Persona 2: Eternal Punishment

Original Release: Playstation, 2000. Version Reviewed: Playstation, 2000.

THE PLOT:

Maya Amano is suffering from a serious case of deja vu. Ever since her chance encounter with high school senior Tatsuya Suou, she has been unable to shake the sense that she should know him - even though he's a complete stranger to her.

A story about a mysterious being called "the Joker," who will kill on request for anyone who dials their own phone number, brings Maya to Tatsuya's school. She and her friend Ulala corner the Joker in the school's clock tower, along with police detective Katsuya Suou - Tatsuya's older brother. The killer easily overpowers them, however, and they survive only because of the intervention of Tatsuya, who seems far more powerful than should be possible, and who knows far too much.

When Katsuya is removed from the case, the three continue their investigation with the help of some reluctant allies: Baofu, an extortionist with links to organized crime; Nate, the young heir to the Nanjo group, who has a personal connection with the forces supporting Joker; and Ellen, a model with surprising knowledge of rumors, fortunes, and Personas. Arrayed against them is The New World Order, a group of criminals, politicians, and members of the elite who believe they can usher in a utopia - at the cost of ending the world!


CHARACTERS:

This is a direct sequel and counterpart to Persona 2: Innocent Sin, so it should be no surprise that the characters from that game reappear here. Maya is now the player character and Tatsuya a supporting character. Ironically, this flattens Maya's personality, which is a pity as she was arguably the strongest character in the previous game. Tatsuya fares much better; as the one person who remembers the events of Innocent Sin, he is burdened with a secret that must never be shared, which leaves him actively avoiding his former friends while also attempting to protect them by discouraging their investigation.

This is the only Persona game with adults as the main characters. This allows for some interesting dynamics that would be difficult to replicate with high school students. Katsuya and Baofu form an engaging double act. The dutiful cop and the shady criminal initially despise each other, to the point where they sometimes seem ready to come to blows, but they (of course) gradually develop mutual respect and understanding. Katsuya worries about his younger brother, particularly given his recently changed behavior. Meanwhile, Ulala has projected her own insecurities onto her friend, resulting in a seething envy of Maya's beauty and success. As with Innocent Sin, I will say simply that this is an altogether more complex layer of characterization than you would expect in a 20-year-old PS1 game.

An early enemy provides hints to a forgotten past...

THE CHOICE:

Eternal Punishment has stronger links to the original game than Innocent Sin had, with the first game's Nanjo (Nate in this version) and Elly (Ellen) getting major supporting roles. Early in the game, you will receive a choice to create a rumor regarding a meeting with either a man or a woman. Depending on your choice, one of these two will join the party for roughly half the game.

I strongly recommend saving right before making this choice. After saving, select the female option to play through Ellen's first dungeon. You would be doing yourself a grave disservice by missing out on this dungeon, which is the most narratively interesting one of all three PS1 games, and which also stands as a pretty good short story in its own right. After that dungeon is complete, I would recommend re-loading and selecting the male option, then playing the rest of the game through from there. Everything after the first dungeon in each path is roughly the same... but Nate's links to the New World Order mean that his path offers a lot of little story-related details that bring the plot more fully to life.


GAMEPLAY:

Persona 2: Eternal Punishment makes heavy use of the assets from Innocent Sin. The settings are the same, most of the dungeon maps are the same (with plot events deliberately echoing similar ones from the previous game). For whatever reason, the PSP version of Eternal Punishment was never released outside of Japan, leaving me to play the PS1 version of Eternal Punishment. This leads to slightly fuzzier visuals and clunkier in-game menus; but once I adjusted to those, the gameplay itself was effectively identical - plot and characterization advanced mainly in conversations held in quest hubs, shops, and rooms; the rest being dungeon crawling to plot objectives/bosses, with random battles along the way.

