Characters

Tatsuya Suo is actually a character I can write screeds about in that his appearance in Eternal Punishment actually did the work of turning my entire opinion on him around. That is to say, he sucks in it. Terribly. Like I'm not even joking his personality is rancid and it's not even on purpose. It's just that I ended up with all these great characters and then here comes this moody teenager teenager-ing up the place to the point that I actually stopped finding him sympathetic pretty early on. Once he's onscreen, he just grabs the story's reigns, holds on, and never lets go thus keeping the more interesting characters from being able to do much more than follow his lead while dragging their feet. Eternal Punishment struggles dearly once you have him in your party and you never get a chance to shake him.

In Innocent Sin, he actually functions better as a silent protagonist. I'm not sure if that says anything about the way his type of character works but his appearances between these two are practically night and day(think Jak vs. Jak2).

His stats are yours to control in Innocent Sin but in Eternal Punishment, he favors his strength stat the most. A fairly simple backstory, his father was a cop falsely accused of corruption and thus was let go. He's now a security guard and lives with this deep sense of shame that casts a shadow over the family. Katsuya, Tatsuya's older brother, ends up having to practically raise Tatsuya, stepping into a fatherly role(and even becoming a cop, himself in order to fix their family's name). Because of this, Tatsuya sees the future in a much more foggy light than most. You can make pretty much any option about his personality from here on out although I don't believe any of it carries between games.

Maya Amano was probably the first time I realized the difference between female jrpg protagonists and male ones. When it comes to your typical male protagonist, their journey tends to be one of testing their mirth, gaining power, unleashing their full potential. Female protagonists, and Maya by extension, have the opportunity to break out of the cycles they've been kept in. They get to see how important they are to those around them, gain a better sense of self, understand truths. The female protagonist chews on and works out deeply rooted issues in order to free themselves. For Maya, her journey throughout Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment was something I wouldn't see again until Shion in Xenosaga.

Another thing that stood out for me was

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how much Maya's character is a breakdown of the fridged woman. Both her fake and real deaths are the catalyst for the events of the first and second games. She is the tragic death of a woman for the sake of the protagonist and yet the goal of the duology is for her to live. I think that switching from Tatsuya(who introduces Maya as a character to the player slowly) to Maya, herself, makes for fantastic storytelling. While both Tatsuya and Maya are meant to serve as series deuteragonists, the bottom line is that Persona 2 could still have legs if Tatsuya's role was swapped with any of the other kids from Innocent Sin. Maya, herself, is irreplaceable both in the minds and hearts of our main cast but also the player and story as well.

As a party member who binds everyone together, she was a blast to have around. As a protagonist, it's interesting to see how her personality has a sort of call to others. Throughout Eternal Punishment, her party seems to relax enough around her to where, even during moments of infighting, they're still willing to treat her like a confidant. I don't think she gets enough wiggle room in choices compared to most jrpgs but, honestly, I'm pretty fine with it. Maya already has an established personality, it would be weird to give her the chance to work completely against type.

Eikichi Mishina or Michelle(as he calls himself) probably carried my ass the most throughout Innocent Sin. I think the beauty of Innocent Sin's characters is that the kids are entirely characterized by having real life problems that make them feel deeper than they would if this took place in a fantasy setting. There's something about building up a world of realism(Persona is low fantasy if anything else) that doesn't work unless your characters also follow that suit. So, of course, you have Eikichi. A mountain of issues in a willowy big guy. I really enjoy when series have a comic relief character who has several layers to them which makes the rubicks cube that is their personality really start to click into place. He's vain, unserious, and in love with the spotlight. He's a kid with big big dreams and nowhere to reach to.

