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Finished the game yesterday. Nice ending... I don't think they are more difficult. Persona E.P. might be more difficult than SMT 2, but SMT 1 is beyond frustrating. And it's not about bosses in SMT 1. It's about those normal encounters through the game. You encounter demons almost every second through the whole game and they are somehow always at higher levels than you are. I actually see no point in setting the difficulty so high. I must admit I also had problems with Nocturne. I choose hard difficulty for my first playthrough. Again, the normal bosses were nothing special. But some of the normal encounters and one of those Riders... Uggghhh.
Have you played SMT 1? I don't know if it's me being spoiled by really easy Square RPG's or was it my incompetence, but SMT 1 is the Nr.1 on my "don't ever play this game again" list.

There is no hard mode. Well, I'm not complaining...   
But it's somewhat strange to play an easy game made by Atlus. I just remembered "Shin Megami Tensei 1".... Brrr...

Is there anyone playing I.S.? Right now I'm near the end of the game and I must say it's easy. Very, very easy. I'm a complete rookie in Persona games but until now my entire party got only wiped out by the Carolco mid bosses (pretty much far in the game). My level wasn't high either (something around lvl. 38 at that point). I played E.P. years ago and somehow I remember it was much more difficult.

Maybe it's the same issue like the Shin Megami Tensei 2 for the playstation. People say that the first print of the game (and I'm not talking about the ISO, I'm talking abot the original game) had some serious bugs like freezing at some point of the game.

Maybe I could find the error free japanese version ISO for you (if you want me too). Only if you have the original game of course. It could take some time but I think I could do it.

I was going to ask the same thing too.

That's good to hear

Thanx. I actually started to play the game now. I'm curios about the rest. It seems that I.S. is somewhat easier than E.P. 

I'm going to try it out today after work. It seems they fixed the patch and the game works well. Gemini said something was missing in the game. Some Black Joker thing and some fusion button configuration? Who/what is the Black Joker?

There's artwork and a sprite for a form of the Joker that never appears in the game. In Eternal Punishment, you can select which fusion spells you want to perform from a list and it will automatically set it up (place characters in the correct order, etc). In Innocent Sin, you have to set them up manually.

Thank you Cho. So they are bonus things only.

Good news people. Gemini gave me a new, fixed patch. Everything works great now. It even fixed my memory card. Strange thing, it seems it happened only to me.

I know, I should have thought about that. But it's no big deal anyway. At least my Vagrant Story save stat is still fine. That's the most important thing.

It's really bad it happened because the rest of the game looks fantastic. Now I got two options. I can use that memory card for Innocent Sin only or I can burn the unpatched ISO, start the game and try to load it hoping it's compatible with the save stats. Than I could overwrite the stats with the unpatched version of the game. The save blocks could maybe appear on the memory card. There is one good thing in all of this. You can't lose your savestats even if you wanted to. 

This new second patch messed up my memory card. I’m playing the game on my modded PS1 PAL console. I started the game and everything was perfect. I played the game and saved it. I just wanted to take a look and play it after I finish the other RPG I’m currently playing. I checked my memory card because I wanted to delete my savestat and there was no Persona 2 I.S. savestat. But I had 3 Castlevania: SOTN save blocks (and I know that I normally have only one). What’s even more weird, the three Castlevania save blocks count as one when you want to delete them. It looks like Innocent Sin took over my Castlevania block and created additional two same looking save blocks. You can guess, I lost my Castlevania stat. However, that’s not important. It gets much worse. I deleted the Castlevania/Persona blocks and started the game again. I choose CONTINUE and my Persona savestat was still present, even it was deleted minutes before. I checked my memory card again and… three Thrill Kill save block (and it’s possible to have only one). Luckily, I have three memory cards. I copyed all my undamaged save blocks to the other memory card and deleted my Thrill Kill/Persona save blocks. It looked (only looked)that my memory card was empty now.I went experimenting. I started the game, clicked CONTINUE and the savestat was still there. I saved my game on all five blocks. Now I looked at my memory card. It was empty/full. You couldn’t see any save blocks but they were there. Which made it impossible to delete them, because they were invisible. I found that out by inserting some game and tried to save it. I got the message “Your memory card is full”.
This is not so bad in my case, because I have three memory cards. But I believe there are people with only one memory card. I hope this only happened to me.
Gemini fix this, please.

I'm going to try it out today after work. It seems they fixed the patch and the game works well. Gemini said something was missing in the game. Some Black Joker thing and some fusion button configuration? Who/what is the Black Joker?

Yeah, but some people take the spoiler issue very seriously. I don't mind spoilers at all but I remember writing something about the atmosphere in SMT 3 and I said something about one particular (important) part of the game. The only response was from some guy who told me I should include spoiler tags for such things and I did it. On the other hand people who are afraid of informations (spoilers) shouldn't visit the forums.

People, the patch is finished. Congratulations to Tom and Gemini!

http://tsumi.wordpress.com/2008/10/15/all-is-lost/#more-641

Just wait a minute yksehtniycul, it's not easy to learn a foreign language. I speak three languages. My native language, a foreign language which I speak fluently and without accent, and english which I speak so-so. I can tell you one thing, in order to use a language properly, you have to speak it. Many people (including myself) are not in the position to speak or write that language. You simply have no contact at all with that particular language. Maybe you don't have the time to learn it. Sure, you could take the dictionary and crack it open every time you play japanese games, but that would be like deciphering the hieroglyphs. It would kill all the fun and after beating the game you would be very happy. Not because you beat the game, but because the torture would be finally over. After all, the japanese language uses completely different scripts. And learning a language just because of videogames...
I must say I'm not so much of a Persona fan but I understand all the fans waiting for the translation to be done. After all, it's best it happened this way. The people are getting original audio with subtitles. The official Atlus version would be dubbed.
But there is one thing I wanted to ask you yksehtniycul. How difficult is the japanese language? How long would it take to learn the language before you could speak it without embarrassing yourself? And do they still use a lot of Kanji today?  I've heard that most things today are written in Hirakana and Katakana.