Difficulty is definitely higher than in Innocent Sin - I suspect the PSP version of Innocent Sin balanced the difficulty curve of the original. Still, though it's a reasonably hard game in places, it has very few sudden difficulty spikes. Most roadblocks are best solved not by grinding, but by visiting The Velvet Room and fusing higher-level Personas. In short, combat strategy ends up counting for more than mindless grinding does, which I greatly appreciated.

A late-game enemy is a reflection of the past.

THOUGHTS:

Persona 2: Eternal Punishment is by far the best of the PS1 Persona series. It will not surpise me if I end up ranking it as the best of the series, period. It is a retro game - Modern gamers approaching it will have to adjust to less detailed visuals and clunkier mechanics than modern games offer. Within that limitation, however, it is enormously involving, challenging in a way that doesn't involve endless grinding or cheap luck-based mechanics, and ultimately rewards the gamer's patience with both a fine game and a fine story.

It does strike me as odd that, for a very long time, this was the only Persona 2 available in the West. I can only imagine how odd it must have been to play a game that was so clearly the second half of an extended story. Thankfully, the localization here did not repeat the mistakes of the initial Persona translation - The action definitely takes place in Japan, and all references to Innocent Sin are retained (including a few full flashbacks). But it's very clearly the second half of the story - It's by far the better half, but it unquestionably assumes that you've already played the earlier title.

That said, all I have left to offer are superlatives. The Nate/Ellen choice offers intrinsic replay value, as each path offers not only a unique dungeon but significant amounts of unique dialogue. The story itself is well-presented, mysteries building throughout roughly 50 hours of game time. The main characters are all flawed in their own ways, but are ultimately likable people, and the climax carries a startling amount of emotional weight... particularly if you make choices that allow certain characters to recall the events of Innocent Sin, which results in a poignant epilogue.

Don't get me wrong - This is an old game, and it looks and plays like one. If you're able to accept that, though, Persona 2: Eternal Punishment brushes very close to being a masterpiece in its own right... and if you take it together with its predecessor, it actually strengthens Innocent Sin in retrospect.

I flat-out loved this. Given how cheap it is to download from the Playstation Store, there's no question that it offers retro gamers good value for their money.


Overall Rating: 10/10.

Previous Game: Persona 2 - Innocent Sin
Next Game: Persona 3

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Shin Megami Tensei: Persona.

Original Release: Playstation, 1996. Version Reviewed: PSP, 2009.

THE PLOT:

A group of Japanese high school students are visiting their friend Maki in the hospital. She is taken away to the ICU... which abruptly vanishes, just as the town is attacked by demons. The mysterious Philemon grants the power of "Persona" to the teenagers, allowing them to summon manifestations of their inner strength to battle these forces.

It's a power they will need. Kandori, an executive at SEBEC, is using the company's resources to power a reality-altering machine. Now familiar places are transformed into dungeons, crawling with increasingly powerful supernatural forces. The high school has vanished. And Maki... seems oddly connected to almost all of the events.


CHARACTERS:

Characterization is above-average for a mid-1990s Playstation game. Most of the characters are fairly one-note, but they all have distinct personalities. Nanjo (Nate in the 1990s US localization), the rich kid whose family is linked to SEBEC, is serious and decisive, and comes across more as the group's leader in the main story than the player character does; Yukino, a minor supporting character in the main story, takes on that role in the alternate Snow Queen route. Masao (Mark) is brash and constantly making jokes, but clearly has feelings for Maki (Mary). Maki, the character most linked to the plot, ironically ends up being the least interesting of the playable characters!

The characters go to the hospital to visit a sick friend. 
Madness ensues.

GAMEPLAY:

Falls into two main elements. There are rooms and shops where your character can interact with others.  In some cases, interactions unlock additional characters; in most cases, you will gain insight into both the characters and the current state of the story. A town map takes you from location to location, and the game provides regular indications of where you should go next.

The rest of the time, you will be dungeon-crawling. The first person POV takes a bit of getting used to, and I quickly realized that it was more useful to look at the mini-map to navigate the labyrinth-like dungeons than to try to do so visually.  Even in the PSP remake, the halls and corridors are too featureless for visual navigation to be worthwhile.

