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Didn't Saito have any acquaintances? The was the son of a famous politician, yet when a detective with his face runs around the city for six years nobody comments on it. Moreover, Aiba claims there's no Picture of him. Was ABIS really capable of scouring 24 years of picture of a minor celebrity from the web?
Considering that Saito was killing animals as a kid and committed murder at 12? It's not hard to imagine So was already suppressing any public knowledge of his son and his sociopathic behavior, along with either of them using their Kumakura connections.
Does Iris even have any friends at her school? If she did how come they never appear in the game and why doesn't she mention them? You'd think they would hang out with her at Lemniscate since she's so famous. Was it a Friendless Background kind of ordeal?
It could just be that her work as an idol leaves her without enough free time to make close friendships; she has a lot of followers but few friends. She also probably has to help her mom out a lot and actually work for money, considering she comes from a single-parent home. When you consider that for the past few months she's been juggling all this along with treatment for stage 4 brain cancer, it's not surprising she has trouble keeping up relationships with people.
What was Saito's reason for wanting to switch bodies with Hayato? He even claimed that he wanted revenge against Date because he ‘stole his body’, but Saito was the one who wanted to swap bodies in the first place.
They mention that due to the glitch in the sync when they swapped bodies, Saito and Date lost their memories, and Saito's memories came back in pieces. It's possible that he forgot that the body switch was his idea.
It is also possible Saito had a grudge against Date not necessarily for the body swap itself, but the outcome that came afterwards. His claim that Date "stole" his body likely stems from what happened to both of them afterwards. While it was in part due to Date receiving a stimulant and Saito receiving a sedative from the swap, Date managed to wake up in Saito's body and then proceeded to escape with it. He then spent the next six years forming a new identity as Kaname Date, member of ABIS, and lived a perfectly normal life with normal relationships, a job, friends, and whatnot. He basically took the body and made it his own, forging his own identity with it, as everyone who saw what was once Saito's face didn't know the body belonged to Saito originally, and instead completely associated it with the man named Kaname Date. Meanwhile Saito himself was locked inside Rohan's body and was completely robbed of his identity, not just because Date was in Saito's original body and created a new identity with it, but because he was charged with Rohan's crimes, declared clinically insane, and was institutionalized for five years afterwards, being forced to bear the identity of Rohan Kumakura, not his own. All photos associated with his original identity were taken off official records as well. So as such, he envied Date because the latter had the better outcome despite both becoming amnesiac parasites in other bodies: Date formed a new identity as a new man and made Saito's body his own, while Saito was left in Rohan's and was forced to bear Rohan's identity all the while being kept in an institution. It especially makes sense when you consider Saito's plan for "revenge" involves systematically ruining Date's life by killing everyone close to him: this can be explained by Saito envying the fact that Date got away with living a normal life with a job, a home, normal relationships, and whatnot, while he himself got the less fortunate outcome by completely losing his identity and then being kept in a mental hospital being declared as a clinically insane person.
Presumably Saito wanted to use Rohan's body to set him up, then switch back. If "Rohan" committed a crime, got away, and was then "mysteriously found" for the police, he'd be sent away. But because Saito didn't know that the prototype anesthetized the host, he got caught up in a foreign body for years (and later found he didn't get any chemical rush from his murders in bodies other than his own), while Date was living it up in freedom in Saito's "stolen" body. One can only assume the reason he tore out his body's eye is because he didn't know it could be safely reset back in the head.
How did Date receive oxytocin before Aiba began supplying it to him?
Since both Pewter and Boss knew about Date's damaged brain, they might have subtly doped him up in times he didn't notice, like when he was drunk (it's hinted that when he gets really plastered, he doesn't remember things like when he got into a fight with Renju over his watch) or when he was in a Psync.
In the true ending, how did they simply brush off Date’s new appearance as "plastic surgery"? How did they explain that a 30-year-old could look like a 42-year-old, and have a completely different body type just by undergoing plastic surgery?
A good portion of that is probably revealed by Mama's reaction: The circumstances are just too wild to consider, so it's better not to try to pry too much to keep things simple. Plus, the fact that there are others that DO know the truth that Date is back in his original body that can help smooth things over.
Plus he acts just like Date, the people who knew Date more than them treat him as Date, the higher ups treat him as Date/ and even has the same replacement eye as Date. So unless it's a massive cover up that has no real point as far as they can tell, they're going to accept surgery and medical treatments. And if they know about Psyncing, they probably just figured that Pewter whipped something up for this.
It's certainly convenient, but Date and Saito don't actually look too much different from each other; they have similar builds, are about the same height, and their faces look close enough that they could pass for brothers.
Why did Pewter take Iris to the cold-storage warehouse in the route to her ending?
Presumably, he was told to do so by Saito in Renju's body, who was hoping to use her as a bargaining chip and / or swap bodies with her in order to get closer to Date.
Why the heck would So agree to go with Iris to a disclose location alone in the Annihilations Route? Even if it is Saito inside Iris' body, So has no way of knowing that and even if So was Iris father, it's not completely certain he realize she was his daughter. Even if that's the case, why the heck would So still be willing to go alone with her, considering how cautious he normally is?
