Contact With Demons - Persona 2: Eternal Punishment Walkthrough
In both Persona 2 games you're able to make Contact with the demons during battle and have a conversation with them. Doing this will allow you to form a Pact with them or get some Tarot cards of the genre they're associated with. For example, if you talk with a Devil demon and you make him interested 3x times he'll give you some Tarot cards.
This system has a few changes from Persona 2: Innocent Sin but for the most part it feels very similar. To make contact with a demon you'll want to select Contact from the menu during battle. It'll ask you what party member you wish to make contact with and that will mostly depend on the monster you're talking to. Each party member is good at raising different emotions depending on the monster type. There's some RNG involved in the process as well but think of it like "when using the right party member, the odds will be more in your favor".
All of the demons in the game have a different personality type which results in them responding differently to your party members. You really only need to care about two emotions, Happy and Interest. The other two emotions - Anger & Fear will result in the Contact ending so there's no point in focusing on them. 3 is the magical number for emotions in this game. When you raise a certain emotions 3 times on a demon you'll get some sort of result.
Raising the Interest emotion 3 times will get you some Tarot cards, you'll probably be doing this emotion the most often. Happiness lets you form Contracts with demons and spread rumors, two things that are useful but we do them much less often than farming Tarot cards. Then you have Anger and Fear. Anger will result in a normal fight taking place and Fear will result in the enemy running from you.
When you're in battle, you can select Contact and mouse over demons to see information about them. Things like what their Persona type is, what their personality traits are and how many Tarot cards you have of their type are all shown. In the screenshot below you can see I am currently targeting an Agathion which is a Star type. His personality traits are Tmd. and Chf. I also have a total of 168 Star cards (as shown in the bottom right).
The circle below the demon means I have a Pact with it
One other thing I would like to point out about the picture above is the circle below the demon. This is what it looks like after you've formed a Contract with them. As aforementioned you can form a contract with a demon by raising their Happy emotion 3 times. When you form a contract the demon will thank you and leave battle, you can't really reap any rewards until you encounter them again and raise happy again.
You have two different ways that Contracts reward you, the first way is by raising happy 3 times on them again to access the "Contract Menu". Doing this will give you different options, you can request money from them, you can request an item or you can ask for info (which is then usually used to spread Rumor which is also an option at the demon). The items that some enemies give are unique and only come from them. Sometimes you can ask for cards too, when that option is available it will replace the request for items.
In my opinion these are the lesser benefits of a Contract, the real benefit comes from raising interest 3 times on a demon you have a contract with. Demons will give you some Free Cards along with whatever cards they would normally give you from their Arcana. You can give these cards to the painter in the Velvet Room and he will turn them into whatever type you want. This can be used to save yourself some time farming or to get a Persona from an arcana not currently available to us demon wise.
For example, there are a few Persona in the teens for arcanas like Sun and Hierophant... but you're not going to encounter any demons with those arcana until later. So you can use the Free Cards to make the Sun/Hierophant cards we need to get those Persona.
The hardest part of getting Tarot cards in this game is usually choosing the correct dialogue choices during your Contact with demons. If you'd like some help on what to choose for both Happy/Interest then check out my Correct Dialogue Choices page for more information.
Demon Rumors
In addition to the rumors that you're given by humans you can also get rumors and spread them through demons. The rumors that demons give you are unique to them, they don't share the same rumors that Rumormongers and others give to you. Demon rumors usually involve the dungeon you're in, spells, weapons or something of that nature.
We'll use an example from Chapter 3 of my Walkthrough, in the Undersea Ruins you can ask an Aeshma for information which will let us access a treasure room in that dungeon. This process is the same as getting and spreading a rumor, you must first form a Contract with a demon (raise Happy 3 times). Once you've done that raise Happy 3 times again and ask for information.
Not all demons are capable of giving you information, pay attention to their personality traits because stupid demons won't give any info. Probably one of the best places to get and spread demon rumors is at Kasugayama High, specifically in the Bomb Shelter. Every Area of the Bomb Shelter has different spell rumors and there will be multiple rumors for moving boulders throughout the Bomb Shelter too. Each boulder moved will make a shortcut for you.
Probably one of the most important demon rumors of all is about the Legendary Weapons. You can spread a rumor to make your Legendary Weapon more powerful, but it comes with the downside that any time you make a demon run in fear he'll spread a rumor which makes your weapon do 1 damage. If you can avoid chasing any enemies away from battle - or you don't mind spreading a rumor again if you do... Then this is definitely worth doing.