Lead-up to Oni
2000: BioCrisis begins.
I couldn't ascertain from Oni's story when this is supposed to have happened, but if we're going to give the Wilderness time to spread and become a menace, we need to push it back some years before Dr. Hasegawa and Jamie venture into a quarantined area. Choosing "2000 AD" is also a bit of an homage to Neon Genesis Evangelion and its Second Impact. However it might make sense to place it decades earlier so it has time to grow at a more reasonable pace.
For the reasoning behind my choice to have a divergent timeline, and why I don't define the BioCrisis as "industrial pollution run amok", see the
Overview's "Backstory" section.
2009: Muro is born.
I have nothing to go on here except my placement of Mai's birth in 2013 (see below) and the assumption that Muro is older than Konoko (based on "blam! love, little sister"). He's probably more than a tiny bit older, considering he has managed to take control of the Syndicate and is a more advanced Daodan host.
2012: Freedom Riots.
2013: Mai is born.
If Konoko is 19, a reasonably believable age, for the period of time that Oni takes place, she would have been born in the range of Dec. 4, 2012 through Nov. 22, 2013. This also gives Jamie time to take part in the Freedom Riots before becoming pregnant with Mai. It's true that Konoko is stated as being 23 in the
Unit Viewer, but this is not repeated in-game anywhere, and I see her rash behavior as more fitting for a teenager than an adult.
2014: Jamie dies in the Wilderness. Daodan project starts.
Has to take place after Mai's birth, and yet we don't have much spare time to work with because Konoko was separated from her dad
at age 3, and the Daodan project initiated by Jamie's death was already advanced enough that they had viable Chrysalises at the time of their separation. Apparently the Hasegawas were too intent on investigating the dangerous Wilderness Preserves to let their baby back home slow them down.
2016: Syndicate raids Hasegawa'a Lab. Mai and Dr. Kerr are taken in by TCTF.
The manual tells us that Konoko was orphaned at age 3 (see previous date for backup), so based on my 2013 birth date for her, we arrive at 2016 or 2017 for the Syndicate raid.
2017: Muro is implanted with the Daodan after his 8th birthday.
It's too neat for Muro to also be seven when implanted, but he does need to be about as young as Mai was when she was implanted in order to explain his maturity as a symbiote.
2020: Konoko is implanted with the Daodan after her 7th birthday. Shinatama is produced using Konoko's brain engrams.
Konoko says that
she was 7 when she was implanted with the Daodan.
2026: Muro takes control of Syndicate.
The manual says that Muro came to power "less than ten years ago". My dates make Muro only 17 in 2026, so I can't strain credulity even further by setting his takeover earlier than this. If the takeover was closer to Oni's time, e.g. 2029, they wouldn't have written "less than ten years ago"; they would have said "a few years ago".
Oni
2032: Konoko fights against the Syndicate and the Cataclysm happens. Konoko is 19, Muro is 23.
It's more or less stated directly that Oni takes place in 2032: see
the manual, the Unit Viewer (giving a birth date of 2009 for Konoko and stating she's 23 now), the alignment of days of the week in Konoko's diary with the 2032 calendar year, and the
double hidden sevens in "2032".
Post-Oni
2032-2033: War Against the Syndicate. Seeing their perfect equilibrium shattered, angered that the world was falling to pieces around them, the WCG has the TCTF wage an all-out war against BGI and the Syndicate. Many strongholds that the WCG had pretended not to know about are raided and destroyed in a matter of weeks, with many casualties on both sides. However the WCG soon begins to lose its hold on the world, and the branches of the former TCTF in each country need to focus on maintaining law and order among the general populace, so the firestorm is soon over for BGI and the Syndicate. The casualties in the upper ranks have, however, caused the two criminal organizations to also splinter and re-organize into smaller groups.
