Um Metro 2033 + Half-Life com uma pitada de Bioshock em alguns momentos.
Começa lento e entediante, após 1hr e 30 minutos o jogo engrena e não desacelera até o final, excelente FPS com gameplay e mecânicas muito bem inspiradas nos clássicos mencionados acima.
O game ainda conta com uma história sobre viagem no tempo muito bem construída, sem se perder nas várias idas e vindas no tempo, o que é um alivio pois é bastante comum os desenvolvedores perderem a mão em histórias cuja temática envolve viagem temporal.

Gameplay-wise it's very simple:
-Game tells you to go to Lvl X area.
-Farm until lvl X and go to area.
-Repeat

But the story's really cool and interesting! And the characters are pretty good! I hope the next games get even better with what they've built here.

Spoilers for 999 and VLR
Introduction
Virtue's Last Reward is a deeply frustrating game not in a mechanical sense but in that it succeeds so well at first, using every clever trick in its narrative bag and keeping you on your toes for an impressive amount of hours and integrating its improved puzzles from its predecessor as well as its central "gimmick" of the meta narrative flowchart; only to ultimately collapse under the weight of a house of cards of its own making. Its frustrating because a game which fails due to overambition is still preferrable to one which fails because it had nothing interesting to say. Its frustrating because for all its faults it expands from 999 in ways that could have worked and would have made the game an all time classic in my book. Its frustrating because it almost clicked together, its a game akin to a man juggling 30 knives for 59 minutes and at the grand finish slipping on a banana peel and stabbing himself repeatedly. Its frustrating ultimately because even after it all its a game I want to love, especially knowing how it's successor turned out even if it was VLR which partly set it up for failure. Its hard to pinpoint exactly why and how VLR turned out this way or why I view it the way I do but I will try to explain as best I can.

Tough Act To Follow
Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors was an adventure game/visual novel released for NintendoDS on the 10th of December 2009 in Japan[1]. Despite poor sales in said country it was localized by Aksys games for North America the next year on the 16th of November 2010[1]. It was unusual for Visual Novels at the time to be released in the west and even more unusual for 999 (I will use this shortened form of the title to refer to the game from now on) which sold better in the west than in its native Japan[2][3]. The combination of "escape the room" style puzzles and a dark, claustrophobic mystery story aboard a ship made for an excellent adventure game and its use of the DS's unique hardware for its final narrative "twist" worked wonderfully.

9 People are trapped inside a ship for unknown reasons, they have 9 hours to escape before it sinks. This involves choosing which (1 through 9) numbered doors to go through advancing deeper into the ship solving "escape sequences" which serve the double function of being satisfying to work out and exploring the various characters who accompany you along the way as the escape sequences have dialogue weaved in to make the 2 portions of the game really connect to each other. The idea for 999 came from a desire by Chunsoft to expand the audience of visual novels, in part to a more casual audience, and Uchikoshi proposed adding puzzles to attract the broader adventure game audience[4].

In keeping with the branching narrative structure, you can only choose 1 option from a list each run, giving weight to the choices especially given the length of each run which can last up to 4 or 5 hours give or take. Originally this was very much opaque in the DS version, although more recently its 8th gen ports include VLR's flowchart system for added QOL although along other changes make me view it as the inferior version, the convenience subtracts from the weight and the DS's hardware's added "twist" which is reworked in a way which was admittedly a good attempt but inevitably fails to recreate the magic of the originals'[5].

For all the various Sci-Fi elements present in the story like Morphogenetic Field theory, ICE-9 from Cat's Cradle, Soporil, Time travel etc it mostly wraps up neatly around a single core "twist" at the end and emotionally resonant character moment which satisfyingly resolves a (depends on how many bad endings you got) 10-15 hour story without many loose threads to pull on. By Uchikoshi's own admission, the game was always supposed to be a standalone entry but the positive reviews especially in the west resulted in a sequel being greenlit[6].

This is all to say, any follow-up to 999 was going to face an uphill struggle from word go and I think its worth reiterating how impressive it is that VLR almost manages to surpass 999. There are a few changes which are also attributable directly to 999's succeses and failures. One of the reasons for 999s poor japanese sales was its dark, horror-esque tone. As per Uchikoshi's own account, the target japanese audience did not buy the game primarily for this aspect and as such the execs at Spike Chunsoft told him to make the sequel lighter in tone[3]. In 999 the punishment for breaking the rules is being blown up by a bomb from inside one's own body, whereas in VLR its a more humane lethal injection with an anaesthetic. There is also a much more frequent presence of jokes and levity, not that 999 was completetly self serious but VLR really undermines itself at times with inappropriate "perv moments" and the like. One minute you are horrified to find a bomb or a corpse of a participant and the next the main character Sigma is asking to see Phi in a swimsuit. This should have perhaps been a warning sign of things to come because the later Uchikoshi series "AI: The Somnium Files" is 10 times worse in this aspect, with the very tension and danger of scenes deflated in favour of gags. This is however outside of the scope of this review so I will not mention it again.

