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Fridge Brilliance
- The opening of the game shows all of the main characters with the ones they relate to the most.
- The two player characters are shown in conjunction with each other.
- Max, Jin and Alicia are all shown on the same space, referring to the fact that they are a closely knit team before the twins were promoted.
- It then cuts to Olive and Brenda, who are later shown to have a Pseudo-Romantic Friendship with each other.
- Marie is shown next, hiding the Lappy suit behind her back. This in reference to both to the Open Secret that she is Lappy, and also the fact that she doesn't really fit in with the rest of thr Neuron crew.
- The opening then cuts to a bunch of scenes from the game before showing Hal, Jena and Yoseph who also have scenes cutting between their reveals. This shows that neither one of the three characters actually have anyone they're close to and likely have their own agendas. Hal never actually turns up to work and is only seen through his custom drone's hologram system. Jena is an ARI researcher-turned-terrorist and was never a part of Neuron in the first place. Though, it may seem odd that Yoseph, the director of Neuron is shown alone, this is foreshadowing the fact that he only viewed Neuron as a means to an end and viewed every single member of Neuron as expendable if necessary (as shown when he makes massive downsizes to the organization and fires practically all of the above people after your character becomes a fugitive).
- The opening also foreshadows the future of Neuron, with everyone depicted in the first half of the song being the ones who kept their allegiances to Neuron or at least to the Neuron before Yoseph started making changes towards his goal (even Max never actually defected from the cause and if the fan-theory that he has indeed merged with the Axe Legion is correct, he's still technically working for Neuron), and everyone in the latter half of the song having gone against Neuron in some way or form (Hal never goes back and is implied to be working with Kyle again in Sector V, Jena was always against Neuron, and Yoseph disbanded Neuron once it was no longer needed for his goals).
- The game's Central Theme is unity and how the best way to accomplish a goal is by being part of a team.
- This is easily the most apparent with the Legions and how you fight with your Legion rather than allowing it to do all the work for you (or conversely doing all the work yourself because you don't trust it). There's also Sync attacks, which make use of both player and Legion.
- Both of the villain's methods of escaping extinction involve merging humanity to the Astral Plane. Jena herself admits that this is simply the natural order of things, with the Astral Plane simply bringing parts of Earth back into itself to be reorganized.
- Anytime a character fails, it can be attributed to them to either them essentially not being a good enough team player or someone else having better teamwork.
- In File 02, both twins nearly die for going against Max's orders and later on in the file, the player character is only saved from dying because the rest of his team appeared at the right time to save them.
- In File 06, the player character once again fails and it can also be attributed to them going against Neuron. They are only saved by Akira, who was Just Following Orders from Yoseph, and the next File sees them arrested for going against the team. Hal himself was fired for the same actions, though Yoseph was likely planning to get rid of him more permanently as he was not connected to the Legions.
- We find out in File 08, that Max ultimately failed to tame his Legion again. Some of the data files suggest that he always had trouble co-operating with his Legion.
- In fact, the only Legion that is continuing to work for Neuron by the end of File 02 was the player character's Sword Legion. They had previously shown exceptional teamwork, in contrast to the rest of the team who tended to just let their Legions do the work. This is possibly the reason the player character was able to yield better results taming their Legion compared to Akira, Max, and the other Legionises.
- In File 09, Jena finally meets her end after having the rest of her "allies" disposed of. In fact, anytime Jena manages to get away, it's with the use of other beings following her orders. She also has a considerably harder time against the player character in File 09 than in File 04, after the player character has gotten better at syncing with their Legion. It's somewhat fitting that she, who never actually worked with anyone but rather created Homunculi to work for her, is killed by a literal fusion of the player character and their Legion.
- The player's Legionic Fusion only fails when two conditions are presented; 1.) there is an internal struggle between the player character and their Legion, thus preventing it from getting anything done and 2.) through better use of teamwork. The Legion Fusion is utterly curb-stomped by the Raven Corps, who utilize their teamwork at such speed that it can't react in time. In the next chapter, Akira's Legion Fusion is able to curb-stomp the Raven Corps because the Legion's chimeric instinct is completely overriding Akira and thus there is nothing preventing the Legion from using it's body to their fullest potential. But even they end up defeated because the player character is able to maintain their own sense of self, instead of being consumed by their chimera's instinct, and actually work with their Legion.
