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.

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.