Oh, he almost certainly recognized Iris somehow (as a child or as a ghost or something alike) since she looked so much like Manaka to the point he swapped Manaka with Iris in his Somnium. Maybe he went with her out of guilt. He did seem honestly horrified in the real murder scene. Saito actually may have had lesser chances in convincing So to come willingly. I mean, with all these slightly familiar murders around So could have predicted that Saito turning up (and in a different body to boot) wouldn't bring him good news.
Are there any hints as to why Date has vague recollections of previous routes?
While not explicitly stated in the first game itself, the sequel, Nirvana Initiative, highlights the existence of the Frayer, aka you, the player, as a character in-universe who is experiencing the game's events alongside the protagonists. The sequel further emphasizes the existence of you as a character by having people aware of your existence talk to you, but even so, it can easily be inferred that "The Frayer" was very much involved in experiencing Date's life throughout the timelines of the original game and lived inside Date in each timeline and experienced the events through him. The Frayer is implied to supply Ryuki and Mizuki with information of events that happen in other timelines in the main timeline during the sequel: thus, in retrospect, it can be inferred that The Frayer does the same with Date during the Annihilation and Resolution Routes. As the Frayer, we take the information we learn from the other routes with us when we jump from route to route, and supply said information to Date, so even though he's not aware of our existence, we are telling him what happened in those routes so he knows the crucial information needed to solve the case in the final two routes. Essentially you, as the player, are a character in-universe who lives through the protagonists and indirectly communes with them, in this game that protagonist would be Date himself.
In the plot branching between the Ota/Mizuki routes and the Annihilation route, what is the reason that Saito fails to kill Iris(So) and Ota in the former, but succeeds in the latter? For both, the livestream starts around 3:00AM. This troper can only think of a few differences between the two circumstances: 1) In the Ota/Mizuki routes Saito has Mayumi's kitchen knife, Mayumi is at the warehouse and witnesses the failed murder attempt, and Date arrives at 3:17 AM 2) In the Annihilation route, Saito does NOT have the kitchen knife, Mayumi is not at the warehouse at all, and Date arrives at 3:35 AM. Were there any other differences, and if not how did these affect the different outcomes?
The main decider would be where Date was knocked out and the distance from there to the cold-storage warehouse, no? In the Annihilation route, the shock of seeing his own face in relation to the Original Cyclops Killings causes Date to completely forget about Saito sneaking NILE messages to Ota; this allows Saito to set up the ambush (by texting right in Date's car, no less) at Marble which is located in the top left corner of the map. In the Ota/Mizuki routes, the information retrieved from Somnium is less personal which causes Date to bring up the NILE messages, call Ota, and decide the meeting point at the Diner which is near the middle of the map and much closer to the warehouse. While we're pointing out route differences, Aiba is awake in the Ota/Mizuki routes since Date gets bonked instead of tazed, though apparently she couldn't call for help since Date is out for 5 hours either way.
This Headscratchers answers its own question. Date arrived a whole 20 minutes earlier at the scene, therefore Iris was still alive, and Ota got medical attention earlier, which apparently was enough to save his life.
How did Rohan discover Hitomi harboured Manaka’s baby?
It is never known, and we likely never will know how specifically, but there are a few possibilities. He may have put the pieces together from Iris's appearance, as Iris had the same pink hair and similar facial features to Manaka. Another possibility may be that he managed to get access to information that the mob doctor, Dokuta Yogano, was keeping secret. Seeing as Dokuta was one of Rohan's men and was secretly involved in both helping Manaka give birth to Iris and in helping Hitomi and Renju with naming the baby and creating a birth certificate declaring Hitomi as Iris's mother, this information may have at some point been something Rohan discovered in some form or another due to Dokuta being one of his underlings. How he managed to obtain such information is unknown, but he may have uncovered Dokuta's secrets through some form of coercion or other form of asserting power over Dokuta.
Why exactly did Saito kill Iris? Date literally didn’t know she existed until the case started and Saito didn’t know Iris was his half sister. As far as he was concerned, she was just on of Mizuki’s friends. But if that was was enough reason, why not kill Ota too?
Because Saito quite clearly knows about Falco's relationship to Iris and Hitomi, from interrogating him with truth serum 6 years in the past. You can see this in how Hitomi is specifically targeted in both the Annihilation and Resolution routes, and Saito outright saying how much he wants to see Date suffer from watching the Sagans die before his eyes.
Why didn't Iris and Hitomi ask Renju to pay for Iris' brain tumor treatment? As the president of such a successful company, wouldn't it be trivial for him to pay for it?
They were already reliant on the money Renju makes from his businesses to remain stable in terms of sustainable income to begin with (Renju uses the money he makes to help fund and support them regularly), and it's implied that the nanomachine treatment is *so* expensive that it takes someone of prestige far beyond even what Renju has to be able to pay for it. So given those circumstances Renju was out of the question. As such, Hitomi had to resort to blackmailing So, since the man is one of the wealthiest people in the country due to his status as a politician, and in the end, when Iris does finally get the treatment, it's done by Boss blackmailing the police force's higher-ups. In other words, the nanomachine treatment's costs were at an extremely high level that only people who have significant authority over the country, such as a politician or the executives of the police, could feasibly afford to invest. And in these cases, the only way it manages to be paid for is through blackmail of people who have the proper funds to do it.
Why does Iris' brain tumor kill her in the Iris Route ending, yet still she still survives the Resolution Route long enough to get the nanomachine treatment?
