I like to tell people that Persona 1 is a Shin Megami Tensei game, Persona 2 is a Final Fantasy Game, and Persona 3 is a Persona game. Eternal Punishment complicates this little mantra significantly, because it is WAY more of a Shin Megami Tensei game in its design than Innocent Sin is.

When I say that, I mean it has more Matadors. A "Matador", for the record, is when Atlus stops the player with a mandatory boss who is clearly meant to be defeated in one particular way which will almost certainly require grinding. The bosses can be defeated without employing the one, clear solution, yes, but doing so is a miserable experience, and often one that leans heavily on RNG.

I hate Matadors. They are probably my least favorite thing about the entire wider SMT franchise. This, I realize, is far from universal. Many lovers of SMT are drawn to it specifically because of these puzzle bosses challenging them to rifle through their drawer until they find a suitable key. I however despise being sent away to spend potentially several hours sourcing new party members, and several more in trial and error if I don't open up the wikis and charts. I hate being told to "go get the thing." I want to be able to figure out a solution with what I have, but in Eternal Punishment and often elsewhere in SMT, "what I have" is barely capable of inflicting any damage at all.

Over the course of Eternal Punishment, on the PSP's Normal mode, despite dutifully playing out all of my prescribed random encounters on my way through every dungeon, I had to grind intensely at four separate points in the story. When I say "had to" I do not mean that I had to do this to match up to the hilariously inflated level ranges that online guides always provide. I remained ten or more levels under every boss's level and every guide's recommendation for the entire run. I had to grind like that just to keep up with being UNDERLEVELED. In order to fuse the personas that could give me the puzzle boss gimmick keys I needed and actually be useful with them, I often needed to slam out a full ten levels. I can and do hold this EXP curve against Eternal Punishment. This is a Persona 1 level of keep-up grinding that is on display by the end of the game. I'm sure that the veterans who knew about the double experience fortune... thing that you can do from the start and who spent time hunting down every rare encounter and who tracked down all the sidequests experienced a lot less of this, but even if that remedies the situation, having such things be necessary to finish a playthrough isn't great either.

To rub more salt in the grinding wound, players need EXP, yes, but they also need cards, and they cannot get those two things at the same time. The negotiation card grind is a completely parallel activity that cannot be done simultaneously with actually killing things for EXP. This means that pretty much every time there's a grind to be done, there are actually two grinds to be done... and that's if you don't have to fish for material cards from rare encounters.

If I did not have access to a great auto-battle system, the ability to turn off battle animations, and an emulator's fast-forward function, I imagine that I would not have finished Eternal Punishment, and that would have been a massive shame, because its story is at least as good as Innocent Sin's and it's better paced. It walks a wonderfully fine line between reusing old environments and inventing new ones, and I'm so glad that I played it. I just can't see myself wanting to do it again.

I actually lowered the entry bar on my silly little "five-star club" in order to let Innocent Sin into it. It got away with it because while some of its systems were definitely rough, they could mostly be ignored, and the PS1 version kept things engaging enough when those questionable systems WERE being ignored that the ultimate experience was still fantastic. I certainly enjoyed my time with Eternal Punishment, but not without some very significant things repeatedly getting in the way. Even still, I recognize that a lot of my grievances are tied to my preference for difficulty being delivered IN battles, rather than scavenger hunting outside them. There exists a legion of players who love the latter, and I'm not about to argue with them.

I admire Eternal Punishment's commitment to the systems that Innocent Sin so overlooked, but I have to admit, I had a better time when they were largely being ignored.

I've always wanted to write something for this duology, and now that it's fresh in my mind, let's not waste time: it's a godamn masterpiece.

Eternal Punishment is the sequel of Innocent Sin, and WHAT OF A SEQUEL. Still in the same vein of the first one, i'm just amazed how great the story is. This is, like i said before, a direct sequel of Innocent Sin, involving most of the same characters and story elements, but in a different way. I won't spoil anything, but it is just too great.

The crew members are this time (and only this time, sadly) adults, and i'm pretty sure that's one of the reason this game is so good. The themes and reflections are those of the transition to adulthood and the beginning of life in society, which will resonate much more in the minds of adults than the eternal problems of high school students life.