A note on the title Virtue's Last Reward
Before proceeding I should quickly explain the title Virtue's Last Reward. In the original japanese the title could be read as either "good people die" or "I want to be a good person" which of course relates to the game's central themes and the prisoner's dilemma. In order to preserve both meanings, Ben Bateman of Aksys games explains the decision to combine 2 english idioms with similar meanings : "Virtue is its own reward" and "Gone to his last reward"(i.e to die)[7]. Personally, I think the fact that this needs to be explained to make sense kind of undermines the attempt, but I understand the unenviable position the translation team found themselves in.

A note on the usage of Visual Novel
I should also very quickly mention the usage of the term Visual Novel in this review. In an interview Uchikoshi explained that in Japan "there is no visual novel genre per say. With me personally when I made 999 and VLR these are not referred to as Visual Novels, they're referred to as actual adventure games. Whereas overseas they're referred to as Visual Novels".

The distinctions between adventure games and visual novel genres are controversial and hard to define, so for this review they will be used interchangeably when talking about the Zero Escape series in general.

Pace Yourself
VLR's strengths sit atop 3 pillars : the first of which is its pacing. I have played through VLR all the way through 3 times now. Even in this most recent playthrough in preparation for the write-up, a playthrough in which I was periodically taking notes whilst playing, VLR kept me hooked for almost its entire 30ish hour runtime. It was in part due to my familiarity with the story that I was able to discern some of the "tricks" and common techniques which are used to build tension as well as provide the appropriate down time to allow the various mysteries to stew just the right amount of time.

The flowchart which will be explored more in depth later on does much of the work to aid in this, as it starts off linearly with the tutorial sequence with Phi, setting up the initial mysteries of why and how we are here, why Phi seems to know us, how she can jump really high etc. The tutorial mirrors 999's initial escape room with a threat of death on a timer: a flooding room in 999 and a falling elevator in VLR. After we are briefly introduced to the other characters and Zero III explains the basic rules of the nonary game.

The dialogue alternates between characterising the cast and establishing the basic premise. A "slow" moment when we come out of the room to meet the rest of the participants is followed by an "exciting" moment of K carrying an unconscious Clover out of the elevator. New mysteries are dropped on us, who is K and why is he wearing a suit of armour, he's an amnesiac, is he lying about it? But before we can stew on it for too long Zero III begins the fairly long exposition scene setting the game up. Fortunately on subsequent runs this sequence can be skipped and before long the announcement of the Chromatic Doors open and ZeroIII leaves us to choose our first major divergence on the Flowchart. Even the slightly dry exposition scene cleverly omits the "penalty" until it can be used for maximum effect.

This is the structure that VLR follows at a micro and macro level. Despite being a branching narrative game there is a lot of overlap in the events, especially in the earlier sections of a branch. We make a decision whether it be in the AB game or escape sections and the consequences play out, a betray vote may lead to a character being angry at us for example. The game never dwells on them for long however.
An example would be in the Tenmyouji route choosing the Yellow Door first. During the first escape route in the infirmary the radical 6 pandemic is mentioned for the first time. Our characters and ourselves cannot quite believe its veracity, did a Pandemic really kill 100,000 people and we never heard about it? Is the nonary game a quarantine effort? Tenmyouji tries not to say anything of course and knowing the ending it makes sense why. The tension dissipates as we meet up with the others and realize how long it will take to open the next set of doors. In between rounds we explore some of the other rooms that other characters explored and even the one we did. These are very effective at creating down time for characters to interact, information to be exchanged and the pace to be slowed down a bit to give us a breather.

Before we can get too comfortable however, the doors to the AB rooms are opened and a corpse is discovered by the main characters. After all the implications that that brings are brought up, the characters are out of time and must vote, which depending on your decision will involve another series of dramatic consequences and interactions with the rest of the cast. After another "slow" round of character scenes Quark, a child tries to commit suicide due to the symptoms of radical 6 before he is sedated. Inmediately after however we have no time and must carry him through the next set of doors to the treatment center.

VLR then follows this structure pretty much the rest of the game. The various time limits given for each sequence of the game are a fairly genius excuse to move things along when you need to without appearing cheap in doing so (999 did a similar-ish thing with the 9 hour time limit, but characters telling you to stop your important conversations feels more blunt in that game due to the lack of information on the remaining time for most of the game). The "Locks" add some complications to the question of pacing as they are quite literally a stop and start affair, but even with those, our innate desire to see them unlocked and whichever events were kept away from us usually trumps the lack of a truly consistent run to follow through.

Quick Footnote : A lot of people dislike the whole "beeping dot" method of not having to animate or do foley work for characters walking around the facility but I think its fine for the most part. It creates the view of seeing a rat traverse a Maze or even that famous turret scene in Aliens. It is overdone though, I will admit.

Puzzles
The second pillar is the puzzles. The puzzles in VLR are just straight up better than in 999. They are not without a few stinkers but they are generally more enjoyable to solve, much more variety. Notably, since VLR was designed with a more global audience in mind, the puzzles feature more numbers, as they are mostly universal[8]. Much like in 999 these "escape the room" style puzzle sequences interweave character interactions, plot and a challenge, meshing story and gameplay together somewhat.

