AND makes fire would be the coolest thing I could own so I can see me carrying one around and giving it to a friend.

[Timrod]

@SpammyV

You think Sudou already knew what the flower meant or did he have to look it up? Was he just really disturbing some flower shop employee or perched like a gargoyle on a chair in an internet cafe trying to find a website?

This is actually kinda funny, because there’s kind of a plot hole in the game that as far as I’m aware only got addressed in some source outside of the game. It’s kind of a minor spoiler, but then again if you played Innocent Sin it isn’t all that surprising.

The actual canon explanation for why Sudou remembers Innocent Sin is that he basically got a copy of the Innocent Sin script from Nyarlathotep, so he probably just paged through it until he found one of Jun and Tatsuya’s romance scenes.

[Timrod]

Summary

: I had to go back through the Aerospace Museum anyway, so here’s a quick addendum to the last update.

: On the second attempt, I fused new Personas for everyone but Baofu. While we don’t really need them, they’re good for one reason: we can use them to gain stat points.

New Persona: Phaleg

Origin: 16th Century Swiss LARPers

First Appearance: Persona 1

Supposed Olympian spirit from a book called the Arbatel of Magick, which was published in 1575 by Swiss LARPers.

: Phaleg is given to Maya, specifically because he boosts Dexterity at level-up. By the time I finished fighting Sudou again, Maya was nearly halfway to maxing out Dexterity… at level 14.

: We fused Surya in Innocent Sin, but he was re-designed for Eternal Punishment. In Innocent Sin, he was a robot-looking thing with wheels instead of legs.

: Surya boosts Agility at level-up, and as such he goes to Katsuya. Baofu is now our slowest party member, but we have no easy way of fixing him right now.

: I also return all of the starter Personas except Helios, who isn’t maxed yet. The Agility incenses go to Katsuya, and I dump the Vitality incence on Maya to make her slightly less fragile.

: This time, I just have everyone defend while Tatsuya dumps Agidynes. I did find out one unfortunate quirk of Eternal Punishment’s battle system that I don’t think existed in Innocent Sin.

: While I was running through the museum, I ranked Surya up and got Maragi. I tried to have Katsuya use it early on, because no one had hit Sudou yet - meaning he can’t heal off it.

: Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite work that way. Even though the Shax and Minotaurs are weak to fire, because Sudou absorbs it the Maragi immediately ends when it hits him.

: I also figured out the trick to surviving Old Maid. Notice how everyone but Tatsuya is defending.

: As soon as the attack went off, Ulala switched from defend to a physical attack. This is how you know Old Maid has hit you. I don’t believe the game will switch spells to physical attacks, though.

: Maya gains two levels, and now has more than double the magic attack of anyone else in the party.

: “…!? Tatsuya…!? Has anyone seen Tatsuya!?”

: I had an idea for a Salty Vanilla pic where Baofu points at the ocean and there’s a snorkel sticking out of the waves, and it’s Tatsuya waiting for the party to leave.

: “Calm down… he’s been through a lot more than you… he probably avoided us and went ashore somewhere else…”

: My screenshot tool fucked up massively on this one conversation and I have no idea why, so pardon the weird resolution. I’m also using the dialog from the PS1 LP because yeah, not doing this again.

: “I don’t know… I just feel I know him from long ago… just a feeling he was someone important…”

: I like to think that Tatsuya is just off screen holding up a sign reading “Jun’s my boyfriend” and Maya and Baofu can see it but Katsuya is totally oblivious.

: “But the Joker is dead now, right?! It’s over… I’m so relieved. I can finally get on with my miserable life!”

: “Moron… nothing is over yet. We still don’t know what Tatsuzou intends to do.”

: “For once, he’s actually right… we haven’t learned anything about the Sudou family, Joker, or Tatsuya… it’s unfortunate that the suspect is dead. I should let HQ know.”

: “Haven’t you learned anything, Suou? You can’t depend on the police…”

: “Say that again…”

: “You’re not only hard-headed, but hard of hearing too? Or is it that you can’t do anything without your badge? Hmph! That’s what I thought. Do you really think you can catch Tatsuzou by yourself? Good luck…”

: Katsuya does, admittedly, kinda suck.

: “Say what you will. Just stay out of my way, or you’ll find yourself in the slammer with Tatsuzou.”

: “I don’t know about you, but I’m quitting while I’m ahead. Ma-ya, don’t get involved… I don’t think I could handle it if you got hurt…”

: “Cowards! What are you afraid of!? It’s the truth that matters! Don’t tell me you’re quitting too?”

: You can’t see it, but he’s looking at Maya when he asks that. She shakes her head.

: “Heh… good for you. I’m gonna head back to my place to see if I can get a bead on Tatsuzou. See if any of your friends at Kismet know anything. I’ll swing by and pick you up later.”

: Our party is gone, and we need to go get them back. The only place we can really go right now (apart from the shops and the Velvet Room) is to Kismet.

: I’m not sure why they bother introducing Chizuru here, because she’s a character who only appears on Elly’s route.

: “You my dear, have a peculiar aura about you. You must let me read your fortune… you… you are feeling that you are not yourself? You are worrying about a younger man…”

: “Tell me, do you enjoy life? Are you glad you came into this world?”

: I mean, it could be better.

: You might be asking if she’s Nyarlathotep in disguise again, and the answer is surprisingly no.

: “Where were you before… in your past life? Another country? Or maybe… another world… Humans are connected. Not only to the past, but to themselves in another world… you will change… along with this world…”

: Chizuru clearly forgot that they got rid of that for Ni no Kuni 2, though I think we all know that Maya’s isekai realm counterpart is some kind of gremlin.

: “Please excuse me, but I must be going.”

: When we leave the editor’s room, Chizuru leaves the building.

: Wait a second, this is just scientology.

: “Joka is a dragon, filled with Kegare. The Guardian Dragons will absorb bad luck during this cycle… it is a much more powerful negative trend than that of ‘Tenchusatsu’ or ‘Ankensatsu’.”

: Gesundheit.

: “Kegare calls forth further Kegare, and Joka causes sin to increase… the more people sin, the greater Kegare’s power becomes.”

: “It is cause and effect… you must not let jealousy and petty grudges consume you! You must not perform the JOKER curse!”

: You know, I wonder if dialing your own number to get your voicemail counts for that, because that was a super common method of getting to your voicemail in the pre-smartphone era.

: I mean, no, that’s how the entire stupid plot to fool Akechi into thinking he’d killed Joker worked. Also, his real name is John Persona.

: Chief Togashi is in Innocent Sin, but unless you’re one of those people who runs around to every location to check on every NPC, you’ll probably never know he’s there.

: “Sir! Then, what about that blimp!? Something that wasn’t supposed to fly was flying!”

: “What fire…!? What are you talking about? I was just there!”

: “That can’t be…”

: “It’s a waste of time to keep investigating! We should be tracking down Tatsuzou!”

: It’s blurry because of the PSP resolution, but there’s something here you might recognize from the sanitarium - and it kind of makes no sense that Katsuya doesn’t.

: The phone records have a thousand calls from someone named Yusuke, and then a handful listed internally as “HORNY (DO NOT PICK UP)”.

: I’m also pretty sure that phone records don’t work that way. Even if the shadowy conspiracy asked for the records of anyone who called their own number, how could they know it’s for the Joker?

: When I said that Hashino stole the entire plot for Persona 5 from this game, this is what I meant.

: Here’s what I don’t get about that, by the way. You see Chizuru leave the Kismet building - did she have a TV crew waiting outside?

: What Baofu doesn’t realize is that Maya did the Joker curse, except she called Persona 5 Joker and now she’s getting sudden urges to clean her room and eat something that isn’t canned crab.

: “It’s Tatsuzou… that bastard torched the sanitarium to destroy the evidence. Even on the blimp, he must have had someone watching over his son… that bastard has got his hands everywhere.”

: “I tapped his home telephone, and they were talking about plans to finish someone off. I couldn’t tell who the ‘mark’ was though. So what do we do now?”

: We all know what Maya really wants to say is “Let’s go get French takeout”.

: “I’m not too hip about it, but there seems to be no other way… he’s the only way we can get information from the cops. If that woman’s fortune telling airs, the whole city could be in danger. Damn… what a pain…”

: Didn’t it already air? Wasn’t that why it was on TV? Our next destination is the police station to go pick up Katsuya.

: “I figured… the fortune telling went on TV and became a rumor, causing everyone who used the curse to become a Joker…”

: One of the rejected ideas I had for a Salty Vanilla image was the Persona 5 party all dressed like Joker after calling him.

: "It pains me to say this, but we can’t rely on my colleagues. They’re only making things worse…’

: “Hehheh… a little bitter, aren’t we…? Just leave this to us…”

: “I can’t do that… I would rather turn in my badge than just turn my head. I’m going with you.”

: “Do whatever you want…”

: I bet we’re going to walk into Gold and find Ulala dressed in checkered pants and a black jacket with a dumbass mascot shadow hanging off her shoulder.

: “What…? Don’t tell me… was she using the Joker curse as well?”

: “If that’s true, Serizawa-kun is going to become a murderer… who would she curse!? Amano-kun, you must know someone who Serizawa-kun didn’t get along with…”

: “Anything is helpful. Try to remember…”

: In case you don’t remember this guy, his name was Makimura. He was… honestly just kinda there when we did GOLD as a dungeon in Innocent Sin.

: I have absolutely no idea how this doesn’t count as remembering that Innocent Sin happened.

: Ever since I played No More Heroes 3, I associate the phrase “Hey, what’s wrong?” with Travis Touchdown cutting shit in half.

: “Huh…? Are you saying you’ve never met this guy, but you recognize his face?”

: “What do you mean…?”

: “That ‘deja vu’ stuff again… anyway, let’s apprehend that con-artist. We can’t let Serizawa-kun commit a crime.”

: “I don’t understand, but you can tell by looking at his face, right? What do you wanna do, just look around? Wait… let’s drop by Hirasaka first.”

: “Rumor says the head of an Izakaya bar has services for locating people… there may be clues.”

: This is most of what we’re going to do this update, because the next dungeon is another copy-paste from Innocent Sin and requires a significant amount of grinding.

: There’s actually a second dungeon we could do here - that being Kasugayama High. Remember the bomb shelter? That is this game’s Abandoned Factory. We won’t be bothering with it just yet.

: Shiraishi Ramen has been turned into an izakaya.

: In Innocent Sin, we turned this lady into a Russian spy who also had a legendary guitar gun. In Eternal Punishment, she’s a sidequest instead.

: And now we’re off to Parabellum.

: “I see… we have reason to believe a woman who was swindled used the Joker curse for revenge. We were sent to protect him… but… if you aren’t the man we’re looking for…”

: “That’s all we need, another dead body… poor bastard… it’s probably too late.”

: “Gotcha… hey nee-san, next time learn to be a better judge of character…”

: “Amano-kun, where would Serizawa-kun be?”

: GOLD sucks ass and we’re kinda underleveled, so let’s do something else.

: Now that we’ve unlocked GOLD, we have access to Peace Diner and another rumormonger.

: We need that first rumor because it’s one of the best ways to make money in this game… if you’re using savestates or save-reloading.

: For purposes of this LP, casino savestating will be legal as a means of skipping money grind. All PSP custom firmwares have native access to savestates, and this hack is only playable on CFW.

: Toku was a rumormonger in Innocent Sin who lived in the park in Rengedai. In Eternal Punishment, he now stays at Shiraishi.

: We can get this rumor after visiting Parabellum, and we want to use it because it gives us access to some very easy money.

: I’m not sure if this is better or worse than the blackjack rumor, but I went with it anyway.

: I went to go spread some rumors, and remembered that there’s a reference to Devil Summoner in Todoroki’s office.

: If you check this bookshelf behind Todoroki, it opens up and gives you a magazine. This allows you to buy a soundtrack CD to play on Maya’s stereo.

