what a fucking dreadful game. ugly as sin, awful voice performances, worse technical performance than the fucking psp game with constant framedrops and glitches, music is good but is used so poorly it might as well not be there. story is completely incomprehensible dogshit that is just trying to rip off silent hill 2, half the creature designs are just stolen from the first 3 games and the other half are so bland and uninspired you'd think they were leftovers from an xbox live indies title.

it completely misunderstands the spirit and purpose of this series and isn't even remotely playable. evil terrible game. god will not have mercy on double helix.

For many reasons, playing this game consistently gave me a headache. One of those headaches got so bad I vomited. Ultra Despair Girls gets the honor of being the first game to make me physically sick.

In my rating system, I reserve .5 stars for predatory, unplayable, or evil games, and in Ultra Despair Girls' case, I'm confident arguing it is a form of evil. (There's a lot I want to blast it for first, but I'll get there!) Even if you're a fan of the typical Danganronpa visual novels, stay the hell away from this. Not only do you have to play two games to understand what's happening in Ultra Despair Girls, playing Ultra Despair Girls will, at most, let you better understand like 2 episodes of the anime Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School - Despair Arc for 1 character that ends up having zero plot relevance before they literally fuck off to outer space. That is not a joke. I cannot overstate how much this game is not worth it.

Wow, just thinking about this game again to write this review makes me nauseous! So let's get into it.

This collection of headache inducing factors masquerading as entertainment can be split into the game's presentation and the game's story content. Ultra Despair Girls is the series' first with 3D gameplay, after previous entries were primarily visual novels. Transitioning genres to 3rd person shooter caused a lot of friction. Development shortcuts are obvious and plentiful, and the team’s intuition for the needs of the new genre is painfully off. But surprise, Ultra Despair Girls is still almost as much a visual novel as the mainline Danganronpa games, and all the gameplay sections are literally filler until more cutscenes can happen.

If you skip all the cutscenes and look at the game's bones, it is a cheap, functional 3rd-person shooter. You'll be asked to trek through the same environments forwards and backwards with slightly different paths blocked or opened, each one a decorated hallway. There are only a handful of enemy types with a handful of ammo types meant to counter them, with puzzles littered throughout the level requiring some light thinking if you want a higher score. otherwise you can progress by blasting everything anyway

Coming from a series known for loud, garish colors, Ultra Despair Girls goes for broke. Where before coloration functioned to keep interest in a visual novel that required hours of reading, the same assault of neon, acidic tones is hard to look at in a 3D environment. Environments have no atmospheric effects and little to no dynamic lighting - the game feels like an HD release of an early PS2 game with bad art direction. The plainly implemented camera wildly shifts whenever you ready your weapon, made even worse if you turn on the unpredictable auto-aiming feature. Maybe you won’t get dizzy as the camera whips around harshly colored environments at disorienting speeds, maybe you won’t get turned around in same-y looking environments when surrounded by copy-pasted enemies. But I did, and I had a real bad time!

Did I mention the game is boring to play? Did I mention the game is slow? That you'll be holding down the run button almost the entire time, often wondering if it even made a difference? That combat is so easy you'll forget it's possible to die until you walk into a pit and get an instant Game Over? That some of the puzzles are glitched and won’t consistently give you credit for solving them? That the game even failed to load cutscenes a couple times and forced me to restart my whole system?

And let me tell you, the story parts of the game are FAR worse.

Make no mistake, the writing in Danganronpa has always been bad. The premise is crass, the characters are distillations of Hot Anime Nonsense, and surprising or shocking the player is valued over logical consistency. But the ways in which the Danganronpa games are bad is at least balanced around being engaging, schlocky fun. Ultra Despair Girls completely fails its handling of its characters and subject matter in ways both bone headed and insulting - and the Hot Anime Nonsense is cranked up to toxic levels.

Here's the game’s premise: a group of genius grade schoolers have taken control of an army of murder robots to brainwash every child on an island. They then use these robots and brainwashed children to mass murder all the adults on the island.

