the development staff visited Hariti's temple in Zōshigaya and Taira no Masakado's grave to cleanse themselves. They had done this before, first during the development of the first Shin Megami Tensei; after one of the staff members got robbed, they decided to do it regularly. The inspiration to do this came from Go Nagai, who was said to have exorcised a spirit with the help of Hariti while writing the manga Devilman. During the game's planning, it was decided that it should not be directly connected to Shin Megami Tensei, ensuring that it would hold interest independent from the first game; because of this, Kaneko envisioned it as a story loosely based on Shin Megami Tensei'''s future. At first, he imagined it to take place ten years after the first game, as he thought that would be roughly the amount of time needed for society to rebuild, but another staff member wanted it to take place hundreds of years later. Kaneko disagreed, saying that culture would have changed a lot over a hundred years, and that he could not even imagine what the world would look like a hundred years into the future or what it had been like during the Meiji period. The two had different ideas about the timeline of the series, but eventually decided to set the game "several decades" after Shin Megami Tensei. They made use of the tree of life as a central theme of the story. According to Kaneko, the reason for choosing the Judeo-Christian god, YHVH, as the game's antagonist, was that he saw YHVH as the base for all other gods around the world: Having observed common motives throughout different mythologies, such as the flood and the creation of the world, he reasoned that they all originated in one single mythology, which had been changed as people took it with them, leading to modern-day myths. He thought the original mythology would be the Old Testament, and therefore considered YHVH the folkloristic base of all gods. Despite casting YHVH as the antagonist, Kaneko noted that he did not intend for YHVH to be evil incarnate in Megami Tensei. Character design Aleph was created to embody the Shin Megami Tensei II world, which is reflected in his character design: he has a portable computer and a visor that he controls demons with, and carries swords, guns and armor for use in battle. His computer