So, I was just noticing the lacking number of forum posts about this title, and I am honestly a little bit angry at that. I picked up the game recently for about 20 CIB, and I LOVE IT! The story is great, albeit paced strangely. The characters are up to par with the normally great characters in the Persona series. Sure, this game might not have the great gameplay like P3 and P4 have, but I feel that it deserves a much bigger fanbase. Oh, and this might just be a personal opinion, but I feel that Lisa Silverman and Chie are VERY similar characters...

The reason it doesn't have a huge fanbase is that one of the games in the Persona 2 series didn't receive a U.S. release till very recently

I could think of a couple of reasons for the lack of fanfare on GB:

1. It's a remake of an obscure rpg that was never released in the West.

2. It came out on the PSP (in 2011).

3. It's not related to Persona 4.

I think this one is the most likely.

4. Giantbomb is weird like that. The number of posts in a game's forum doesn't necessarily mean that people hate it, it just means that it was people haven't been discussing it on Giantbomb. I'm sure there are people (myself included) that would vouch for the game's quality and would have a good time discussing it, but...y'know.

Anyway, I'm glad to hear that you've been enjoying yourself. The SMT/Persona titles aren't exactly the most popular things in the world, but their quality is right up there with the best of them.

P.S. Welcome to the site!

@commisar123: I realize that, but my entire point is that P2 games (IS and EP) tend to get ignored when compared to P3 and P4...

I'm working my way to it! Two incredibly long and hard JRPG's in one year (Persona 3 and Nocturne) is quite enough. I'm also trying to beat Strange Journey and IV is coming up, and maybe Persona 4 as well.

Honestly, though, Persona 1 and 2 aren't really high up on the list of SMT games that I want to play. 1, 2, Soul Hackers, and DDS 1 and 2 all seem more interesting to me in addition to the ones listed above. I'm more interested in SMT games for their dungeon exploration and hard difficulty and battles, anyway, which is another reason why Persona 1 and 2 aren't the ones that I've got my eye on. Doesn't hurt that my PSP doesn't really want to play UMD's anymore, nor will it connect to PSN.

I started playing it awhile back and had to stop. It was too slowly paced in the combat, with menus upon menus upon menus to do anything. I was intrigued enough by the story that I'll go back at some point, but it just was too much for me at the time.

It is what it is. Finished P2:IS just last year (and P2:EP in April) and it is indeed a fantastic duology. The gameplay is fairly dated, but definitely not as much as the first game and the characters and overall story are amazing. Heck, I wrote a blog post about how great Innocent Sin is when I had finished it.

The cast of characters are no doubt better than Persona 4's to me.

P2 does actually have a pretty decent sized fanbase, it's just that most of those people played the game years ago. The PSP version didn't get a lot of new fanfare since it was so different from P3 and P4 and by the time it came out it did feel pretty dated in a number of ways. P2 has long been one of the most highly praised games in the MegaTen franchise though.

I personally hold P2 in fairly high regard, but some of the gameplay definitely doesn't hold up that well. At this point it's a game you mostly play for the story, which not everyone is willing to do. Also, I kind of have mixed feelings about how the story wraps up in Eternal Punishment.

@believer258: If it makes you feel any better, P1 hasn't aged too gracefully. The PSP version fixes many of the mistakes that were present in the original western release, but it's still a first-person dungeon crawler from the 90s. I found the music to be enjoyable, but I wouldn't be surprised if others thought it was a bit grating.

I liked what I played of it back when the only way to play it in english was via translated iso and have always meant to get the PSP version. Any game that has Hitler in it as the penultimate boss fight is a game worth playing in my book, even if it's a somewhat crusty JRPG with more than its fair share of grinding.

@flappy: Persona 1 is a terrible experience (for me) that doesn't match any of the other Persona games at all. Only reason I'm glad I played through it (even though I landed a bad ending) was for the significant cameos and callbacks in P2.

