It's the kind of pedantry up with which most people do not put.

An FPS that gives you the option of playing with either regenerating or static/numeric health and alters the stage makeup and game mechanics accordingly, e.g. more cover for the former, faster movement speed, armor and health pickups for the latter.

If it's the actual Kusanagi (and considering what's happening in the world, it's entirely reasonable to assume it is), having it just be in a chest with no fanfare honestly kind of makes sense: The real one was lost, misplaced, stolen or otherwise not where it should have been for centuries and it certainly doesn't look like it's of earth-shattering importance, least of all to people whose experience with Japanese gods entails either fighting them or hiding from them.  The Mesians could have just killed the person (or demon) who had it without knowing what it was, then just tossed it into a storage room.  Or they could have looted it from a shrine when they were off doing Mesian things, e.g. fighting anything that's not a Mesian.

...and/or the relative lack of fanfare upon getting it could be a sign that the world is not as it was.  I'm probably reading into things too much.

This is basically the "Man Who Enjoys Thing Informed He Is Wrong" article from The Onion in action, isn't it?

The butler.

You can fuse Nebiros and Belial to get Alice in Persona 4, though, and having them both at the same time in Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army leads to a quest chain that lets you fight her (and possibly get her as a demon, I'm not sure).  That... might be all the special things there are for those three.  Still, continuity nods.

http://www.borders.com/online/store/UsedSearchResults?sku=1597961728&type=1

WHAT IN THE SEVEN FUCKS IS THIS SHITTING BOOK PRINTED ON

SOLID FUCKING GOLD? THE WOOD OF THE TRUE CROSS

I JUST WANT TO FINISH MY STORY ABOUT A MOON CRASHING CRAZY VAMPIRE AND THE KID WITH THE DEVIL AND VAGUE CHRISTIAN IMAGREY AND THIS SHIT IS FUCKING NUTS

Isn't it sad, Lyrai? ;_;

Oh boy, another theology discussion I can dick up!   But seriously though.

It's clear that the game doesn't think highly of Christianity, what with the Judeo-Christian demiurge being the series' primary antagonist and all. To a typical Japanese person who lives steeped in Shinto and Buddhist religious concepts, I guess Christianity is all about wiping out a nation's native belief system and replacing it with the One Jealous God. In general terms, it's always been a source of strife and conflict. It's hard to argue with this view, but on the other hand, by focusing only on the fundamentalist, militant aspects, you don't get to see Christian orphanages or hospitals or homeless shelters (though even those have been tainted more than their share, I suppose). Eh... I'm not trying to defend anything here or spark a debate on religion, I guess I'm reflecting on how the game may be justified in focusing on the negatives exactly because its creators haven't really been exposed to what positives there are.

Christianity, on the whole, has so many concepts which differ from Japan's native faiths that it's... well, alien and almost sinister-sounding compared to their own, which is probably the reason why they don't have reservations about using it as such (see also: Final Fantasy Tactics, Breath of Fire II, Vagrant Story, That One Game).  It's doubtful that it's done out of malice; they just needed a scary foreign faith that differed from their own.  If it helps, just see it as the Occidental equivalent of how western gurus talked about the "secrets of the Orient" in the 60s and 70s.

Plus I have it on good authority that the developers of the Megami Tensei series have said that "God is not the source of all evil in the MegaTen universe." Then there's the aspect of how it's "Law versus Chaos" and not "Good versus Evil;" both the Mesians and Gaians have good and bad points to make, all told.

Not sure how relevant some of that is to anything, but there you go.

Eagerly awaiting the commercials for this thing.

"It's like a nut you can touch on the back!"

You forgot the part of the story where Guild, Thad, Brentai and I teamed up to defeat Lavos and retrieve the Booster Shield to enhance the Shuttle Craft so we could fly it into the Space Colony Eurasia to retrieve the Reboot Cluster to enhance the Reboot command

Then the world exploded.