: Man-Searcher is an extremely easy sidequest if you’re using a guide. You pay a small fee up front, and then collect ten times that fee as reward money when you find the target.

: This guy is our first target. he’s in the back of Time Castle, behind Nyarlathotep.

: You have to guess their names, because apparently hunting people down for money follows the Rumplestiltskin rule.

: I forgot to take a shot of the name entry screen, but all you have to do is enter the name as it appears on the request and you get paid. This is from the second target, who is in Kismet’s editorial room.

: By the time I get the last available one done, we’ve made over 60,000 yen. We’re going to need this money to take advantage of a little exploit for stat-maxing.

: Also, let me explain why we’re not doing GOLD this update. It’s because I made a horrible mistake. GOLD is an exact replica of the Innocent Sin version.

: It has a bullshit high encounter rate, including the return of Faust from Innocent Sin. Faust can cast Gry and hit the entire party (Maya included) for half their maximum HP or more.

: I got Baofu a new Persona that increases his Dexterity. This is still good because it boosts his pathetically low magic stats, even if it’s not Agility. Then I made a mistake.

: Early on in GOLD, you can find a Rainbow Light in one of the dressing rooms. This allows us to fuse Iris - which at the time I thought “Sure, why not, it has a heal and I need a heal”. This was a mistake.

: Iris is only compatible with Maya. She’s weak to wind, which almost everything in GOLD uses. She also broke my one fusion spell because she lacks Aqua. But that’s not the worst part.

: You see the “Agility +1” level-up bonus? That’s bad. To understand why, we need to remember how fusion spells work in Innocent Sin - and this is something I forgot.

: Fusion spells are boosted by the Dexterity of the last person in the casting order. This means that you want the person with the highest Dexterity to also be the slowest person in the party.

: I uh… kinda forgot about that when I did the Innocent Sin LP, because Tatsuya had 99 Dexterity and 99 Agility.

: I’m going to re-record most of this and not fuck up again for the next update.

[Timrod]

: Oh, right. I forgot that I have a new pic from Salty Vanilla. In this one, Futaba finds out who her real dad is.

[Timrod]

Summary

: GOLD is completely unchanged from Innocent Sin, apart from some of the doors being locked.

: “It wouldn’t happen to be Ulala Serizawa, would it? Is she alright?”

: “Isn’t there any way to open the gym from the outside?”

: I mean, given that Katsuya (presumably) has the power to light shit on fire, you’d think he could simply burn the door down.

: “I see… thanks for your help, Miss. We’ll take it from here.”

: This is one of the two rooms we can still enter. I didn’t get a shot of it because it’s flashing when it’s on screen, but Maya briefly sees the weight bar Sudou tried to drop on her in Innocent Sin.

: This sounds like a joke, but no. That’s actually where we need to go. It’s on the third floor.

: There’s some optional dialog here if we talk to Katsuya.

: If you come back into this room, the guy in the back is gone. Katsuya straight-up deleted that man.

: The boxing gym is right across the hall from where we entered the dungeon. Before we go in though, I’d like to show you what a kick in the dick this dungeon is if you decide to do any more than the bare minimum.

: Nekomata is a frequently-encountered enemy who is both very fast and has a spell called “Blow a Kiss” that is effectively a full-party Marin Karin. Iris also has it, but it almost never works.

: Here’s the problem - this happened to me at least twice on my recording run, and if it does, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to game over. You can still attempt to run from the battle.

: That is, unless you’re playing on hard mode. Hard mode is fucking broken in that you can’t run without using an item or a skill… neither of which are available at this point in the game.

: Also, half the enemies in GOLD have some form of insta-kill. That’s always fun.

: “We’ve arrested Youichi Makimura. The law will punish him. There’s no reason to throw your life away just for this low-life…”

: “Listen to Suou… Makimura will get what’s coming to him. So…”

: This is from my first run. You might not think there’s any real difference between the two dialog options… but there is.

: If you pick the second option, Ulala turns around and punches Maya. This means Maya starts the boss fight with half HP.

: Ulala has been Jokerfied. Funny enough, this will be the first time we fight a boss in GOLD - there wasn’t a boss in Innocent Sin’s version.

: When I was recording, I thought Iris was a terrible Persona to bring - she’s weak to Wind, which makes up most of Ulala’s attacks. When I reviewed the recording, I noticed Maya was only taking 1 damage.

: Most guides recommend bringing Arianrhod, because Arianrhod has Wind Wall, which nulls Wind for one person for the entire fight. The problem is that Arianrhod fucking sucks.

: Now, here’s why this fight sucks. Remember Sudou’s “Old Maid” attack?

: Yeah. She has that. If Maya gets it, the entire party is probably dead. Let’s cut to my second attempt. I was using the same Personas here, except I gave Phaleg to Katsuya instead of Surya.

: Picking the first option makes it so that Maya doesn’t get hit for half her health. That’s always a plus.

: The second time around, I have Maya use Magnara while everyone else defends. This isn’t the most efficient way to do this fight, but it works.

: Ulala also has a very powerful physical attack, which hits Maya especially hard due to her near-total lack of physical defense.

: Here’s the exact moment the fight goes to shit. As it turns out, the trick I mentioned with Old Maid in the Sudou fight doesn’t actually work, or at least it doesn’t work in this fight for whatever reason.

: Fortunately, Maya is basically impervious to magic and Katsuya and Baofu both suck at magic so she’s not in any real danger, but Katsuya dies.

: Maya gets an agility point, making her slightly faster than Baofu or Katsuya.

: “Whatever… I do… I usually fail…? I’ve taken extracurricular lessons, obtained licenses… but, never found a future in them. It seems… that Ma-ya had everything… sorry… I’m… such a fool…”

: Uh… what. Maya’s a borderline shut-in with daddy issues who lives in a trash heap.

: If you pick the top answer, you are locked out of all contact options between Maya and Ulala for about half the game. You also don’t get Maia Prime, which… honestly, Maia Prime kinda sucks anyway.

: “Nice try, Makimura… we all know what you want to happen… if Serizawa dies, the evidence to put you away goes with her… do you think we’re that stupid?”

: “You son of a…”

: “Hold it, Suou. Let me handle this. I wouldn’t want you to get in trouble.”

: God I wish the characters in the Hashino games were like this. Imagine that scene in P4 where they have Nametame in the hospital and somebody just fucking decks him for being too dumb to live.

: Or that scene at the end of vanilla Persona 5 (which I forgot to do in the LP) where Sae makes her dumbass suggestion that Joker turn himself in and Makoto redeems herself by punching her sister out.

: “W…wait… he’s right…”

: “Thank Serizawa-kun for that one… if I ever see your face again, I’ll personally hunt you down!!”

: “Amano-kun… we should get her to a hospital.”

: “Hmm… so that’s it… a Joker is the same as a Persona…”

: It is absolutely canon that at some point in Persona 5, Yusuke discovers he can summon his boyfriend by shouting “Persona!” and Joker abuses the hell out of it to not pay for train fare or movie tickets.

: “No doctor can help her… if you want to yank that demon out of her, I know a place…”

: “You’re talking about the Velvet Room, right? I guess we’ve got no choice… let’s hurry…”

: Igor pulls out his cell phone, which is how he summons Personas in both this game and Innocent Sin.

: Now, here’s my question. If Igor did this to Joker, what happens? A Caroline and Justine situation? Joker having himself as a Persona? Joker having Jun and/or Tatsuya Sudou as Personas?

: I guess this explains why Joker doesn’t die when Yaldabaoth erases him from existence - it’s the Law of Conservation of Joker. Joker can neither be created, nor destroyed.

: “Ugh… M…Ma-ya…?”

: “You’ve come around… you can rest easy, Serizawa-kun. But…”

: “The rest is up to me, right? I heard… I’m really sorry, Ma-ya… I know I can’t change what I’ve done, but I promise I’ll be there when you need me…”

: “Uh… my grandmother always said to repay your debts… thank you… Ma-ya…”

: Oh good, they’re already dating.

: “So Noriko was the one behind the murders of the principal and the hit-and-run suspect… but why would anyone start kidnapping people who’ve used the Joker curse…?”

: “I’m sure we’ll find out when we get down to that club… I’ve got a bad feeling about this…”

: Before we leave, there’s a PSP-specific bit of dialog if we talk to Igor.

: I have no idea what he’s talking about. It seems like originally they planned for you to find an actual item, but probably got rid of it because all the dungeons are one time only.

: So yeah, the whole “Don’t fuckin’ remember the other side!” bit was just tossed out the window. This is how we unlock the first of three parts of Tatsuya’s Scenario.

: Tatsuya’s Scenario is probably non-canon. It’s also mostly a visual novel. Unfortunately… it was also made with the assumption that you’ve already played Eternal Punishment before touching it.

: It spoils a couple of major plot points that won’t appear until the end of the game. It’s kind of impossible to cut those out, because Tatsuya repeats them a few times.

: There is one thing I want to point out with Tatsuya’s Scenario, though. All of the items and money from the main game are shared. This works both ways - any items you pick up in Tatsuya’s Scenario are available in the main game, and as far as I understand it this includes if you quit out without finishing it.

: Tatsuya gets a couple of really powerful healing items early on, so it might be worth it if you’re playing this for yourself to mash through (or fast-forward) through the dialog to get them.

: Each time you go into Tatsuya’s Scenario from the main game, your progress resets. Theoretically, if I felt like it, I could farm up 99 Beads and use those in the main game.

: We can actually use this to do a little gamebreaking later on - in Part 3 of Tatsuya’s Scenario, there’s a spot where you can get infinite Fool cards, which otherwise have a VERY small chance to drop.

: Oh, right. I should talk a little bit about the mechanics as well. In Tatsuya’s Scenario, you only have access to Apollo and can’t negotiate. The first fight we have access to is against two Byakhees.

: This is the reason I don’t want to do this scenario just yet - because I didn’t bother to rank Apollo up in Innocent Sin, Tatsuya only has access to Agidyne and one other crap physical move.

: You might ask “Well, why not just rank Apollo up?” and that’s a valid question. There’s two reasons for that. The first is that even though Apollo’s SP costs were nerfed in Eternal Punishment, they’re still very high at 39 per spell, and we don’t have a lot of SP recovery items.

: The second is because of this motherfucker. Picollus has a move that was in Innocent Sin, but that we never actually saw get used because we nuked everything with fusion spells.

: The move is called Hula of Misfortune, and it causes you to lose half your money. Remember, money carries over between the main game and Tatsuya’s Scenario.

: This was the second random encounter past that Byakhee fight, and Tatsuya was already down that much SP. I should mention that Picollus is a common encounter in this area.

: My plan is that when I do this part, I’m going to probably do some casino grinding and max out on healing items and SP recovery before starting it, since Tatsuya also can’t buy anything.

: Next update, we’ll do Zodiac - a dungeon that has several gimmicks that I’m going to have to grind for.

[Timrod]

Summary

: Before we go into Zodiac, there’s a rumor we can get on the street about Teke Teke. Teke Teke is a bitch to find - you have to use Estoma or a Clean Salt to make it so only it can appear and it sucks.

: Zodiac has a bunch of gimmicks, including a returning one from Innocent Sin. Will I be showing any of them? FUCK NO! You’ll see why.

: “Eh…? Tatsuya’s…? Tatsuya, where is he now? That’s right… Tatsuya and I hung out here a lot… He’s really bad, but he’s so kind… but lately, he’s been acting up, and not been around…”

: Clearly they were forming a gay support group to deal with difficult situations, such as Jun demanding that Tatsuya go out to the fifteenth garden place this week because it might have new flowers.

: “What did Tatsuya say before he disappeared?”

: “Atone for my sins… was what he said. Whatever that means…”

: “Sins…”

: “So where are these people that’ve been supposedly kidnapped?”