Taking the first 3 sequences as an example, the Crew Quarters introduce the idea of Schrodinger's Cat and we get some interactions with Alice. The Infirmary as mentioned previously shows us the article about the Radical 6 pandemic. The Lounge's puzzles are all about the solar eclipse taking place on the 31st of December 2028. These are all some of the most important stepping stones to the various "twists" that the plot takes before its conclusion and establishing them early on whilst solving riddles works well in my view.

This is merely speculation on my part, but I think some reviews must have complained about the ease of puzzles in 999 and the myriad hints dropped on the player by other characters which led the team to overhaul the puzzle gameplay. First of all, there is now a difficulty selection for each individual puzzle section: on hard, hints will be scarce and on easy other characters will all but tell you what's important and how the puzzle solution works. Its a nice feature to try and satisfy both those who are more in it for the story and those who appreciate meatier puzzles.
There is also the matter of the 2 passwords you can unlock in each puzzle room, one unlocks the door, ending the sequence and the other unlocks a series of "secret files" with more details on the plot, the various real life elements, developer notes etc. In theory this is a further tweak to difficulty based on personal preferrence but in practice a lot of the blue files are either easier to get than the escape password or sometimes kind of obtuse. Particular mention of secret file passwords I thought were annoying include infirmary and the infamous archives dice puzzle, the latter of which illustrates my point nicely.

You see in this puzzle you need to set dice on a specific spot. For the gold file, you must only place them in the correct spot based on their colour; there are 6 die of 3 different colours and you find a bookmark illustrating a sort of t-shaped pattern with the 6 coloured squares. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out. After you roll the dice to each spot you unlock the secret file password. The second solution involves a second bookmark in the same pattern with numbers on it, illustrating which side of the dice must be facing forward for this solution. However, this overlaps directly with the first, meaning what can (and did happen to me the first time) happen is you'll roll all the dice into their correct spot safe for the last, start trying to get the last dice in such a position as it can roll and be facing the right direction when its put into its correct position and if you miscalculate or accidentally put it there by accident (an easy thing to do because its isometric and the controls are fiddly as fuck) the puzzle will declare GOOD JOB YOU SOLVED IT! but because you already got the gold file you get nothing and the puzzle resets leaving you to do that shit again.

This would be fucked enough, if it weren't for the fact that they bring this puzzle back for the last, hardest puzzle room in the game : the Q room. I am not the biggest fan of Q room, mainly because it makes you play minesweeper which I hate. It also has 0 riddle type puzzles. Up until this point the puzzles felt like they struck a nice balance of inventory puzzles, pure logic/execution puzzles, riddles, etc. At the very least its not very long and is close to the climax of the game so it gets a pass.

Flowcharts and the VN Landscape
The third and final pillar is the metanarrative flowchart.
In a previous review of Harmony : The fall of Reverie[9] I mentioned how branching narrative seem to me to fall into 3 main categories : the opaque, the transparent and the metanarrative. Heaven's Vault would be opaque, it branches based on non or very lightly signposted decisions. Heavy Rain with its flowchart would be the transparent, its clear what decisions leads to what. And the metanarrative would be YU-NO and of course VLR; decisions are not only visible but the process of gaming the structure of the branching is an in universe canonical event. This is my entirely personal terminology however, and it does not neatly encapsulate all branching narratives, really it works more as a spectrum than a strictly discrete categorisation.

Flowcharts in VNs were already somewhat common before VLR[10]. VLR's "innovation" expanding upon previous work in Ever17 and Yu-No is making the flowchart help tell its story. As you advance through the various routes will lead you to either "Locks" or Game Overs. These locks are points at which your character needs information from a different route to proceed. In universe the main character Sigma and Phi can obtain information from other timelines based on the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, explained in excruciating detail during the game, in the archives.

This really is VLR's core and ultimately its double edged sword. The locks are an ingenious way for Uchikoshi to maintain some control of the game's pacing, as whilst we can choose to explore the branches in any order, making sure we have information from certain other routes ensures that certain reveals cannot occur before others. The final normal route of the game before the ending for example requires the passwords and locations to 4 different bombs, which each require a separate route of the Dio ending revealing his backstory and the organisation known as free the soul, the director's office (which itself has a lock requiring reading the book found in the laboratory), bomb 2 from lock 7 which also requires the dio ending and lock 5.
Its genuinely emotionally exciting to see and unlock these, a narrative "to be continued" drives you to do other routes and find the information which helps the game move forward. They are as I said a double edged sword because along with what was mentioned in the pacing section, stringing you along with countless mysteries, questions etc creates the unfortunate need to have to bring them all together in the end. VLR is an ungodly behemoth of moving parts, every set up and sci-fi concept are another challenge to try to tie together and it simply becomes impossible to pull off in the end. It also fully abandons the "route" dynamic of 999 and most VNs generally where a single "run" will start and begin before you can do another one.

With so many routes its impossible to not repeat many dialogues and sequences, even those which are tweaked slighlty. You can skip over them but with so many jumps and timelines the individual impact of the various nodes is greatly lessened. It becomes an almost sludge of melted down coins forming an indistinct pool of liquid. This does at least work at a metanarrative level in regards to the series protagonist : Akane. Its not just you, the player who is becoming desensitized to seeing their non-wizard friends be murdered and blown up in myriad ways, but also the Shifters themselves. Sigma does admittedly have Phi to keep him semi grounded but given her characterisation in the game, Akane comes off as a Dr Manhattan type, doomed by her cosmic powers to view the lives of ordinary humans as insignificant. This was, admittedly sort of the case in 999 but that had the emotional core of child Akane, before she set up a ridiculously complicated death game and engineered the murder of 3 people.

