Hey hey folks and welcome to my critique of Yakuza Kiwami. It was great to play this remake of the first game in the Yakuza series after enjoying Yakuza 0 so much. I tried to keep my expectations in check, knowing that the writing of this game would not be as strong, but I still found myself engaged with the drama of the main story. This video is about learning to love the boss fights of the game, and why the fight against Nishiki is an encounter I’ll always remember. Enjoy!
Nishiki’s Importance
How often is the final boss of a videogame its best moment? It feels like I shouldn't have to ask that question. Like it should be a given that a game is always leading mechanically and dramatically towards its climax, ending with a challenge that leaves the player accomplished but also feeling a sense of catharsis. Thinking back on a lifetime of playing videogames, I can't recall too many instances where the final boss satisfied me on both a mechanical and dramatic level. Often by the time I reach a boss I'm wanting the game to be over, and let's be real, how many games have stories that affect the player during that final encounter, or at all. It reminds me how in many Japanese role playing games, there will be the mechanically difficult final boss often followed by a dramatically unsatisfying story boss.
Yakuza Kiwami is different. Fighting Nishiki at the end of Yakuza Kiwami might be my favourite final boss in all of videogaming. In terms of a JRPG he’s the story boss, as we just went through the Jingu fight which was mechanically annoying and exhausting (and I'll get to why later), only to come face to face with Kiryu's yakuza brother. Both have been traveling their own path the entire game, despite Nishiki throwing obstacles in Kiryu's way for his own selfish reasons. By the time this fight happens, the two are equals. They don't want to fight each other, but they must, and the fight itself reflects this. Not only are the two on equal footing, but through the special event cutscenes and all the flashbacks during this encounter, I felt bittersweet. Kiryu doesn't want this, and neither do I as a player, but we both can't let Nishiki have his way.
What makes it even more tragic is that even though the game portrays the two on equal footing in this encounter, Nishiki is no match for Kiryu. At this point after a game’s worth of leveling up, and after struggling with every significant boss encounter up to this point, I finally gleaned an understanding of the push and pull of boss combat. I was finally enjoying the mechanics of the fighting system while simultaneously being emotionally affected by the gravity of the situation Kiryu and I find ourselves in. And because I'm engaged mechanically as well as dramatically, Nishiki didn't stand a chance. It's too easy to build up heat attacks, too easy to counter a move, and even though I didn't understand what the game wanted from me during the Kiwami charges (only learning about them during my research), the recharged health bar wasn't a concern considering how outclassed Nishiki was in this scenario.
Of course the impact of this boss fight is in part due to the Kiwami remake itself. The fall of Nishiki, how he changed from Kiryu's brother into a ruthless psychopath over the period of 10 years is told in cutscenes parallel to the main story. These cutscenes are an addition to the remake. The original version on the PS2 didn't have them, and they are everything in terms of feeling sympathy towards Nishiki during his boss fight. We see him struggle, get disrespected, lose everybody, and then when he was about to take his own life, a chance encounter with his subordinate, the wrong words spoken, and Nishiki is set down a new path. A dark path. I found these scenes more compelling than Kiryu trying to find Mizuki, Yumi, and dealing with Haruka. So much so, this game feels like Nishiki's story more than Kiryu's. He even gets a moment of redemption at the end.
Learning to Fight
But returning to this idea of mechanics and drama being seperate (With how good the storytelling is in this game, it's different in my mind than just talking about gameplay vs story), while the core of the drama in Yakuza Kiwami is Nishiki's downfall, the core of the mechanics are Kiryu regaining his fighting prowess and rebecoming the Dragon of Dojima. And when I say that, I'm talking more about leveling up, then the sub-quest of fighting Majima over and over again to unlock abilities in the Dragon fighting style. Early on in the game, Majima hid himself somewhere in Kamurocho and I could never find him (not that I looked that hard), so while that part of the game was left on the backburner, the experience I earned by playing through the main story and a significant chunk of the side stories was more than enough to fill in all but the outer wheels on all three skill trees.
But that idea of starting small, out of my depth, and gaining mastery and power as I played through the game (one of my favourite things about playing any RPG) was most evident throughout the games' boss fights. If I hadn't stocked up on health drinks early on, I might not have been able to get through that first fight with Shimano in chapter 3. This fight is indicative of other tough battles I had, like with the Omi Yakuza in Ares, against Majima in the batting cage, or against Nishiki's men in the alley behind Serena. I just never found a good way to break defense. It seems at least in the early game the idea is to chip away at damage and hope you don't get caught in a counter-attack. If evades aren't perfect you end up taking damage, if an enemy brushes you with an attack you end up taking damage, and during this supposed push and pull, it's far too easy to get stunlocked. I theorised early on that if I had access to more heat actions and maybe some weapons things would be easier, and for the most part, that turned out to be true.