: “… I see.”

: “Then leave Noriko-chan and Tatsuya-kun to us…”

: If you’ll remember, Innocent Sin had a gimmick where there were two versions of Zodiac, depending on whether you spread a rumor or not.

: If you go into the back now, you’re locked into the shorter, non-maze version. The maze version gives you a couple of skill cards, including one we’ll probably want for a bit later.

: Now I’d like to talk about this dungeon’s gimmick. If you pick the shorter version, all the chests have already been opened - this is because Tatsuya does it in his scenario.

: The maze version has a gimmick with damage floors. They can be removed… but good luck doing that without savestates.

: The two most common encounters here are Taiwanese mafia guys and Zombie DJs, neither of whom can be negotiated with.

: Jack Frost is a much more rare encounter, and we need him to get rid of the damage floors. To do this, we have to use a negotiation technique between Ulala and Katsuya.

: Getting that negotiation technique requires something I didn’t show - you have to talk to Katsuya at Sumaru Prison BEFORE you pick up Makimura. I don’t think you can get it after that.

: Now, here’s why this sucks and I’m not doing it. First, the drop rates on demon rumors are ABYSMAL compared to Innocent Sin. I went two hours without it dropping.

: Second, even if we got the rumor to drop, there’s a pretty good chance we wouldn’t get it anyway. The reason for this is that when we finished GOLD, we unlocked a new set of demon rumors.

: I never showed them off in Innocent Sin because they were useless, but there are certain demons that have rumors which upgrade a spell on them - the first one being Jack Frost.

: What this means is that we have a 50% chance on top of whatever garbage droprate to actually get the correct rumor.

: Zodiac is the first dungeon to not be totally re-used. In fact, only the front part of Zodiac (before the dungeon entrance) is the same. Here’s the Eternal Punishment map compared to Innocent Sin’s.

: You’ll notice that there’s no required damage floors here - they’re basically a shortcut if you can remove them, but I have a much easier shortcut.

: Instead of spending two more hours getting the rumor, I simply ranked Iris up a few times to get Media. With Maya’s stats, she can full-heal the party for 24 SP.

: The damage floors do hurt a lot, though. This was from one step in - I think the damage is mitigated by magic defense, which is why Maya has taken way less damage proportionally.

: This might sound dangerous, but being on a damage floor turns off random encounters, so as long as you heal before stepping off you’re fine.

: I start running around collecting the items. What I really want is the Media card. This is because we can use it to grind Persona ranks while AFK - you set one person to heal and then turn on autobattle.

: There’s two ways to do this dungeon - you can either go to the right side of the first floor and skip a bunch of stuff, or you can do the left side first if you want to see everything.

: The right side has this door labelled “Secret Casino”, but we need a password to get in. Unlike Persona 5, if you already know what the password is, you don’t need to find it in-game to open the door.

: I get in a fight with three Jack Frosts and a Kiyohime, and Kiyohime drops the Atomic Bufula rumor.

: Then, in the same fight, Jack Frost drops the rumor I’ve been looking for. As far as I can tell, the best way to farm it is to go to the second floor, where the zombies and mafia guys are less common.

: You then make a pact with Kiyohime, a pact with Jack Frost, and a pact with either Tengu or Fjalar.

: Once we spread this, all the damage floors go away. Interestingly, the spots where they were still block random encounters.

: This spot here is where we need to go for the password. It’s on the left side of the third floor and doesn’t connect to the casino area.

: It’s a neat touch that Baofu and the Taiwanese mafia guys all speak Chinese.

: You know, it almost would’ve made more sense for this to be one of those “you actually have to find the password to use it” things because it would be in Chinese and only Baofu can pronounce it.

: Ignore the Hiragana, my controller kept losing connection to my PSP during recording and I think this was the consequence of me trying to re-sync the bluetooth connection.

: You know, for an illegal backroom mafia casino, this sure looks a lot like a mahjong parlor. You’d think there would be more slots or obvious card game tables or something.

: Unfortunately, the mafia leader doesn’t have a portrait on the wiki. The wiki is kind of severely lacking in portraits for Eternal Punishment compared to Innocent Sin.

: “Who is he…?”

: “Yung Pao… a lowlife assassin…”

: “Assassin…!? What… why was a guy like that… at the police station!?”

: Even though the Tien Tao Lien are based off a real organized crime group, Yung Pao isn’t based on a real person as far as I know.

: I mean, considering the average Taiwanese mafia guy has a couple hundred HP and Baofu has a starting Persona with a multi-target spell, this actually makes sense.

: “Shut your face, Yung Pao! Tell me what you know before you die… what is Tatsuzou planning…? Come clean and I’ll kill you painlessly…”

: “I’m tired of playing your games, Yung Pao! Where are the people who have been abducted!?”

: We are now in what is easily the worst boss fight yet. To get an idea of what we’re up against, Joker Noriko has 1220 HP. The two mafia guys (who are on her side) have 480 each.

: The mafia guys hit very hard, Noriko has Marin Karin (which hits nearly 100% of the time) and even worse…

: She has buffs and debuffs. I checked the list of every Persona in the game, and there is exactly one within a reasonable level range that even has a buff - and that’s a mutation-only Persona.

: Oh, and then there’s the worst part. Noriko can buff her Agility to ensure she goes first, and then immediately casts Old Maid after you’ve already locked in your actions.

: You can avoid this by mashing circle, which will cause the game to go back to the menu when your turn comes up, but it’s still kinda bullshit. In any case, doing this with our current Personas will be hard.

: Noriko is weak to fire, and we need something that hits all enemies. There is a way we can do this, but it would require a significant amount of grind.

: I decide to try and follow the guide made by the patch author, which suggests fusing Kinich Kakmo for Katsuya. Do not do this.

: You see, Kinich Kakmo is weak to guns. The mafia guys use guns, and can now kill Katsuya in one hit. This is about the worst Persona you could possibly use for this fight.

: The problem with this fight is that it is extremely RNG-based. Ideally, Noriko will only use her water spell - which you can actually plan for - and spend the fight wasting her turns.

: I loaded a save from before I wasted a bunch of cards on Kinich Kakmo and then I just set the game to Easy mode. I probably could’ve done it on Normal if I grinded for a few hours, but nah.

: On the third attempt, I figure out a strategy that actually probably would work even on Normal - but I don’t feel like testing that. Baofu, Ulala and Maya can use Towering Inferno.

: Normally, Towering Inferno sucks because it takes three people and hits a single target for not much more than one person’s worth of damage… but in this case, Maya is the final caster, so it gets her Dex bonus.

: There is one better way I could’ve done this, which would have been to buy an Agi card from Time Castle and throw it on someone so they can Blazing Burst with Maya.

: Even on Easy, the mafia guys are a huge problem, but we take Noriko out in four turns.

: She uses Malaques exactly once, which is the only time I saw her do it in any of the three attempts I made. So much for the Water Wall strategy.

: “Looks like she’s just unconscious… poor thing…”

: “Damn, he got away…”

: “Baofu… is what he said true?”

: I mean, we’ve killed at least a few dozen of those guys on the way up here, unless they were all Nyarlathotep in disguise.

: “So what if it is…? They’re hunted in Taiwan for being impure. No matter how many are killed, people should be grateful.”

: This line probably could’ve used a little work, since it’s identical to the PS1 version. Something more like "They’re scum.

: “This is out of your jurisdiction! You don’t have what it takes to handle this! Just back off, Suou!”

: This will make more sense when we know what Baofu’s backstory is.

: “You’re well versed on inside information regarding the police and mafia… who are you…?”

: The first thing I thought of when I saw this in recording was Kusabi arresting Noriko’s Joker and bringing it downtown. Big Dick asks him if it’s Kamui, and Kusabi shrugs. “I dunno, probably?”

: “Thank you…”

: “Well, well… it seems that our by-the-books policeman is a softie after all…”

: “Hmph! All that means is that the law can’t adjudicate in this situation… you’ve got your hands tied, Suou…”

: I mean, the cops had a phone log of Noriko calling the Joker line, and then Sudou showed up and killed the principal. It’s not like Persona 5 where you’d have to explain the Metaverse in court.

: “There are many who need to be judged before her… Tatsuzou, the Mafia, and the traitors within the Police… I’ll find the cancer…”

: You’d think he’d already know who the corrupt cops are, given that he saw the Taiwanese mafia guy in a meeting with his direct supervisor and the police chief.

: “What…!? Who are you?”

: " ‘Sneak’, you say…? As in ‘sneaky’, huh? Sounds suspicious… what do you plan to do?"

: Next update, we’ll go for a walk in the park. I also plan to do some grinding on an emulator so I can show off how to stop Katsuya and Baofu being the slowest people alive.

[Timrod]

: Here’s a new pic from Salty Vanilla showing what actually happened when Baofu tried to turn Parabellum into a gun store.

: Also this one, where Tatsuya describes in great detail how he remembers Jun post-timeline shift. There’s a loophole for remembering boyfriends.

[Timrod]

Summary

: There is some stuff we could do before going into Aoba Park, but we might as well just go in. I bought new armor at Rosa Candida, but… there’s actually a much better way we can use that.

: This footage is all from a first recording run, where I accidentally ran into the end cutscene without doing the major sidequest in the park.

: Right around the corner from where Kuzunoha’s is, there’s an old guy who gives us the rumor from Innocent Sin about the flowers being able to talk. We DEFINITELY want to do this.

: Your real goal here is to find the answer to the purple flower’s question and answer it correctly. Like the password in Zodiac, you don’t actually need to find the answer if you have it already.

: Parika is an extremely common enemy here, and a good source of cards if you need them.

: Near the entrance is a box with a White Bandana, which increases Luck by 2 when equipped. This is barely better than Maya’s starting accessory.

: Oh right, the map. Eternal Punishment’s version of Aoba Park is largely identical to Innocent Sin’s. Some of the damage floors got shuffled around.

: Gandharva and Hel are both new enemies that are frequently encountered together. Gandharva is annoying in that he can spam status effects.

: I hit a damage floor and it barely does anything… and then I realized that I still had the game on Easy. Easy feels like Innocent Sin’s default difficulty.

: The orange flower is right near the end of the park, and I accidentally wandered in shortly after talking to it.

: Right near the final flower is an SP drain trap with a pretty good item on the other side. The Mechanical Hat nulls critical hits, which would have been useful several hours ago.

: Before we go back and finish the flower puzzle, I’ll just post the next story bit since it’s here.

: Oh come on, that’s so obviously the police chief it’s not even funny. Why Katsuya doesn’t recognize his voice is beyond me.

: The New World Order is Eternal Punishment’s replacement for Hitler and the Last Battalion. I feel like it’s not as good, mostly because it lacks the “out of left field” value that Hitler had.

: What’s funny is that Eternal Punishment uses the Hitler theme in a number of places, including the video that plays on the title screen and in Tatsuya’s scenario. They did not want to let that go.

: " ‘New World Order’, you say…? What is their objective… what is Tatsuzou planning!?"

: Probably to raise an alien spaceship and fulfill the Oracle of Maia.

: “If you don’t talk, then we’ll just bust into the station and corner Shimazu and Togashi.”

: “No, definitely don’t raid the police, because I am definitely not a cop!”

: “You… know my father!?”

: Katsuya is so clueless that I feel like the chief could throw his police badge over his shoulder, have it land directly in Katsuya’s lap facing up with his name clearly visible, and Katsuya would go “I wonder who that belongs to?”

: I miss Kusabi.

: I feel like Katsuya would be right at home with the Persona 4 cast in terms of being clueless.

: You know, I don’t know why the photos would have to be blurry - no one in the party went to St. Hermelin, so it’s not like anyone would recognize them right off.

: “Isn’t this… voyeurism?”

: “It’s just too fishy… I don’t trust him.”

