Because the rumors are coming true, we meet the ghost of Maia in the temple, despite her never dying there.
After Nazis appear and all characters (except Yukki, because she’s from the previous game) get upgraded personas, there’s a difficulty spike. But nothing that can’t be resolved by grinding. Tatsuya’s Vulcanus Prime also gets an amazing Fiery Fury skill. As I mentioned, skills in Persona 2 have three target types: single, group and “all”, with “all” being the best. Why wouldn’t you like to hit all your enemies after all? Well, one reason is that some enemies are resistant to fire attacks. But here the second part of this skill comes into play: it doubles as physical attack as well. So it’s basically effective against everything.
Yukki gets a new persona too, but only for a short while, as she leaves the party after her boyfriend is killed by the Nazis. We manage to rescue Jun/Joker from Niarlotep (never expected so much Lovecraft influence). Turns out it’s Jun’s father who has been leading the Masked Circle, not Jun. Jun replaces Yukki as a party member, and all the party members get new personas once again. This time really new, instead of adding “Prime” to the name of the persona.
Now party need to beat 4 temples, one for each element. At the end of the first temple Jun gets persona mutation, first time in the game.
I think this game is easier than most other games in the series, because money solves everything. Items are cheap and you can stock tons of them, so you never run out of SP. And your SP also recovers with every step. Compare that to the stingy mechanics from Persona 4, where SP regen was one of the later skills, and SP recovery items were limited.