I’m going to start this video on the first game in the Zero Escape trilogy by telling you a story about playing No More Heroes on the Nintendo Wii. Before the first boss, Player character Travis Touchdown is walking down a long hallway when he receives a phone call from the girl he’s after, Sylvia Crystal. I could only just make out her voice. It didn’t take me long to comprehend that she was talking to me through the Wiimote speaker. I smiled as I lifted the controller to my ear like a cellphone. Then she started yelling and I had to pull it away. The rest of the conversation took place and I continued playing the game with a huge grin. It was such a small interaction with the Wiimote but to this day I think fondly of that interaction, and remember No More Heroes as a great experience largely because of it. So much so, that when I saw it was ported to the PS3, and then heard about it coming to Steam this year I shook my head. I said to myself, “It’s great that more people are going to be able to play it, but without the Wii, they won’t be able to have the same memorable experience I had”. Now, if such a small interaction affected the way I consider ports of No More Hereos, what about a game like 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors, where the emotional climax is built around the hardware of the Nintendo DS? That’s what I’m going to be talking about in this video. I’ll start by explaining why my initial playthough of 999 on the DS in 2012 was so impactful, and what I think of the changes that had to be made to the 2017 remake in order for it to work on a single screen. Let’s get to it.
Why 999 made such an impression
You know, I cannot remember what made me pick up 999. It might have been one of those listacles. “5 games with excellent stories that you have to play on the Nintendo DS”. Something like that. All I know is I got a copy of the game on a whim, and I was hooked. I mean I’m already predisposed to liking a good story in a videogame, and I will put up with a lot of tedious gameplay if I find the story, and more importantly, the characters and themes engaging. As 999 is a visual novel, I used a walkthrough to make sure I was making the right choices and going down the right path, and the guide I was following covered every ending, spacing them out in a way that the writer thought was narratively intriguing. It worked. I made my way through the bad endings, the normal ending, and then the true ending. Before writing this paragraph I went back and had a look at the guide to see if I replicated the order of endings it laid out this time around. I thought it would be cool if 9 years after originally playing the game on the DS, I subconsciously picked the same path. It would make it more intriguing when I finally start talking about morphogenetic fields. Sadly in this replay not only did I play the bad endings in a different order, but I even got the dummy ending before unlocking the normal ending and then the true ending. Sheesh.
Let’s talk about morphogenetic fields. Honestly, they’re the heart of the game. It’s a theory by a biologist named Rupert Sheldrake. It’s similar to the ideas of the collective unconscious or that humans can share information through fields similar magnetism. Here’s a simplistic example. I’ve only recently started solving the New York Times crossword. According to the idea of the morphogenetic field I should be solving the crossword as late in the day as possible. The more people who solve the crossword, the more the answers to the crossword will be spread through the morphogenetic field, allowing those who haven’t solved it yet to have an easier time of it. The answers are out there in the field, and are able to be plucked out of the air by those staring at the clues. Now, imagine if a person with a lot of money wanted to prove the morphogenetic field existed, and he wanted to do it because of the power and control one could have if they could influence what was broadcasted or received through such a field.
Gentarou Hongou is the CEO of Cradle Pharmecuticals. In his younger days he was a participant in the Nonary Game, a sick escapade run by a billionaire and his cohorts to have people that were deep in debt solve their way out of an escape room in order to save their lives. Hongou wanted to prove the existence of the morphogenetic field theory in part to cure his prosopagnosia, a condition where the afflicted are not able to recognise human faces. Cradle kidnapped 18 child siblings, and held a Nonary Game at two locations, the idea being that through the threat of death, the kids in one location would be insprired to solve the puzzles and free themselves, and then transmit that knowledge to their siblings in the second location through the morphogenetic field. The game was interrupted by a detective, but while he was able to rescue the other children, one girl was left behind, forced to solve a puzzle in an incinerator or be burned to death. She didn’t make it. That girl’s name was Akane Kurashiki.
9 years later the player finds themselves in a new Nonary game as Junpei. One of the participants is a young woman named Akane Kurashiki, who Junpei recognises as a childhood friend. Through the Nonary Game, the player chooses what doors to go in as well as which characters to travel with as they try and find door 9 to escape the game with their lives. If the player chooses certain doors, Akane will feel feverish and have to rest. These pathways result in most of the characters being murdered and Junpei suffering an untimely demise. In the DS version of 999, the bad ending is saved to the player’s file, and the game begins again. By the end of my final playthrough, I knew most of the solutions to the puzzles off by heart (especially the code to the door in the room Junpei wakes up in). Repetition breeds familiarity. Having to replay the game multiple times was a criticism of 999, and in the sequel Virtue’s Last Reward, a narrative flow chart was introduced, so that at any time a player could teleport to an earlier node and follow a different path. For the remake of 999, this flow chart was added, removing the tedium of having to replay puzzle rooms over and over again. Here’s the thing though, in Virtue’s Last Reward, the ability to hop around the timeline is baked into the narrative, and in the DS version of 999, having to replay the game over and over again is the same.