Uchikoshi's Writing Style and the Fourth Wall
Kotaro Uchikoshi started his career working for a company called KID, first as a 3D modeller for Pepsiman and later was approached to write scenario for Memories Off, which was a Bishoujo(japanese for "pretty girl", a subsection of VN focused on dating girls) game[11]. He was told by higher ups that he couldnt put sci-fi elements in it, that "if you dont have a cute girl showing up in the game it would not sell". Never 7 was then a dating sim with slight sci-fi elements which received praise : "so then, gradually, I could increase the Sci-Fi content and it just grew from that"[11].
Later on he joined Chunsoft, which was more focused on mystery and adventure games than dating sims. He was approached to join a team (the 999 team specifically) to write a story to be sold to a wider audience than the one Chunsoft usually sold to[4].

Throughout his career, Uchikoshi's writing style has followed certain constants. The most important two to note here would be his heavy use of sci-fi and real life elements (which will be explored more in depth later on in this review) and his "twist" first, back to front writing style. By his own admission :

"In general, I just start from the end and I work my way forward. For example, in 999, one of the biggest reveals was that they were not on a boat. So I would start from there and work my way back. For VLR, the end twist was that we were on the moon, so I would work from that"
I don't want to turn this already long write-up into a piece on Uchikoshi's entire career, in part because I have not yet played the infinity series; but his writing style stays so constant across the Zero Escape and AI games that I think its helpful to explore its impact.

Writing the twist first and working your way backwards certainly has its advantages as its probably almost mandatory if you're planning to have an ambitious structure like VLR and need to make sure all the various elements fit together without (major) plot holes or inconsistencies. You can then think about how to build up to the climax by spreading the various narrative elements necessary to accomplish this throughout the story. For example : in 999 its revealed at the end that Santa and June's bracelets were not in fact 3 and 6 respectively but 0 and 9, which means you then have to make sure than Akane and Santa always go through the same numbered doors so that the digital roots work out.

This method does, however, exacerbate the problem of introducing more mysteries and routes requiring more of an ultimate explanation. Part of it is that VLR has many more "twists" than 999 but part of it is that "they were actually not on a boat at all" is easier to pull off (we're never shown any windows and water does not fill the ship gradually) than "they were on the moon the whole time" for what I hope are obvious reasons, but they will be discussed in the endings section regardless. This method is also why I don't know if my arguments will be compelling regarding the ultimate failure of VLR's conclusion. On an "'objective'" level the story certainly explains itself, its just that on a subjective emotional reaction it ultimately falls flat, its like debating a very argumentative person on something, Uchikoshi can explain it all away but he can't make me think the explanation is ultimately satisfying.

Characters
Brief mention to the change from 2D sprites to 3D models : its fine, I think aesthetically the characters are fine and expressive enough. Kinu Nishimura's visual character designs are generally quite well realized and expressive.

I will echo SunlitSonata's sentiment that "The individual characters are stronger [in VLR] but 999's cast is better as an ensemble"[12]. I think Virtue's last reward has more compelling character moments but ultimately its cast is the victim of the scenario more than anything else. Tenmyouji's relationship to Quark and his backstory reveal is compelling but for most routes most of the time Quark is a non entity; more of a tool to create tension than a character as he disappears and collapses with comical frequency. It was disturbing and tense when he first tried to kill himself due to the effects of Radical 6 but by the 4th time its happened? White noise.

Clover and Alice's relationship is a highlight and Clover herself bears special mention because she's in both games and is infinitely more sympathetic and well written here. Even when she lashes out and/or does something bad its understandeable, as opposed to in 999 where she was seemingly only a bad day away(ok thats definitely an undertatement) from becoming a deranged axe murderer. Wisely, VLR decides to delegate all murder to a single character, although unlike Ace in 999, Dio is way more obviously the villain almost from word go, to the point that I was only surprised he wasn't a Red Herring. Unfortunately the game also demands Alice die horribly several times which again, becomes less impactful every time even if her backstory and personality are compelling.

A lot of character details are nicely foreshadowed in the puzzle sections themselves : e.g Tenmyouji knows about salvage, Dio's knowledge of DNA in the lab cause he's a clone, etc. A strength of the Flowchart is that the player always starts with Phi and then can only partner with either Tenmyouji, Alice or Luna for the first round which are the three core characters in terms of emotional investment and importance. They are also by definition the only 3 characters with runs in which you only partner up with them : obviously you cant choose to only partner with Dio for e.g if you can only partner with him starting from the second round.

There is a constant in both 999 and VLR of making character appearances be deceiving. Lotus' extravagant and fairly horny design masks her reveal to be a genius programmer who, well, just likes dressing like that which is valid in my eyes. K is another example, such a simple decision to have a character behind a mask who turns out to be a soft spoken but cunning nerd. Alice is an attempt at something similar but in this aspect ultimately falls flat because a) her retcon from 999 implies she was somehow dressed as a mummy when trying to infiltrate a secret compound in the middle of the nevada desert and b) her "twist" is basically a rehash of lotus, but as a CIA agent instead of a coder. Similarly Clover has the same concept here but her design makes Alice look conservatively dressed.