@fluxwavez: I can't really argue with you there. It had some interesting ideas and it was pretty cool going back to the original Persona title, but after experiencing P3FES and P4 (I believe P4 had come out at that point), it was -really- hard to go that far backwards. I love me some good ol' jrpgs, but geez.

There must be more than this, but the only other game with Hitler as the penultimate boss fight that I can think of is Wolfenstein 3D, a crusty old shooter with more than its fair share of keycard hunting.

i might give this one a try... at some point.

I wish I could contribute to giving the game a bigger fanbase but after 5 attempts at playing it (across emulators and the PSP release), I just can't deal with the gameplay. The same goes for Persona 1. Whoever decided that it would be a good idea to double the number of battles you need to fight (to get cards for fusion and experience, can't get both in one battle) in order to be adequately levelled was sick in the head. Oh, and EP will never be released in Europe cos Atlus so that's fun :)

I like Persona 2, I'm still working my way through it, but I don't love the demon negotiation parts. That's the real grindy aspect of the first couple of games.

It has randomly triggered encounters.

I love Persona 3, Persona 4, Devil Survivor, Nocturne and Digital Devil Saga. Persona 2 is really hard to enjoy though.

So what is the best way to play both chapters of Persona 2 in English? It seems like they have been localized inconsistently across platforms.

The PSP version of Persona 2: Innocent Sin was localized and is playable on the Vita or the PSP. The PSP version of Persona 2: Eternal Punishment was not localized but the PS1 version was made available on PSN and is playable on the PS3 or the Vita through PSN.

There is. There's actually a pretty good reason why Hitler's in the game in the first place (thematically; plot-wise, it's largely because everybody wished him there from the bottom of their hearts).

I find SMT: Persona 2 IS to be way to easy compared to other games in the franchise. So easy that it's boring to go through the game. Just got to the " bunker" and other than 1 or 2 enemies nothing has given reason to not just auto attack on regular enemies and I have the game on hard. SMT:Persona on the other hand had me being very careful.

I was such a huge fan of Eternal Punishment that I tracked down a copy of Innocent Sin and played through the entirety of it in Japanese despite speaking zero Japanese. I had a translation of the script, but I had to trial and error my way through items, weapons, spells, and persona. Thankfully the contact system was somewhat simpler than EP's. Good times!

I want to play these games. I really really do, but holy shit are the systems bad and grindy. What I've seen of the story seems super cool and Maya(Innocent Sin) is fantastic. I just wish the game parts weren't horrid.

persona 2 is the best persona game.

You're surprised an old obscure Japanese game doesn't have a ton of posts about it?

I'm pretty sure they made the PSP version even easier, although it's not like the game was that hard originally either. Definitely play on hard if you're playing the PSP version.

If someone could contextualise that Hitler fight for me that would be dandy. I've only played P3 and P4 so I'm having a hard time understanding how the series progressed from battling Hitler to what we have today.

@walkertr77 said:

It makes total sense in the context of Innocent Sin. The game is about rumors becoming reality, and Hitler, among other things, is the product of the antagonists' machinations.

It's not really even Hitler anyway. (And I don't just mean the censorship in the PSP version.) Also, he's not really as important to the game as people make him out to be. He kind of just shows up near the end along with his Nazi pals to give you some new enemies to fight, and he's only a warmup to the actual final boss. Other than "oh no, Nazis!" and the Longinus he's pretty much irrelevant to the plot.

Although P3 and P4 did take some pretty hard swings in a different direction with the plot anyway, so even if he was important I doubt it would have had any affect on those games.

Sadly I already am playing on hard. I'm just surprised, by the difficulty jumpt of the SMT games around this time. Been playing Soul hackers on Hard and I feel the difficulty level of Soul hackers is how hard they should of made Persona 2:IS

@bretf: The early parts of the game are definitely a joke even on hard. It does actually get harder later, but you'll also likely be spamming fusion spells a lot.

+1 to that fanbase @bretf, I really enjoyed the story I think the battle system is Okay... I had left off in the entrance of the dungeon that came after walking through the forest and picked it back up recently. Great Story now i'll probably head on to Eternal Punishment.