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Essentially he's not only living under the expectations of a father who doesn't understand or even seem to like him, but he's also living under his own as well. See, Eikichi had a terrible time as a small child due to his weight. It's genetic(according to a translation of his character page, he resents his mom for also having low metabolism) so he gained an eating disorder in order to 'fix' it. This suddenly makes everything click into place, Eikichi is one of the largest members of both P2's casts(towering over the adults by a good few inches) he was a guy meant to be tall and large and, in turn, his stats reflect that. Once he became thinner, he started getting weird about his appearance but also became more protective of other kids who are being bullied. This is why he's in a school for delinquents despite being barely rebellious in his own homelife. Eikichi's entire personality is built up around fixing both his situation and the situations of those around him. In any other jrpg he would be thrown into a knight role. In this, he's just a kid.

Lisa (Ginko) Silverman. It is actually funny to me that Eikichi calls her 'Ginko' as an insult and it stuck so hard, all the text boxes and stat windows just call her that from then on out. Lisa is such an interesting character that I see people in the west misinterpret horribly but that's an argument for another day. First of all, Lisa is white but she was raised in Japan since birth. She knows no English(she wasn't allowed to learn it) and tries to separate herself from other white people(tourists fill her with dread) due to the way she is treated by everyone around her. They see her just plainly as a white girl with all the connotations and exoticism that that entails. This is one reason why she seems to keep her distance from people around her. She's social, pleasant, even what you would refer to as 'popular' but she knows where she stands with those around her and the Japanese ideals around foreigners can become crushing at times. Her father is controlling- his fetishism for Japan eking out to infect his daily life and even his relationship with his daughter. He holds this social ideal of 'the perfect Japanese woman' in his mind. A racist, sexist, caricature that cannot be defeated by any forms of logic. Instead, he wants his daughter to embody this caricature in every way and she fights to worm her way out of the social expectations both he and her peers impose on her.

Short tempered, hot blooded, Lisa always seems like someone who has been stretched to her limit and is fed up. At times, this is played for laughs, but there's always a part of her that seems like she's just this close to really snapping one day.

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I was actually shocked to find out that Lisa is essentially Laura Palmer if she turned her life around right before it went out of control. There's a lot of damage Lisa holds in how much she just wants someone to give her a normal life and treat her like a normal girl despite everything.

Yukino(Yuki) Mayuzumi is one of our holdovers from Persona 1 and is actually the only one that seems actually worth writing about. Tough as nails but gentle where it counts, Yuki spends a majority of the first game acting as party leader alongside Maya. She's a photographer and works as a journalist but seems less caught up in pondering everyone's situation and more set on pushing everyone forward. There's actually a really nice subplot with her and Anne; she sees so much of herself in the girl and knows how close she is to destroying herself. Yuki is actually one of the best party members that you'll get in the duology and she's only here for about 75% of the game.

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I can admit here that I totally screwed up and didn't pick the right option for her when she was crying over her dead boyfriend. This leads to her and Anne having a bad ending and sort of puts into a weird question on what ties a Shadow to their human selves especially this early on where Shadows were functioning as something far more different than they do later in the series.

In the second game, she's sort of just a happy NPC that hangs around work. You can talk to her from time to time but, really, she barely has anything of value to add. It actually feels like a huge bummer seeing how crucial she felt to the story of Innocent Sin, acting as a nice counterbalance to Maya. To be fair, though, I guess you don't really need a counterbalance if you take away Maya's ability to, uh, balance in the first place.

Jun Kurosu . I know, I know; every other person besides me loves Jun as a character for one reason or another. I just sort of...don't? Half because I was miffed at losing Yukki as a party member, half because you only really get him during the last 25% of the game. Once he gets thrown into your party, it feels like the story just focuses way too hard on him and not everyone we've built up until now. Everyone's plots sort of feel rushed to completion while Jun ends up becoming god's very special widdle baby and I don't know...I think the story could've worked fine if we kept Yukki and he was sort of there to follow the party around as a non-combatant.