In this one, Tatsuya (the protagonist of the first one) becomes a recurring character who speaks while Maya, who spoke in the first one, becomes the silent protagonist of this one. I was amazed how great Tatsuya quickly become one of my favorite persona protagonist, juste by giving him his personnality and own reactions. Silent protagonists are something i don't particularly like, so it was a bless for this game to giving me 2 real mc, even if it's turn by turn.

Well, whatever, like already said before, this game is a godamn masterpiece, everything is way too good, from the characters to the OST. Undeniably one of atlus finnest piece of art. We will be there if a remake ever comes out.

Persona 2 Eternal Punishment is by far the most derivative mainline Persona game. It's simultaneously a sequel to Innocent Sin AND Persona 1, and reuses a lot of elements from the former. Despite that, It manages to surpass it's predecessor, and refines and improves a lot of the problems that game had.
Pros: The gameplay in this game, while still not amazing, is significantly better than Innocent Sin's. It expects you to have played Innocent Sin and expects you to take advantage of all the vast myriad of obscure gameplay mechanics and shops available for use. The game stops pulling its punches and gets significantly harder, and the difficulty is much needed. The strategies I was using in Innocent Sin stopped working, and I had to adapt to new strategies, and build team compositions around being able to form proper Fusion Spells. The game still has the tedium and the slowness of Innocent Sin, but it's more entertaining because it expects a lot more of you. Some people call this the hardest Persona game, but I don't know if I would agree. I didn't struggle with it that much more than I did Innocent Sin. I basically steamrolled the entire final dungeon. The difference is, I would say, is that with Innocent Sin I was barely trying and struggled, and with Eternal Punishment I was aware of it's reputation and was trying as hard as possible and still struggled. Either way, if you can go through the game taking the most possible advantage of Fusion Spells and Mutations and Skill Cards, you shouldn't have the hardest time. The story in the game is also great. I love how different it is from every other game in the series, aided by the fact that it has a fully adult cast. I still think I like Innocent Sin's story just a bit more, but Eternal Punishment still has everything great that game had. The characters are still super entertaining, and I especially love how Tatsuya was characterized in this game. Turning a silent protagonist into an actual character isn't something that can be done easily, but it was pulled off flawlessly here and feels so natural. The game's contact system is much improved. It's streamlined from Innocent Sin to be less complicated and I think it works very well to remove some of the tedium of demon contact. The rumor system also returns and is also improved. Rumors are much more varied and control much more. There's a lot to love here.
Cons: The battle system, while better, still has a lot of the flaws of Innocent Sin. In addition, this game takes a bit too much from Innocent Sin. It's justified incredibly well within the story, but a lot of things are reused. Some dungeons in the game are completely original and those tend to be the best and most interesting. Other dungeons take place in the same place as dungeons from Innocent Sin, and as a result use the same visuals and environments, but still contain different layouts, and those are much less interesting. Other dungeons are literally ripped straight from Innocent Sin, with the exact same layout and everything. Those are the ones I really take issue with. It feels like a slog and a waste of time to have to do everything all over again. Again, it's justified well within the story, and it's not too big of an issue, but it was an annoyance I had. Another thing I don't like about this game is it's characterization of Maya. Maya was turned into this game's silent protagonist and while I like that doing so allowed Tatsuya to become his own character, I don't like how much Maya's character had to be reduced. Maya was the emotional core of the group in Innocent Sin, and her trauma and backstory was a major focus of that game. It just feels awkward that none of that is really focused on much anymore, because all Maya says in this game is "...." and "Maya smiled gently" or something.
Overall: This is another must play game, even more so than Innocent Sin, despite being it's direct sequel. It has a lot of the same strengths as Innocent Sin and improves upon its biggest flaws.

"I just moved here, but Aoba sure is a great place." (Young Man)

Before starting this review, I need to say this kind of works as my combined thoughts on Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment. My score is indicative of just this game, but I never felt like I wanted to make a review for both since the gameplay is practically identical and I'd just be repeating myself a lot.

Eternal Punishment has some seriously missed potential. There are some great ideas here that are tough to appreciate from the gameplay that is present.

