Persona 2 is a welcome change from the original. It ditches the first person dungeon in a favor of a completely overhead view, with sprite based characters and polygonal landscapes. It still looks low-tech, but at least it's serviceable now. It's also so big that it had to be contained in two games. Innocent Sin, the first part, was only released in Japan. There's no real official reason why it was never released in America - Atlus USA has stated that no one currently working there has any idea - but theories include SCEA denying it due to content due to schoolyard violence (Columbine was around the same time) and the appearance of Hitler.

Much like the first game, Persona 2: Innocent Sin focuses on a small group of Japanese high schoolers. Taking place a few years after the original, strange things have been going on, the most bizarre being that rumors are now becoming reality. The latest urban myth is that calling your own cell phone number will summon a demon called The Joker, who will grant you a wish. Unfortunately, a lot of people are being killed by this Joker fellow, but your gang decides to try it out anyway. Sure enough, the Joker appears - only he seems to bear a grudge towards Tatsuya, Eikichi and Lisa, taunting them about a sin they can't remember. They meet Philemon and are granted Personae, much like the original, and begin their journey to discover the meaning behind the Joker curse. It's a journey back into the same strange world, with demented principals who seek to punish slacking students with death, and neo Nazis looking to resurrect Hitler.

These are some of the coolest characters ever to grace an RPG, with characterizations that rival the Lunar games. Party members talk amongst themselves a lot more, especially when commenting on the situation at hand. Many of them fit into the usual stereotypes - the hormonal yet effeminate punk, the ditzy blond girl - but they're pulled off so well that they transcend the usual clichés.

Many of the mechanics of the first game are back, although they've been streamlined. Conversations work much the same way, although the "moon phases" present in almost all of the other Megaten games have been eliminated. In addition to each character having four conversation skills, you can team members up for different combinations. Also new are "contracts" - when you make an enemy happy, they're make a guarantee that they won't hurt you, and can also give you special items.

The grid-based battle system is thankfully gone, and there are tons of fusion attacks that allow Personae to combine their magic into super powerful attacks. Strangely, the default option is to auto-battle. In order to target a specific enemy or do a certain attack, you need to wade through several menus to change your orders. It takes a little while to get used too, as it feels cumbersome and a bit too automated, since in most battles, you just sit and watch, maybe altering a spell to take advantage of a certain enemy's weakness. However, it ultimately ends up making boss battles less tedious, since you really just need to identify a certain pattern and keep cycling until it's dead. The fights too tend to look a little dull, especially with the single repeating texture as a landscape. There are voice clips used in battle and at certain small sequences in the game, although they're pretty rare.

Overall, it's an excellent game, and a shame that it never came to North America. Thankfully, a full translation patch can be found here. It also features some cross continuity with the other Megaten titles - you can visit the Kuzonoha Detective Agency, the same one run by Kyuoji in Devil Summoner, and one of the staff members is Tamaki, the female protagonist from Shin Megami Tensei if...

Things did not end well for our heroes at the finale of Innocent Sin. So, Eternal Punishment takes place in a parallel world where the events from the previous game never happened. While the locale is the same, none of the characters know each other. The heroine this time is Maya, who comes across a boy who seems to remember, but can't - she calls this her "Deja Vu Boy". This lad is Tatsuya, the only person that seems to remember the events from Innocent Sin. If this wasn't weird enough, the Joker is back, making mad proclamations of the "Other Side", and is determined to murder Maya, a punishment for something she doesn't understand. So it's up to our Persona wielding heros and heroines to uncover the meaning behind the joker, and how it ties to the world from Innocent Sin.

Eternal Punishment plays exactly the same as its predecessor, and you even visit some of the same locations. While it reuses some music, most of it is entirely new, and just as good. There's now an option to turn off battle animations, which makes fights go much faster. There are some small graphical upgrades (including fog around the battle fields, which make it feel a little bit more like the original Persona). There's even separate paths towards the end of the game, where you can choose between Persona alumnists Nate or Elly to join your team. The only real difference is the simplified conversation system, where each character has only a single individual skill, and you can team up with other party members for various results. Pairing Maya and Ulala will have them hold a beauty competition, for example.

The translation is far better than the first Persona, although sometimes the text can feel a little confusing. The conversation dialogues are often hilarious, even though it still doesn't make any sense - why is Maya interviewing demons or Baofu threatening them with wiretaps? The voice acting is over the top, but it fits the bizarre natures of the characters, and some of the battle quotes are hilarious. Of course, for English speakers, the major problem is that you're starting off in the middle of the story. While the plot is fully explained by the end of the game - and to an extent, having no prior knowledge of Innocent Sin makes the plot more intriguing - one can't help but feel like they're missing out on something. Part of the fun was seeing what happened to characters in the different world - a teacher who was dead in Innocent Sin is alive and well in Eternal Punishment - and some other references just plain won't make sense. It's great that the Western world got to play Persona 2 at all, but it's really just a fragment of the whole.

It's hard to say which game is better - Eternal Punishment has branching paths and a faster battle system, but personally I prefer the characters and music from Innocent Sin. Plus, it's weird for Maya to be a silent character in EP after her loving her infective perkiness, and Tatsuya was much cooler when he never talked - he spends most of Eternal Punishment hopping out of nowhere to be angsty. But they're both excellent games, and taken together, make for one hell of an epic RPG.