: “No, I think we can trust him… that was the voice of a man atoning for his sins…”

: “Well, how are we gonna find them with just these pictures…? Ah! I got it! Just spread a rumor… so, let’s go to Kuzunoha!”

: Now, here’s the dumb part: even though we go back to Aoba Park later, we’re now locked out of the park. I don’t know if you can do the flower sidequest on the second visit or not.

: There are two other flowers we can get information from, but not only do we not need them to solve the puzzle, they’re way the fuck out of the way. We’ll see that in a minute.

: Before we do though, I’d like to show off how it is I spent all the party’s money on the re-recording.

: Kuzunoha’s cat now wants ten times the amount it did before - 100,000 yen instead of 10,000.

: The 10,000 we put in during Innocent Sin carries over, and the cat will tell you when you’ve hit 50 and 80 donations, though I forgot to capture the 80 donation one.

: And now, we’ll finally find out what the secret of Kuzunoha’s talking lucky cat is.

: Wait, what the shit? Why is there a demon in the bathroom? How has no one figured this out the entire time?

: It’s just like the old SMT games, only this time we get something for giving the demon a shit-ton of money instead of it just running away and laughing at us.

: Nekomata is the source of a couple of rumors that enhance certain shops in a way that’s rather opaque unless you have a guide or feel like spending a shit-ton of time save reloading.

: Let me explain how these work.

: Etheria’s added options are the most opaque. What these do is let you negotiate with demons you otherwise couldn’t… provided you have the right one on the right person.

: Kaori, on the other hand, now has a shit-ton of options that all have no description. What these do is raise or lower your chances of encountering specific demons by arcana.

: This is useful if you’re hunting down rare demons, since you can boost their arcana and also use an encounter blocker like Estoma or a Clean Salt to block everything else.

: Anyway, back to the park. As I mentioned before, there’s two other flowers, but they’re extremely out of the way. Remember how in Innocent Sin, we went through here to get to the concert stage?

: That whole area still exists, and is where the other two flowers are. There are a couple of incenses up here, which is why I bothered to come up at all.

: This one is way over on the north-east side, and goes on Baofu.

: The Vit incense is on the other side in a corner, and goes on Maya.

: The only other drop up here is a box that puts us in a fight with two Angels and two Archangels.

: Everyone’s at least Level 20 now, and this is where I stopped because we’re getting close to the point where we want to get the items to fix Baofu and Katsuya’s stats.

: “You say… but we don’t know what kind of people they are. It’s not right to spread rumors about people you don’t even know.”

: “But it has to be interesting to people or it won’t become a rumor. What kind of rumor are you going to use?”

: “Don’t worry, I got it all planned out. A man or woman who has key information to this case will appear at Parabellum. So if the two actually do show up, we have a picture of them, you know?”

: “Fool. That’ll stand out like crazy… like Amano said, the media’s gonna jump all over it…”

: “Hmph! And I suppose you’ve got a better idea… that’s what I thought, you long-haired freak… so, what do you think, Ma-ya?”

: Picking the first option makes you pay for the rumor. If you pick the second option, Ulala gives you money for it instead.

: What I didn’t know when I started the LP is that the LP on the archive went the Elly route… but I might still do it, so I’m going to stop here and grind to get those items I want.

[Timrod]

Summary

: Excuse the slight change in aspect ratio on these shots - I’m also using my capture card for my other consoles, and had it set to the settings I use for my Switch.

: “Hey… don’t be a sore loser. You’re the one who drew the short straw…”

: “This isn’t my style… why don’t you get Suou to do this…”

: If this was a TV show, there’d be a cut to the last time Katsuya tried this, where he takes one drink and immediately breaks down into tears.

: “You know what to do, right?”

: “Yeah, but…”

: I love this so much. Ulala’s trying to do character development and Baofu is just “Nope, not having it.” The writing in this game is so much better than Persona 5’s it’s not even funny.

: “I don’t know… it’s just that you seem to have a purpose. I was just wondering what kind of life you’ve lived…”

: This cut right here is some AMAZING fucking foreshadowing if you already know what Baofu’s story is. For reference, this is the spot where Tatsuya and Jun exchanged gifts as kids.

: “Are those people really going to come… if so, are those two gonna get it right? …I’m worried…”

: I like to think that the Innocent Sin party is sitting just offscreen ready to do one of those slow motion diving saves to prevent Maya and Katsuya hooking up.

: “Ah… well, either way we’ll play it by ear…”

: “I know what you’re thinking… I’m the guy who worries too much…”

: “I’ve always been like that…”

: “…”

: “Do you get tired of who you are?”

: Katsuya has been having these horrible thoughts about what if he was a prosecutor and also a woman and had a dog-themed tramp stamp and also Tatsuya was a girl and completely boring and straight.

: That’d be awful. Good thing it never happened.

: Sometimes, Maya wonders what life would be like if she replaced “Let’s Positive Thinking” with “Let’s Constantly Drinking” and spent all of her time in an okama bar.

: That would admittedly be less horrible than that first scenario, but still not great.

: “I see… life doesn’t always turn out the way you want it to… at least for Tatsuya…”

: “…!”

: “Ch… Damn they’re quick… there’s nothing we can do now… let’s get this over with…”

: “Those’re some mad acting skills you got… o, okay then…”

: “You’re too damned needy! That’s why men always run away from you, you CD woman.”

: I was going to explain the “CD woman” bit but the game will do that in a moment.

: “What!? What did you just say!?”

: “Hmph!”

: “Tch!”

: Nanjo has changed a lot since Persona 1. He’s a biker now, and even though he’s wearing a motorcycle helmet indoors and still has that dumbass ascot, he’s got a pretty sick biker jacket.

: Even with her hair trimmed, Elly is still the best girl in the entire series.

: Persona 1’s ending explained this, but Elly is 5’ 4" and thus “too short” to be a model - at least, according to Satomi Tadashi. I’d like to point out that Ann in Persona 5 is 5’ 5".

: My theory is that if you put Ann or Makoto, or really any of the female Persona 5 cast apart from maybe Futaba too close to Elly, they’d spontaneously combust like in Parasite Eve.

: That includes Hifumi, because as it turns out, several of her dialog lines are lifted word for word from Yukiko in Persona 4. Yes, this technically makes Hashino a plagiarist as he did not write Persona 4.

: “So… why were you guys investigating the New World Order?”

: “Do you know a guy named ‘Hisataka Shinjo’?”

: “Just the name. He’s Tatsuzou’s secretary, but his work history and his details come up a blank… he’s like a shadow.”

: People who played Persona 1 immediately know it’s going to be Nyarlathotep in disguise, given that we saw Kandori get eaten by Nyarlathotep in Deva Yuga.

: “Kandori, the president of SEBEC? Wasn’t he responsible for that accident in Mikage-cho? Isn’t he dead?”

: I mean, technically it was Maki’s fault.

: Anyway, this is why the translator recommends picking Nanjo’s route - and not just because it’s the only way to unlock Tatsuya’s Scenario. Nanjo is kind of more plot-relevant than Elly is.

: “While chasing the shadow of a dead man, you arrived at Tatsuzou, huh…? The little girl over there, too?”

: “They are creating Jokers and sorting out people’s fortunes, so the curse is used more. It sounds ridiculous, but look at it now…”

: “I see… there’s nothing as enviable as another person’s good fortune… but why…?”

: “That’s something we should ask the head of the NWO… the kidnapped Jokers were supposedly taken to a nearby science laboratory. Shinjo goes in and out of there often…”

: “We have to split up…”

: “It would be greatly appreciated if all of you could help. Kirishima can handle the fortune teller on her own.”

: If you do Elly’s route, you go to Sumaru TV and fight Chizuru, but she’s just kinda there. Chizuru is to this game what Shujin’s principal or Madarame were to the shadowy conspiracy in Persona 5.

: Matsuoka is Nanjo’s replacement butler. In case you didn’t read it for some reason, his first butler died in Persona 1 and is now his ultimate Persona.

]

: CD is short for “crossdresser”. Essentially, he’s calling her a transvestite without knowing it. Anyway, at this point, I realize a fatal flaw in my plan. I mean, apart from not recording for a week.

: The Abandoned Factory has been replaced by Kasugayama High’s bomb shelter. Remember how much that dungeon sucked? Guess what.

: Let me talk about how much the bomb shelter sucks. Remember how the Abandoned Factory had a map, and it was obvious where each area was, and all you had to do to open them was make story progress?

: Haha yeah no. The bomb shelter has no map to start with, is full of damage floors, AND you have to unlock shortcuts to each area through demon rumors.

: Just like the Abandoned Factory, the bomb shelter now has an entire series of notes to find. I bet that Sachiko is the same one from Corpse Party.

: Right now, we only have access to Area 1, which contains demons from the start of the game through about the Aerospace Museum. You still probably want to come here anyway, though.

: You see, Nanjo’s starting Persona is Aizen Myouou - the same one he had in Persona 1. Aizen Myouou kinda sucks in that she only knows Hama to start, even though her resistances aren’t bad.

: The guide recommends replacing Aizen Myouou as soon as possible, but we’re close enough to where we want to be level-wise before we stop leveling for a bit.

: Next time, more grind, followed by a sewer level.

[SpammyV]

“Let’s go to the sewage plant” is a great line to read in any video game that you’re playing.

[Timrod]

Summary

: This is going to be a short update, because the game crashed again. Turns out, it’s a known problem with the romhack that isn’t supposed to occur on real hardware… but clearly does.

: It’s also going to be short because I had to do a shit-ton of grinding, and will have to do a shit-ton more after this.

: I head back into the bomb shelter in order to get Katsuya and Baofu to level 23. As it turns out, about half this grind wasn’t necessary because we’re on Nanjo’s route.

: All we really had to do was get Nanjo and Katsuya to level 23, with Baofu being kind of irrelevant. You’d only need Baofu on Elly’s route.

: During the grind, which I remind you I did on real hardware, we encounter Sakya. Sakya was a rare spawn in the Abandoned Factory in Innocent Sin that I never ran into.

: In Eternal Punishment, he’s also a rare spawn - one that gives you a material card to fuse him as a Persona.

: Sakya’s gimmick is that he’s a metal slime: he only has 500 HP, but has really high defenses. He also tends to break up fusion spells with a full-party lightning attack that has a very high chance of shocking.

: On Normal difficulty, you more or less need Mediarama to not die. Because we’re still on Easy at this point, it’s a fairly straightforward fight.

: As a bonus, Phaleg gets a form change mutation. This is both rare AND very, very good… or at least it would’ve been.

: We now have a “Mutate Persona” option, which I immediately use. My plan was to fuse everything I needed to fuse, save the game, and then transfer to the emulator for a bit.

NEW PERSONA: FUKUROKUJU

Origin: China

First Appearance: Persona 2 Innocent Sin

God who was originally part of a trio of Chinese gods known as the Sanxing. Adapted into Japanese myth, where he became one of the Seven Lucky Gods.

: Fukurokuju isn’t that great of a Persona. The reason we care about him is because of what he returns - namely that Luck Source. Luck Source is an accessory that boosts Luck by 1 every level.

: He also has Media, which means we could AFK grind him to Rank 8. The Luck Source is an amazing accessory for Maya because it lets you abuse the shit out of the casino.

: I think I logged Marduk in either Persona 1 or Innocent Sin. He’s a generic Fire/Physical hybrid who, like Fukurokuju, exists for one reason: to drop a stat booster.

: In Marduk’s case, that booster is the Agility Source, which is what we need to fix Katsuya and Baofu’s godawful speed stats. I slapped a Media card on him, and then it would’ve been off to the races.

: The other Persona we want is Mars, who is also a generic Fire/Physical hybrid. We want him because he drops the Strength Source.

: Anyway, I’m just about to save at this point, and then I notice something. I fused a Hel for Ulala offscreen some time ago, and it is now returnable for a Dx Card.

