Demon Contact Guide - Persona 2: Innocent Sin Guides
In Persona 2: Innocent Sin you're able to make contact with demons during battle and talk with them. This system was part of the first Persona game too, thankfully with this release it was refined a bit and made into something a lot less RNG focused. Don't get me wrong, there is still a lot of RNG associated with this system - just not as much as the first game.
To make contact with a demon you'll want to select Contact from the menu during a battle. Once you've selected Contact you'll be asked to select which party member you'd like to make Contact with. Each character has 4 'conversation skills' that they can choose from. These skills will allow you to interact with the demon and to change one of their emotions.
Every demon in this game has a different personality and thus will respond differently to each characters and their conversation skills. Depending on what emotion you want to raise on the demon determines which conversation skills you should use on them. To make things a lot easier for you, the only two emotions that really matter are Eager and Happy.
Raising their Eager emotion will get you Tarot Cards from that demon, this is the #1 thing that you're going to be using Contact for while playing through the game. Happiness is also an important emotion because it will allow you to form Pacts with demons and get additional/new rewards from them as well as learn and spread rumors through them.
Below I give you a bit more information about these emotions and about Contacting demons during battle.
Eager Emotion: Raising Eager 3 times for a demon will get you Tarot Cards that correspond to the type that demon is. For example, if you're fighting a demon that is a Strength Arcana, you'll get Strength Cards for raising Eager enough.
Happy Emotion: When you raise Happy 3 times you'll be able to make a Pact with a demon.
The picture above is something you will see a variation of during battle every time you go to Contact a demon. At the top where it says Cockatrice, this will be replaced by the name of the demon you're attempting to talk with. Level is obvious, that's the level of the monster. World is the Arcana genre that this monster belongs to, this is important because it tells you the type of card you'll get for raising Eager.
Next to where it says World in the screenshot above you'll see it shows a picture of a card and says x265. This tells you how many cards you have that are in that demon's Arcana. Since it says x265 for me that means I have 265 World Cards at my disposal. If you take a look at my screenshot at the top of the page you'll see that I am battling Kiyohime and I have 65 Strength Cards at that time.
Pay close attention to this number for every fight because you'll typically always want to use Contact on the demon with the lowest one. My advice to you is once you reach level 20 and start getting 10 - 25 cards per battle you should stock up on cards because it'll allow you to summon the newest and best Personas when you return to the Velvet Room.
Choosing the right dialogue choices and the right character when you interact with demons is the hardest part of getting cards. Thankfully, I have a guide that tells you exactly how to raise the Eager and Happy emotions for each demon. Check out my Correct Dialogue Choices Guide, that has a list of every dungeon and the demons that you will come into contact with inside of them. It'll tell you which character to use for each demon and what dialogue choice you'll want to select.
We haven't talked too much about the Happy emotion and what forming a Pact with a demon does. Let's take a deeper look into this and see how it can benefit us. When you raise the Happy emotion 3 times you'll trigger a Pact with the demon you're talking to, this is shown in the screenshot below.
The first time you create a Pact with the demon nothing amazing will happen - you have to encounter that demon in battle a second time and raise Happy 3 times again. Once you've done this you'll get a dialogue prompt similar to the one shown in the screenshot below this paragraph.
If you have a Pact with a demon and you raise the Happy emotion 3 times you'll have a choice of what you want from the demon. You can ask him for an item, money, information or to spread a rumor for you. The amount of money that demons give you is very small and it's pretty much never worth choosing this option.
Important! When you have an active Pact with a demon they will also give you additional Free Cards each time you raise Eager 3 times and/or ask it for Cards. You can turn Free Cards into whatever Card you'd like by talking with the painter in the Velvet Room.
As far as items go, depending on the demon asking for an item may not be a bad idea. Every demon gives you a different item and what item they give you will never change, which is helpful. However, very few demons give you items worth going out of your way to obtain. So I honestly don't recommend you bother with asking for items either.
This leaves us with the last two options available, give me information and spread a rumor for me.
Give me information is a prerequisite to spreading a rumor so this always comes first. If the demon doesn't know any information then they'll give you an item or some money, both of which are almost always a waste of your time. Demons give you different rumors than the ones you learn throughout the game normally so this is the only way to acquire their rumors.
Most of the rumors demons give and spread are only important for people who want to min/max their game to an extreme degree though, in my opinion. To give an example of some rumors demons can give to you, sometimes they may have a rumor that a certain Persona has a special ability. If you spread this rumor it'll give that Persona the special ability.
When you collect someone's ultimate weapon later in the game you can spread rumors about it being strong or weak or having a certain elemental strength. None of these are required to beat the game and the amount of benefit you get from them compared to how long it takes to learn them and spread them is... not very good.
Like learning a rumor that one of your character's ultimate weapons is stronger. This is nice and all but it'll take you a few hours to do it (unless you cheat with Save States or get lucky) and in this game you don't even use your weapons very much, you use mostly Personas. So I ask myself what is the point of investing a few hours to do this? Then you have learning a rumor to make a certain Persona stronger in a game where you're intended to constantly switch Personas... Again, I ask myself what the point is of spending a few hours to do this when you're probably going to switch Personas after you finish all this grinding to spread the rumor anyway?
This is the biggest short fall of the entire Demon Contact System in Persona 2, it's just not that useful and it's too tedious. It's extremely easy to annul a Pact if you choose the wrong dialogue options and each time you interact with a Demon they may not even have useful information for you, or they may just flat out decline to spread your rumor.
For this reason I honestly recommend you skip raising Happy as an emotion altogether and focus entirely on Eager. You need Eager to collect Tarot Cards anyway - so at least that has a very important use. Every other aspect of the Contact System can honestly be forgotten about and ignored.
Other Demon Contact Guides
List of Demon Dialogue Choices
Demon Dialogue Questions & Answers