Let me establish here: this premise is very dumb. Leaning into the dumbness, I could see some room for jokes. But Ultra Despair Girls plays this concept completely straight. The aggressors are ruthlessly efficient at their goal, and the adults are massacred. But before I tear into the story, I’d like to touch on a side-effect of this setting that makes the game harder to play.

In the Danganronpa franchise, blood is stylized to be flaming hot pink. This is because the mainline Danganronpa games are about teenagers murdering each other, so a level of abstraction stops the tone from getting too heavy. Ultra Despair Girls keeps this abstraction while building upon it, making every NPC's model washed out in bright electric blue so the developers can copy-paste the same two models infinitely without you noticing right away.

Why this matters for gameplay: every level is littered with corpses. You'll find mounds of corpses in the middle of the street. Corpses nailed unevenly to walls. Lone corpses slumped in chairs. With hot pink blood splashes on every surface, and unshaded blue blobs peppering every locale, the already same-y and forgettable level geometry becomes even more incomprehensible. Landmarks become invisible once overshadowed by the same scenarios of copied corpses as you’ve been seeing the whole game. For how simple the levels are constructed, it is astounding to reflect back on how often I had to open the map.

Within this prevalence of corpses does the tainted soul of Ultra Despair Girls start to emerge. Because it is a choice to show all these corpses. Not every game with disaster stricken cities shows the human devastation. But the murder robots and the children didn't just kill all the adults - the brainwashed children are also playing with the corpses.

Children will be gathered around corpses, poking them with sticks, encircling them with dances and games, singing in makeshift choirs. And not just the same copy and pasted scenarios over and over, (even though you will see the same kid Fornite taunting atop a car near a dozen times (random family members still beneath the tires, random kids gathered to watch)). There are hand-placed corpses everywhere. Someone whose leg got hurt, and limped behind some furniture before they bled out. Someone who was running and was slashed in the back while they tried to escape. Throats slashed while seated at an outdoor patio, children pilfering their drinks

There is a commitment to this concept that baffles me. Gameplay wise, it is wholly unnecessary. You only shoot at the robots, not the children. Even boss fights against the genius elementary students have you shoot at their remote controlled mechs. But this commitment is not limited to the level’s set dressing - the pointless collectables strewn throughout the levels include dozens of awful notes from children and adults how they want to kill each other. All collectables look the same until obtained, so you have no idea ahead of time if you are picking up a health upgrade, or four pages of text graphically detailing a plan to feed a human their dismembered limbs. You can nearly taste the self-conscious shame of either the original writer or the translator (or both) in trying to sell this garbage.

So our premise is played straight, but the intention is crashing against the presentation. The visuals are too goofy to work as horror, but the content is too gross to be glossed over. And it is in this failing juxtaposition that we introduce the secret ingredient that takes this project from merely “bad art” to “morally irresponsible”: Hot. Anime. Nonsense.

Hot Anime Nonsense is a collection of cliches and character archetypes that metastasized from decades of anime creators basing their characters off of other anime characters instead of their own imaginations or human experiences. It's a form of repetition that transcends shorthand to become prescription. With Ultra Despair Girls, Danganronpa forgos any glimmer of originality to use anime character cliches exclusively in the most rote, lifeless, plot-first writing possible.

The two playable main characters consist of an upbeat “average” (idiot) girl and mean tsundere girl. (A tsundere is an English anime word stolen from Japanese that means “is a bitch to everyone so you might feel something when they are nice to the main character once in the final episode.” (you will not.)) Upbeat average girl has, at the time of the story’s beginning, been kept imprisoned in isolation for a year and a half. If you thought her time being imprisoned would change her character, give her nuance, or be at all plot relevant, you would be wrong. She was peppy going in, and just as optimistic coming out. Mean tsundere girl is a stalker and has a split personality with a man-hating serial killer. This has nothing to do with her being a mean tsundere stalker girl.

Every interaction between the two follows this script. Average girl says something nice to tsundere girl. Tsundere girl says something mean to average girl. Average girl is hurt and / or misunderstands what tsundere girl said to think maybe tsundere girl is being nice. Regardless, tsundere girl says something mean again. This formula is repeated for every collectible they have a discussion about. This formula is repeated in every cutscene. It does not change for the entire game. It happens this way because the “chemistry” between an “average” girl and a “tsundere” girl is supposed to be comedic. Not by the will of this game’s developers, but by the definitions of how these cliches interact with each other. I don’t know in what anime this dynamic ever worked, but it has been lost to time. All that remains is this formula, hollow and pointless, and woefully inappropriate for this game.