Being that Eternal Punishment is a direct sequel to Innocent Sin, it reuses a ton of assets from the original game, with the major culprits being the dungeons and music. Logically, the reused dungeons make sense as they pertain to the story's happenings, but I think there comes a point where, in development, the creators should have asked themselves if that was truly an ideal way to entertain the player. I would have liked to see how the settings have changed atmospherically in the sequel, but all we got were map layout updates. I was also disappointed by the game's soundtrack this time around. Most songs are either remixed or just reused entirely. There's some new songs though, one of which is the Aoba Park theme which is a beautiful track, and this remix of the Mountain Trail theme, but I enjoyed Innocent Sin’s OST more since all the music was brand new.

It's clear the developers drew some inspiration from Phantasy Star when making this combat system. Combat revolving around auto-battling, a 5-character party, and most notably, fusion spells. Differing from PSIV, you're able to switch around turn orders mid-battle, which is a great addition for fusion spells considering PSIV had you making your characters defend to link the turns for people with varying speed stats. I honestly never really ended up using these in Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment, as a lot just seemed worse than their non-chainable counterparts. An instance being when you use spells that target groups of enemies that share the same element, you can be prompted to turn it into a fusion spell that only attacks one enemy instead, which was inconvenient in standard battles with enemy groups. You can opt out of using the fusion spell before it happens in battle, which is another great addition, so it's not really an issue. The only time I ended up really using them was when combining two elements to do a bit more damage in boss fights. A major oversight, or intended mechanic, depending on who you ask, is the defend trick, where you cancel auto-battle and make everyone defend after their action. It's tedious to use in standard battles but proves extremely effective in boss battles due to you taking close to no damage. It really does make me believe it's an oversight, unless the developers thought it would be too useless to waste an extra turn defending. A cool aspect of the combat was the ability to have characters be able to switch their personae without wasting a turn, which led me to use it quite frequently. Turning anyone into a healer out of the blue was very helpful.

EP is known to be one of the harder entries in the SMT franchise, and I was well aware of this from friends. I know it sounds condescending, but I thought it was going to be a case of Persona 5 fans playing an older RPG, but Eternal Punishment is one of the harder RPG titles in the PS1 library, in my opinion. The difficulty was kind of mixed in its tedious structure along with its slow combat and frustrating encounter rate. By tedious structure, I am referring to demon fusion, which is done by gathering spell cards through demon negotiation. When fusing demons, there are different arcanas of cards they will give you pertaining to their arcana. Later on, demons will give you more and more per negotiation as the card requirements for fusions rise for higher-leveled personae. It's pretty easy to find a way to entertain them for cards, as there's multiple character combinations that work, but the strategy you want to go for is to form a contract with them, which usually has a very small amount or 1 specific character combo that raises their joy stat. The reason you want to do this is because after contract formation, when you entertain them for cards, they'll give you wild cards, which you can give to someone in the velvet room to change into any arcana you want. Considering there's over 20 card types in the game, this is the most convenient method of fusing personae. There’s different personae to fuse in each arcana of cards, which explains why you’d want the wild cards for complete freedom of your team's builds. It’s frustrating to find the joy-raising action to initiate these contracts, part of it being that they’re integral to the gameplay. There’s an art to demon negotiation; you’ll be able to tell what works sometimes from your characters' personalities meshing well with the demons, but it is by no means consistent. It’s something that’s fun at first but quickly becomes tedious when you're tasked with doing it more than a few times. It felt like I was just aimlessly trying anything that might work, which most times resulted in the demon getting mad and you having to enter a new encounter to try again. The salt on the wound is that making them mad will have them break your contract… Persona 2 is best played with a notebook nearby to write down the correct prompts for these demons. Even though the end result is a team with some killer personae, it's a goal that’s hard to work towards with all the tedium associated with it. 

