I have now played and finished the Persona 2 duology of Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment. The second part follows a mostly different cast of characters in an alternate reality take of events from the first game. I was initially annoyed at how this seemed like an excuse to literally copy and paste some of the dungeons with very little changes, but the game comes into it's own as it goes along.
The fundamental difference between Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment is that Eternal Punishment added difficulty to the game, since Innocent Sin is probably one of the easiest unbalanced RPGs I've ever played with bosses doing 1-5 damage to your 200 HP party. You'd think an easy RPG would allow you to blow through it quickly and just see the story, but really being so easy made it tedious and it still felt as slow as ever. I expected coming into Eternal Punishment that is one would be way too hard in order to counter Innocent Sin being way too easy, but I actually found the difficulty in this one was just about right. The game encourages you to upgrade your equipment and Personas often whereas in Innocent Sin you could use the stuff they give you at the very start of the game to make it 90% to the end making the entire tarot system, money and materials useless. Although I never felt that what the game asked of me was unreasonable and got through the main story with minimal grinding.
The way I played this game was on PSP via PS1 classics. Back in the day on PS1 the release of Innocent Sin was cancelled in the West (blame Hitler) and they skipped straight to Eternal Punishment, which must have been very confusing for players since it was essentially part 2. Later down the line Innocent Sin was remade for the PSP and released in the West, a remake of Eternal Punishment was also later made for PSP but by that time piracy had killed the PSP in the West and the Western release of Eternal Punishment on PSP was also cancelled. Going in I expected the difference to be jarring going from PSP to PS1 and I wasn't sure if I'd enjoy it, sure the UI is worse, music is worse and there are some strange localisation choices, but all in all it's not too different and still totally playable.
What sets these games apart from other spin offs is the amount of dialogue between your party and the amount of dialogue NPC have. The game takes place in a single city and instead of going on a journey from point A to point B like a typical RPG, you explore different areas in the city often returning to places you have already been. After every story event practically all of the NPCs have their dialogue reset to reflect what is happening within the story which really gives the impression of a living world instead of a static one.
The cast of this game is mostly made up of adults compared to the first part where they are mostly teenagers, it provides a nice contrast and two of the new characters namely Katsuya and especially Baofu have interesting backstories.The other characters though are already established from Innocent Sin or the first Persona game , and the same can be said for the game's plot which follows vaguely the same story beats as part one instead of being a continuation. It feels as though Innocent Sin was the story they set out to tell, and Eternal Punishment is another story that conveniently takes place in the same environments.
The battle system is mostly the same as Innocent Sin, it's functional with cool combo attacks for massive damage, and still kinda broken with the ability to cancel moves mid battle and reorder them so you can have the same person go over and over again, and every move costs the exact same amount of SP regardless of it's function making some skills entirely obsolete. It also lacks a big risk reward weakness system like in modern Shin Megami Tensei games such as the press turn system. The added difficulty and need for experimentation though makes it way more fun than Innocent Sin.
The music is mostly reused from Innocent Sin, while this isn't necessarily bad, some of my favourite music from Innocent Sin like the character themes aren't reused and none of the original music for this game stands out to me, so it's hard to see this soundtrack as anything other than worse than Innocent Sin's. One track that I felt held it's own against the remixes in the remake is the Kuzunoha Detective Agency.
Speaking of strange localisation choices, what is this? Some of the strong language in the game is (beeped) out, then sometimes they just sort of forgot and left it in. All of the pictures I took have mistakes in them but that's not really representative of the whole game, there are probably less spelling errors than your typical Phoenix Wright game so I'd give it a pass.
All in all a decent RPG, perhaps a little too slow but it feels faster and better paced than Innocent Sin, but if you want the whole story you'd have to play both.
Battle System
1. Shin Megami Tensei 4
2. Digital Devil Saga 1
3. Devil Survivor 1 Overclocked
4. Persona 2 Eternal Punishment
5. Persona 1
6. Persona 2 Innocent Sin
Story
1. Devil Survivor 1 Overclocked
2. Shin Megami Tensei 4
3. Persona 2 Innocent Sin
4. Persona 2 Eternal Punishment
5. Persona 1
6. Digital Devil Saga 1
Music
1. Shin Megami Tensei 4
2. Digital Devil Saga 1
3. Persona 1
4. Persona 2 Innocent Sin
5. Devil Survivor 1 Overclocked
6. Persona 2 Eternal Punishment
Smoothest Difficulty Curve
1. Devil Survivor 1 Overclocked
2. Persona 2 Eternal Punishment
3. Digital Devil Saga 1
4. Shin Megami Tensei 4
5. Persona 1
6. Persona 2 Innocent Sin