Persona 2: Eternal Punishment does a better job of putting the player into the shoes of former protagonist Tatsuya Suou than Innocent Sin ever could as only he and the player retain their memories of "The Other Side", the previous timeline of Innocent Sin that the party abandoned, along with their memories of it, in order to save the world.

Eternal Punishment retreads a lot of Innocent Sin's story, with just enough variation to make it somewhat unfamiliar and wrong, its like if déjà vu was a video game. It feels helpless at times to see some of the same events play out again knowing what happened in Innocent Sin. I had to stop for a moment at many moments in the story. Most significantly after seeing Tatsuya Sudou's asylum room had The Oracle of Maia scrawled over the walls, when Jun wanted to give Tatsuya his lighter after the flying blimp boss fight, and perhaps most significant of all, when it was revealed the New World Order were creating and purging Joker personas to collect kegare, which is actually where the Shadows of Persona 3 (Cowardly Maya) come from.

The gameplay is a vast improvement to Innocent Sin, with this iteration of demon contacting being perhaps the best in the franchise. An added challenge over Innocent Sin's auto battles, and a fairly reduced encounter rate (thank god). The final boss felt particularly satisfyingly tense.

Maya being a silent protagonist here is fiiine but what confuses me is that in flashbacks to Innocent Sin her spoken lines are inexplicably replaced with typical silent protagonist "........." and are instead recited by Tatsuya, who was that game's silent protagonist, it's somewhat dumbfounding.

Persona 2: Eternal Punishment is textbook for how to make an amazing sequel.