"is it hard being an adult?"

"there's nothing good...the pain keeps growing..."

fucking incredible game. i did a high effort write-up on innocent sin, but i can't talk about eternal punishment without gushing. the way this game explores navigating through life as a young adult with such a lovable cast is great. the gameplay is improved from innocent sin's and the battle system is pushed to its absolute limits. the story has a tighter focus than its predecessor, and recontextualizes it in a dark, yet compelling fashion. if you're like me, inching towards the age of the adult cast in this game, a lot of their concerns and feelings hit really hard and resonate a lot. it's just an excellent sequel and, in my opinion, the best JRPG you can play on the playstation.

at the end of the day, eternal punishment stands out as a story about moving on from past friendships and bonds rather than clinging onto the past. while tatsuya needs to let go of his friends from innocent sin, he still finds a support network in the adults around him, allowing him to make hard decisions in his life. while there is a time and place for "friendship is power" endings in stories, having a narrative that highlights how friendships sometimes need to be cut off is very compelling to me.

It's okay to feel guilt, regret, or to yearn for something long since lost. It's normal for traumatic experiences to affect you as a person, or to feel that your actions mean that something is entirely your responsibility.

But you don't have to bear the burden alone. There'll always be someone who cares, or wants to help, and things will eventually get better.

In these turbulent times, the Persona 2 duology provide some powerful, meaningful messages that are more important to abide by now than they possibly ever have been. So, let's be positive, everyone.

I honestly have a lot less to say about Eternal Punishment as I did with Innocent Sin. I found the game to be enjoyable, but definitely did start to grow dull toward the middle to end sections, and it didn't pick up much in the conclusion for me.

I think much of this has to do with a lot of the story being retreading of Innocent Sin, with a lot of the structure being entirely beat for beat recreations of events in Innocent Sin. There was nothing offensive, but very few standout moments that had me feeling satisfied. I'd say that the major problem I had was the emotional throughline felt weak to me, as it was largely pushed toward Tatsuya who is not present through most of the game and story until the very end. While it didn't have anything as offensively bad or gross as the nazis, or the wasted potential of the Masked Circle in the first game... It also just felt lacking. Such as finding the fortune telling to be weaker than the wish granting and shadow men scenario in Innocent Sin. Again, just an alright and passable story that didn't grip me as much as I would have liked.

As far as the main cast: While I did enjoy Katsuya and Baofu and their bickering, I didn't really feel much for Ulala or Maya, who was weakened greatly with her voice being taken away. Maya still served as a better protagonist that Tatsuya in my opinion, but making her silent was a large mistake. As a result, with it largely being the four characters through most of the story, I felt their chemistry could have been stronger. With Maya silent, there was no fun banter with Ulala with her, and instead the best banter Ulala gets is with Baofu. Katsuya and Baofu have their moments with their morals ending up on opposite sides given one is a detective and one is a vigilante, but there also wasn't much with Baofu and Maya. Katsuya's crush on Maya was cute however. Tatsuya himself felt like he was written into being too gloomy, and while it makes sense in this scenario and with the themes of maturing and adulthood, it does take away other aspects of his character from the past game with him making goofy sounds to demons. I had gone with Nanjo route for story, and Nanjo largely was just the same as he was in P1, but I felt he had less chemistry with the EP cast than Yukino did with Maya in IS. As a result, it often feels like there are 3 1/2 party members for the full game, with Ulala, Katsuya, Baofu, and silent protagonist Maya. I would have liked the party to have a stronger connection, which probably would have helped with Maya no longer being silent, and Tatsuya opening up more in the end game.

The gameplay was largely the same, with a bit more difficulty put onto boss fights so they weren't as braindead as they were in Innocent Sin. I found the game to be a good blend of difficulty for the limited combat system, only finding some aspects to be more annoying and not well thought out. Such as the Old Maid skill being something that bosses could spam rather than having a cooldown or trigger to activate, and that some enemies had skills that could completely drain your wallet. In that sense, they just felt more mean-spirited than difficult. Beyond that, my thoughts from Innocent Sin's gameplay is largely the same. It was serviceable, was an improvement to problems in P1, still miss the grid system, but still doesn't reward exploiting weaknesses as much as SMT games, or future Persona games. Leading to using your favorite spell over and over again generally being the best strategy.

