Persona 2: Innocent Sin was next on my list. Back in August of last year I talked about how I wanted to play the original Persona game, and created a traditional text-based “Let’s Play” discussion thread in order to motivate myself into continuing with the game. Once that was done, I knew that I’d have to follow up with the Persona 2 games eventually, and as we welcomed 2019 I began a similar “Let’s Play” of Persona 2: Innocent Sin. It’s a game that I had zero experience with at the time… with P1 I at least played a fair amount before bouncing off, but here I was in the dark. However, I quickly found that it had plenty of ideas of its own that made it worth recommending..
It starts off with a fairly simple and vague premise; our heroes face a threat, mysteriously awaken to the power of Persona, meet Philemon after falling unconscious and are told that they’re destined to go on a big JRPG quest (well, not quite.) Although most of Innocent Sin has the classic mapping, battling and negotiating you’d expect from an early Persona, it has one of the most painful openings I’ve seen in a while. Two or three hours into the game, you’re searching rooms for objects to smash whilst being hit with random battles… and it just feels like padding. Thankfully, things pick up beyond this, and you’re quickly swept up in a mystery of falsities, fragmented memories, and truths.
The Innocent Sin of rumourmongering
Innocent Sin is also the game that introduces the Rumour system – a gameplay mechanic that seems unusual at first but effectively lets you add gameplay modifiers to things like shop prices and stock. It’s a neat feature but it could have been explained a little better – I got the feeling that it ended up sounding more complex than it actually was. Negotiation also returns, but you can’t skip entire battles quite in the same way that you could with P1 (it takes a few more button presses), which is a disappointment. I can’t say that Innocent Sin’s any smoother a ride than P1 because of the laboured negotiations, but you can find ways to make progress feel smooth if you learn negotiations and play with fusion. All that aside, you’ll still be fusing, battling, and opening locked doors… so there remains a lot of familiarity within the gameplay.
The finer details of the story go in all kinds of weird places, and there are ideas and concepts that I think are genuinely interesting (particularly later takes on the early idea of “rumours becoming true”), as well as some narrative events that hit pretty hard (one or two scenes with Maya at the shrine were quite shocking.) Other story moments just felt a bit too dense in terms of information; almost as if the writers were throwing too many ideas into the story – I’ll confess that sometimes it was tricky to know what you should be paying attention to. The other main observation I made was that P1 clearly turned into Maki’s story…and I don’t feel like Innocent Sin has that central identity. Maya could maybe fit into that role based on some of the events near the end, but I found Maki’s journey more interesting.
Different but likeable
Notable gameplay features include multiple characters negotiating together, with the success of this being influenced by their relationship – something that’s manipulated based on in-game events and dialogue choices. It’s perhaps a proto-Social Link system, and is genuinely a neat idea… but embarrassingly I didn’t take notice of it until later in the game. Additionally, Velvet Room summoning is a little different – simpler and more grindy, but easy to get behind. Oh, and the battles also seem a bit kinder; you don’t struggle as much with formation and grid placement, and attack ranges are rarely useless.
In general, I enjoyed P1’s general story and negotiation more, but Innocent Sin has more immediate combat and perhaps a more interesting cast. Just like P1, I think you could have a current-gen update of P2 somehow (as long as it patiently explains the gameplay concepts), but the changes made in P3 and beyond still transform an intriguing series into an unmissable one. Then again, I still have Eternal Punishment to look forward to, so I can’t judge P2 as a whole just yet…
If you’re interested in playing Persona 2: Innocent Sin, it’s available digitally on the PlayStation Store for PSP and Vita.