A seductive stare

Day 404

Kuzonoha Detective Agency

 I've spent the vast majority of the last two days feverishly playing Persona 2: Innocent Sin. The whole experience has reminded me just how much I love the series as a whole. The first game of the series might have given me a bad impression and made me expect less from Innocent Sin, but I shouldn't have let it color my judgment. It's a great game and has a lot of merits that differentiate it from the games that followed it. Of course, it's not all good, but it's a rare game that entices me to play in extremely long marathon sessions for more than just gameplay purposes. I really enjoy grinding to unlock new personas, abilities, and combo attacks, but I'm also interested in the plot, as strange as it might be.

Persona 3 and Persona 4 are full of fun and interesting characters, but Innocent Sin is no slouch in that regard either. Although a significant portion of the time I've spent on this has been dungeon crawling and leveling up personas, I'm glad there's a thread of plot that keeps me interested in playing just to find out what happens. The dynamic between the party's characters is interesting. It very much makes me wish there existed an enhanced remake of this game that featured Social Links in some way--one of my favorite features of both Persona 3 and 4. Like support conversations from the Fire Emblem series, Social Links go a long way in fleshing out characters and delving into the relationships between these characters and the protagonist. In Innocent Sin, Tatsuya has little to no personality. He's a mute protagonist, as is traditional for the series. I really dislike this JRPG trope and can't discern any particular reason why it should exist. I've been saying the same thing since way before Chrono Trigger came out. I'm hoping Atlus will choose to diverge from this trend with Persona 4. I don't have much confidence this will happen, even if Yu Narukami from Persona 4 has been given a personality in other media like the anime and fighting game spinoffs of the game.

Although Tatsuya is intertwined with the backstory of the other playable characters, his part in it is much less interesting because--of course--he has nothing to say. Maya, Lisa (Ginko), and Eikichi (Michel) are all interesting because of their perspective on the things that have happened to them as well as their personalities in general. There's certainly not as much dialogue as in Persona 3 and Persona 4, but there's definitely still enough for me to get a good idea of what these characters are like and how they interact. No one feels underdeveloped or underused in any way, except of course for Tatsuya himself, who is supposed to be serve as a sort of surrogate for the player. Again, I really don't think it's necessary for a game like this. Leave silent protagonists to first-person western RPGs that allow you to create your character in ridiculous detail, I say. It's far more appropriate there.


Every Persona title seems to have some kind of underlying theme on which the plot is based. In Shin Megami Tensei: Persona, the plot centered around the Persona Game, a supernatural game said to have the capability to reveal the players' futures. In the original game and in Innocent Sin, a being known as Philemon grants the characters the ability to summon persona. His existence is only alluded to in future Persona titles, where other explanations are given for the phenomenon. It's hard to say whether all the game exist in the same canon or of it's more of a Final Fantasy kind of situation. It's worth noting that Innocent Sin features many characters from the original Persona title--and Persona 4 features at least one cameo of a Persona 3 character. In spin-offs, Persona 3 and 4 characters coexist, but it's doubtful these games can be considered canonical additions to the series.