after ztd, i am practically convinced 999 was a beautiful accident - a weird combination of a lack of resources but the right ideas and platform. virtue's last reward was a game that was better than its predecessor but told a dumber story and did so far worse.
999 managed to captivate its audience with bust-ups, no voice acting, and fun ideas and good writing. there's a real urgency to getting off the sinking ship in 999, and by forcing the player into a timeline, the sense of claustrophobia is heightened until you hit what is almost inevitably, a bad end. it almost feels intentionally designed that way - where vlr and ztd go off on their flowcharts in order to make everything easier.
what 999 did was offer two or three bad endings and several paths there. vlr and ztd allow you to jump from place to place, to the point where the characters acknowledge that they're going to do it casually. i totally could not buy the dilemma towards the end of ztd of 'but what about our other consciousnesses guys!' what vlr and ztd do is remove the weight from the choices being made in the game, and by having so many negative ends, the horror and suspense is reduced to almost nothing.
there has been a real sliding scale of presentation too. vlr was worrisome yet understandable in going with models. they still do the bust-ups with the 3d models, which is fine. here they went full-cinematic with it and it's just garbage. voice acting is fairly hit and miss (although i think it's mostly good aside from akane's unfortunately), and a lot of the scene direction is bonkers. like diana and akane twitching on the ground with their eyes bugging out. i'm not sure if it was aksys or spike chunsoft who thought this was necessary to the game being appealing, but someone didn't understand what made 999 appealing in the first place, because it certainly wasn't its cinematics. a real swing and a miss there.
while that seems like surface stuff, it's not. it matters to me since it takes me out of the game very time i see characters looking dumb, animating poorly, or reacting extremely slowly to the environment around them.
puzzles are fine, i guess. i never got too stuck, and usually if i saved a puzzle for the next day, i could get back to it and it would work out. i dislike how they are all basically bunched together, and then the final story bits happen for about five hours straight. just weird pacing there, but given the context of the story, i suppose it's understandable. it's disappointing though that there isn't any sort of grand finale - 999 had one with the incinerator room, and vlr had one in zero's room.
as for the characters, the new ones suck and the old ones are disappointing i don't care about delta. i think phi being sigma's kid retroactively makes vlr really gross. akane and junpei's dynamic is ruined and each character is worse due to this game. mira sucks, eric sucks, sean's all right and the d-team are generally all right too. having a character named zero in this game is super dumb and there's actually no reason for it whatsoever.
i'm fine with vlr's world being a sideplot. in fact when it happened, it was one of the few genuine surprises in the game since i didn't think it was actively happening. however, the fact that this was all so delta could be born is a crummy story to tell, and lacks the weight of 999's loop-closing since we don't know who delta is until 75% of the game's been completed. i also don't like that this is pretty much here to set up a zero escape 4 where the current team of superheroes goes on to defeat a terrorist.
to wrap this up, i have to return to the subject of tension. 999 does this really well with having a single (two) main character(s) experiencing just a couple different stories, with the goal of really just saving one person. its twists are fun because they come from the backdrop of the game's setting, anecdotes sprinkled throughout the game, and because they're a subversion video game mechanics and tropes that we've come to know for years now. and before the game gets into any sort of weird pseudo-science, you're basically trying to escape a sinking ship and stop a mastermind without any understanding that there's something else going on. we learn it with the characters. by starting us off in a somewhat-familiar place, and introducing the player to a pretty straightforward idea in a really straightforward way (you are playing a mystery visual novel that has different endings - good luck!), expectations are set in a certain way.
in virtue's last reward, we start hearing about more sci-fi, but plausible stuff like human cloning, cryostasis, a lunar base, and other things that could exist in the far future, as well as the game's own fake disease, radical-6. in zero time dilemma we have a transportation pod and mind hacking: things that are never set up and just kind of pop into the game because of reasons. the plan is both grand (assembling a group of superheroes) and simple (making sure delta was born). and the audience has no real investment in it because delta is no akane and the grand scheme is just a set up for another game. i kind of liked that virtue's last reward's endgame was just to close a time loop. i thought that the game would be a lot more focused on stopping radical-6. i thought it would be more focused on any one thing. instead we get a lot of dumb out-of-character moments like akane killing carlos with a chainsaw.
this almost feels like a game that uchikoshi didn't want to make. it's obviously set up for more in the series, especially with the zero escape franchise name now. at least, this isn't the game i would have wanted uchikoshi to make. i would have preferred some closure. i would have liked to see the radical-6 story tie back into the akane/nonary game story. i guess i am glad that i have an original copy of 999. at least the zero escape branding stink didn't get all over it.
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