: Combine that with Maya’s luck stat and some casino grind and we could have an extra 10 points of dexterity on every single Persona we fuse. Unfortunately…

: The game fucking froze here, before I could save. At this point, I’m taking it to the emulator, and then I figure out almost immediately why the game keeps freezing… I think.

: The problem is that the patch author injected a copyright screen that pops up when you start the game. I’m pretty sure what happens is it doesn’t properly unload that screen.

: It’s very hard to capture, but you can see the text from that screen any time you get into a battle, and from what I can tell it’s probably causing a memory leak on my PSP.

: It’s pretty clear the patch author did not test this on real hardware. Anyway, I got Sakya again on the emulator and then saved after grinding to 23.

: What we want to do now is go to Kasugayama High and get in a fight. Nanjo and Katsuya are set to heal, everyone else defends. You don’t even really need the “fast forward” button for this.

: This is perfectly safe to do while not even watching the game, because what happens is that as soon as Nanjo and Katsuya run out of SP, the game auto-switches them to physical attacks.

: By the way, you do NOT want to use Media cards for this. They cost 45,000 yen each from Time Castle, while a Dia card costs 12,500.

: About half an hour of spamming Dia later, we have sources on Ulala, Katsuya, and Baofu. I did try to abuse savestates to get Fukurokuju back, but no luck there.

: There’s also a couple of new rumors and one other thing we have to do that I have no idea how you’d figure out without a guide. We’ll see what this does at the end of the update. There will be viewer participation.

: You remember the shrine we had to dump 10,000 yen into back on Mount Katatsumuri? The one you can only access before going into the sanitarium for the first time? This is the second part of that.

: You can ONLY do this before going to the sewers (or to Sumaru TV if you’re on Elly’s route) and must answer with the first option.

: There are also two “random effect” rumors. These both have two outcomes, which are chosen at random when you spread the rumor.

: The first one either makes Rosa Candida sell the armor Nanjo starts with, or alternatively replaces the store owner with her sister.

: The second one makes Ma’am either give you some new dialog or sell a new food item. I’ll show off the dialog for Ma’am because I happened to get it.

: These are all references to the older James Bond films, which makes sense because of how we made Ma’am a Russian spy in Innocent Sin (she’s also technically still a spy in Eternal Punishment).

: This is definitely a reference to something, but I don’t know what.

: We’ve also unlocked Narumi, an area that was not in Innocent Sin.

: This rumor only appears if you’re on Nanjo’s route, as the Tsuchinoko is in the sewers. We’ll see if we run into it.

: There’s also a new bar named Ebony, which is where the map collection sidequest takes place.

: This guy is a bit of a stereotype, but he’ll change… quite a bit when we spread a rumor we’re going to get here.

: There’s another rumor you can get about Clair de Lune from Toku-san at Shiraishi, which outright states that Soejima (the waiter) is a demon. I guess that explains the whole spaghetti di kusaya thing.

: Padparacha is how you get some of the best equipment in the game.

: Finally, there’s one other thing we need to do. There’s a group negotiation technique only unlockable on Nanjo’s route that requires you to talk to Baofu at Shiraishi.

: The “Hankami Jaguars” are a reference to the Hanshin Tigers. Doesn’t it seem a little odd that a Taiwanese hacker would be into Japanese baseball?

: I’ll end the update here while I go grind some more. The Genie asks a series of questions. I don’t know if they matter, but just in case, here they are. They’re all yes or no questions:

• Q1: Are you a man?
• Q2: Like cars/motorbikes?
• Q3: Prefer vacation out of the country?
• Q4: Have a worry you can’t tell anyone else?
• Q5: Rather live alone than with family?
• Q6: Want the same gender when reincarnated?

: If anyone chooses to answer the questions, I’ll use whichever answers I get. I could also answer them as Tatsuya or Maya.

[Timrod]

Summary

: Before we switch back to Normal difficulty, I need to grind for cards. Making all those sources kind of ate away at the leftover card stash from Innocent Sin.

: First up on the new Persona list is Tensen Nyannyan, who I think I logged in Innocent Sin. Tensen Nyannyan is one of the first Personas to learn Mediarama.

: While grinding, I get the rumor from Robin Goodfellow about the shortcut to Area 2 of the bomb shelter.

: Just like the rumor from Club Zodiac, we have to first get it, and then form a pact with Minotaur to get him to break the rock.

: You can definitely see the influence of the people behind Nocturne here. The shortcut to Area 2 has an unavoidable damage floor directly in front of it that has a pretty decent chance to poison.

: Next, I fuse Gullinbursti for Maya.

New Persona: Gullinbursti

Origin: Norse Myth

First Appearance: Maijn Tensei II (SNES)

Boar belonging to Freyr, made to run through air and water. Also glows, because do you really think a Norse god is gonna drift a boar without headlights?

: Gullinbursti is important because he is extremely resistant to physical attacks and conveys an extra Vitality every level. This will fix Maya’s low HP and low physical defense.

: Sakya fucking rules. He’s about as close as Eternal Punishment gets to Persona 1’s version of Lilim. Even better, he has Best compatibility with Nanjo, so we might be able to mutate him.

New Persona: Culebre

Origin: Spain

First Appearance: Devil Summoner

Mythical Spanish dragon born in underground rivers that rarely moves and spends most of its time guarding treasures.

: Culebre is another one of those Personas I only really pick because I want what it mutates into, which is actually the same thing Sakya mutates into. I’d rather lose Culebre than Sakya.

: With this, we should be ready for the sewer, even if we’re a little heavy on Earth and Water Personas. I fused a third Marduk for Baofu offscreen, meaning we’ve spent over 200 cards on Marduks.

: Before we leave, we want to grab the mission to map out the science lab from Salam. You have to do this before you leave. The sewer (thankfully) does not count.

: “A distinctive feature is the maze setting. On top of that, at each block, a flood of water comes through at timed intervals.”

: “There are two routes connecting the blocks… if we don’t take the shorter way, we have a higher chance of getting washed away.”

: “We must control the locks for the two paths by the 1st and 2nd Control Rooms respectively. Thus, two people must stay…”

: “You really did your homework…”

: I like to think that Tatsuzou went to Nanjo’s dad and straight up went “Hi, I need a sewage plant to use as my evil base for taking over the world because I’m crazy” and Nanjo’s dad handed him a check.

: “Sometimes adults don’t make sense… are you cool with that?”

: “A world of facades and concessions is a cold one indeed… I just walk the path I believe in.”

: I also like to think that at some point during this dungeon, Baofu goes up to Nanjo and goes “Hi, I need ten million dollars to build a larger hacker bunker” and Nanjo immediately writes the check.

: “Perfect… so, who’s staying?”

: Oh fuck, it’s Reiji! They should have put him in while Sudou was still alive, because it’d be funny as hell to see Sudou complaining about “MY FUCKIN’ DAD” and Reiji just kinda nodding in agreement.

: This line is most likely inaccurate, since I think the “six-pack” thing was purely an addition by the Revelations: Persona “translators”.

: Elly sent Maki here because Maki was less likely to hurt someone when she randomly whips out a gun and starts blasting. Yes, that was a thing in Persona 1… in case you forgot.

: Here’s my question - why is Nanjo in the party, and not Reiji? Reiji’s entire life goal is murdering Kandori, and if Kandori is still alive his job is not done.

: There should’ve been a line where Reiji goes “Nah, fuck that, kill his bitch ass. I’ll help.”

: “All right… I’ll try.”

: “I leave the releasing of the locks to them… we can contact them with that walkie-talkie. When you decide between routes A and B, give them a call.”

: Now it’s time to talk about how the sewers work. There are three segments, and each segment has a 10-minute time limit. At the end of the time limit, the water comes and pushes you back.

: There is no limit as to how many times you can go through each section, if you’re doing something like hunting for the Tsuchinoko.

: Here’s the map. The suggested route is to take either door for the first section, and then do Route B for the rest of the dungeon as it has more items.

: This is why the sewers don’t count for the mapping sidequest - you can’t actually see the entire sewer because it’s one-way and you’ll always miss out on half of it. There’s also some optional dialogue.

: Eat shit, Katsuya.

: Reiji is already married by this point, and I’m pretty sure Lisa would have first dibs given the whole weird staring match she had with him in Innocent Sin.

: I pick the A route to start, because it’s shorter and more straightforward than the B route and has the same items.

: It’s nothing good, and honestly I could’ve just ignored it all. I could also skip Reiji’s dialog for opening the door, but it’s actually pretty good.

: Why do I have a feeling that if this was Innocent Sin, Lisa would’ve done exactly the same thing?

: Route B2 can be completed in about twenty seconds if you simply walk in a straight line. However, there’s a couple of platforms south of the exit with items.

: There’s another Damascus Steel, which we can take to Padparacha to get made into a weapon.

: There’s also a weapon for Baofu and a Luck Incense, which I immediately give to Maya.

: And on the way back, 20 Free Cards. You might ask what the fights are like here, and, well…

: For the most part, they’re exactly the same as Aoba Park. The only difference is that Kanaloa and Kraken are here and the enemies tend to come in larger groups.

: Kanaloa is particularly annoying because it has a physical skill with a chance of instantly killing. For reference, Kanaloa is the blue one.

: I did, by the way, make an effort to find the Tsuchinoko and did not find it. I don’t even know what the item you get from it does, and I don’t feel like grinding to find out… especially not after what’s coming up.

: By the way, I recommend leaving the game on Easy mode here and running away from battles, because you’ll occasionally get forced negotations which eat up a lot of time.

: We reach the second checkpoint. There’s some optional dialog with Nanjo here that fills in a couple of holes after Persona 1.

: “The system Kandori made… the DEVA system… as well as his other research, could be of incredible benefit, you know…”

: Yeah, benefits like being re-used by the Persona 5 Royal writers. Great job there, Nanjo.

: “So, that’s how we teamed with Tatsuzou. Before we knew of the New World Order, we unwittingly helped them… it’s a foolish story… when I think of all the feelings of those who were involved, there’s no way I could ever make it up…”

: Who is this guy, and what has he done with Reiji? This almost sounds like he’s Nanjo’s boyfriend or something. I mean, admittedly we don’t know that Nanjo isn’t gay.

: The next area is a long hallway where half the chests are traps or have forced battles, and the other half have some pretty okay items. The Pipe Fox boosts Magic Attack by 10. It goes right on Maya.

: This sword is a slight upgrade for Nanjo and has a chance to shock on hit.

: “If we don’t render that inoperable, I can’t ensure you of our freedom to move.”

: “Hey, they’ve got guns… does your company supply the guards with firearms!?”

: Somewhere in the Nanjo Group’s headquarters, Tatsuzou Sudou approaches Nanjo’s dad. “Hey, uh, I need several dozen crates of illegal guns. You know, to take over the world. Because I’m crazy.”

: Nanjo’s dad hands him a check immediately.

: “That is absurd… even my group’s scientists aren’t allowed entry in here. Those aren’t our security officers, either.”

: You just know that Maya is thinking “I wonder if I could get Nanjo to write me a check for a warehouse full of crab meat, or my own crab fishing company, or maybe a cleaner.”

: “Then we don’t need to hold back…”

: “We shouldn’t make any sounds…”

: “Whaddya mean by that!?”

: This is probably what happens in every dungeon in Persona 5 after Makoto joins, behind the scenes. Joker: “Here we go, Ann and Ryuji. You can be plot-relevant again next time.”

: “Mmmm…”

: Ulala’s like “That guy is absolutely fucking dead, and… oh, that’s what he meant.”

: Oh hell yeah, it’s Eikichi! Unfortunately, Satomi Tadashi screwed him out of plot relevance to the point where as far as I know he doesn’t have his Persona in this game.

: “Dammit! Release Sugimoto, NOW…!!! If ya don’t, I’m gonna beat your ass!!!”

