THE MUSIC OF PERSONA 2
For all your lyric translation needs!
PERSONA 2 TSUMI AND BATSU: THE ERRORS OF THEIR YOUTH
(click on title for translations and tracklisting)
I could try to describe this drama CD to you, but I don't think I could do it justice. Usually I find drama CDs to be boring; it's just a bunch of the voice reading their lines into a microphone. But this. This CD is so FUCKING HILARIOUS. There is a total of ONE serious track out of 19. Half of the rest are actually extremely catchy songs (the image songs for the main characters, basically) and the rest are extremely fucked-up humorous drama tracks. If you can, get ahold of this; I got mine from CDJapan. Click to go to the separate page for the music.
PERSONA TSUMI TO BATSU ~UNA SUBSTANTIA~ MANGA
This manga deserves its own page. This is set in the universe of Persona 2, but not a retelling.ARTBOOKS
There are two artists responsible for Persona 2. Kazuma Kaneko is responsible for those wonderfully stylized character designs for Persona 2 (as well as for the majority of the older Megaten games). Shigenori Soejima did the "bust-ups" or the in-game art for Persona 2, before taking over character design duty for the Persona series and other Atlus games (Persona 3, Persona 4, Trauma Center, Catherine, etc.) His style was a little different between Persona 2 and Persona 3; the re-release of Persona 2 seems to be trying to find a happy medium between the two.
Kazuma Kaneko has three big artbooks out that contain Persona art - collectively, they're known as the "Pandaemonium" (Place of Many Demons). (He has many more artbooks, but you won't find Persona art in them). The first two - the Red and the Black book - have demon designs from all the games he's worked on in the Megaten series up to 2002 or so, with english names, katakana spellings, and a short (Japanese) mythological explanation of the demon. The third artbook, the Purple Book, is all character designs. I love these artbooks. You can get all three of these from Amazon Japan at least, but the last time I checked, they were pretty pricey and only available used. Sorry, I don't know if any English stores sell them. They're well worth getting if you love Kaneko's art.
THE PERSONA WORLD GUIDANCE
The Persona World Guidance was released on 4/6/2001, and is meant to be an encyclopedia for Persona 1 and 2 (both parts). It is a source of a lot of the images and information on these pages. It also includes all the bust-up art from inside the games (the different expressions, etc.) so if you want the Soejima art for this game, this seems to be the place to go. The book is in Japanese, and unfortunately, none of the English fan-translation projects seem to have gotten very far with this. I do see this book sold online for $40-60.
ISBN4-7973-1498-2
240 pages