- Yoseph's plan is to merge both humanity and the Astral Plane into a being called Noah, thereby achieving godhood. He first accomplishes this by having the Raven Corps fuse with their Legions and then fuse even further into Noah and then fusing Noah into himself. The result—Noah: Soul of Ambition—is so powerful that the player character cannot fight it but try and escape it. Even when, the player character encounters Yoseph again, they cannot damage him because he's fused with the Astral Plane.
- Much like Legionic Fusion, Noah is only defeated through internal struggle and as such when it is not fully united. The first time is when the player literally goes inside it to defeat its core. The second is when Yoseph is finally killed thanks to Akira, who he had forcibly fused with, attacking him. They could only do this because they too had fused with the Astral Plane. The third is when Noah's death, which consists of the player character quickly switching between Legions and dealing a chain of sync attacks on it before Akira finally breaks free of Noah's control and makes it vulnerable enough to allow a fatal blow to be dealt on it.
- How does the Lappy suit defeat something as sophisticated as IRIS? Marie does Neuron's admin work, and would have access to the database. She added a dud entry for Lappy so her coworkers couldn't use IRIS to identify her. (There's other reasons it doesn't work, but points for effort.)
- It's repeatedly shown in the game that Chimeras drag civilians off to the Astral Plane. Most of the time, there will be side quests that involve you going into the Astral Plane to rescue these civilians but that somehow makes it worse. The Chimeras have been on Earth for decades. How many men, women and children have died because there was no one capable of saving them? Heck, one side quest involves you trying to find a woman's fiancée, only to turn up with only their ring. Even you can only do so much, it seems.
- Aberrations. They aren't as dangerous as Chimeras, can be seen by normals and can be stopped by regular weapons. The problem is the fact that they were human once and only became aberrations after The Corruption became too strong and caused them to redshift into these monstrosities. Destroying them is probably a Mercy Kill, if anything but just remember that whenever you do so, you're killing someone's family member who is only fighting you because no one could save them in the first place.
- On the other end of the scale are the Chimeras, who are completely unsympathetic by virtue of seemingly being Always Chaotic Evil. They are completely Invisible to Normals, are generally a lot stronger than you, and their presence alone is enough to leave a lovely dose of red matter, which causes the aforementioned "redshifting". If that's not enough they come in a wide variety of flavors, all having a power of some kind just to make them extra dangerous. Being a civilian on the Ark, let alone the planet must be truly hell.
- If Jena is correct, then most if not all of the Chimeras were also humans, corrupted by the Astral Plane to the point where there's no trace of their humanity left beyond their basic form (at least, on a surface-level appearance). These include the Chimeras that were chained up and made into your Legions, which might make you reconsider how you and the rest of Neuron have been treating them as super-powered attack dogs.
- The Astral Plane, itself. It's already a Death World, which nothing but Chimeras can survive in by way of having such high levels of corruption. However, if Jena is to be believed, the Astral Plane (or whoever's in charge of it) has a desire to bring Earth to itself to be "archived". Even though Jena and Yoseph had the same goal in mind, they were only hastening the process. The Astral Plane has repeatedly been stated to be infinite, far larger than Earth, meaning that all the work the protagonists are doing is merely prolonging the inevitable. Eventually, the Earth's resources will run dry and there will be nothing anyone can do to stop what happens next.
- Yeah, Max sacrificing himself to save the rest of Neuron's frontliners is already tragic enough, but imagine if he managed to stay alive. He'd have to bear his older child sneaking into Zone 09 for an illegal mission when they know that is off-limits to police and his younger child being nearly killed by a terrorist and then being cloned en masse for an army of soulless Legion-wielders. Then there's the matter of his superior Yoseph turning out to be Evil All Along with an omnicidal savior complex.
- There are several patients at the Aegis Research Institute that you can cure with blueshifting, which doesn't bode well for their own efforts to treat redshifting, even though that's part of the reason the ARI was founded. Why don't the doctors have a Legion of their own on standby to cure patients, if you can do it with such little effort or training? Do they just not know your Legion can do that? Did they have one, but it was lost or destroyed in Jena's bombing? Or are they deliberately leaving people in agony to test the effects of redshifting without the patients knowing there's a cure?
- Why did Yoseph choose Akira instead of the player's twin to be the basis of the Raven Corps? Sure, he had easy access to them while treating them from the injuries they got from Jena, but since both are registered cops it shouldn't be too hard to get a DNA sample from either of them, and at that point the player is clearly the superior Legion handler. Perhaps he got a hint that you might turn against him and so chose the twin who would be more likely to cooperate, especially after saving their life? Or is there a second, secret army of player-character clones somewhere, just waiting to be armed with Legions and unleashed?
