Someone might wanna clean it up or whatever.
 
But wow y'all, that game is a trip. I left out stuff about some of the characters because spoilers, but I don't know if that's really an issue for this game that most people have 0 interest playing.  (And, I guess I left out some because I didn't fully understand it and I'll have to dig through piles and piles of NicoNico videos of the game to comprehend, and I don't really want to do that)

Hey folks spoilers
 
Yeah they don't call 'em Lawful Stupid for no reason!!!  
(I kid, I kid. Everyone in Megami Tensei is "______ Stupid")
 
A lot of the spoilers I was talking about were things like the Flower Girl's identity, and some back story to the Partner characters. Like, Miranda (Law Heroine)'s father helped develop the nuclear warheads used in SMT1 feels guilty about it  (and yet... she's Law?). Moby-kun (Law Hero) had lost someone he cared about in the past and so he became kind of a cold asshole.  
 
Grown up Sumire was apparently abused by her father when she was younger, so she gets the lust for power to take her revenge on him and somehow gets caught up in the Gaea Cult's terrorist activities. I couldn't find anything about grown up Baraki, although i suppose he's probably in the same boat.
 
There's also a guy named Naitou which I don't really understand. He's the fallen angel Raguel. Apparently he Fell, but through some trickery he became an angel again. But then... he's preaching Gaia after The Flood? And Feris, the leader of the Administration in Idea Space, is a Gaian?  
 
...I liked my initial speculation of the plot better: That Idea Space was designed to keep Lucifer caged so the Messians could build their Millennium. As it stands now, it's like the game is just a poor knock off of SMT2's "Gimmel the VR Messiah" plotline.  
 
According to Japanese people with too much time on their hands, NINE also has a time jump. It begins one year before The Hero returns to Tokyo in SMT1, but due to circumstances  the main character head to the Makai (it says that Miranda goes and the others follow to save her). They don't return until 10 years after the Great Flood/Battle at the Cathedral.
 
(Time line website navigation: Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 explain their reckonings of how it works. Chapter 2.1 is Timeline 1 (1, 2, and NINE)
 
I'm glad that Sophia is finally around, but I'm sad that her appearance is wasted in what amounts to a sidestory that does not matter in the slightest instead of being like, AT THE END of the series, y'know? Especially considering I thought Sophia was the being that appeared in the credits of SMT2, even though this game takes place before that. The True Neutral ending, where Sophia is fully redeemed and as such the only way the Hero had any effect on the world,  can't be the official one because Lucifer is still sealed away in that one.
 
TL;DR:  
Let's just ignore this horrible mess of a game and pretend it never happened. Let's instead focus our thoughts on Imagine, which, like a glorious phoenix, arose from the decrepit corpse that is NINE. Yeah, Imagine is the salvaged bits of what was once going to be the online components of NINE. When Imagine was initially announced, it even used the same (hideous) graphics engine that NINE did. At some point, presumably due to the horrific sales numbers for NINE and the critical acclaim of the Nocturne, they realized it would be smarter to make it look more like Nocturne.  
 
(I suppose if you don't like Online you can pretend it doesn't exist, either)

Quote from granitor on 01/26/09 at 01:44:01:

 You're continually playing the wrong PC games over and over if you don't play PC games because most that you play are "tedious"
 
Anyway, Cho, were you the one that wrote the HCG101 SMT:NINE article?
 
 
Ha ha, he's not going to respond.