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I suspect the masterminds motivations for Mezz are a bit more complicated than that.  I think 'fan' is being used euphemistically, I wouldn't take the statement at face value.

I don't want to dive too much into speculation land, but I have some ideas.  

1. I agree that the next game will likely be in one of the towers since the quest in this game was to gain access to a tower.  For the enemy type?   Could be Dobermans since we see them slumming in the gutter in GT, but I could easily see bitshift going in a different direction.  Each game has its own color too, neon pink for CS and neon green for GT.  I don't know what to expect in the next game, but maybe neon blue for the tower.

2. We know there is a mastermind behind the events in the first two games, having provided the ear clips to Diezel and probably the Dragon's Breath to Mahir (this is not explicitly stated, but the Dragon's Breath is a new development for the hyenas so it's likely they got it from the same source since Mahir is a cat's paw for the mastermind).

3. I'd wager that Scratch is also a (likely unwitting) cat's paw for the mastermind since it's through him that Mezz gets sent to both the island and the gutter which were both set-ups.

4. We don't know what the mastermind's goals are, but we know they have some mind control power at their disposal, at least enough to control Mahir.   The mastermind is a 'fan' of Mezz, but we don't know what that means and whether messing with our protagonist is a primary or secondary objective. 

I have some other much more speculative ideas about what's actually going on, but they have limited support from the actual text, so I am reluctant to share them just yet, we are only on game 2 of a planned 5 so it's still really early in the story.

In the Beg command dialogue one of the random responses has a typo:
"Mezz: Shove it it! "

I presume this is intended to be:

"Mezz: Shove it in!"

Note that  the cologne has a duration, you might need to re-apply it periodically.

The force daze after 4 fights of not being dazed happens at the start of turn 2 instead of during the enemy action, which interrupts the player action effectively adding an extra turn of stun.  It's extra punishing but when it happens you just went 4 fights without being dazed so it's not too bad.   This appears to be the only place where enemies act first.  In other circumstances you choose your action, then you act, then the enemies act.

I kind of figured that the alley is supposed to be the hard mode for when you have abundant combat resources to spend while the other route might have it's own deterrents.  

Overall mechanically I think things are fairly well balanced until Entertainment District 3, if you've used up your Dazzle Blasts at that point you pretty much have to save scum for some good luck.  If you do have DBs you can still get hosed by RNG if you miss or just overly spread the damage.  If you enter the alley already Slipping you will probably auto-lose to the Trainer without good RNG from either Hard Knocks or Hard Times.   It's kind of a bummer since you can basically end up in a near-fail state on your game with no chance to recover short of just getting really lucky.

It's surprising how many buttons this game pushes for me.  Top notch writing.  I look forward to seeing what you have planned for updates.