Tag: 999

1487: Uchikoshi’s Last Reward

Kotaro Uchikoshi, the creator of the two Zero Escape games 999 and Virtue’s Last Reward, opened an English language Twitter account today, even despite his own admission that his English is not all that great. Still, he felt compelled to communicate directly with his fans since, surprisingly, it seems the majority of the Zero Escape fanbase is actually in English-speaking territories — and that neither 999 or Virtue’s Last Reward sold well enough in Japan to make a third and final installment in the series possible in the immediate future.

This is… distressing to see, frankly. Uchikoshi’s Twitter feed is heartbreaking to read. Even through the occasionally slightly broken English — his English is certainly better than my Japanese, mind — it’s clear that there stands a passionate man who would like nothing better than to realise his grand vision for his magnum opus, a man constantly frustrated by the realities of the modern games biz — key word “biz” — and a man who genuinely feels bad that he’s letting his fans down. I find it incredibly sad that someone doing such wonderfully distinctive things with interactive storytelling has been put in such a position in this, an age where story-centric games such as Gone Home, The Stanley Parable and numerous others can be held up and celebrated — even declared “Game of the Year” in some quarters of the Internet. Surely the modern industry is diverse enough to support both the Titanfalls of the world and a third installment in the Zero Escape series?

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Perhaps it is — in fact, given the outpouring of support I’ve seen for it today, I know it is — and Uchikoshi simply hasn’t yet found the right route to market. Despite the bleak, apologetic nature of his tweets, it’s clear that he hasn’t given up hope as yet. Following a heartfelt plea for any prospective investors to contact him directly via Facebook (I’m providing the link there on the off-chance that anyone rich is reading and feels like funding Zero Escape 3) he attempted to reassure fans that Zero Escape 3 “will definitely be released somehow, someday!” And I’d like to believe that he’s right.

The question is “how?” Uchikoshi claims that he’s considered crowdfunding but was concerned that it wouldn’t be “persuasive” enough, but this may partly be due to the fact that crowdfunding is still yet to make a huge impact in Japan; it’s still primarily a Western thing, with the exception of a few Japanese developers like Nigoro (though still in collaboration with Western publisher Playism, I might add) turning to the platform to fund projects such as La-Mulana 2. I would have thought that Kickstarter would be an ideal solution for Uchikoshi to clearly solicit and demonstrate fans’ support for the Zero Escape series, but this may not help the situation in his native Japan, which is where the problems really are. I’m assuming there are some sort of rights issues involved with developer Spike Chunsoft that prevent him from striking out on his own and making Zero Escape 3 as an independent developer, or releasing 999 and Virtue’s Last Reward (and Zero Escape 3) on PC, or…

Well, anyway. Sadly, I don’t have the power to do anything about the situation. But it will be absolutely criminal if someone with as clear an artistic vision as Uchikoshi isn’t able to realise his creative visions due to matters of “business”. This is something I hope that the industry as a whole can solve together; regardless of whether or not you liked 999 and Virtue’s Last Reward, you can hopefully agree that the gaming landscape is a richer place with titles like them in it. Creative, interesting games should be encouraged and rewarded; instead, if we’re not careful, we’ll drive people like Uchikoshi away forever and be stuck with an vicious cycle; an endless of soulless but profitable games, and no-one wanting to rock the boat by doing something a bit different.

Zero-Escape-Virtues-Last-Reward-Review-Topper

That’s a Doomsday scenario, obviously, and unlikely to happen, particularly while the Western indie space is flourishing to such a degree. Now we just need the East to follow suit.

I wish Uchikoshi the best of luck in his endeavours to get Zero Escape 3 into the hands of those of us who really, really want to see it, and would urge you to support him in any way you can if you believe in interesting, distinctive games that do some truly creative things with the medium as a means of interactive storytelling.

1422: Zero Bossu

Can’t remember if I’ve mentioned Virtue’s Last Reward or its predecessor Nine Persons, Nine Hours, Nine Doors or Some Other Combination Thereof (aka 999) on these pages to date, so I thought now might be a good time to talk about them, with particular (and spoiler-free) regard to the latter.

The two games, collectively known as Zero Escape, are a combination of visual novel and room escape adventure games. The former you’ve heard me talk about extensively on these very pages; the latter is a peculiarly Japanese offshoot of the adventure game genre in which you’re regularly thrown into self-contained puzzles in which you must escape from a room, and everything you need in order to do so is in the room with you.

You actually spend the vast majority of your time in both 999 and Virtue’s Last Reward reading non-interactive visual novel segments rather than solving puzzles, but that doesn’t make the room escape sequences any less satisfying. In fact, given that the room escape sequences in Virtue’s Last Reward in particular are pretty damn challenging, they’re incredibly satisfying to successfully solve.

The puzzles strike that perfect balance between bewildering and making you feel smart, you see. At no point will you be thrown into a situation where the answer is so obtuse you’ll never work it out without an FAQ at your side, but at the same time, those initial moments as you wander around the room, looking at everything and hoping to find some clues, are magical in how daunting they feel.

