"Oh, another journal about the Persona series? Oh DO go on how you love this series and continue to stroke it's ego." This is what some of you might be thinking. But seriously I'm posting this for myself as a record of my thoughts of the themes of the Persona games (The ones I've played anyway, which is 3, 4, and I've started 2 innocent Sin) and what I like about each of the games over some of the others.

Might as well start this out numerically correct and start with 2. Interesting side note of this game is there's two Persona 2 games. One is called Innocent Sin and the second was Eternal punishment. But the first wasn't released in America in 1999. Reason being you could have a gay relationship with one of your male party members(And it being 1999 when it came out, makes sense for the time period).

Another reason being a villain of the game were Nazis. Luckily it was officially released for PSP years later. With the Nazis now re-skinned and as of right now I am not sure if the removed the gay romance but I feel they didn't as it was released 2011.

As of right now I'm not vary far into the game yet, but I must say it's retro graphics are rather charming and it has that feeling of 90's nostalgia that's not so bad every once-in-awhile.

The game play is rather straight forward, go into dungeon, fight monsters, beat boss, rinse and repeat. But like other Persona games you can swap out your persona for another so you can always have a growing power. But unlike Persona 3 and 4 the only way to get new personas is to talk to the monsters you fight and make a contract with them by doing various actions or answering questions to make them happy. They will then hand you cards you can trade in for personas.

Only problem with this is, who want's to talk to the monsters and remember who in your party set up the contract and what action you used, it wouldn't be so bad if like say if you ran into the monster it automatically went "Oh, you and I have a contract, here's the cards". But it doesn't so I just ended up ignoring the whole thing and am using the starter personas. I just hope it won't bite me in the ass later when I'm so far into the game and suddenly there's a boss that's like super impossible.

Besides The flaws I see with the game there is one cool thing about Persona 2 I kind of like and hate at the same time. You have to go hunting for info at times and so you must go ask six different rumor spreaders to get rumors you can then pay to spread which will affect the real world. Like say there's a shop that sells crap armor, you can get a rumor that says they sell great armor but it's expensive and next time you visit the shop will be selling better armor. I love it for the interesting affect you have on the world, but I hate it because it seems like all choices suck in some form. Whether is be it's so expensive I'm out of money, or the item sucks but they pay good for selling something back to them.

As for the story, you play as student of "Seven Sisters High" when your friend/love interest Lisa Silvermen (Yes, she's white yet she was born in Japan and speaks Cantonese, a topic the game LOVES To bring up often) tells you a student of the school has been kidnaped by students of the rival school "Kasugayama high". The leader of the schools gang is Eikichi has challenged you to a fight and if you don't show the kidnaped student will be killed.

So you head off to the gangs hide-out and find out it was a set up by Eikichi's friends to ask you to join his band, they never even intended to hurt the student. But when Eikichi shows his power of persona you fight back with your own. After things calm down you all decide to partake in a rumor in which you call a number and tell the person on the phone known as Joker your deepest dream. If you fail, you will be turned into a shadow person and it's as if you never existed. Joker attacks Eikichi, Lisa, and you but you three use your persona's to fight him off and how you three along with a few new friends now have to find out why Joker is collecting the power of everyone's dreams and why he wants to kill you.

Now, Just so this journal doesn't drag on, I'll break this up into three journals. See you guys in the next journal where we'll cover Persona 3.