Tag: Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors

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.