Part of it is what I see as a clash of styles. No, not just the ability to switch fighting styles with the press of a button, but it feels like the combat during random encounters and the combat during a boss fight are two different things. With the different sized yellow health bars on screen, the ability to pick up weapons, and the boss health bars changing colour, it's easy to see the Yakuza games as an evolution of the beat'em up genre so popular in the 90s. Games like Final Fight, where you'd walk into a crowd of tough baddies and mash the attack buttons with wild abandon. In a way the bosses are similar too. In those games they would have a lot of health, block attacks, knock you down, and hit for major damage. Of course back then the purpose was to get you to spend more money in the arcades by artificially inflating the difficulty, while in Yakuza I see these tactics as roadblocks to learn more about how the combat works, and to make sure one is adequately leveled up.
Once the player gets used to switching styles in combat, has access to more ways to generate heat, as well as stronger heat actions, the fights become a lot easier, but also more fun. By the finale of the game, I was enjoying the boss battles. The Majima fight in the soapland was a great push and pull between our styles, as was the fight soon after against Shimano (which I took as revenge for how infuriating I found the fight back in chapter 3). These fights can become annoying if flunkies are around, but there's always the Beast style's heat attack where you swing an enemy into his buddies, and knock everyone down like bowling pins. Of course that's if everyone is in melee range and you're not having to deal with a foe half a screen away firing a pistol at you.
That's what made the fight against Jingu and his subordinates so annoying. It was very similar to the fight on the rooftop against Arase when Kiryu was trying to save Reina and Shinji. When multiple foes have guns, and one of those foes is a boss, the game becomes exponentially more frustrating and that's because getting shot sucks. I mean, duh, but it's not as easy as just losing a chunk of health and focusing on the foe with the weapon. Getting shot is a stark gameplay interruption. The player drops, the sound and colour cuts out, and a button needs to be mashed to get back up. It brings the intensity of combat to a grinding halt. Now on the other hand, if you defeat an enemy with a gun and pick it up, it's a great way to clear the room. I just don't think the cons outweigh the pros regarding firearms.
Jingu and his bodyguards all have guns. Once you put the bodyguards down, they get back up, this time with knives, which is marginally better. If you add the gauntlet Kiryu needed to fight through to reach Jingu in the first place, this whole sequence is exhausting, and it's mainly for the same reasons the Nishiki fight is so great. We've spent the game seeing Nishiki's downfall. We're emotionally invested in him as a character, and we feel bad about having to put him down in the end. The finale of the game is the first time we meet Jingu. He's been talked about before, but not until we learn what was going on with Yumi. And once we learn about him, who is he? Some corrupt politician who is willing to kill a woman and her child in order to further his goals. Compared to Nishiki he's like the villain of a Saturday morning cartoon. Although the reason I hate Jingu so much has nothing to do with him as a character, it's because while trying to reach and fight him, Kiryu has had more holes put in him than a piece of swiss cheese. My hatred of Jingu is mechanical. It's how frustrating the combat is regarding him and his flunkies. Even though the fight with Nishiki was not easy, I was enjoying the back and forth because I respected him as a character and I was emotionally invested. I just wanted Jingu to go away.
Conclusion
So while joking about how so many JRPGs have the final boss and then the story boss, Yakuza Kiwami follows the same formula, and I love it. Because the final boss was not a fun fight, or a cool fight. It was not emotionally satisfying. That was all saved for Nishiki, the story boss. While I thought Yakuza 0 had better writing overall, I can't even remember the final boss of that game, but I think I'll always remember my fight with Nishiki. I wonder if the future Yakuza titles will have a final fight this strong. Thanks for watching.
Hey hey folks, Dave here. Welcome to my critique on Control. I’ve been excited to play this game since its release in 2019. I grew up watching the X-Files, so the idea of exploring a government agency dedicated to understanding what’s beyond our understanding, spoke to me on a fundamental level. Now that I’ve played the game and both pieces of DLC, I’ve made a video. What I loved about the game, what I didn’t, and why I ultimately had trouble connecting with it. Enjoy.