: Sugimoto was the guy that Sudou set on fire on Kasugayama High’s rooftop.

: “But that’s pretty hasty… weren’t YOU the target of the Joker curse in the first place?”

: “I neutralized security… we should be able to bypass the security devices for a while.”

: “Eikichi-kun, leave your friend to us and go home… this is not a place for kids.”

: “Don’t kid me! I’m not gonna just pull back! Take me too! If ya don’t, I’ll make a ruckus…!? SOMEBODY ---- !!”

: “Very well… let’s take him with us. I can understand his position. But in return… refrain from getting in our way. When we say come back, come back.”

: I’m going to start this dungeon out by saying that if you ever play this yourself, DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, DO THE MAPPING SIDEQUEST. Also, have some optional dialogue.

: Katsuya is such a cop it hurts.

: One thing I feel like the original translator did very poorly was making Eikichi feel like Eikichi. This feels like a different character from the Eikichi we knew in Innocent Sin.

: Let’s talk about the map sidequest, because there really isn’t much to this dungeon if you’re not doing it. You see those dark squares on the minimap? We need the whole map to look like that.

: The annoying thing is that the game only counts tiles within a one-tile radius of Maya as “mapped”, and a lot of hallways are three tiles wide.

: Right down the first hallway is a Velvet Room and Trish’s Fountain, so I go in there for optional dialogue.

: “Huh? Why am I able to use Personas…? That’s what I’d like to know… though I might’ve played that game when I was a kid.”

: He was also hit with a Persona-producing arrow by an old lady from the Middle East. It was like a nerf dart and bounced off, so he didn’t notice.

: “I have used this place quite often. Personas are useful not only in fighting, but in normal social settings as well.”

: “My friend, who became a salesman, uses his power to succeed in his career. Now if only Kido were that clever…”

: Nanjo clearly didn’t read the part of Jung where the Persona is a key piece of the psyche and everyone has one because you need it to exist. Or to protect you from jangly key men. One of those.

: “Come to think of it, back in high school I learned Persona from you and played it… I wonder if it has anything to do with this?”

: The lab is filled with new enemies, including Taranis, who is probably the least annoying one next to the humans. Taranis is weak to Water, and we’ve got plenty of that.

: All routes leading out of the starting area are blocked by these shutters. I should post the map while I’m at it so you can see.

: This is where this dungeon starts to suck. Cwn Annwn has an instant death attack that it uses at random, which as far as I know always works and can’t be avoided.

: The first thing I did was form a pact with them specifically to stop this bullshit from happening. We still don’t have Mediarama on Tensen Nyannyan yet, so I have to switch Maya to Iris every time I want to heal.

: There’s a set of stairs near the Velvet Room that comes out pretty much right here. This is a cutscene room, and we need to see it before we can move on.

: I like to think this is Joker’s origin story in Persona 5. He came out of a lab trying to do boyfriend experiments. It’s about as canon as this room is, which is to say it’s not.

: “Uh…!? What… what happened to this person?!”

: This is Satomi Tadashi trying to do worldbuilding. It will never come up again, and is non-canon.

: “There’s another one over here… on their necks… looks like an electrode…”

: “Human experiments… how horrific and deplorable…!”

: “Calm down, young man. We will locate your friend. You escort these people here to the trailer in the parking facility.”

: “What do you plan to do, Nanjo-kun?”

: “Treat them at our hospital… I figured out… what they do here. I can’t turn the other way.”

: I’m surprised the answer isn’t “bring them upstairs to Igor”, but whatever.

: “Can you bring them back?”

: “We won’t know if we don’t try… it’s still a hundred times better than doing nothing…”

: On the other side of the basement is this guy, who is how we make progress.

: “An employee… hey, we came to find out what’s going on in this laboratory. Can you give us the details?”

: “Understood. Leave the rest to us.”

: I spend a few minutes running around to fill in map squares. There’s a lot of pointless space in the basement.

: Anyway, here’s where I fucked up. To finish the map, you need a demon rumor. The demon that drops the rumor only spawns in the basement and on the first floor. Only one guide mentions this.

: After how much shit I went through trying to get the one in Club Zodiac, it’s safe to say I am not doing that again without an emulator.

: Past that door is a switch that allows you to open either “A” doors or “B” doors. There’s an “A” door blocking an item near the start of the dungeon, so you have to backtrack for map completion.

: Note that because of the tiny mapping radius, I have to run all the way around this pointless room after getting the item.

: This part, right after the first A/B switch, is where I was about ready to shut off the PSP. I’d like you to notice something. See how we’re right in front of a damage floor, but it’s not on the map, even though it’s very clearly within the one-tile mapping range?

: This one I ran all the way around, and there’s unfilled map squares where the damage floor is. Yes, this means we have to run over each and every fucking damage floor to complete the map. It gets worse.

: The damage floor room has an A/B switch, and a staircase in the south that will lead you in a route to this guy on the other side of this Level 2 shutter. However…

: This is the room directly above the room with the red damage floors. These are blue damage floors - which, if you’ll recall, drain SP. They don’t drain it from Maya, and that’s to prevent a softlock.

: Yep, we’ve got to run over all of those fucking damage floors. Everyone now has 1 SP except for Maya, and I had next to no SP restoration items.

: Now, you might say, “Why not go to Easy mode and run around to restore SP, since Easy increases the amount of SP restored per step?” Here’s why.

: This floor has Principality on it. Principality has Mahama, which targets everyone and can potentially wipe your party if you are unlucky.

: Principality is level 29, and even after all the grinding I did, we are only around level 27. This means no pact, which means we have to negotiate him away each time for no benefit.

: I’m gonna say it outright, the mapping sidequest sucks. The encounter rate here is very high, and given the amount of bullshit you have to go through, it’s simply not worth doing.

: And here’s the final kick in the dick. I actually went past the spot I was supposed to go to make progress and went to outside the boss room.

: The last mappable squares require you to use the elevator. There’s a fuse box next to it. It’s locked, and the keycards don’t work on it.

: What you have to do is go down to the first floor and fight one of these things, which I forgot to take a shot of:

: They’re called Kabandha, and are annoying because they can hit Katsuya’s water weakness. You have to get the rumor from them that Rasputin has the key to the fuse box.

: The rest of this dungeon consists of going to the floor with the red damage floors, flipping the A/B switch to B, and then using the side staircase to get to the second scientist.

: We now have everything we need to get to the boss room, and can take a shortcut there.

: We’ll do the boss next time, mostly because I might load the game back into the emulator and see if I can’t get that demon rumor.

[Timrod]

Summary

: Well, let’s get back into this and see how egregious the grind for the demon rumor is. First order of business is to set the game back to Easy for the guaranteed escapes from battle.

: Kabandha only spawns in the basement of the lab - at least, as far as I can tell - and so I spend the better part of an hour running around in circles in this room near the stairs.

: It takes me something like 10 negotiations after forming a pact to get the rumor, which sounds not that bad, but Kabandha is a relatively rare spawn.

: By the time this dungeon is over, I amassed nearly 400 free tarot cards from forced negotiations with Cwn Annwn.

: We now have the Fuse Box Key, which allows us to power the elevator and go to the one area we haven’t mapped yet.

: The Maragion card would be useful for the upcoming boss, but we don’t really need it. There’s one other useless skill card down here.

: Totally worth all the grinding. Now, I do happen to know that the game will tell you when you’ve finished the map - and we still don’t have that notification. Why, you ask?

: That’s because there’s a big, pointless room outside the boss door.

: You know, it’s funny sometimes how Salty Vanilla knows this game better than I do. In that pic they did of Baofu and Futaba I think they originally had Baofu using a laptop.

: “This is…!?”

: " ‘Experiments on separating the Joker from its user’… ‘Theory on spinal nerve transplants for two-legged organisms…’ "

: " ‘Separating’ the Jokers…? For what reason!?"

: “Just one moment… it says the research it’s based on exists.”

: Wait a second, isn’t that just the “Currently existing technology” line from Metal Gear Solid 1?

: “…We can’t read it all now. I’m gonna save the entire thing on a hard drive. I’m crashing the original data.”

: This is very, very close to being that cutscene from Final Fantasy 7 with Jenova’s holding tank.

: Kandori, now with sunglasses.

: I think this is probably a holdover from Revelations: Persona. Kandori never wanted to destroy the world - his initial plan was to sell the DEVA system. The whole Maki thing was an accident.

: Maki was the one who wanted to destroy the world.

: “Kandori…! How…How is it that you are alive!?”

: The word “Kotodama” came up in the intro as well, so let me talk for a minute about what it means. Kotodama is an old Shinto concept which has kind of been co-opted into popular culture.

: It literally means “word spirit” and basically means just that - it’s the idea that words have a kind of spiritual power to them.

: It’s talked about a lot in martial arts, with the whole idea of the “kiai shout” that’s supposed to make you hit harder.

: Another example is that whole thing about buildings in Japan not having a fourth floor, because the word for “four” sounds like the word for “death”. That’s also a kotodama thing.

: Oh, and the thing with the Calgary Flames fans putting “amharic curses” on any team the Flames go up against is also probably kotodama.

: “They summoned me back from Hades…”

: “…”

: “Why do you continue your wicked ways…? That time you were…!”

: “Hmph… ‘The fate of those who are enchanted by the shadows’… I’ll leave it at that… I’m not as young as you. I can’t change my ways now… so… what are you going to do?”

: I’d like to point out that Kandori has an official birthdate: November 8, 1968. He’s actually a few months younger than Baofu, who was born on June 13, 1967.

: Baofu then slides his laptop across the entire length of the floor. I have to wonder what the hell his laptop is made out of that he can do that, because I’m pretty sure mine wouldn’t slide very far.

: It’s probably coated in the same butter/bacon grease mixture that one driver from Daytona USA with the zero handling stat uses to coat his tires.

: I’d like to point out that by the end of Innocent Sin, Eikichi had probably been shot several hundred times.

: Kandori probably should’ve listened to Tetsugoro Kusabi and simply shot Eikichi.

: Tatsuya straight up fucking kills this guy. He is beyond giving a fuck.

: “Tatsuya!?”

: This is one detail I really like over the later games. If this happened in Persona 5, the entire party would just run. Here, you have Maya and Katsuya covering Ulala and Nanjo’s escape.

: I also really like that whoever animated this cutscene had the forethought to have Ulala and Nanjo escape first, then Baofu because his coins aren’t as long-range as a gun would be.

: “Regardless, neither you, nor they, can escape from fate… Paradox boy…”

: “I see… you, too, were enchanted… by ‘him’… then tell ‘him’ for me… That I’ll protect… Maya and everyone else…!”

: We’ll actually get to see this fight when we get to Tatsuya’s Scenario - the second part takes place here.

: And here’s the boss. Devil Sugimoto is an extremely easy fight compared to the last few. If you have Tensen Nyannyan and Mediarama, you basically can’t lose.

: Sugimoto is weak to Fire and Light. Unfortunately, the Kouga line of spells doesn’t exist in Persona 2, but Sakya has a non-instakill Light spell that works just as well.

: Apart from being able to inflict Fury and Poison, Sugimoto has a full-party ice spell that honestly doesn’t do much. The guards only attack with relatively weak physical attacks. I ignored them.

: My strategy was something like this. Maya is on Magnara, Ulala is on Mediarama, Katsuya to whatever, Baofu to Agilao, and then Nanjo to Holy Light. The only time you need to turn off auto-battle is if Ulala gets hit with Fury.

: You can see how much of a difference the Agility Source makes - Agility is now Katsuya’s second highest stat after Strength.

: Baofu, on the other hand, is becoming a rather powerful caster.

: Oh yeah, I should point out that Eikichi’s portraits are all the original PS1 ones. Why they didn’t update them to the re-done ones for the PSP version, I do not know.