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Hohhh boy, where do I start with Jun? Well, first of all, he is in the entire game from the start as he's introduced, along with everyone else, at the start. His whole thing is that he's fucked up over being neglected and unloved and ostracized and part of that is due to him being gay. You'd think this would be a big thing that would really engage me but this, again, is all sort of spilled in the last quarter of the game and, by the time you get him into your party his personality suddenly becomes milquetoast and none of his stats are any good. Every time anything happens in the plot after that point, he just keels over and starts crying and whining about how everything is his fault and how everybody should hate him and blah blah blah blah blah. It's just not very engaging. I don't like people that cause problems and then don't own up to them but, instead, guilt everyone around them into forgiving them by self deprecating. It's so selfish and stupid and, yeah, I know he's a teenager and I don't care. I'm way too old to deal with this bullshit. In the second game he does sort of act as a catalyst to show that the Tatsuya that's been running around is both the one we knew from the last game and also is so different from the one we used to know. It's very artfully done.

Something I will say is that I do like that they knew how to convey him being gay through small stereotypes without making it ugly. Yeah, he's sensitive, gentle, and quiet and really loves his mother but he actually has interests and knowledge about things. Also, love it or leave it, he does have a personality outside of being gay. That's so much better than most media does for us, so, whatever.

Ulala Serizawa has to be one of the more down to earth characters out of the new party. Not to say that she's boring, she's actually one of the more interesting ones- just to say that her problems are typical for a woman her age. She's going nowhere fast, unsure about the future, unsure about what she even wants to do with her life, and is rapidly approaching the *gasp* dreaded age of TWENTY FIVE???? Yeah, this game makes a weird effort on how sexism really does poison your brain so Ulala is twenty four and mourning her life like it's over when, really, it's just begun. It's funny because she even has a reading that her life is about to take a big major turn at the beginning. She literally only references it at the end of the game but, for some reason, it stuck in my brain as something huge and important.

It's funny because Ulala sort of feels like Stephanie Plum(ask your mom); she's almost a comedic relief character except there's a little bit of something keeping her from going full clown and I think that's her moxie. I think the people who made her wanted her to seem as unfuckable as possible(she's basically like every redditor's nightmare) but, actually, I think it ends up making her really cool. She's into the occult, boxing, she has a sexuality that she's not really shy about. Nothing about her is fanservice, she's just a weird woman who acts like a weird woman. By the way, I have no fucking clue how she can punch demons in that outfit of hers. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying, girl, ditch the dress.

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It actually feels weird having a spoiler section for Ulala because she's very much a person who is, well, what you see is what you get. However, I wanted to say I actually enjoyed her romance plot with Baofu. I think there's a way to do romance plots without making that a female character's entire *thing* and I think this is a good example of that. They each bring out something in each other that I think they need- someone they can just be normal to. See, Ulala's main thing is that she always puts on a front in order to get guys because, well, that's what women are taught to do. With Baofu, all bets are off, and they actually engage with each other like people on a level that they really never can with anyone else. Besides that, I think it's interesting to show that her and Maya's relationship has basically reached it's end.

Not to sound cynical but I actually do think that Ulala and Maya will grow apart after this game, not due to a fight or anything, just that they had known each other for so long and grew so separately. After having lived together for a good number of years and Ulala having to essentially be Maya's caretaker, I think it's a natural conclusion to believe that she and Maya stayed friends but couldn't continue to stay close.