All of VLR's characters, even the evil ones come across as flawed and sympathetic and ultimately human; except ironically for Akane, the supposed heart of the franchise. Even when they ally or betray unexpectedly there is an effort to make their actions somewhat justifiable, even if its in part due to the slow doling out of information making their decisions not fully thought out with all of the truth in hand.

SciFi elements and Pseudoscience
Both 999 and VLR make heavy use of Sci-Fi concepts and pseudoscience. VLR also uses Game Theory and specifically The Prisoner's Dilemma as its central conceit. I was originally going to go in depth to how appropriately these are used but I've decided against it because ultimately the accuracy of the depiction and validity of these concepts is somewhat besides the point to whether or not they make for a good story and its way outside my expertise and the scope of this already long review to deal with such contentious topics of research.

I think the most important question about these elements is do they make a good story? For the most part I would say yes. The prisoner's dilemma is an interesting and appropriately ambiguous thought experiment, and as the basis for both a branching narrative based on binary decisions and the interactions with characters who you do not know much about and whose motivations can be vexingly hard to grasp at times it serves its purpose well.

The entire plot revolves around the many worlds interpretation of Quantum mechanics, put simply, the properties of matter at its smallest level exist as a space of possibility which collapse into a single "solution" when observed. As with the explanation of Schrödinger's cat wherein a cat is both alive and dead until one opens the box[14]. This implies that there are many parallel worlds diverging from the movement of particles and any number of events like personal decisions of living beings.

In VLR this concept is used to explain the various timelines in the flowchart all existing simultaneously as well as why at points a character will vote ALLY or BETRAY based on your decision even though in theory they would have no way to know what you voted for.

The Prisoner's dilemma is a game theory thought experiment. The entire field of game theory is an attempt to study human decision making, its rationality and/or lack thereof. A usual wording of this prisoner's dilemma is that two prisoners are told by a cop that they can confess to their crimes and they'll go free, their partner will get 3 years however. If they both confess they both get 2 years and if they both stay silent they'll only get 1 year. The "dilemma" occurs because the collectively best decision is for both to stay silent (or cooperate/ally) yet individual rationality suggests confessing is the optimal play(or defect/betray). If the prisoner's accept this logic, however, they will inevitably end up losing individually as well by getting 2 years[13].

VLR's AB game is a modified version of this problem but with higher stakes, losing points via being betrayed can eventually result in your death and if someone reaches 9 points they can leave the facility through the number 9 door which will never open again. It adds a lot to the tragic nature of the character interactions in the AB game, characters who want to trust others but can't in part due to not knowing them enough, events during the game such as bombs being planted, murders and the overwhelming urge to escape the nonary game's nightmare as soon as possible. This is helped along with the slow dole out of information by ZeroIII like the penalty for having 0 points being death, the person you partner up with to go through the doors (and therefore the person with which you will spend some time getting to know a bit beforehand) being the same person you will be voting against during the AB game, etc.

It does feel cheap at times why certain characters will make each decision to vote in the way they do, basically cause we know they're going to choose both Ally and Betray seemingly arbitrarily. Thankfully even in those instances they usually have a somewhat justifiable reason for it, or at least one they can personally defend. I like how Dio tries to convince us that voting betray against someone who only had 1 point was justified, and how you almost buy the explanation.

Even if the attempt to make the decision to vote Ally or Betray have a ticking clock tension is undermined by having functionally unlimited time to make the call (and the game's explanation for why this is, is dumb) ; the decision itself remains surprisingly nerve wracking despite the repetition and aforementioned sludge problem.

Localisation
I would be remiss not to mention the localisation to 999 and VLR, probably a key factor in the games' popularity in the west. According to Ben Bateman and Nobara Noba Nakayama, the key translators for the project, their translation process involved an extensive e-mail back and forth, clarifying and reclarifying exact meanings and intentions behind certain segments and even the background research informing said segment[15].

There are a couple of details lost in translation like Zero III being a rabbit foreshadowing the moon twist due to japanese folklore asociating the two[16] and arguably the whole-ass meaning of the title unless youre intimately familiar with the combination of english language idioms or you've read the Ben Bateman interview where he tells us about it.

Famously, the entire localisation of 999 had to be put on hold when Nakayama discovered a key twist involved a japanese pun[17]. Basically the number 9 door is actually a Q. In japanese, 9 is pronounced Kyuu, hence the pun. It gets worked out in the end though. Infuriatingly, whilst doing research on this piece I came across a section of an interview Ben Bateman gave which I cannot for the life of me find again. It said that the use of third person for the narration/novel screen was a substitute for the twist in the japanese version hinging on some sort of play/subversion of japanese male and female pronouns. You will just have to trust me on that, I'm afraid.

Endings
Finally and appropriately we should discuss the main failing and ultimate reason why VLR fails to live up to 999 : the ending. Now I am generally not one to say that a bad ending "ruins" a story, but it can definitely make a story built on shaky foundations crumble in on itself, which is definitely the case with Virtue's Last Reward.