Because unless you couldn’t tell, there is nothing funny happening in this story. There is no room for jokes. Kids are being brainwashed! The kids have killed their parents! The city’s on fire! Our main characters kind of hate each other! The villains are children, being sold lies from super villains! The neutral side characters are billionaire war profiteers! But every single character follows an anime trope to a tee, and interacts with every other anime trope with dialog written in strict adherence to the anime trope’s unwritten rules. The problem is, several of these tropes are meant to be comedic, either alone or in tandem, and nothing is done to adapt to the story being told.

This slavish trope adherence crystalized for me when I reached the backstory of one of the genius elementary students, a pink-haired loli. (A loli is an English anime word stolen from Japanese (stolen from English) that refers to a pre-teen girl the work invites you to think about sexually. The pink-haired variant is loud, shrill, impetuous, manipulative, and self-infantilizing.) In an effort to bolster her daughter’s acting career, loli’s mother sold both the loli and herself into prostitution to the producers of the industry. Loli is triggered by her multiple experiences with rape any time she hears the word “gentle,” as her father promised all clients would be “gentle” with her.

The instant her flashback is over, the duration of which she has been having an obvious PTSD episode, she takes a cartoonish tumble and falls on her face, camera pointed directly at her exposed polka-dotted panties.

I reeled so hard I had to put down the controller for a moment. Was this game so unaware of what it had done? That it had just invited me to share a mindspace with a child rapist? To demean a child sex-trafficing victim? In service of - a “comedic” panty shot? Because that was the kind of “joke” associated with pink-haired lolis? Was this “joke” preordained the moment they selected the pink-haired loli archetype, irrevocable regardless of the backstory they gave her?

Because she popped right back up and reacted with a taunt, teasing the main character for feeling flustered for seeing her panties. This is not how any human behaves. This is not how the character just described to us would behave. This is how the pink-haired loli archetype behaves. After being abstracted to this degree, all of this behavior becomes pointless on its own, and only given meaning via context. And in thoughtlessly being applied to this scenario, the context makes the representation reckless, vulgar, irresponsible, evil.

It is evil because it establishes the existence of real evils that exist in the real world as also existing in this fictional world, and does not keep the viewer on the correct side of the scenario. It is evil because this invitation is done involuntarily, without pretext, without commentary, without purpose. It is evil because it is ignorant of its own nature. It is evil because it is pointless.

Ultra Despair Girls is evil because it utterly fails its responsibility to give meaning to the atrocities it invents.

The cruelest joke of the whole game is, average girl is not allowed to become a hero within this game. Because her brother is the virtuous modest everyman trope from the first Danganronpa game. By the rules of Hot Anime Nonsense, no one else in this fictional world can be like him, because the writers can’t handle two virtuous characters at once. It would ruin their template for how characters talk to each other. So after the events of the end of this game, average girl has to remain an average girl.

Spoilers, if you somehow still want to suffer through this game yourself. There is no resolution. There is no moralizing. There is a continuation of the status quo, which I need remind you, is the adults are dead, the island is cut-off from the world, and thousands of children are being brainwashed as hostages. Why was this done? Because of reasons dreamed up by characters in other games that are never revealed. How does this get resolved? The brainwashed children, the trapped survivors, the main character’s separation from her family? None of this is resolved in any other game or anime adaptation.

Ultra Despair Girls is grotesque misery porn. It is the bone-headed utilization of shocking imagery in absurd scenarios for ends so oblivious, so shallow as to be nothing besides window dressing. It fails to understand that depictions of child abuse, rape, torture, dismemberment, and familicide tend to make real people, like the ones playing this game, uncomfortable when done senselessly. Ultra Despair Girls shows these topics, and more, artlessly, passionlessly, in ways that are both boring and offensive. I hold this game in the utmost contempt and pity every hard working developer who contributed to a project that objectively made the world a little worse off.

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.