Katsuya Suo can have his moments here and there. He's not exactly the most interesting guy in the world but he's also not the most boring party member you can get. He is down there, though. To be honest, there's a part of me that believes this game was created with the Shin Megami Tensei ideal of "Chaos/Order/Free Will" in mind so, while Baofu seems to encompass Chaos and Ulala Free Will; Katsuya's thing would be Order. That means him bickering with Baofu(and virtually anyone who dares to not be the shining example of virtue he expects) at every turn. It can tend to feel like the creators are trying just a bit too hard to insert some conflict here and there and it ends up coming off unnatural. That said, he's a cop who, at first, finds himself in this mess because he's just trying to solve a case. This leads him down a long trail through corruption and mystery until all of that sort of resolves itself. This plot also runs parallel to Tatsuya acting funny until that carries the rest of his arc to it's conclusion. Eh, what can I say, it feels like the latter half of this game had weird rewrites. He also has like a little will they/won't they "love triangle" between himself, Maya, and his own brother which you would think would be at least interesting but it's not!! I don't know how you make something so insane so boring but they sure managed to do it! Sadly, that means having to choose for Maya to be all googly eyed with this guy because the only other choice she has is some angsty teenager and god, no one wants that. It's even funnier because you might think being the Order guy, Katsuya would at least have common sense but he just blindly follows orders and believes propaganda like an idiot. Nobody over the age of 12 is going to listen to some guy go "The cops will solve the problem and save the day because the cops are the good guys :)" and not think that this guy is dumb as fuck.

I do think that by the end of the game, he ends up being a better character but, by then, all of his stuff revolves around his little brother and I can't stand that guy.

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You essentially find out that the crime his father was convicted of was actually ploy to frame him for knowing too much. Katsuya comes to some hard truths upon realizing the entire police force has been corrupt long before he even earned his badge(oh wow, what a surprise!). This leads to him mellowing out a bit and the scenes with him taking care of his brother are actually really sweet, at least on his end. You can really see that he parented his brother a lot growing up so coming to terms with the fact that his brother is now no longer his brother is a show of strength on his part. I think that's also a major point of his character- strength in the face of adversity. By the end he's learned to chill out and actually does start to consider dropping out of the force in order to pursue his actual dreams now that his main goal(finding out who framed his father) has been accomplished.

Baofu's whole profile might as well be a giant spoiler. I know that, in itself, makes it feel like he's a spoiler character but he's really not. During a lot of the lulls in this game(and, oh boy are there quite a few of those), the main thing that can keep you engaged is at least wanting to figure out the mystery of this weird guy who won't stop lying to you.

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It's funnier in knowing that you actually did see Baofu in another section of Innocent Sin outside of just talking to him on the computer. There's a flashback sequence between Tatsuya and Jun where they bump into a younger Baofu but you wouldn't recognize him seeing as he's actually happy for once.

His real name is Karou Saga and he's the personification of a long con. Basically, the story is that he was a detective working on a case with his partner(who was also his lover) and they were brutally attacked by the Taiwanese mafia. She died and he survived, barely, allowing himself to be considered legally dead in order to rebuild himself. You see, this is actually the start of the whole "Personas can be born out of a near death experience!" thing that the rest of the series gloms onto. Since then, Baofu actually hates his Persona out of both hatred for himself for surviving and for being a representation of this horrible thing that happened to him. He's sort of sequestered himself away from human contact; chainsmoking, doing weird bullshit on his computer; using blackmail to amass a small fortune in order to take down the men who destroyed his life. There's actually hints about himself that made all of this incredibly easy to catch early on(I had this guy read like a book) if you take the time to talk to him. He never says anything outright but there's specific lines and mannerisms that begin to add up if you start piecing them together. There's points where in the latter half of the game, he begins to see too much of himself in Tatsuya and that sort of becomes a whatever thing for me. You always get this feeling as if he's not actively trying to kill himself but you do feel like he's a death seeker in a way.

Also I just want to say that it's really fucking funny that the game frames him as this dangerous mystery that will probably betray everyone until it's revealed that he isn't Taiwanese and is actually Japanese. After that, he's basically treated like a normal guy. That's so fucked up and weird, I don't even think that was intentional.

I also actually think he's the funniest guy in the world. His sense of humor is a far cry from what you'd find in the previous game but it's exactly my kind of humor. It's very dry and cynical, typically making straight-faced observations or saying shit that's the verbal equivalent of firing off gunshots in a crowded room. He's like a walking, talking Smiths album.

Game Index

Characters