Such as an older character for Time 刻 being used in red font, Risette saying "the clock hand is accelerating" when talking about technological developments, the Genesis units and Genesis Tower having a clockwork motif, and so on. Given the game actually acknowledges the rapid pace of change in the past few years, it's possible this is related to the power of Time. The Genesis Tower being described as an observation device could draw comparisons to AZOTH, I guess.

You can't even wander around freely in the observatory to look through the telescope. 🙁

- Might as well get the gripe out of the way first: The segment where you run around Pandemonium Edith getting the band back together drags. In fairness, it's exactly what Azure did in its finale but somehow it seemed worse here because you know what you're going to be doing and have to run around and fight Mini-Ramiels until you can fight the spheres and then have some dialogue, for every district, to finally get back to the tower that's all you wanted to see in the first place. It feels like they could have sped that up without removing too much of importance. I dunno, make it so you run around town looking for people who can help get past the barrier with a couple fights as part of it but reduce it to maybe three mandatory fights, like the Renne one since that's pretty important. Since some of the spheres get destroyed offscreen by other people, they could have accounted for more of the things and saved the player an hour or two of repetition.

- I'm kind of surprised we didn't get any resolution on Nina obviously working with some other party, especially since one of the missable downtime segments involves you walking into her having a conversation; I was really expecting a last-minute twist there if nothing else. Also, that line of hers she practices in her last Connect event sounds almost like something she's preparing to say to Judith whenever her secret comes out...

- Falcom seems to be teasing us with (S-?)Crafts for Kasim, Ortesia and Rion in the barrier-breaking scene. That sequence reminded me a lot of the approach to Pandora in Tokyo Xanadu.

- With the Pandemonium effect stopping time for most people, time rewinding to revive the pillars around Genesis Tower and the countdown starting to reverse once we enter it, the clock motif the tower itself shows off, and several dead Almata members showing up again (without Gerard's excuse) we're definitely dealing with the Sept-Terrion of Time here, which means Falcom pulled another G. Nome on us with クロノキセキ.

- Vagrants=Zion, huh? I'm going to have to go back to the conversation sequence again because between the katakana shenanigans and being extremely late when I finished, I only caught about half of what he was saying and as the end of Zero would prove after the fact, that stuff can be Important.

- That ending sequence was incredible.