You see in 999 everything revolved around and wrapped around its ultimate "twist" which is that Akane built the Nonary Game both to punish the key players in Cradle Pharmaceuticals who organised the original game and save herself in the past/future. Everything else fit fairly neatly around this idea, the facility being a building in the desert and not a ship, the various participants, Ace's murders, and the metanarrative use of information from other routes. Even the slightly bullshit things like the convenience of Seven's amnesia ocurring and then reversing when needed, Zero's seeming knowledge of what Ace and others would do at every point etc being tidied up by the whole "Akane saw what would happen in the future and simply prepared accordingly". The problem, is that this is lightning in a bottle. In 999 this convenience of having seen the future can really only be used once and the denser you make the plot and its various twists the more this conceit has to carry upon its back an ungodly amount of bullshit. In VLR it mostly comes across as bullshit.

How did Akane know Tenmyouji would go to the moon when called? She saw it through the Morphogenetic Field. How did Zero, K and Luna know the passowords to Dio's Bombs? Morphogenetic Field. How did Akane know that everyone wouldn't just ally or that Sigma would make it to the director's office alone or that Alice would be able to decode a 25 digit prime factorisation or any of the countless fucking things that had to go right for her convoluted ass plan to move forward? Morphogenetic Field. It becomes akin to the Force in Star Wars or Hashirama Cells in Naruto, all purpose plot insulation.

Im tempted to dive into some general nitpicking here like why Dio carries a knife with the name of his super duper secret illuminati commando force on it, or how Sigma never touched his eye at any point or asked any of the people calling him old to clarify what they meant by that. But in all honesty Im not too bothered by those, truthfully.
The ending to VLR takes 2 whole hours of straight exposition after the final Q room puzzle, and I know because I timed it. Proportional to its total runtime its not inappropriate but its still way too much to not just become overwhelming. "You're helping a girl in the past from the future" is a lot easier to accept than "you were on the moon the whole time but didnt notice because you were infected with an infectious brain virus that lowers your brain's processing speed and also your consciousness is in the body of your 60 year old self and K was a clone of you which you created to send back in time to 2029 so you could then spend 45 years preparing this whole AB game to send yourself even further back in time to avert nuclear war and a global pandemic". The funny thing is, it almost works on me. Its so...audacious? Its like if Uchikoshi came up to me, said nothing, carefully took out my wallet from my trouser pocket and slowly walked away. I kind of respect it even if it falls on its face.

Despite Akane's insistence that the ends justifies the means, its almost comical how tone deaf it is to meet young Akane at the end with the game expecting us to feel some sort of positive emotion, knowing full well she's a machiavellian monster responsible for countless deaths. Tenmyouji deserves better. At least in 999 her young self was innocent and even her older self only put bombs in people who were evil and who she did not directly kill.
Ultimately VLR contains the gravest sin of any piece of fiction in my eye, in that its not even set in the most interesting period of its story. This is admittedly another problem derived from turning a standalone entry into a series - the more death games you make the more reasons you need to come up with for them to be held, especially if the reason isnt just the usual "for entertainment of the rich/punishment of the civillian population by a dystopian government". At the end of VLR what have you accomplished? You have made sure that a future event MIGHT occur and the world MIGHT be saved; which is just such a non-ending.

At some point I had to mention the elephant in the room of ZTD but in all honesty ZTD being the way it is (though personally I love it, its one of the funniest games Ive ever played, the decisions are so baffling they wrap around to being amusing) is all the more damning to VLR being so overstuffed its loose ends spilled over into the entry which was supposed to properly conclude it all with yet another death game.

I suspect that VLR's original ending might have been a better one, though Uchikoshi's description of it isnt exactly extensive, it seems that due to the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake it was changed to be a bit less dramatic: "what happens is that all human kind is destroyed, nobody survives. At this point someone goes back to the past and the original ending was to go back to the past, change a little bit so the future is saved, and then it finishes. However this felt crisp and sudden. So what we did is we added a lot of content to say that you, by going back and working in the past to change the future, thanks to your efforts there is some hope. To give it a more positive nuance"[11].
After a bit more digging I found a different interview explaining the 4th Wall breaking "?" section at the very end of the game which I feel I should post here in full because its fairly enlightening :

"It’s actually metafiction written through the viewpoint of higher realities/dimensions, and has no connection to the chronology of the official storyline. The official story of VLR ended with young Sigma witnessing the explosion of the antimatter reactors from the Crash Keys base on April 13, 2029.

But the tragic 2011 Tohoku earthquake, which claimed 20,000 lives, occurred during voice recording, and we began to wonder “was it appropriate to end the story of VLR like this? Should we add a scenario which brought more hope?” This brought about the addition of “Another Time End.” The Japanese version didn’t include voices in this scene because the script was written after the completion of voice recording. However, during the process of adding this scene, I made two regrettable errors which caused even more confusion. The first was adding voices to the English version “Another Time End.” The second was putting the “Another Time End” right below “Phi End” on the flowchart. I did not incorporate what happened in that ending when working on ZTD. The reason behind that was because there was no assurance that everybody saw this ending. Some players only finished the escape rooms on easy mode. I wanted to be sure that they too would enjoy the story of ZTD.