: “You didn’t… you’re didn’t have to kill him! You’re all murderers, just like them!!”

: “Look carefully… Nanjo-kun didn’t kill him.”

: “I’m greedy… I take everything that I can get a hold of…”

: “I’m sorry! I said some horrible things… you are a true man! Make me your apprentice!”

: Again, this sounds nothing like the Eikichi we knew in Innocent Sin.

: “Enough with the warm fuzziness… we’re gonna beat it outta here.”

: “Hey wait! What about Tatsuya-kun…? And the stolen data…”

: I like the idea that Baofu is in the middle of that room with a dozen guys with guns pointed at him and starts removing the hard drive but they don’t care because they’re all tech-illiterate.

: “And… just forget about that guy. He has way more experience than you guys, and some guts… heck, we’d be in his way.”

: Again, amazing cutscene direction. This is why relegating the Personas to Tartarus/TV World was a horrible idea from a storytelling perspective.

: “Mishima… Yamai…!”

: “Wh… why are you the only one still alive!? You’re a traitor, aren’t you…!?”

: “Hey… couldn’t this have been the work of that ‘Sneak’ guy?”

: “Impossible… we were never followed…!”

: “Not this time… but there were plenty of chances before… we can’t stay here. Let’s go back to my place, we’ll be safe there…”

: “…I see. Now they’ve done it.”

: “Have you found something?”

: “Some of the files still have some sort of protection on them… that big thing seems to be called ‘JSM’. I don’t know the logic behind it, but it’s basically a machine that separates the Joker from the possessed people…”

: If you read the Innocent Sin LP, you’re probably asking “Hey wait, isn’t this just the Crystal Skull subplot only instead of hopes and dreams they’re stealing those enemies from Kingdom Hearts” and yes, you’re absolutely right.

: Anyway, there was one thing I forgot to mention when Chizuru brought up this subject the first time. Kegare is another Shinto term, though it came from Japanese mythology.

: If you know Japanese myth, you probably know about the story of the creation of Susano and Amaterasu - Izanagi goes to the underworld, gets a divorce, and then washes himself and makes a bunch of gods in the process.

: That bathing process is called kegare, and is one of the core practices in Shinto. My guess is that the pronunciation thing was an awkward addon from the PS1 version.

: " ‘Kegare’…? What are they going to use that for?"

: “I don’t know that far…”

: “Wait… these are phone records! The sending-end and the receiving-end are the same…? It’s a list of Joker calls!”

: “A ‘delivery list’… they knew who was going to be the next Joker. I can’t even make a phone call in peace…”

: “He’s even got records of 911 reports and police radio dispatch… that damn Shimazu!!”

: One thing I’d like to point out on that last one - people have been able to listen to police radio for almost as long as police radio has existed. It’s a very important tool for police reporters.

: In fact, in recent years the police in a number of areas (including the entire UK and a few US states) have made moves to encrypt police radio specifically to block the media.

: Metal Gear!? No, really, isn’t that just Metal Gear? Do we know if it’s equipped with an ICBM launcher?

: “Just like Elly-chan said. Because of Wang Long Chizuru’s fortunes, the whole city is in a panic. I actually believed that bitch!”

: “Wang Long Chizuru IS connected with the New World Order. She read that all of the Guardian Dragons showed signs of ‘Joka’. And at this rate, there’ll be many more people as Jokers.”

: “What she meant by a Joker is a person who has been influenced by ‘Joka’… many people believe in her readings. It’s already spreading, and those not using the Joker curse are turning into Joker also…”

: “What else?”

: “She escaped in the end… she said people like us make fortune telling necessary, and she was able to collect numerous Kegare…”

: “Kegare again…”

: “Hmm… it’s all so clear now… the fortune teller increased the amount of Jokers and the Mafia hunts them down… the captured people get “Joker-separated” by Kandori, and the police cover it up… we’ve got to find out what Shimazu is up to…”

: “Hold on… that’s not enough to prove the connection between Tatsuzou… going public with this won’t solve anything. We gotta get more evidence…”

: Two things I’d like to point out. First, Ginji Sasaki was a member of the Masked Circle in Innocent Sin - he was Prince Taurus, who just kinda showed up and then got fried by a laser in Xibalba.

: Second, we’ve basically been fighting the original Masked Circle members as bosses the entire game. We fought Sudou, we fought Noriko standing in for Anna, and now Ginji.

: What I’m saying is that yes, I’ve read ahead in the guide, and yes we’re doing another shithouse fucking Old Maid bossfight fuckfest.

: Next time, we’re going through Smile Hirasaka for a second time. You didn’t seriously think Atlus was done recycling dungeons, did you?

[SpammyV]

Persona 2, now with 50% more sequel to Persona 1 at no additional cost!

[Timrod]

Summary

: Before we move on to Smile Hirasaka, there’s a few things we can do, including fixing the output resolution on my capture card. Unfortunately, this will not fix the absolute shithouse of a dungeon we’re about to enter.

: The first thing we need to do is visit Sumaru TV. Does this make any sense? No, and the entire reason we have to do it is because they put all the effort into Elly’s route.

: On Elly’s route, Elly becomes the center of almost all negotiations. Most of Nanjo’s negotiations are totally useless or only effect one demon per dungeon.

: This gets us a negotiation called “Song of a Baseball Fanatic” between Nanjo and Baofu. It is used on exactly one demon in the next dungeon.

: We can also trade our map to Salam and pick up the new map for Smile Hirasaka. Let me explain how Salam’s rewards work, since after Smile Hirasaka I took comparative screenshots.

: For most dungeons, Salam gives you a “card pack” that contains a number of random skill cards and a number of Free Tarot cards.

: When I reloaded the game after the last recording, I happened to get a Grydyne card which I gave to the Count at Time Castle. If you’re willing to reload and/or abuse savestates, this can be worth it.

: This is what I wind up spending all the party’s money on.

: Smile Hirasaka is another dungeon that becomes hell if you try to do the map sidequest. It doesn’t even make a whole lot of sense, given that Smile Hirasaka is a mall.

: I mean, you can barely walk five steps in the average mall without running into one of those big fuckoff maps that list a bunch of stores that haven’t existed in years.

: There’s also a rumor we can pick up, but we have to do a man-search for it. I went to see what rumor effect I’d gotten from that random one about the owner of Shiraishi, and found out they sell the banana char siu ramen that Eikichi had to eat in Innocent Sin.

: This lady here is the target.

: This rumor either expands Kaori’s aromatherapy menu or causes nothing at all to happen. Why this had to be random, I do not know.

: The last thing I do is get the affinity reading I mentioned a few updates ago. All it does is give you a discount at a random Satomi Tadashi store.

: The first thing you want to do here is spend all of your money. You’ll see why.

: Now it’s time to talk about why Smile Hirasaka sucks. To do that, all I really need to do is post the map.

: If you’ve read the Innocent Sin LP, you’ll remember IS’s version of Smile Hirasaka, where the mission was to find your party members and defuse all the bombs.

: Eternal Punishment’s version is surprisingly not an exact copy - it’s actually much bigger and much emptier. They added an entire floor that didn’t exist in Innocent Sin’s version that has nothing in it.

: The thing is, there’s no good reason why the mall should be as empty as it is. It was empty in Innocent Sin because of a bomb threat, but that obviously hasn’t happened here.

: The enemies here are exactly the same as in the upper floors of the lab, with the addition of Hunhau and Picollus (the little green guy on the left) who likes to spam Hula of Misfortune.

: What I highly recommend is that you set the game to Easy and form a pact with Picollus the second you reach level 30.

: Smile Hirasaka can be cleared in about 5 minutes by simply walking up to the elevator and taking it to the fourth floor. Instead, I spent like 90 minutes filling in map squares like a demented version of Splatoon.

: This sucks because most of the hallways in Smile Hirasaka are wide enough that you cannot get every map square in one go unless you’re moving diagonally at all times.

: Other highlights include the second floor having what is apparently a portal to the dark side of Silent Hill. I guess now we know where Eddie got that pizza from.

: The way the dungeon is laid out is also annoying because there’s two sides to each floor - one that’s accessible from the entrance, and another you have to use a second set of stairs from the third floor to access.

: You can complete the map before fighting the boss, so I do. I wanted to fuse some new Personas anyway.

: Shout-out to these little one-tile-wide hallways near this planter, which I have a feeling has never been a thing in a mall anywhere.

: This time, Salam gives us a bunch of useless healing spells… and Maragidyne. It’s absolutely not worth it when we have Grydyne, but I guess I’ll take it.

: The only thing on the fusion menu is Heimdall. We need him for Magarula so that we can abuse fusion spells against the boss.

New Persona: Heimdall

Origin: Norse Myth

First Appearance: Soul Hackers (the good one, not the bad one)

Norse god who guards the Bifrost Bridge between Asgard and Midgard. Owner of the Gjallarhorn, which signals the beginning of Ragnarok. Destined to fight against Loki at the end of Ragnarok, killing them both.

: “This building’s design is somewhat outdated. If we can find an air duct, it’s possible for us to check what’s happening inside, but… the question is where it’s located.”

: Maya has a flashback to better times. You know, it’s weird that her smoking never gets brought up again. It’s also weird that the “bruise acts up every time Maya remembers something” bit never gets brought up again.

: This part also seems kinda dumb to me. The whole “shadowmen” thing made sense in Innocent Sin because people were more or less getting jumped and having their hopes and dreams sucked out.

: You’d think someone would be like “Why is there a giant breakable glass Metroid containment tube full of weird goop with eyes?”

: Ginji’s eyes will randomly turn yellow. I think that’s a bug with the PSP’s video output.

: “Lives wandering aimlessly… though not satisfied, there are no efforts made for change. The one thing to do is begrudge others! That is sin! That is Kegare! That’s how the Joker consumes people!!”

: “Whew… that guy’s lost it…”

: “But your worries are fully understandable… not knowing what to do, not knowing how to live… that’s right, not having a dream!!”

: "That is why we have Wang Long Chizuru! We have Wang Long fortune telling! It is for the common man!

: “…”

: “Here, I have Chizuru-sama’s statue of a sacred dragon… Fukugi. If you believe Chiziru-sama’s words and touch this statue, you’ll be cleansed… Now, be reborn into innocence!”

: Somewhere in the audience, a young Maruki thinks “Wow, this is a really good idea!”.

: If I was writing this, they would absolutely follow up with “Heil Crabmeat! Heil French takeout!” and start running to empty the mall of any and all canned crab products to Maya’s complete horror.

: Then they come back and do a ritual dumping of the laundry basket onto the floors of the mall.

: “…!?”

: “Ma-ya, they stole your motto!?”

: “Catch Sasaki, or destroy the machine… either way, with all those people, they are going to get mixed up in it!”

: What Maya’s saying is that you can’t start a fire. You can’t start a fire without a spark. This gun’s for hire, even if we’re just dancing in the dark.

: I’m almost positive I used that one before, but they’re asking for it.

: “Haven’t you had enough fires? Besides, I don’t think Suou-san would let you start one in front of him…”

: “Actually, I think it’s a good idea.”

: “What the hell? Unbelievable! You were always yapping ‘justice, justice, justice’ but when it’s Ma-ya, anything is okay?”

: “No, I meant…”

: “Ohhhh… Ahhhh… now this is a big surprise. With cops like this, this country really is finished… I seeeeee…”

: “Hey stupid, look up…”

: “How about burning some trash at the duct too? If we make a little smoke, it should be much more effective than just an alarm.”

: This part is honestly nonsensical. It doesn’t effect the boss fight - all it means is that you have to walk from the bathroom to the seminar room with just Maya, Ulala, and Nanjo.

: “If you ask me, there’s something wrong with you guys for being able to stay so calm at a time like this…”

: “Your reaction is relatively normal. Everybody is just used to these situations… What I don’t understand is Ms. Amano… where does your ‘deja vu’ originate from?”

