1483: Virtue’s Almost-Last Reward

I will finish this game. I will finish this game. It’s been 40 hours. It’s a matter of pride now.

There may be mild spoilers for Virtue’s Last Reward in this post. There will almost certainly be spoilers for 999. I haven’t quite worked out what I’m going to write yet; I just feel like I need to do something like a brain dump in order to try and work out what on Earth is going on.

Putting in a “read more” tag so those casually browsing the front page don’t run into any spoilers… see you after the jump if you’re continuing to read.

All right. First up, let me say that I really liked the big reveal at the end of 999. It explained a lot and wrapped up a lot of things. For those who can’t remember, or who have no intention of playing the game, it went something like this: each of the various “endings” happened on a different timeline, and a core concept of the story involved the ability to transmit information through the “morphogenetic field” across time and space. One of the cast of 999 — young girl and sort-of love interest June — had her past self communicating with the protagonist Junpei in her future (which is actually the present) in order to help save her from a horrible fate in an incinerator. The different paths down which the story progressed reflected how close Junpei and the rest of the gang came to figuring out what was going on and saving June’s past self — when heading down a route where her past self was likely to die, she’d become more and more feverish and ill as the time of her death drew nearer. Eventually, final success revolved around “remembering” information from one path and applying it to another — something which the morphogenetic field made possible.

Virtue’s Last Reward plays with this idea in a different way. Straight away, we can tell things are at least a little different, since the game is narrated from a first-person perspective rather than 999’s third-person — it transpires (in my eyes, anyway) that 999’s narrator was actually past-June, not Junpei, which explains why everything he did was narrated as if someone was watching him, rather than as if it was he himself doing it. By contrast, Virtue’s Last Reward has narration that is very clearly from the perspective of new protagonist Sigma, who remains largely enigmatic throughout.

This time around, however, Sigma and one of the other characters have the ability to “jump” between parallel timelines and see how different situations pan out. This is specifically addressed and referenced in one of the aforementioned timelines, but it’s something you’ll probably figure out before getting there due to the fact that every so often, Sigma will “remember” some information that he couldn’t possibly have known in the timeline that he’s presently on. In fact, specifically leveraging this fact is essential to reaching the end of not only Virtue’s Last Reward’s “true” path, but also several of the other endings, too.

At several points in the game, Virtue’s Last Reward throws up “locks,” you see, which is where Sigma and company get themselves into a seemingly unwinnable situation. The difference between a lock and a full-on “Game Over” bad ending, however, is that by finding something out in one of the other timelines, you can overcome a lock, whereas a Game Over is an unavoidable ending as a consequence of one or more of your past choices — usually the most recent one.

Interestingly, at at least one point in the game, you have to have seen a Game Over before you can continue down the “correct” path for that particular timeline, since overcoming the challenge in front of you requires the use of knowledge that you only discover in your last moments. At several other points, immediately before something disastrous happens — bombs exploding and obliterating the entire facility that Sigma and his companions are in, for example — you discover some information that needs to be used in one of the other paths. Usually, this is used automatically, but I’ve started to run into situations now where you actually need to remember (or at least note down) the things you’ve discovered in order to proceed.

Each time Sigma blurts out something that he “shouldn’t” know, it’s pointed out. It’s not a plot hole; it’s supposed to happen. Having not quite beaten the whole game yet, I don’t know exactly how this is all resolved, but I’m very, very interested to find out. It’s utterly mindbending but handled with enough internal logic and coherence to be convincing… so far, anyway. Will it manage to keep that up until the bitter end?

That remains to be seen. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and try to find out.