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?

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.

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.

1478: Virtue’s Numerous Penultimate Rewards

I’m still plugging away at the sequel to 999, Virtue’s Last Reward. This is an interesting game in many ways, but one of the most fascinating things I’ve found about it so far is how it’s far more willing to withhold an ending from you than 999 was. In 999, there was only one ending that had a “prerequisite” — i.e. you had to finish one path before you could finish the “true” path — but in Virtue’s Last Reward, there are numerous plot branches that end prematurely with a “To Be Continued” message that may only be unlocked using knowledge obtained in one of the other narrative paths. Consequently, a big part of the game’s challenge looks set to revolve around determining precisely which order you should do things in.

To speak too much about this aspect of the game and why it’s structured in this way would be to get somewhat spoileriffic, and I know that at least one person who might be reading this is currently playing through the game at the same time as me, a number of hours behind where I am. As such, I’ll refrain from discussing this aspect of it too publicly for the moment and satisfy myself simply by saying that I find this approach really interesting.

It’s one of the things I like best about the visual novel medium, as it happens. It’s also one of the main means through which the visual novel medium distinguishes itself from conventional novels and other linear forms of storytelling. The branching nature of visual novels means the medium inherently lends itself to a form of storytelling whereby you only get the complete picture of what is going on by seeing things from multiple perspectives. And I’m not necessarily talking about switching narration perspectives to different characters — in most cases I’m simply talking about the protagonist making different choices, proceeding down a different path and consequently demonstrating a different side to themselves.

In some cases, these different paths are manifested as the protagonist changing in different ways. In Katawa Shoujo, for example, each narrative path sees the protagonist learning something from his chosen partner, and growing into a markedly different person as a result. He’s still Hisao at heart, but each of the girls bring a different aspect of him to the forefront — Rin brings out his artistic side, for example, while Emi encourages him to never give up and to always keep on with whatever he’s put his mind to.

In other cases, these different paths simply allow us to see how the protagonist responds to different life situations. In Kira Kira, for example, each of the main narrative paths corresponds to each of the very different female members of the cast, each of whom have their own story to tell. By seeing all of these stories through to their conclusion, you get a complete picture of who they are — and perhaps the reasons they do the things they do.

One of the best examples I can think of in recent memory is School Days HQ, too. I’m still yet to see 100% of the scenes in this, but I’ve seen enough of the endings to know that knowledge gained in some narrative paths can completely change the way you look at others. What may superficially seem to be a romantic scene can be tinged with sadness or tragedy when approached from a different angle with different knowledge already in your mind. And if you’re unfortunate enough to catch that game’s most notorious bad ending on your first run through… well, I pity you trying to see the rest of the game in the same way afterwards.

Rather than separating narrative paths into their own discrete threads that neatly tie themselves up, then leaving the player to do all the mental fingerwork to weave them all together into a complete picture, it seems that Virtue’s Last Reward is deliberately structured in such a way as to encourage you to explore all the different options — including the “bad” endings. In the path I played tonight, making a “bad” choice ultimately proved to be something I actually needed to do in order to progress the story further down another route. That’s something I’ve never seen before, and it’s proving to be a real highlight of the experience for me.

But as I say, in discussing this we’re getting dangerously close to spoiler territory, and I’m keen to avoid that. So I’ll leave that there… and now I’m off to go and see if I can’t actually make it to one of the endings before I go to sleep this evening.

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.