At this point I need to explain how 999 was designed with the Nintendo DS in mind. In fact, the game’s twist is built around it. It has to do with the morphogenetic field, and how the text is divvied up between the top and bottom screens of the DS. For the whole game dialogue from all the characters is displayed on the top screen while Junpei’s inner thoughts, reading like the narration of a novel is displayed on the bottom screen. It’s only right before the final puzzle of the true ending do we learn that the bottom screen has not been Junpei at all. The original Nonary game was successful at proving the ability to manipulate others through the morphogenetic field, only not across space, but across time. As Akane made her way through the Nonary game as a child she linked up with Junpei 9 years in the future. Everything the player has read about Junpei’s thoughts were actually Akane’s as she’s guiding Junpei safely through the Nonary game. Since Akane is the bottom screen, that means that every puzzle Junpei solved is actually Akane showing him the solution. All except for the final puzzle, she was never able to solve that on her own, and that’s why she died.
This is why when the player accompanies Akane down a path that results in a bad end, she becomes feverish. Junpei is heading down a pathway that results in Akane not being able to solve the final puzzle and so in this timeline, she no longer exists. Without her guidance, the Nonary game goes awry and Junpei and many of the others die too. That’s why restarting the game is so important. Every bad end results in Akane retracing her steps after her projection didn’t work out, and following another path. That’s why the player is able to so easily solve the puzzles they’ve been through many times before, because Akane has also been through them many times before. When this was revealed I was floored at 999 using the two screens of the DS in such a thematic manner. It’s an effective twist because it changed the way I had perceived the whole game up to that point, and yet, 999 wasn’t finished with using its two screens in service of emotional impact.
Akane has been helping Junpei solve every puzzle up to this point but she was never able to solve the final puzzle. Now with the player at that same puzzle, it’s time for Junpei to return the favour. The final puzzle, appearing on the bottom screen is upside down. On the top screen is an image of young Akane crying her eyes out. The player needs to turn their DS upside down in order to solve the puzzle. Suddenly Junpei on the top screen is able to help Akane on the bottom screen. The player solves the puzzle, Akane lives, and her and her brother Aoi are able to live their lives planning out the Nonary game that must take place 9 years in the future for Akane to live. This use of the hardware of the Nintendo DS to aid the storytelling of 999, to give its ending such impact is why the game made such an impression on me, and why I knew I had to play Virtue’s Last Reward. I did. It was excellent and it became one of my favourite games, but that’s for another video. When Zero Time Dilemma finally came out in 2016 I felt I needed to replay the first two games to prime me for the final game in the trilogy, and wouldn’t you know it, The Nonary Game collection came out the next year. By this point I knew I had to make videos on every game, so I’ve held out until now to play them all. All this time I was worried about how a game that built its twist around the hardware of the DS was going to fare on other systems, and now having played the remake, I see I was right to worry.
How does the remake compare?
Let’s start with the positives of the remake. The art is upscaled, and it felt like more animations were added to the characters. There’s voice acting, and it’s pretty good. I think it added appropriate weight to certain moments and I like the casting choices. The flowchart is a trickier addition to praise. It’s true it made the game a lot easier to play. I appreciated only having to play the first puzzle room the one time. I appreciated seeing which lanes of the chart I still had to explore, and when I realised how to interpret the lock and key images, I appreciated how easy it was to enter a puzzle room, experience the new dialogue options, and then leave for the next room, but looking back on my playthrough now I can see how thematically unfulfilling it is. Having to replay everything for new information was part of the point. It makes the ending have more resonance. It’s one of those quality of life vs thematic importance decisions, and I can only assume that the ease of play was more important to the dev team than forcing the player back through the game multiple times in order to give greater weight to the twist. I can understand that. It could be rewritten to make sense too. Instead of going back to the start each time there’s a bad end, Akane could just jump to a choice point, but to my knowledge, this change wasn’t acknowledged. The bigger problem is that the lack of two screens robs the climactic moment of meaning.
The remake does try to accommodate the original’s layout with two modes the player can switch through, adventure mode (which is the default) and novel mode. Adventure mode is Junpei’s top screen, novel mode are Akane’s thoughts. The player can switch between them with the press of a button but I never did because I didn’t realise what was going on with the two modes as I was playing. The game started me off in adventure mode so I just assumed that they had changed the twist to work within one screen. I actually thought that everytime the wavy blue lines appeared and Junpei’s voice went through a filter, it was alluding to Akane’s influence from the past. Oh how wrong I was. Seeing that the novel mode is Akane’s thoughts, and we only get to hear Junpei when he’s talking, the solution reached is that more dialogue would be added to Junpei voicing his thoughts as the player makes their way through the game. A lot of players found this solution cumbersome and quite unnatural. I find it odd that I didn’t. At the time I did think that certain sections of the game were longwinded but I just put that down to my inexperience with visual novels, and that there would be an overabundance of what I found to be obvious exposition. Also, I talk to myself all the time. Like all the time, so if this is considered unnatural, I certainly did not pick up on it.
