Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward (2012)

!Warning! This game has a nasty save corruption bug on 3DS.

I just hit this after 20 hours, quite frustrating. People say it only happens when you save in Puzzle rooms. This is not true. For me it happened when I saved at the end of a scenario and then the game crashed in a puzzle room. So a save prompt at the end of a scenario killed my playthrough ._.

So either don't play this on 3DS or diligently back up your save games with homebrew tooling!

As with the first game, 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors, Virtue's Last Reward drags you along on a crazy sci-fi inspired journey through a bunch of escape room puzzle games all fitting together to create the overarching Nonary Game. It's got just as many if not more plot twists than the first game, which was already chock full of them, and the scope is a bit bigger here as well. Unfortunately, while the writing overall was pretty great and I have to respect the insane amount of effort put into having it all hang together relatively well, I came away from it feeling a bit disappointed in the end.

I binged through through around 30 hours of this in this past week after having stopped around 10 hours in a few years ago. When you spend that much time in this game you really start to notice just how much bloat there is here. There is a massive amount of dialogue and voice acting in a full playthrough of this game, but I'd say like 30% of it is repetition, whether it be literal repetition of dialogue you have actually seen before in a different route (which you can fast forward most of the time) or dialogue that has been rephrased in order to fit it into the route you're currently on, which is unskippable. The fast forward feature is nice, but when you have to listen to characters marvel at the set of white doors in the second warehouse around 8 times (maybe more?) in your playthrough because technically someone new is saying the words now, it reeeaaally starts to grate on you. It's kind of in the nature of a game featuring closed loop time travel to feature some repetition, but a more dynamic fast forward feature could have gone a long way to cut wasted time.

That's also not to mention the unskippable map transition cutscenes which are literally pointless save for maybe hiding loading screens, if they even do that. They pulled a Resident Evil 2002 on us here, except this time it's not just doors opening, it's watching a little dot move back and forth across a map. The culmination of these scenes is literally over an hour long, which is an insane amount of wasted time. No, the maps are not ever useful, because thankfully the characters know how to get where they need to go by themselves.

And the cherry on top of all this is you also have to watch the credits every time you get a major route ending. They are also not skippable. I didn't mind this as much because typically the major routes give you some cool plot revelations to chew on so the credits allow for some breathing/thinking time. But when you take all of the unskippable repetition into account, you could probably cut a solid 4 hours out of the game, if you ask me.

But the positives of this game make all the repetition worth it, in my eyes. As I said, the plot is really impressive with the way it loops in on itself and allows each character some good development time. It somehow all mostly fits together very well despite all the insane sci-fi stuff and twists they packed in. I can only imagine it must have taken a very long time to write all of it. For the most part, it pays off. I think I still prefer the characters, story, and visual presentation of the first game, but this one is by no means an unworthy successor. Sigma, the protag, is a little unbearable sometimes though.

The escape room puzzles are pretty high quality for the most part, save for some irritating ones like the dart puzzle and a number of similar puzzles in the final room. For the most part I just wanted to get back to the VN segments of the game because I was more interested in the plot, but I did enjoy these very much.

I do plan to play Zero Time Dilemma at some point, which seems to have a much more negative reputation than the first two Zero Escape games. I think as long as the puzzles are decent and the plot is entertaining enough, I'll have an okay time.

Thanks for reading!

As being an improvement, gameplay wise, over its predecessor 999, I somehow enjoyed this title less. Not sure whether was the cast of characters or just that the game was raising too many questions for way too long without really giving me any answers.

As it turns out at the end of the game, going through different endings / routes without any clue is pretty much the way story is told. But it was really testing my patience.

As I played 999, i knew that other routes are necessary to complete in order get the whole picture. However I came to my first ending after playing for 24 hours. Thats quite a lot of time. I kept hitting story locks just when I got invested in the story. And hitting a story lock is very very unsatisfying after investing a couple of hours in to one story route. Especially when you are clueless what your character is acctually missing. Most of the bad endings / story locks just lazily conclude with random unexplained death or not even that. But even when the character is in impossible situations, I am interested how would he and other character react or try to survive behind the sealed number 9 door.