Overall, Eternal Punishment is mostly a lot more of Innocent Sin, but without the offensive parts of it. It has a decent story, a decent cast of characters, and decent gameplay for the time it came out in. Though, I think it does lack the strong emotional core and the highlights of Innocent Sin that I liked about it. In this sense, Eternal Punishment was fun, but nothing standout to me. Compared to Innocent Sin's constant highlights and low points, Eternal Punishment was just a steady ride from beginning to end. 3.5/5

Pretty cool story that's sadly attached to a low-grade PS1 JRPG. To be honest, after a few hours I was just not vibing with the gameplay and decided I wasn't losing anything by just watching the story on YouTube. A beat Innocent Sin 2 years ago and mostly trudged through that with speed up and grinding. Now, I realize it isn't worth it to act like I'm engaging with the game when I'm not. That aside, the story's neat, it's the most explicit the series has gone into Sci-fi. Back when this came out, I'm sure the mechanics were experimental and conceptually cool, but comparing them to RPGs of today (and even to a degree, some of its contemporaries) it kinda sucks. P2 is amazingly deserving of a remake.

"There are good things even when you become an adult... Just a few..."

"This is... the burden of sin"

might be a bit more personal of a review at the start than i intended but oh well! also dragged on new-persona a bit more than i wanted but i'm keeping it in because i find it important to my thoughts on the game

i think i played eternal punishment at the perfect time in my life. i'm a largely aimless adult who thought they knew what they wanted out of life but is currently just in a state of trying to find something that makes sense, something to hold onto and give me a direction. at the same time, i'm only 20 years old at the time of playing the game and writing this, and more than an aimless and confused adult, i'm a scared kid who doesn't know and isn't ready for what being an adult entails. because of this, i've never really related more to a cast of characters in a game more than the cast of eternal punishment.

if you know anything about persona it's probably persona 4 and 5, which uh. you can see my reviews on those games to find out how i feel about them. their casts are of teenagers whose biggest problems never seemed to be anything that i could relate to, other than futaba who is autistic and has trauma, but even then there's this thin layer of tropiness on every character so you can't even relate to them past a superficial level of recognizing a small bit of yourself in them for the sake of doing the bare minimum to be hip and relatable teenagers.
in p2ep however, you have a group that amounts to a directionless adult, an adult who is questioning his direction, an adult who lost his way, and an adult who is too absorbed in the direction she took to really go any other way (she is the weakest example of the theme). later on, you also get (in my playthrough at least, there are two persona 1 party members you can choose between later on and i chose nanjo) an adult who found his way and has an experience that strengthens his resolve, and a teenager who is deeply afraid of being alone, and is scared of what becoming an adult is going to mean for him.

the party in eternal punishment are all handled so well and the way they interact with each other feels just as real as the friends in innocent sin. its a palpable feeling where these characters are in their lives and careers and how happy they are with it and i love it, it made me feel like maybe there is a way for me to claw my way out of the uncertainty of early adulthood, a way for me to... Change My Way.

sorry

aside from the characters, the narrative is also a great continuation of innocent sin and the original persona (but mostly innocent sin). you get really nice conclusions and additions to the characters from the first game sprinkled throughout, and seeing as it is a sequel to innocent sin, a lot of content that is greatly benefited by having played that game first. whereas innocent sin ends in a sorrowful and hopeless note for these kids who didn't do anything to deserve it, eternal punishment highlights that hopelessness at first, but ultimately shows it all through a lens of hope. i won't spoil much but these characters get mostly happy endings and they get to move on with their lives and find a place and direction they can be happy with, and after playing 2 games i would hope i at least get to feel a little nice about what happens in the end.

gameplay wise, eternal punishments psp port is a lot better than the psp port of innocent sin. a lot of minor quality of life features make the battle system a lot more fun to mess with and it isn't so awful that you're going to be begging for a visual novel adaptation. it's honestly one of the more fun turn based systems in a jrpg i've played even if near the end i started to get a little bored, at least of the random encounters and some reoccurring bosses. the dungeon crawling is also a lot better in this one aside from a certain dungeon near the end of the game. it's hardly ever aimless and frustrating like i felt innocent sin could be.

overall, eternal punishment is an amazing game and a perfect finale to innocent sin, and it's a shame that persona just never was this good or real again. maybe with a new director to the series we could see a return to this style of storytelling and presentation in the series, but with how popular the newest games are and how prominent the dating sim elements are, i don't see that happening sadly. it's not all bad though, because these old games, or in the case of the original and the psp port of innocent sin, the stories, hold up incredibly well and far surpass their younger peers. i implore anyone who feels like they can't get into modern persona or just anyone who wants a good jrpg to sink a few weeks into to play this duology, i promise you won't be disappointed.