Will forever be known to me as a game i played ONLY during every single one of my Jewish Studies lectures. Im not even Jewish so i cant begin to tell you how i ended up in that class but this was the only thing i looked forward doing at 10:55 - 11:30am tuesdays and thursdays every week. Today was my last day of class so it was either I beat the game today or i take another class about the Jewish religion. There was no better option.

Fun game though if not a little confusing at times which is why it took me so long to beat it, though the game does have hints which i used religiously because between learning about pangrea or whatever my professor was talking about and me not knowing the geography of Japan i couldnt hope to keep up... Then i would have had to take a second Jewish culture class. The zones are pretty open at times and normally i would find this to be boring but the music was very good so i didnt really care much... either that or i was just so bored that anything was entertaining. The tight corridor areas were extremely fucking annoying due to the god awful camera

This game also does that Final Fantasy V shit with the humor where they do an attempt at comedy and nobody laughs but instead of playing this it just plays a laugh track (<-- thats a laugh track in case any of you didnt know) and unfortunately im a sucker for shitty jokes so this appealed to me. I think beating this game was more of an accomplishment to me than completing the course

Love the use of Amano’s art style and I wish final fantasy treated it with as much respect as this game and on a completely unrelated note did they just not teach Wanzer pilots how to aim in the military? More than half of my attacks missed throughout the course of the game… it’s really not even that serious but everytime it happened every ounce of dopamine disintegrated because the game relies on hitting random body parts with no way to guide shots unless your pilot learns a skill that allows them to do so, but that comes in play half way through the game and even then you get more XP if you destroy every body part, so I ended up not using it half the time. Front mission also has stats that increase depending on what weapon you’re attacking with. You know what other game did this? Final Fantasy 2. But you all let Projared brainwash you into thinking the level up system sucked. Shame on you. Fake fans.

I want to preface this by saying that I play my games without using Google or any emulator cheats (fast forward / save states / actual cheats) because I feel that by using them, I’m disregarding the game’s design. From my understanding, people use them either because they have limited time to play games or they’re simply impatient and don’t want to deal with archaic design. To both ends, if you truly care about a game and are enjoying your time with it, why rush through it and ignore the pacing of the game? That’s not to say you can’t enjoy a game while fast forwarding and the like, for some it might help them enjoy it more… for me however, it ruins my enjoyment of the product.

I emphasize the above because the contacting system is abhorrent and easily the worst part of this game. I think it worked fine enough in the first game even if it was easily abusable and barebones, but this is just needlessly grindy for absolutely no reason. How it works is each character has 4 unique contact options that you can use to talk to a demon, given that you have 5 characters throughout the game, it easily becomes overwhelming. Depending on the personality of the demon and contact you chose, you will elicit an angry, happy, eager, or scared reaction. The goal is to make them eager so that you can get their arcana’s spell cards, though if you make them happy before doing so, you will get free cards that can be converted into any arcana card type in the velvet room. You can only have 3 happy demons at any given time as the would-be “buff” stays constant throughout the game, unless you make them angry, which is very easy to do. On random occasions, including at the very start of a battle, a demon will start talking to you, except during these sequences you pretty much have to guess what the correct answer is because they ask you questions like “if you were an animal what would you be human dog demon” and on my life I picked every single possible option for multiple demons, and they were all fucking wrong so i think it’s bugged or something. While that’s annoying, I found the fusing system to be fun, assuming I had enough cards to make what I wanted to make. I like the emphasis on spell cards, but I would be lying if I said I preferred this over the modern fusion systems, even though the game is hardly balanced around them.

On the topic of balancing, it’s all over the place. I played the PS1 version which is harder than the PSP remaster according to everyone, and for a good portion of the game all I was doing was getting into random encounters, even boss fights, and just auto battling. To extend on that, the combat system is centered around auto battling. You set your characters moves and press start battle. You can stop the auto battle whenever you want and check the turn order of your party members so you can plan your attacks accordingly, but outside of the final boss I pretty much turned my brain off the entire time, save for a select few instances. I don’t like this system because more than any RPG I’ve ever played, I get little to no reward or satisfaction mainly because I’m not pressing buttons as often. While some might see that fact as a good thing, I see it as mundane and boring. I make it sound bad, but in reality it barely affected me and it’s not like the difficulty is completely nonexistent, it’s there I just found it incredibly easy and manipulable is all. That final boss is some bullshit though. Game goes from being easy for about 15 hours to being extremely tedious and hard for no reason? Boring as hell

THE RUMORS SUCK. The system is there to remind you that the story involves rumors, and it fucking sucks. I don’t like talking to rumor mongerors with the clunky ass text boxes that plague the entire game and just don’t skip properly just to hear that Bimble Fuck Joe is selling his Sweaty Ass Shirt for 3 yen cheaper. Same people who defend this shit are the people who say Drakengard is a masterpiece because the gameplay sucks on purpose or whatever. I’m heavily overblowing it and this was hardly an issue because i did it twice throughout the entire game but it just made me realize how much i hated the textboxes in this game. Going back to that demon happiness shit for a second, if you have 3 contracts (3 happy demons) then the demon you’re currently trying to contact will ask you to replace one of the contracts so that they can be added, and for some god awful reason the developers thought it would be funny to have the dialogue option to appear at the least opportune time so that almost every single time I press the A button to progress the dialogue, the options appear and I annul the wrong contract. Every. Fucking. Time. Even when i'm careful I still somehow fuck it up. Yes, I know, skill issues and many such cases. Shit was made to make me fall asleep im not even going to lie spread a rumor to make my bed more comfortable. Booking the luxury suite at the Innocent Inn™ if it doesn't become a reality (joke donated by @Zotol)

Now that I aired my grievances, I liked the characters! I think they’re easily some of the best and most realistic ones in the series. I loathe how the modern persona games have these uninteresting and almost repetitive characters that for the life of me I just can’t give a single fuck about half the time, and for the first time I actually found myself caring about the issues and problems these characters are facing. They may not be as realized or fleshed out in this game as I would have liked them to be, but they were nonetheless impactful, more so than half of the slop the modern games shoved down my throat and I’m sure they will be even more amazing in the sequel. There's more I could go into and I made the game sound a lot worse than it actually is but the reality is that I'm mincing my words in fear of spoiling people, so it might sound like I'm not complimenting the game enough. The reality is that it does have good qualities but I also don't feel like I'm at a position where I can collect my thoughts and judge the game's story based without having played the sequel, so I won't. It's pretty good though, if not paced strangely at times. It's also incredibly hard to take this game seriously when iykyk is the villain. I'm serious if you don't know shit about this game go play it right now and prepare to have the craziest whiplash ever

I'm not going to lie though that PSP version is probably better because the god awful fan translation for this game gave characters different during different points in the story and I could never tell who was who.. Aside from that, the music was alright. Just alright. Few stand out tracks but I’m not foaming out of the mouth for anything. The PSP soundtrack sounded better from what I heard, and I’m probably going to play the PSP version of Eternal Punishment after my exams.

If you played the PSP versions of Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment, WITHOUT SPOILING, what does the save transfer do? Is it important or can I just play EP on PSP without it