It's a JRPG, so it's unsurprising that combat and leveling is achieved through random encounters. Combat is turn-based, with options for magic attacks, physical attacks, and a variety of guns (yes, these Japanese high school students are well enough armed for an NRA convention). The interesting curveball is that you can also choose to negotiate with demons. Any of your party members can speak, and each has multiple potential approaches. Some of these will please the demons, others will enrage or frighten them. You'll need to do a balance of both combat and negotiation: Combat for leveling up your characters and Personas, and negotiation for gaining new Personas.

Combat is visually dated, but surprisingly fun.

THOUGHTS:

When games journalists rank the entries of the Persona series, they regularly rank the original game at the bottom. Consensus seems to be that the game has aged poorly, and compares negatively to pretty much all of its successors.

I was surprised at how thoroughly I enjoyed it.

To start with: Yes, it is dated. Even the PSP version, with sharper images and streamlined menus, is very clearly a game from an earlier time. The first person dungeon crawling is visually unappealing, and at times downright ugly. The third-person "character interaction" moments are from a top-down view that makes it feel like you're very far away from the characters, which can limit the sense of involvement. In the PSP version, widescreen reformatting leaves the edges of the screen as a featureless void, which is initially off-putting as well.

I will say that I got through most of the SEBEC route (the main story) without much deliberate grinding. Until the final dungeon, that is, when a sudden difficulty spike rendered my previously unstoppable party into a gang of pathetic weaklings. I ended up tromping around the game's last dungeon for hours, leveling up my characters to equip their Ultimate Personas, then grinding to level up those Personas, before I was able to face off against the game's final boss. Meanwhile, the Snow Queen route requires constant grinding for multiple bosses, then yet more grinding before facing the final boss.

Once I adjusted to the game's look and controls, however, I found myself surprisingly compelled by the narrative. Both the SEBEC and Snow Queen routes offer interesting stories, with ambitious themes about human nature and about the ways people both hide and reveal their inner selves. Its rare to find an archive video game that grapples with such subject matter, often quite successfully. Inspired in part by the work of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who discussed how the social face we present to the world is basically a mask disguising our true natures, the script has surprising intelligence even as it presents a decidedly outlandish story.

Originally released in the West as Revelations: Persona, the game's PS1 release suffered from an ill-judged attempt to Americanize the story. The characters were renamed, as mentioned. Further, in an attempt at diversity that went horribly wrong, Masao was "blacked up" to be the streetwise Mark, whose dialogue was slathered in stereotypical slang. The PSP version sets this to rights, restoring the Japanese setting and the original character names. It also restores the Snow Queen side story, which was removed from the western PS1 release (though allusions to it remained). These changes make the PSP release the preferable version.

Even the PSP version suffers from misjudgments, however. In an attempt to force it into the mold of the later Persona games, the remake replaces the eerie original soundtrack with pop tunes, which often jar with the story's serious tone. In addition, a handful of fully-animated cutscenes have been added to portray key story points. The animation looks quite good... arguably too good, to the point that the cutscenes can feel jarring compared to the rest of the game.

Overall, however, the PSP version's good points outweigh its bad, and none of its missteps compare with the wrong-headed localization choices of the original Western release. The game itself is much better than I had been led to believe. When I started playing it, I did so as a background game - something to pick at a few minutes here and there. It quickly became a game I for which I would set aside hours-long chunks of time, however, its story and themes involving me to a far greater degree than I had anticipated.

A willingness to accept the quirks of retro-gaming is required to enjoy this.  But I suspect a lot of gamers who haven't played the original might - after a couple hours of adjustment - be as surprised as I was about how engaging this title is, even close to 25 years after its initial release.

Overall Rating: 6/10.

Spinoff: Persona - Anomalous Tower Chronicle

Next Game: Persona 2 - Innocent Sin

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