Fridge / Shin Megami Tensei II

Fridge Brilliance

• Louis Cypher spends a big chunk of the game hanging out in various bars around the game world. If you were the leader of the Chaos side who'd watched your plans in the previous game get dashed when The Hero went neutral and kicked both your followers' asses and the asses of God's followers, you wouldn't like it. But you can still pick up the pieces and try again, right? Except it doesn't end up working that way. The victory of Neutrality just paved the way for the Messians, and through them the Council of Angels, to Take Over the World. Every day, people who worship your archnemesis YHVH seek to kill more of your followers, both human and demon. Mutants and other "undesirables", who would be the most likely to agree that the current system is corrupt and to want to change it to more fit your chaotic vision, are driven underground by the angels and forbidden from seeing the light of the sun. You'd need a good stiff drink too. And you ARE in a JRPG, where heroes wander into bars all the time looking for quests, information, and the odd Booze-Based Buff, so you get the best of both worlds.
• Daleth and Beth were designed to look like the Hero and Heroine of the previous game. This wasn't just conscious on the part of the game designers; the scientists made them like that. Beth gets decent treatment, but Daleth is forced into an in-universe Designated Villain role. The Messians are probably venting their hatred at the Hero for ruining their plans years ago by making a punching bag that looks like him. What's more, resembling the Hero would make Daleth initially more popular with the people who respected the Hero. When Daleth is revealed as a Dirty Coward, that not only drags his reputation down, but that of the Hero as well.
  • Beth looks like the Heroine because even if she defected to the Hero's side, she was still a beloved Messiah.
  • Beth and Daleth only interact with each other once, when Daleth kills her while trying to kill Aleph, but their actions at that event take on a new light if they're supposed to evoke the strong bond between the Hero and Heroine. If you assume that they're their reincarnations (probably not true but for the sake of the symbolism), it makes more sense that Daleth is angrier that one woman was killed in front of him than the fact that Aleph is claiming to be the Messiah, the whole point of his life, and that Beth begs Aleph not to take revenge. It would be painful to see someone you knew very well suffer, after all.
• The prizes for winning the Valhalla gladiator tournament are citizenship for the Center and one million macca. But the champions generally move straight to the Center; none of that money would ever be spent anywhere else. It's another way that the Center keeps everywhere else poor.
• This might just be an English-language pun, but Arcadia is two letters away from Arcade. It's all a VR simulation, just like the virtual arcades.
• Why does YHVH think that he can order Lucifer, his archenemy, around? According to one school of thought, all demons, including Lucifer, still work for God. It's a way to reconcile the idea that nothing in the world can happen without God's permission, and the belief that bad things are caused by demons. YHVH tells Lucifer to unleash Kuzuryu upon Tokyo Millennium, which is a bad thing enacted by a demon with the permission of God.
• If Aleph takes the Law Path and kills YHVH, the fact that he is an artificial Jesus or at least a Clone Jesus, becomes much more significant given that it's pretty akin to the Old Testament of the Jewish YHVH being replaced by the New Testament of the teachings of Christ. Could double as Fridge Horror for a Jewish audience, as their interpretation of the faith is damned once more by a successor entity.
• The letter Aleph in Hebrew is used as a glottal stop, which is like a pause. Similarly, Aleph is the only one of the lettered heroes who doesn't speak.
• Hiroko is introduced as one of the elite Temple Knights, with her level in the single digits. Once you start encountering Temple Knights as enemies, they're level 26. Hiroko's level seems low because she'd be a Disc-One Nuke otherwise, until you discover that Hiroko was never a Temple Knight to begin with.