: The alarm starts blaring, and now it’s on.

: “If it’s that easy, no one would struggle. Stop confusing these people with your foolish superstitions…”

: “Exactly. There is much we want to ask you. You best worry about you, rather than the machine.”

: “I’m not talking! This is an outrage! Someone get a lawyer!”

: “Will someone please shut this guy up? Amano, you know what to do…”

: “I see… extracted Kegare from the people are themselves, Joker…”

: Didn’t we learn this before we even went into the lab?

: Joker Ginji as a whole seems less bad than Noriko or Ulala were. He starts with four Shoggoth, and can revive them if they die.

: The biggest challenge is surviving the initial hit, which can be very RNG. If the shoggoths decide to explode, you’ll be hit for a shitload of damage.

: Fortunately, we can do Kamaitaichi, which does around a fifth of Ginji’s total HP even on Normal mode.

: Nanjo follows up with Nirvana, which the Shoggoth are weak to.

: Eventually, we get it down to just Ginji without him using any of his more annoying spells - he can heal himself and has Old Maid, but never used either one.

: Maya has now maxed out on Dexterity. Because we have Heimdall giving us an Agility bonus, I throw the rest of the points into Vitality to help boost her HP.

: “Damn… this isn’t good…”

: “In the end, we couldn’t find anything out… seemed to be under a strong mind control… probably a waste to question subordinates…”

: “But they’re doing the same thing all over the place, right? What are we going to do…”

: “Going one at a time gets us nowhere. Before they do any more damage, we should expose the New World Order publicly.”

: You know, in a tabloid.

: Elly immediately calls every occult magazine she can reach.

: “I want to ask you one thing. A penthouse was attacked. Was it you?”

: Here’s the good news. We don’t need to map Aoba Park. There is no sidequest for it, because apparently Salam can’t be bothered to go to the mall’s website but can go to the park.

: “Is it him?”

: “Yeah… he wants us to meet him at the Concert Hall in Aoba Park…”

: “Wait a minute! It has to be a trap!”

: “You may be right… but, I have to find out if he’s really trustworthy.”

: “Heh… we’ll see. You probably just want to find out about your father… I’m not getting involved.”

: “Do whatever you want, Baofu. Nobody asked you to come along… Amano-kun, I’ll be going now…”

: Honestly, I’d rather have Baofu. Katsuya is just kinda there for the most part.

: “Heheh… I never thought of him as a friend…”

: “Besides, he only irritates me…”

: “Hey! I’m getting tired of your shit, Baofu! Get your ass after him, now! Otherwise, you’ll be joining our friend on the ground over there!”

: “Well, if you put it that way… ch… fine… I don’t care about him, but separating from Amano right now wouldn’t be wise…”

: And that’s it. Next time, we make a second run through Aoba Park. I’m going to try and fuse something with Estoma so I can hopefully get the unique Persona there.

[Timrod]

Summary

: Just a heads up as I write this, I built a new computer, so things may or may not look a little weird. My LP drive almost died due to a SATA cable breaking off inside it, but I cleared it out.

: Aoba Park is exactly the same was it was when we left it. As it turns out, you CAN do the flower sidequest the second time.

: The first thing I do is fuse Umayadono-Ouji, who was actually in Innocent Sin and had Estoma there as well. I’m struggling to recall why I didn’t fuse him there.

New Persona: Umayadono-Ouji

Origin: A Real Person

First Appearance: Persona 2 Innocent Sin

Real name: Shoutoku Taishi. Appointed Regent for his aunt, Empress Suiko, in 593 A.D. Known mostly for his ardent promotion of Buddhism, and is credited with being a founder of Japanese Buddhism.

: Shoutoku is Persona 2’s equivalent of an HM mule. His SP costs are stupidly high for his level, but you’re never really going to use him in combat… apart from spamming Dia to rank up.

: If we go to Giga Macho, we can meet Ixquic again. I wish she could’ve been a party member.

: This is one of two sidequests we can get from Ixquic. Both of them suck. Let’s spread the rumor, which causes the hag to appear on the third floor of Giga Macho.

: Now we’ll just walk upstairs and use the Estoma trick to encounter only the hag, and… wait, what’s that Jack Frost doing there?

: Two things. First, this is a reference to Devil Summoner, where a Jack Frost and a Pyro Jack/Jack O’Lantern form the “DB Busters” (Devil Buster Busters) to combat devil summoners.

: Second, this sucks ass because it means we can’t really use the Estoma trick… not that it matters.

: The hag is a very annoying gimmick monster. She only has a couple hundred HP, but has a high chance to simply…

: Yep. She can just run the fuck away, forcing you to find her again. The second time I found her, she escaped before I even got a turn. At that point I went “Nah, fuck this” and left.

: Let’s just go to Aoba Park. Thanks to Estoma, we can just run through here without fighting anything. The enemies DO get replaced with higher level ones, but we outlevel all of them.

: One of those new enemies is Lilim, who like a lot of the older demons gets a complete redesign in Eternal Punishment that never shows up again.

: As you get closer to the concert hall, you can hear a heartbeat in the background. I did spend some time looking for the rare demon that spawns here, but had no luck finding it.

: I then accidentally crossed into the concert hall with Nanjo still using Shoutoku, which was a mistake. This is from the first recording.

: “He went inside here…?”

: “Dammit! One of these days Suou’s going to get himself into real trouble…”

: Unfortunately, the wiki doesn’t have a portrait for Togashi. I know what I can use instead.

: “I can’t ask for you to believe me, but… I wasn’t informed about the attack. The organization does not trust me… if you want to shoot, go ahead. But can you at least listen to my story… I want to atone for the sin I’ve committed.”

: Kiyotada Sumaru is entirely made up, as you’ve probably guessed.

: “20 years ago, when Honmaru Park was build, they unearthed Kiyotada’s mummy. That’s when everything began… the top leaders of the organization were responsible for the park’s construction.”

: “Until then, they were just a small local company, but now they are big enough to move this country… all because of Kiyotada’s strong curses. To me it just looks like a mummy. They claim to be able to hear voices…”

: Clearly this guy doesn’t subscribe to the Tetsugoro Kusabi school of police work.

: If you’ve read the Persona 5 Royal LP, you’ll realize that this sounds remarkably similar to Shido’s plot, and that’s because what Satomi Tadashi creates, Rehashino steals.

: “That’s foolish… what are they trying to accomplish?”

: “To them, the entire world is a ‘sin’… an innocent world is created by one tribe, with one universal utopian ideal… the eradication of Sin by Punishment… the spreading of Jokers and fortunes are solely for that purpose.”

: The funny part is that if I put some of this dialog into the Silver Case LP, you’d probably never know it’s not from The Silver Case.

: “That is such arrogance…! Sure, man commits sin… even grave sins! But shouldn’t there be atonement!? One must atone for one’s own sins. Being the Police, shouldn’t we understand that better than anyone?”

: Togashi looks at him funny. “You… do realize the entire point of the police is to fuel the prison-industrial complex and act as an unofficial tax collector, right?”

: I can only imagine what this scene would look like if this was Sae instead of Katsuya. They would cut to Makoto going “This is too complex for our audience!” after the first sentence.

: “…The problem is their will and power… you may know that fortune telling stems from an ancient curse called ‘Wang Long’… the dragons of Wang Long are underground energy flows called leylines…”

: The idea of dragon-based leylines gives me horrible flashbacks to Broken Sword 3. I never finished that game because it sucks.

: “Since ancient times man has prospered by watching, or sometimes, controlling it… they are going to use the dragon for the contrary purpose.”

: You might notice that this is almost exactly the Oracle of Maia, and that’s because I swear Eternal Punishment was made to be a Western-friendly version of Innocent Sin.

: Unlike Nyarlathotep’s plan in Innocent Sin, however, a magnetic pole shift would be far less lethal than suddenly stopping the planet’s rotation.

: In fact, magnetic pole reversals have happened several times without really doing much of anything at all.

: There’s a theory that if there was to be a total pole shift that Earth’s magnetic field would “shut off” and expose the planet to cosmic radiation, but the evidence doesn’t support that.

: “Pole shift…? That’s impossible!! That’s the purpose of the Jokers!? That would destroy the New World Order itself… that is nonsense!”

: Yep, we’re going back to Xibalba again. I’m also not sure how doing the Xibalba thing would help much in a theoretical “magnetosphere shuts off” scenario, since that would bring you closer to the cosmic radiation.

: “WHAT!?”

: This part feels like it would have made way more sense in Innocent Sin, to the point where I have to wonder if Satomi Tadashi cut it for time or something.

: Remember, half the reason Tatsuya’s father got involved in the first place was because Sudou tried to kill Tatsuya… which never happened in this timeline.

: “He’s right… I betrayed your father… I knew that this would happen ever since I heard his son was in the police academy… I knew all along…”

: “You became a cop to prove your father’s innocence… and to gain back the family bond which I had destroyed… but at least believe this… your father was a very proud man.”

: “He accepted the false accusations in order to protect both me and his family…”

: All of Shimazu’s lines here are kind of mangled. I checked, and they are completely unchanged from the PS1 version.

: “You bastard… you think you’re an enforcer?”

: This is what I like about Satomi Tadashi. How many RPGs today, let alone in the late 90s, do you think would allow their female lead to point a gun at someone?

: “Tell us where Tatsuzou is! Ma-ya’s got a really itchy trigger finger, so don’t mess with her!”

: Katsuya apparently shot two of those guys to death in the interim. I reset the game here on the first recording, because we definitely want Sakya equipped.

: Let me first explain what we’re up against. First, we have Shimazu himself. Shimazu is neutral to almost everything and only has gun skills. His only resistance is to guns.

: Then we have the four swat guys, who have almost half of Shimazu’s HP each. They resist almost everything and are weak to Havoc and Sword.

: This fight is more annoying than anything else. The swat guys have two really annoying attacks - this is the first one, which attempts to put everyone to sleep.

: The second is our old friend Sharpshoot, which is still an instant kill but no longer 100% accurate.

: The good news is that Katsuya has Wing Flap, which happens to do Havoc damage. It’s great… when he’s not asleep and/or dead.

: The rest of the fight consists of whoever is alive and not asleep using whatever they can on Shimazu while Ulala heals.

: So much for getting information or whatever the hell we were doing here. At least we killed seven cops.

: “Now’s not the time. The old man paid his dues… you show respect for a ‘man’…”

: “Let’s get back to my place… we have to figure out Tatsuzou’s next move…”

: “I tapped Tatsuzou’s phone. Either his home or office… I’ve tapped most phones the bastard should be using. Of course, I can’t do diddly about cell phones and public phones…”

: I’m imagining Baofu trying to explain wiretapping to Futaba, and her going “Why did you need a wire? Couldn’t you just hack their phone? Do phones even have wires?”

: “Yung Pao…!”

: “That guy must have been spying on us…!”

: “…”

: “…This is our chance to nail Tatsuzou’s ass… Ha! He’ll never see us comin’!”

: I’d do the song thing here, but Persona 5 sucks.

: “I’m going ahead to check things out.”

: “No need for insults. Is it ready…?”

: “It is complete. It should be a good test for X-1. Excuse me…”

: “Watch your mouth… we are in front of Gozen. Gozen’s ideas are far beyond our comprehension… we must all accomplish our duties.”

: Tatsuzou then spends a good ten seconds walking very slowly offscreen.

: If you’re playing Elly’s route, this is the first time you’re introduced to Kandori, and I think it’s the only time you see him on that route.

: Next time, we’re off to the Abandoned Factory, which is thankfully much smaller than it was in Innocent Sin and does not include the liquid waste facility.

[SpammyV]

Suddenly flashing back to my childhood and my mom asking if I’d go along with jumping off a bridge or destroying the world just because all my mummies were doing it.