Now, the slow combat. Not only is the game some of the slowest combat on the system, but it is also grindy as all hell. Throughout the game, you’ll need to fuse new personae a lot to stay on top of the game's difficulty. To unlock the moves on each persona, you’ll have to use any of their moves to get them to slowly rank up to their max level of 8 and get each move associated with them. Why would you want to rank them up all the way? Because sometimes the personae will have an integral move like healing everyone, or attack moves which you'll need for them to be useful. This was by far the most annoying part of the game's combat. When I’d get to a skill-check boss fight, I’d have to back out and grind up new personas, which got really irritating. I honestly wouldn’t mind the idea of it if they’d rank up quicker, because later on it started to tread on multiple hours of grinding. You can get them to skip 2 ranks from finishing battles with fusion attacks from a lucky mutation, but I could never get this to happen, so take that as you will. Even though I have a lot of complaints about this game's systems, it’s still fun to make builds for your characters with persona fusion. You can add a stat boost card and a card to add a certain move during the fusion, which adds a good layer of customizability. There’s also a level-up bonus for each persona to add a point to a particular stat, which is something you need to think about so you can boost your character's strengths. It’s as fun as the rest of the series in that regard; there’s still a bunch of pondering time spent in the velvet room, but it’s hard to look past the requirements of doing so.

I will say, though, that Eternal Punishment has great boss fights; almost every boss in the game will make you switch up your strategy and punish you if you don't. For instance, there's one fight later on where the boss heals a set amount of HP passively every turn, so you'll need to utilize fusion spells to maximize damage while balancing out support for your party. They were always a challenge to look forward to, and I was always preemptively aware that there would be a challenge that I'd have to face when outside boss doors in dungeons, no matter how high level or good my personae were.

By far the most endearing aspect of Eternal Punishment is its cast of characters. It's really nice to see a game tackle aspects of adulthood in such a blunt way in a real-life setting. These characters are people that most can truly relate to. By the time they started revealing a lot about them near the end through flashbacks, I got a bit emotional. These characters have realistic internal conflicts, not some shit out of Persona 5. I do wish there was more of it throughout the game. It may be the absurd amount of time spent in dungeons, but it really feels like there were barely any cutscenes for these characters to develop. Of course, the ones we have are great, but I wanted more.

I'm being told I should have played the PSP releases of these games, but I always like playing original releases because I like to admire what games did at the time of their original release. Part of the reason P1 is so interesting to me is that it is an early 5th generation title, and it was up in the air what to make next since there wasn’t really a blueprint yet. I feel more in tune with the innovations associated with games when I play their original releases, since a lot feels lost to me when I look at HD re-releases. Just looking at the UI in these titles and how they tried to make P1 overly accessible with the fast movement and out-of-place soundtrack, which completely alters the heavy atmosphere the Revelations version has, it was evident enough that these were not the definitive ways for me to play these titles. For the P2 games, though, the redone soundtracks actually sound really nice, but the battle UI looks and plays awful. So, that's just in case anyone was wondering why I played these versions instead.

What can I take away from these games? I will never complain about lengthy combat animations again. Kidding, but not really... These games definitely got me more interested in trying out the classic SMT games, and newer SMT games, for that matter, and I liked P2’s structure as opposed to the later entries in the Persona series. If you like this game and feel like I’m missing something, feel free to let me know in the comments. I’m curious to know aspects of why people enjoy this game.

Side Note: Whenever I play SMT games, something befalls me every single time. When I was playing Nocturne, I was incapable of sleeping for a week for some reason? During Revelations, I got hacked on every single account I own from what I think to be my cookies getting logged, and yes, even my Backloggd was hacked. Can you believe the nerve of someone to hack a Backloggd account? Someone must really hate me. During this game, I got sick for the first time in like 2 years and feel like shit. I fear for my life next time I go back to this series. I'll end off this review by reminding everyone to use 2 Factor sign in for your accounts. Stay safe out there, fellas...

This game is home to amazing sprite work with beautiful settings, although its combat feels rather dated in the way that the moves happen in a sequence and not as you input them which hasnt left a good impression in me both in this game and its predecessor (innocent sin). What stands out about this game is its phenomenal story, Persona 2 is a masterclass of storytelling in the persona franchise, not only from the perspective of the characters own stories and relationship developments, but in how well paced it all is, in terms of Persona stories, theres this and then theres everything else

It's a good direct continuation from the first game. Giving Tatsuya a personality was a great idea, and the cast in this game is much better than the first. Even though Maya doesn't speak much, she still maintains her charisma. However, in my opinion, Tatsuya remains the best character in this game. The ending isn't a happy one, but that's what makes it feel more "realistic." If it were just Persona 2: Innocent Sin on its own, it wouldn't be as good as people say. But combining both games makes for an incredible experience, especially in terms of the story.

