Quote Originally Posted by Cilia View Post
Pandaemonium is a very layered and indirect thing.

While the Emperor isn't named in II itself, supplementary material typically names him Mateus. Mateus is the Scion of Darkness named in opposition to the Esper of Light Lahabrea in Ivalician lore, hence Lahabrea's heavy involvement in the Pandaemonium raids. It's architecture isn't a 1:1, but it does feature that sort of "organic" look in various places (e.g. the arena where you fight Hephaistos). More meaningfully, you descend to the depths to fight Hephaistos (the "Hell Emperor") before ascending to the "heavens" to face the "Light Emperor" (Athena) who tries to portray herself as a goodly person but is just as bad as (if not worse than) the "evil" half, which is what happens in the "Soul of Rebirth" scenario introduced in II's remake(s) (for bonus points you play as the characters who died in the main game during Soul of Rebirth, not unlike how Athena reconstructs Lahabrea, Erichthonios, and Themis from soul fragments just to show off). No, it's not a "Look at this thing from II! Everybody clap like a seal!" thing but it's there. Of course they couldn't resist shoehorning in an Ivalice reference or two on top of it, but you know.
All of this is mostly a solid read (although I'd probably argue that if we're saying anyone is the split Emperor it's Lahabrea/Hephaistos), but again, that's a lot more transformative than what the OP's bar seems to be, which is 'you can only show love through a hollow direct depiction of Thing From Game'. By his logic, the FF2 fans should be in an uproar that Pandaemonium wasn't very specifically a castle from Hell that has a few monster-in-a-box bosses and then ends in a fight against someone specifically named 'The Emperor'! (And then possibly doing it all again but mirrored this time.)

Of course, that hypothetical proposes that there are FF2 fans, and across the over twenty years I've been following the series, I haven't seen any evidence of that.