People will probably wonder if what happened in “Another Time End” was all fake and whether I was deceiving the players. This is far from the truth. You said “My guess was it was the player” and that is correct. I wrote the script for this part with “?” being the player, and put some fragment of the player’s involvement in ZTD. This is the reason I made it appear that the player is capable of using an ability similar to Delta’s mind hack. But please don’t consider this to be the ultimate answer. The reason I don’t want everyone to see this as the only answer is because I’ve come across a number of interesting theories in forums which I do not want to deny. Maybe the character who was making the decisions in the Decision Game was the one who was participating in the game, or perhaps it’s Delta, or even the player. There are many ways of interpreting it, and I hope each fan will decide which fits best for them personally.
I’d also like to discuss Kyle. As mentioned before, “Another Time End” is metafiction, meaning the comment made by old Akane where she is speaking to the player himself is also metafiction. During this scene she said, “He (Kyle) was thrown out when you entered. Right now – in a manner of speaking – he has arrived at December 25th, 2028. His consciousness has gone into a body from that time.” The year we are currently in is 2016 and not 2028. That’s my answer towards Kyle"[18].

Now, if you go through the "?" section it starts to make more sense the impact from the earthquake in regards to Tenmyouji's extensive speech about the survivors of a tragedy having lives worth living and undoing that would be unfair to their efforts in making the most out of a bad situation. This is already like the 3rd time I have seen a behind the scenes japanese game development story mention the Tohoku Earthquake and its impact as a key turning point/inspiration in a project, I can intuit that this is a deeply scarring and generation defining event in the Japanese collective consciousness so I will not pretend to know if the original ending would have been poorly received. I will however say that not robbing Tenmyouji of his past and accepting that their lives were worth living and undoing it would be wrong does pretty seriously undermine investment in saving the world at all. Why do we even care about the lives of millions if we have let die countless people in other timelines. This is sort of an issue with multiverses and many worlds interpretation in fiction.
Similarly, if VLR had ended instead with Sigma jumping directly to 2028 and stopping the nukes/pandemic through something quick or even off screen I think it would have been a much better ending, although our timeline would have been robbed of the masterpiece of Zero Time Dilemma.

To be Continued...
The title of this section is in jest, the review ends here. Hopefully this overlong essay has gone some way in explaining why I find VLR equally compelling and frustrating, and perhaps you have learned a thing or two about the behind the scenes of the game.
If I were less lazy I would have gone more in depth on the visual design especially the environment and why I find Rhizome 9 less compelling than building Q to explore and Im kicking myself that I didnt mention the excellent soundtrack, especially morphogenetic sorrow and bluebird lamentation but this has gone for long enough I feel like. Maybe one day I'll mention these in a review of Zero Time Dilemma or Ever 17 when I finally play it.
I will reiterate that I still like VLR and its a game I desperately want to love for what it does well and what it tries to do with a story only really possible in videogame form or perhaps the world's thickest, 1000 page choose your own adventure which somehow locks you in an escape room periodically.

Bibliography
1. https://www.igdb.com/games/zero-escape-nine-hours-nine-persons-nine-doors
2. https://twitter.com/Uchikoshi_Eng/status/433998278393217024
3. https://zeroescape.fandom.com/wiki/Answers#71_2
4. https://www.vg247.com/inside-the-genesis-of-virtues-last-reward-and-the-challenges-of-visual-novels
5. https://store.steampowered.com/app/477740/Zero_Escape_The_Nonary_Games/
6. https://www.siliconera.com/zero-escape-3-takes-place-on-mars-and-will-make-you-question-philosophies/
7. https://www.siliconera.com/the-thinking-behind-the-title-zero-escape-virtues-last-reward/
8. https://www.siliconera.com/999-and-virtues-last-reward-creator-chats-about-suspenseful-visual-novels/
9. https://www.backloggd.com/u/LordDarias/review/820433/
10. https://vndb.org/g991
11. The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers ISBN 9781500229306
12. https://www.backloggd.com/u/SunlitSonata/review/236571/
13. https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/ap-microeconomics/imperfect-competition/oligopoly-and-game-theory/v/prisoners-dilemma-and-nash-equilibrium
14. https://www.universetoday.com/113900/parallel-universes-and-the-many-worlds-theory/
15. https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/04/22/down-the-rabbit-hole-the-narrative-genius-of-virtues-last-reward
16. https://www.gamesradar.com/zero-escape-past-present-and-future/
17. https://www.gonintendo.com/stories/212144-aksys-discusses-the-challenges-of-localizing-visual-novels
18. https://www.siliconera.com/spoiler-filled-interview-zero-time-dilemmas-director/
Bonus : https://www.gamereactor.eu/too-kyo-too-crazy-an-interview-with-kotaro-uchikoshi/ Don't cry Uchikoshi-san, Cage is a fraud, you're better.

I was apprehensive about Resident Evil 4 getting a remake. After all, the original is still a great game that's easy to pick up and play today, and there are other Resident Evils - notably RE5 and Code Veronica - which would benefit more from a second pass. I understood the profit motive of doing this, but whether or not it would justify itself as a game I was a whole lot less certain of.