In this game, for some reason, Atlus decided to destroy the UI and create the worst battle UI I've ever seen in my life. To change your attack, you have to go through 5 different screens, which is unbearable. It's almost preferable to almost die and leave it on auto than to go through these 5 screens for each character every turn. It's definitely the worst battle UI I've ever seen. They could have kept the same UI from the first Persona 2, but aside from that, Persona 2 as a whole is a great game and it truly lives up to the hype that people talk about without a doubt, if you like Persona, it's definitely worth playing.

After hearing how popular the duology was for old-school SMT fans, this was on the top of my hitlist after completing Persona 5. Going in, I was hearing everyone describe this as a dark and mature game and I was left a bit disappointed, unfortunately. This game has its moments here and there, but I was expecting something way darker than what we got.
That's not to say the game is bad by any means. It's a huge step up from Innocent Sin in terms of characterization and story. I liked the cast a lot more in this one because they felt real and fleshed out. I'm a particular fan of Baofu he's a fun character who gets some great moments with the rest of the party. Also happy we got to see Katsuya as a playable character and his antics with Tatsuya in particular are adorable. Overall, the game's cast is the strongest aspect of the story for me and I think that is due in part to them being actual adults. There's a very cute touch where Tatsuya is unable to purchase alcoholic drinks because he's underage which I thought was delightful.
I think the plot doesn't go nearly as crazy as Innocent Sin does, though, which was my favorite part of that game. Innocent Sin really leaned into the idea of rumor becoming reality using commonly held conspiracy theories and turning them into pivotal story points which I thought was more interesting than Eternal Punishment.
The gameplay's more the same. A bit archaic but I eventually found myself enjoying it. There's a catharsis to blasting an any group with Giga Cyclone and raking in some experience. In particular, I wish they'd bring back Fusion Spells in future Persona games because they make party building more important and interesting. I also love the mutation mechanic that further incentivizes using fusion spells and can often result in some unexpected developments.
While I still prefer Persona 5 Royal I did greatly enjoy myself with Eternal Punishment and I hope Atlus eventually remakes the duology one day because these games deserve to get some modernization for modern players to experience.

Upon completing Innocent Sin, I was left feeling a bit unsatisfied for a few reasons – the contact system, the ending, etc.; there were of course a lot of things I liked (and even loved) in Innocent Sin, but I wasn’t left as wowed by the experience as I would’ve hoped for. Instead of immediately playing Eternal Punishment next though, the next game I went into was Persona 4 Golden (a game that turned out to be significantly less interesting than P5R or P2 IS), and that gave me about a month to really chew on my experience with Innocent Sin.

When I finished P4G and felt ready to return to Sumaru City, I started Eternal Punishment. And by jove, this game just... delights in being a sequel to Innocent Sin so much.

On the gameplay front, so many of my hangups with Innocent Sin were improved upon – the contact system was greatly simplified, the shop rumors were pared down to the essentials, Salam Ladeen’s maps gave a great incentive for fully exploring dungeons in the latter half of the game, some of the sillier fusion spells were “nerfed” to be less over-centralizing, etc. Playing the Playstation version of the game, there were still some QoL things that nagged me here and there, but I can forgive that in a 24-year-old game (especially when using an emulator with speed-up), and overall, I can only see its gamefeel as a direct improvement over Innocent Sin.

On the writing front, the setup for Eternal Punishment naturally leads to revisiting a lot of the same ground covered in Innocent Sin. However, each time the thought “This is cool, but it’s not too different from what happened in the previous game” started creeping out of the back of my mind, Eternal Punishment would yank the rug out from under me, telling me “No, this is different, and you better buckle in.” Between that and in general a stronger cast, at this point I’m left believing that Eternal Punishment is simply the most well-written Persona game of the lot, let alone being “just” an improvement over Innocent Sin.

In the end, I found Eternal Punishment to be one of my favorite videogame experiences of the last decade, and I think my time with it (however brief in the grand scheme of things) will continue to inform my perception of story-driven games for a long time to come.