Chunsoft - 2012 - Vita/3DS
Despite my grievances with 999's game design, the quality of the writing enticed me enough to play its sequel. Thankfully, VLR corrects most of the frustrating game design from predecessor. Like 999, VLR has a non-linear story with branching decision points and multiple different endings are required in order to get the "true" ending. VLR implements a much needed "time travel flowchart" where you can skip to any decision point or puzzle you've already encountered in the game, so you don't have to completely restart the game every time you get an ending. Honestly, if 999 had this feature, I could and would have forgiven a lot of that game's faults.
There are numerous UI enhancements to VLR as well. In 999, if you needed to consult your notes when solving a puzzle, you had to flip back and forth between menu screens. I can remember sarcastically thinking "If only the DS had two screens and I could look at both of these things at the same time...". Thankfully, the developers have now taken advantage of the DS' hardware and corrected this annoyance. There's also now a built in note taking feature which allows you to doodle or jot down quick things that you think may be important later in the game. All puzzle solving sections are now fully three dimensional rooms with a rotating camera rather than a 2D screen, which allowed me to get a better sense of the rooms I was in. Nearly all of the text in the story sections has been supplemented with voice acting. When I first heard this, I was kind of nervous because I've found that bad voice acting can take me out of a game really easily. But I found that the voicework in VLR to be pretty good quality. It really enhanced the game and added more flavor to the characters. I kind of wish 999 was voice acted after playing this.
Where this game stumbles a bit is with the puzzles. They're not really bad puzzles, but they don't give the profound "Ah Ha!" moments like puzzles in games like Portal or Braid. Some of the logic behind the puzzles isn't communicated that well and you kind of have to trial and error your way into what the game wants you to do. Solutions to some other puzzles seem random or ambiguous or arbitrary. It almost reminded me a bit of To The Moon. I loved the writing in that game, but the puzzles didn't mesh with the narrative. They feel like an afterthought, as though some video game police would come by and arrest this game for not being "gamey" enough. The puzzles' only purpose seem to be to ruin the excellent pace set by the narrative. The game seems to grind to a halt at each puzzle section, and I felt like I couldn't get past the poorly integrated puzzles fast enough and get back to the story.
Where 999 made the terrible mistake of forcing the player to repeat puzzle sections, VLR makes the mistake of blasting the user with the same dialogue they've already heard a bunch of times before. If you're going to make a game with 24 endings or whatever it is, at least make each of them different from another. So many of the "false" endings feel like copies of the same thing and a lot of them repeat dialogue verbatim. I think I may have the dialogue telling how the main character initially gets captured committed to my memory for the rest of my life. It's told to you exactly the same way 8 or 9 times verbatim. Whyyyy??? Would it be that hard to write it slightly differently each time in order to keep the player engaged? Or drop slight little tidbits of knowledge or tell the player interesting details or facts not found in the other sections where the same story is told?
If I were to be able to give the director of this game some feedback/advice, it would be to redesign or eliminate the puzzles, don't repeat dialogue and cut back on some of the false endings. There's just too many. More is not always better. This game is really too long, it's significantly longer than 999 and I was ready for this game to be over long before it actually was. But man, the director, Kotaro Uchikoshi, really has a talent for writing compelling sci-fi murder mysteries. The ending to VLR is even more mind blowing and well executed than 999's ending. It's really top notch suspenseful writing. My only criticism is that the game's attempts at humor often miss the mark. But maybe that's a Japanese to English translation thing. Also why must all of the female characters in this game be hyper-sexualized? It's out of place in a murder mystery and doesn't fit the tone of the rest of the writing. It's just seems juvenile and sophomoric. It's a bit hard to buy that the main character would really be thinking about undressing one of the other girls moments after witnessing someone else die, which happens frequently throughout the game.
Summary:
Despite this game's flaws, I still enjoyed it a lot. I think even more than 999. But if this series or this type of game interests you, I would start with 999 first. It's a bit shorter and there's several very important references to 999 in VLR that you won't get if you don't play it first. I recently read that Uchikoshi said he's having trouble securing funding to make a third game in the series due to poor sales of the first two. I hope somehow, someway another game like these gets made. Uchikoshi is an excellent writer and if the kinks in his game design get worked out, Zero Escape 3 would be an instant buy for me
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