Well, damn, this must've been directed by Raylan Givens, because it's justified.

This isn't the Resident Evil 3 remake, which was patently reductive in its approach, gutting large chunks of gameplay and limiting Nemesis to scripted events. Rather, Resident Evil 4 builds on the source material in a way that feels very natural, and understandably so considering the "REmake series" shares more of its DNA with 2005's Resident Evil 4 than it does with the "classic" trilogy. Toe to tip, this feels like the better game to me, owed to the fact that Capcom has been refining the core design concepts and mechanics of the original for 18 years.

Much like the recent Resident Evil 2, it trades slow enemies, limited controls, and tight spaces for more fluid and kinetic gameplay. Make no mistake, I am not faulting these games for playing the way they do, I find their control schemes to be not only a product of their time but critical for crafting tension, and the larger design of those games was so carefully curated around how they control it's hard for me to imagine playing them any other way (I still use tank controls in the HD remaster of Resident Evil, for chrissakes.)

There's a stronger emphasis on movement, as Ganados are no longer prone to passively pointing and screaming at you. No, these Ganados have drank all their Powerade™ and they are coming for your ass, which means you'll need to be even more aware of your surroundings and constantly be on the move. There's a much greater expectation on interacting with your environment, especially during combat, and some of the ways you can turn the arena against your enemies is extremely satisfying. Especially if doing so results in an explosion, which are so abrupt and visceral in the amount of damage they do. The first time I shot a stick of dynamite out of a Ganado's hand and saw it immediately break them in half and fling their upper-body several feet away I shouted "oh FUCK" to absolutely no one.

Being able to actually hotswap weapons makes such a huge difference as well and is crucial to maintaining the pace and flow of combat. It got me thinking more strategically about which weapons I wanted to employ on the fly and even helped me weasel my way out of a few dicey situations. The combat knife has similarly been overhauled. Now more a defensive weapon, you can use the knife to push away an attacking Ganados at the expense of its durability, and you can even use it to parry enemy attacks when you're back into a corner or low on ammunition. Not that you'll be low on ammo often, it's every bit as abundant as it was in 2005 and you're now able to craft more ammo using gunpowder and "resources," although they're more likely to just eat up inventory space. Still, I think the remake's greatest strength is in the amount of options it gives you, and how its combat arenas are big playgrounds that can be freely approached.

Bosses and certain set pieces are also vastly improved. Salazar no longer stands still, swiping at you occasionally with broad, easily avoidable attacks. The mine cart segment is much more of a thrill ride (I do like thrill rides), requiring you to lean into turns and take out enemy mine carts rather than wait for Ganados to jump in for a claustrophobic firefight. Krauser's initial boss battle relies upon the expanded knife mechanics, which means you no longer get to watch the same cutscene like, five times until you have all the QTE's memorized. Puzzles are also much better. In the original game they were almost obligatory, downright insipid in places, but the remake makes them far more engaging and I actually think some of these might be among the best in the REmake series. However, I will mourn the loss of the gigantic animatronic Salazar, and although It was never Resident Evil 4's strongest encounter, I was hoping to see them actually do something with It rather than cut It.

One of the biggest points of contention seems to be Resident Evil 4's story and the way it handles its characters, with people complaining about a wide array of things from how it lacks a prerequisite amount of camp to characters not being attractive enough (???) And, again, I disagree with a lot of it. Leon is still a total himbo with a penchant for belting out corny one-liners, the only difference here is that a lot of them are spoken in the middle of combat. Which, personally, I find even funnier because it means he's saying stuff like "Oh, oops, I slipped" while administering a roundhouse to a Ganado's cranium with no one around. That's just for him. I don't know how anyone can hear the line "I'll give you a hole-y body" before skewering a guy and think this game lacks camp.

Sure, it's more grounded and tonally in-step with the other remakes, but it's still ridiculous. The original Resident Evil 4 was a pastiche of post-9/11 action movies, and I firmly believe that kind of satire wouldn't play as well today. It just doesn't have the same punch so far removed from the zenith of that style of filmmaking. However, I was surprised to find out how much of that energy was still present. Mike, your helicopter pilot, is somehow even more 2005-action-movie-dumbass than before, and a lot of notes and files are word-for-word, including the "Subject Analysis: Regenerador" document, which is one of my favorites across the entire franchise. Even Salazar's extremely clunky dialog about Leon being a player in his "script" is intact, which is amazing because it's so bad I would've thought if you had a second pass on any singular piece of dialog, that'd be it. Vocal performances are good overall, the guy they got to do the Merchant turns in one hell of an approximation of the original, and I love how Luis is a total slimeball in this. On the other hand, Ada sounds positively bored to be here, and Wesker is so lacking in smugness as to sound distressingly uninspired. If a Resident Evil 5 remake is in the cards, I am begging Capcom to find some way to get Peter Jessop back.

Now that we've gotten Resident Evil 4 out of the way, I am begging Capcom to remake Dino Crisis. Please, please do it, pleaes i need to see Regina's thighs just le tme at them i paid full price for this, i gave it a 4.5, i did everything you asked of me please