Because most players would not be checking out novel mode as they wouldn’t see a reason to (until the game forces it, which it does very infrequently until the ending), and that Junpei voices a lot of what would be covered through Akane’s eyes in the original game, it’s obvious to me now that the blue wavy lines are the few times when Junpei is able to think to himself without Akane’s influence. So in this remake here’s what we have. The player is able to switch between the two screens of the game, but because it rarely forces this perspective shift, most players won’t spend time in novel mode. To counteract this Junpei is going to voice his thoughts a lot more, and using a voice filter and wavy blue lines will note when Junpei is actually thinking on his own. Here’s the issues I see with this solution. Having Junpei voice many of the observations made on the bottom screen through Akane’s eyes, dampens the shock of the twist when the player finds out Akane has been solving the puzzles for the player all this time. Although we have been playing as Akane influencing Junpei, this isn’t as easily made aware to us. Even knowing the twist I was questioning just what the significance of the wavy blue lines were because often Junpei’s thoughts didn’t seem to be that important or revelatory. Now imagine if I hadn’t originally played the game on the DS. I feel I’d have no idea what was going on.
Eventually the difference between the two modes and the two screens is made explicit. In the ending of the game, adventure mode is changed to ‘Junpei vision’ and novel mode is changed to ‘Akane vision’. The game can’t pull the same trick it did with the final puzzle either. Player’s can’t rotate their monitors or televisions 180 degrees, nor would they need to with only one screen available. I understand that the final puzzle was not going to be as emotionally resonant due to this change, but I have no idea why they changed the puzzle itself. In the DS version, it was a Sudoku. Thematically brilliant. A puzzle with 9 rows, 9 columns, 9 squares to cap off 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors. So what do we have instead? A puzzle where each surrounding square needs to equal the digital root of 9. I haven’t explained digital roots yet, but they’re a big deal in this game. Basically a number will be broken down into its separate digits and added together until we reach one digit. For instance the number 39 would be broken into 3+9, which equals 12, and then 1 + 2, which equals 3, so the digital root of 39, is 3. But the digital root isn’t the only point of the final puzzle. The player also has to spell out a word with the tiles at the bottom of the screen. The word it spells is “password”, and then once the puzzle is solved, the player is asked to enter a password. I took a random shot in the dark, and entered 9. It turned out to be correct. Compared to the beautiful simplicity of the Sudoku, this new puzzle just let me cold during the game’s climax, and there was no image of a young frightened Akane to remind me of what I was solving the puzzle for in the first place.
Conclusion
And without that emotional resonance, I think the ending of the game, in which Junpei, Clover, Snake, and Lotus are driving off in order to catch up with Santa and Akane bothered me more than it did back on the DS. I wanted closure, and instead all I got was a tease for a new story. That’s how I feel about this replay. Unsatisfied. I enjoyed my time playing it. I like the puzzles, I like all the discussions about interesting yet odd topics, but the remake felt like I was kept at arm’s length, and I wonder if my prior experience is to blame. If I had not played the DS version 9 years ago, would I think more highly of this remake, or would I think less of it? Just like any port of No More Heroes will be compared to my original experience playing it on the Wii, any playthrough of 999 will be compared to that original playthrough on the DS. I can’t say this remake is bad, because I still enjoyed my time with it, but I will say that The Nonary Games remake of 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 doors, is not what it once was. Thanks for watching.
Questions, thank yous, and what’s next
But what are your thoughts? If you’ve played both versions, how do you regard the remake? If you’ve only played the remake, how did the story, and the twist affect you? Should games that are built around unique hardware just never be remade? I’d love to hear all about it down in the comments. As always I would like to thank everyone whose work inspired this video. Famitsu’s interview with Kotaro Uchikoshi translated by Sceneryrecalled, Kayjulers’ “999 - The pinnacle of immersive storytelling”, and ItsyourpalJacob’s “999 Port - Lost in translation”. Links to these works are down in the description. So, what’s next? Well I’m not going to jump right into Virtue’s Last Reward. Because not everyone watching will be interested in my thoughts on the Zero Escape games, I thought it best to break up the series with other critiques inbetween. So earlier in the year I played through Planescape: Torment and was happy to have finally completed such a classic. I aim to do that again. Another game I’ve attempted so many times over the years. A touchstone for so much of modern game design that it feels ridiculous that I haven’t made a video on it yet. I’m going to be playing 2000s Deus Ex. The original. I hope you join me for that one, and then we’ll get to Virtue’s Last Reward. Finally, if you enjoyed the video, I would appreciate a like, a comment, or sharing it with your friends, and until next time, I hope you’re all having a wonderful day.
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