4/5 ★ – RawMetal's review of Persona 2: Eternal Punishment.

System: PlayStation Started: February 13, 2021 Ended: October 16, 2021 During my playthrough of Innocent Sin, I thought that Eternal Punishment was a sequel like the adventure was fulfilled and leads to another adventure, but as I slowly progressed through the story and saw the ending, The story is still not over. In order to complete the full story of Persona 2, you have to play Eternal Punishment. To me, I thought that was pretty shady, you have to pay full price for these games back in the day to complete the story. That is like if you play Ghost n’ Goblins and get the first ending and then you have to buy the game again to get the true ending. The worst part about it is that back in the day, Eternal Punishment was released outside of Japan, but not its predecessor, Innocent Sin. So Gamers in western regions who have played Revelations: Persona and then got the Sequel, that is actually a Sequel from the entry’s Sequel are going to get confused on what the hell is going on in the story. Eternal Punishment felt like the same game as Innocent Sin but at least it tries to be different. It has that Adult feel to it as you actually play characters who are over 21: they drink, they smoke, utter swear words, and the body count in this game is pretty high. You get to play as Maya from Innocent Sin this time instead of Tatsuya. I’ll consider this to be the darkest and Mature Persona game in the franchise by far and I haven’t even started 3 yet. Innocent Sin was your Day Side and Eternal Punishment was your Night. Regardless of the maturity to this game, the characters are great but are not as interesting as the characters from Innocent Sin and those characters are actually key purposes in the entire story in Persona 2 but sadly, we have to cast them aside and we now play as the adults this time. Obviously my favorite in this is Baofu and I can tell the dev team put him in the spotlight more often. Since he is the edgy character after all. There is a new game plus, however it does not carry your items, materials and weapons, but at least your Persona data, Tarot Cards for summoning and a few personas specifically will be carried over. Persona 5 did it better honestly which is why I managed to finish New Game Plus on that one quicker. The battle phase can be mixed between convenience and annoyance since somehow for every battle, the turns can be jumbled up but at least you can reorder the roster in combat and cancel anytime before their turn is up and re-strategize your play. It ruins the flow but at least you want to win since this game does throw curveballs on the difficulty. Much like Innocent Sin, the pacing is pretty slow since you’ll spend a good while in a dungeon by average of 2-3 hours much like a DnD session and once you are out of a dungeon, be prepare to spend another good 2-3 hours prepping for the next dungeon for summoning Personas, Go to restaurants to boost your team’s stats, Find Rumormongers and spread Rumors, Go to the Casino to get some extra money, go to the store to stock up on items and purchasing weapons, excess grinding at the Bomb Shelter dungeon for fearing you are going to get your ass kicked in the next dungeon. It goes on and it might ruin the pacing for most people. On the bright side, this is a pretty lengthy game that you might not be able to finish for a long time. Just be prepared to reload your save file a lot if you want to get rare personas and items if you want to 100% complete it. After finishing both Persona 2 games, This is possibly a contender for best story in the franchise so far, even though Eternal Punishment almost felt unnecessary to be honest. In short for that game without spoilers: Tatsuya made an oopsie from the events from Innocent Sin and its up to the new party that were introduced from Innocent Sin only briefly to fix it...that’s it. But it's still a great entry though, like if someone I know actually says Persona 2 is their favorite, I don’t blame them. Comparing the two, I prefer Innocent Sin to be the better Persona 2 entry. If you really loved Persona 2 Innocent Sin and want to find out more about what happened next, I say play Eternal Punishment and I highly suggest getting it on the PS3 digital store since it's really the cheapest you can get. And I say get it before Sony pulls the plug off the store. You can also get it on the Vita as well digitally.