One Happy Team...

Completed Persona 2 Innocent Sin.
I haven’t mentioned the dungeons in Persona 2, and that’s because they are horrible. They are ugly mazes that lack any logic and made to be annoying with invisible traps that often impossible to avoid. Xibalba, the final dungeon / alien spaceship, is the epytomy of everything wrong with them. It’s 8 floors of annoyance.

Storywise, it’s a fun concept, though, were all the fears come true. So when one character says that there might be laser traps, and another is afraid to be locked in an oven room: both things happen. And Michele has to face metalic version of his father, because that’s what he’s afraid of.

I managed to beat the final boss with the default personas, and my characters were only around level 57 or so. So I honestly thought there will be another dungeon after that.

The ending is disappointing, and it feels to me that they just decided to split the game in two. After beating Niarhalotep, Crazy Teacher appears and stabs Maya with Longinus spear, so she cannot be healed. Nia says something along the lines, “what did you expect, to beat a god and defy a profecy?” and Philimone offers to “try another time”. This is a common theme in Shin Megami Tensei games, where at the end heroes are offered to either forget everything or continue suffering: Persona 3 and Devil Summoner 2 are two examples I remember, and I didn’t play that many games in the series.

I went to the Aquarius temple first, so I didn’t understand why Longinus said to Jun “you don’t know who this seat is intended for”. The second temple I did was Scorpio, and its boss is Shadow Michele. Turns out Persona 4 just repeats the concept of shadows from Persona 2.
Michele’s plotline is quite touching, though, albeit simple: he was a fat kid, so he liked the only girl that threated him well.
When they grew up, he became fit, and she got fat, so she hid her identity (they are all using nicknames anyway, Michele is Ekichi’s nickname), then sold her soul to Joker in order to be beautiful.

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.