Searching on the internet I found an optimal way to play the game. Which story routes to take first and which last. I believe that playing in the recommended order would save you some of the frustrations. But in my opinion thats a game flaw as giving people options and not delivering satisfying results upon their choice just results in frustration.

Cast of characters was okay with well written and beliavable personalities. However the biggest problem to me were Dio and Quark. Making Dio the most unlikable character, while being pretty much the main villain of the story felt a bit cheap. On the other hand, the character that I cared for the least was probably Quark. Which is a shame as the game is really pushing in every storyline to care for him and save him as he gets infected or disappeaears. I understand that his main trait is innocence as he is just a child, but even that is put under the question pretty much throughout entire game. I was secretly hoping that he would turn out as the main villain in some wicked way as the game was allways dissmising him, while also subtly raising suspicion on him.

On the topic of escape rooms there are some that I enjoyed greatly while others were frustrating - being way too mathematical and not very fun. The double password system of the safe also dodnt click with me as I didnt understand what value does the golden notebook in the safe have.

Lastly, when the whole story wraps together it does make sense and does answers most of the questions. However compared to 999, Virtues Last reward is much more SciFi and it might be a bit much. But I probably felt that way because most of the high tech and mindblowing stuff was revealed right at the very end.

Overall with its flaws I recommend giving it a shot. However for me it is not a must play. I also think that people who are going into this game without playing 999 would probably miss on significance of some quite important events and connections between the characters. I would also recommend following the guide which tells you what is the optimal order of story arcs to take.

Virtue's Last Reward is a puzzle game, much like Room Escape where you have to solve the mystery behind your and 8 other people's kidnapping. The main, most nerve wrecking section of this game has to be the Prisoner's Dillema type of game where they have to choose between ally or betray smartly. People fool each other, sometimes only thinking of their own benefit even though they get along really well during other times.

The puzzles are challenging and will sure to keep your brain active although it's a bit silly that your teammates do little to nothing at all during this section (on hard mode). You may get stumped on some puzzles; I certainly did. But you can switch to easy mode to get additional hints from your teammates. I love this feature because they made is so that there is no reason for you to look at the walkthrough.

You may encounter "story lock" on your first playthrough. Although this can get frustrating quickly (I got 5 story locks in a row...), I think this is a neat feature that they added so you will be compelled to see other endings and be satisfied when you finally unlocked that last story lock.

PS. If you are playing this on 3DS, just be very careful because this game seem to crashes a lot and at some point will freeze your DS. Make a note to not save during a puzzle so you will not corrupt your save.

I loved that the graphics were enhanced (although there were some clunky parts). I loved the idea of jumping around in various timelines was both recognized and encouraged, which really makes you want to 100% the game (otherwise, you won't get any of the story, just some facts here and there). In comparison to the first game, 999, you could essentially "beat" the game and skip over the bad endings if you wanted. Granted, you wouldn't have all the details, but it's possible. However, for Virtue's, the end wasn't possible unless you completed every avenue (although, I believe you could technically skip the bad ally/betray choices that lead to game over if you knew what they were ahead of time). I also enjoyed playing as Sigma; he was engaging, humorous, and sometimes a little dumb, which made for some funny scenes and lines. Another note that I truly appreciate as an improvement for the second game was that idea that you didn't have to repeat any of the rooms, as every single path will take you to a different room. In 999, things got a little too repetitive and yes, there is the skip feature when you're repeating novel scenes, but sometime you had to repeat a room or a path to get to another choice.

So why not a 5? I didn't really feel for any of the characters this time, unlike 999. In the first game, it felt that everyone had a much deeper, emotional story that brought them together. However, in this game (while trying to avoid bringing in any spoilers here...), the characters seemed... kind of bland. I believe the only characters I felt that Sigma really connected with at any of the endings was Luna, Alice, and Tenmyouji. The others, including Phido, fell flat and dull. Speaking of Phido, while I certainly recognize her importance to the story, I found her character irritating most of the time.

That being said, I'm excited to finally get the third game of the series and see where the story goes next!