How on Earth am I going to get out of here? you’ll think. What am I even supposed to do?

Fortunately, those feelings rarely last all that long; after a little careful and methodical investigation, you’ll generally uncover one or more “big tasks” that you’ll need to complete in order to solve the room, and your job then becomes prioritising these tasks into an appropriate order, figuring out how to complete them and then, well, completing them.

There’s a good mix of puzzle types in there, too, though not as much diversity as Level-5’s Professor Layton series. For my money, though, I think I prefer Zero Escape’s approach because there’s at least some attempt to integrate the puzzles into the game’s narrative and setting; that said, I’m basing my entire opinion of Professor Layton on the first game in the series, so that may be something that improves in the future — I do own all of them so I fully intend to find out.

Anyway, I digress; Virtue’s Last Reward’s puzzles in particular are enormously satisfying because they make you feel clever. It’s pretty rare you’ll find a puzzle in which the solution is just blind trial and error until something good happens — though I still hate slidey-block puzles — instead, for the most part, puzzles are reliant on a keen sense of observation, and a willingness to trawl through the various documents in the in-game archives to figure out various pieces of information’s relevance to the situation at hand.

Virtue’s Last Reward goes one little extra step beyond this, though; you can solve the room and get out without too much difficulty in most cases, but all rooms have more than one solution, one of which opens the exit and the other of which unlocks supplementary reading material in the in-game archives. It can be just as challenging — if not more so — to figure out what the conditions for unlocking this bonus content are as it can be to just escape the room successfully. And the supplementary material is always worth a read, too; while much of it is revealed in the game, it often delves deeper into the real-life concepts and experiments explored through the narrative, such as the “Chinese Room” experiment and all manner of other things.

Despite reaching the “end” of a number of narrative paths in Virtue’s Last Reward, I’m yet to actually get a definitive “ending”. I’ve had two bad endings, a narrative path which I need to go back to when I have more information, an ending that “locked” itself until I figured something out in one of the other narrative paths, and I’m currently working on another branch. All in all, there are supposedly 24 different conclusions, including “bad ends”, and you’re damn right I’m going to see every one of them.

In fact, let’s go work on that right now. Bye-bye.

1406: Sunday Night

It is, as the title says, Sunday night, and as usual I have left writing this until the last minute, and as such rather than churn out the first thing that comes into my head while tired, I’m instead going to hold fire on the ongoing story until tomorrow. This week I’m going to attempt to write each installment in the morning before I start work rather than saving it until the last thing in the evening.

This will also (hopefully) have the side-effect of allowing me to focus on those aspects of it that are a little more challenging to write — i.e. the bits drawn from my personal experience as a teacher — while my brain is reasonably alert and thus able to process things a little more clearly.

This, then, leaves this entry free for some generic ramblings about what I’ve been up to. So, okay then, let’s do just that.

After a short break, I’ve been getting back into Final Fantasy XIV and it remains just as compelling as it ever was. Over the last few evenings, I’ve been completing the “Lightning Strikes” questline, in which the heroine from Final Fantasy XIII and its upcoming spinoff Lightning Returns shows up in the lands of Eorzea and enlists your assistance in defeating various unpleasant beasties, culminating in a battle against a giant… thing called “Aspect of Chaos”. It’s essentially an advertising event for Lightning Returns, which came out in Japan recently and comes out in the West in February. (And yes, the event is repeating in February.) But it’s pretty well done. The usual Final Fantasy XIV battle music is replaced by the brilliant “Blinded by Light” from Final Fantasy XIII, until the final boss battle, which is accompanied by Final Fantasy XIII’s boss music, the name of which escapes me right now.

The equipment you get out of it allows you to cosplay as either Lightning or Snow from Final Fantasy XIII, depending on your character’s gender, but it’s not particularly good equipment — it’s just level 13, so it’s all but useless to those who are bumping their head against the level cap. That said, the Free Company I’m in is considering doing some low-level dungeon runs all in Lightning gear, so that might be fun to do at some point.

Aside from Final Fantasy XIV, I’ve also finally got around to playing Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, aka 999. I was expecting to like this, so I was unsurprised to find myself enjoying it a great deal. It’s a very clever game that makes good use of the DS’ twin screens to present its visual novel-style storytelling sequences effectively — dialogue on the top, narrative on the bottom — and features some enjoyable “room escape” puzzle sequences. There are six endings to the game; so far I’ve seen three of them, and they’ve all involved the untimely death of the entire cast, which is unfortunate. There is a “true” ending but I haven’t yet determined the conditions that cause you to proceed down that path — I have my suspicions, but I’m investigating thoroughly since a single playthrough doesn’t take very long and I’d like to see all the different endings, even if most of them are “BAD END”s.

Anyway. Now I’m off to sit in bed and find yet another way to kill off the whole cast. The story will continue tomorrow, assuming I manage to haul myself out of bed in a timely manner.