A collection of two incredible visual novels that make great use of the medium.
There's not much to say about Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors except that it's really damn good. Great mysteries, great characters that all get a good amount of time to shine, incredible atmosphere, there's really not much fault I can find with the story at all. This version of the game is a slightly different matter, though; with how the game made use of the Nintendo DS, some compromises would be unavoidable in translating it to one screen, but the decision to split the game into "novel" and "adventure" modes is baffling. I get what they were going for, but in practice there is basically no reason to use Adventure due to just how much narration you're missing- the narration is crucial in developing the game's atmosphere among other things, and a lot of that is just lost in Adventure (plus the existence of Adventure also has a negative effect on the prose in Novel due to the additional dialogue needed to make it work). It's a very unwieldy way of handling things, and in fact the lost iOS-only "The Novel" version of the game already had a much better solution to the problem. This remaster isn't all bad, though- the flowchart is a really nice QoL feature that really cuts down on repetition, and the newly added voice acting is some of the best I've ever heard and really enhances some of the game's scenes. It's a shame the modes were handled so awkwardly and that there wasn't a 3DS version that featured the best of both worlds, but as it is this is still a worthy way of playing 999 as long as you stay on Novel.
Virtue's Last Reward is a certainly more ambitious game, but it's also one that's considerably less of a focused experience. The game's nonlinear approach to storytelling is very creative and leads to some incredible moments, but it also makes the first half of an average playthrough a pretty slow burn with a lot of repetition while the second just hits the player with twist after twist. This works for some people, it won't for others, I guess I'm somewhere in the middle- I don't mind slowly unraveling a mystery, going through slight variations of the same scenes again and again not so much. Still, I was engaged throughout and it's very satisfying once everything comes together, even if a few things are kind of a stretch. The atmosphere isn't really as good as 999's either, the setting feels a lot less interesting and the sense of danger and urgency that game had is a lot less present here (supposedly due to executive interference), and the cast isn't quite as good or well-balanced in terms of screentime as 999's (Sigma in particular is a far inferior main character to Junpei), but it's still another outstanding experience overall that's definitely worth playing especially if you enjoyed the previous game.
There's not much to say about Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors except that it's really damn good. Great mysteries, great characters that all get a good amount of time to shine, incredible atmosphere, there's really not much fault I can find with the story at all. This version of the game is a slightly different matter, though; with how the game made use of the Nintendo DS, some compromises would be unavoidable in translating it to one screen, but the decision to split the game into "novel" and "adventure" modes is baffling. I get what they were going for, but in practice there is basically no reason to use Adventure due to just how much narration you're missing- the narration is crucial in developing the game's atmosphere among other things, and a lot of that is just lost in Adventure (plus the existence of Adventure also has a negative effect on the prose in Novel due to the additional dialogue needed to make it work). It's a very unwieldy way of handling things, and in fact the lost iOS-only "The Novel" version of the game already had a much better solution to the problem. This remaster isn't all bad, though- the flowchart is a really nice QoL feature that really cuts down on repetition, and the newly added voice acting is some of the best I've ever heard and really enhances some of the game's scenes. It's a shame the modes were handled so awkwardly and that there wasn't a 3DS version that featured the best of both worlds, but as it is this is still a worthy way of playing 999 as long as you stay on Novel.
Virtue's Last Reward is a certainly more ambitious game, but it's also one that's considerably less of a focused experience. The game's nonlinear approach to storytelling is very creative and leads to some incredible moments, but it also makes the first half of an average playthrough a pretty slow burn with a lot of repetition while the second just hits the player with twist after twist. This works for some people, it won't for others, I guess I'm somewhere in the middle- I don't mind slowly unraveling a mystery, going through slight variations of the same scenes again and again not so much. Still, I was engaged throughout and it's very satisfying once everything comes together, even if a few things are kind of a stretch. The atmosphere isn't really as good as 999's either, the setting feels a lot less interesting and the sense of danger and urgency that game had is a lot less present here (supposedly due to executive interference), and the cast isn't quite as good or well-balanced in terms of screentime as 999's (Sigma in particular is a far inferior main character to Junpei), but it's still another outstanding experience overall that's definitely worth playing especially if you enjoyed the previous game.