My Favourite Moment in Control
The Ashtray Maze is supposed to be the visual climax of Control. For the entire game The Oldest House, the facility that Jessie Faden finds herself trapped in has been shifting and changing. The Oldest House is full of impossible spaces. It captures the imagination, and as we're nearing the end of the base game, we are treated to a spectacle. The Ashtray maze. It warps and shifts more than any other part of the house. It's backed by a metal soundtrack. It's high octane, and definitely impressive, but for me it was far from the most visually arresting part of the game.
That's because Control is full of visually arresting moments. As I played I was continually dumbstruck by how good the game looked. The use of colour and framing in each new location was jawdropping. It felt like everytime I paused the game I was treated to a wallpaper worthy composition. So what was my favourite visual moment in the game? Well it occurs right before the Ashtray Maze. To be able to work her way through the maze, Jessie has to go find Ahti, the janitor, who has left on vacation. We follow the images of tropical beaches until we find ourselves in the Foundation of The Oldest House.
Now the Foundation itself is imposing. A series of concrete columns that span out from here to eternity, bathed in the glow of the great beyond. The gondola ride over to this area was impressive enough, allowing the player to gawk at the grandiosity of the space, at the scope of The Oldest House. Does it stretch on forever? With these thoughts fueling my imagination, I make my way through the pillars. As I do, visions of forests overlay the concrete structures. The relaxing vibes of nature and holiday floating over this stark, drab series of columns. Eventually Ahti appears, gives Jessie the walkman to get through the Ashtray Maze and we make our way out of this area, only returning briefly to access the DLC post-game. It felt like after this moment, the Ashtray Maze just couldn't compare. Heck, I have fonder memories of battling the TV to acquire the levitation power, as I think that sequence utilised twisting the shape of the Oldest House to greater effect. I dunno, maybe I found the metal song playing during the Ashtray Maze too corny.
Great Setup, Little Payoff
But I do think the Ashtray Maze is the core of what Control is as a game. Spectacle, engaging encounter design, fun, but little more. Now I've been playing Remedy titles since Max Payne. Man did I play a lot of Max Payne. I liked the sequel, but then I started to sour a bit on Remedy’s output. I didn't like Alan Wake. There's a video on this channel about it. It's far from my best work, but it should communicate my feelings about the game. Then I tried Quantum Break, and didn't find that worth continuing with. Now I play Control and it really feels like this is two decades of a studio who knows what they're doing, crafting something they're passionate about to the best of their abilities. But I listed out my history with Remedy's games for a reason. Max Payne was the only character I cared about out of Remedy’s entire output because his motivations were so well laid out at the beginning of that game. It was easy to empathise with losing his family and his path of vegeance. If we look at Alan Wake, yes he's searching for his wife in this strange new town full of shadow monsters, but I never connected with that plight, and it felt more like as the player I was caught in the whirlwind of a mystery without being attached to the character I was helping survive. Which brings us to Control and Jessie Faden.
Jessie is searching for her brother. This search brings her to a non-descript building in the middle of New York. The Federal Bureau of Control. Unbeknowst to her, the building is on lockdown due to a resonance contagion from another reality, The Hiss. Despite this, she not only makes her way in, but to the director's office, only to find him dead. We pick up the service revolver and create a pact with the enigmatic board from the astral plane. Jessie is the new director. She has to help the surviving members of the Bureau push back the Hiss, and hopefully find her brother. As as setup, I think it's great. Not that we know a lot about Jessie, but there's sufficient mystery to keep us invested. Well at least there was for me. Of course after a few hours I thought about how I was enjoying the rollercoaster ride of combat and the visual design more than I cared about Jessie or anything happening plot wise. I earmarked that as a possible problem, but was confident that eventually this mystery box of a videogame would start providing satisfactory answers, and would hopefully get me emotionally invested. Spoilers, but that never happened.
Setting the Table
When Bioshock Infinite came out, there was some writing by critics on how they felt the world of Columbia was done a disservice by being the backdrop for a generic first person shooter. The more I played of Control, the more I thought about that. The Federal Bureau of Control is such a great concept. I love the weirdness of the setting. I love the Oceanview Motel, the Quarry, the giant tree growing in the middle of research, and how it feels like the Oldest House can contain anything, and can be anything. Not only does the house not play by the rules of physics as we know them, but so many of the objects of power are from alternate realities, alternate dimensions. Not only are The Hiss pushing through from someplace else, but the entity that led Jessie to the Bureau in the first place, and is the reason we ultimately succeed by the end of the game is also from someplace else. I have no complaints about the setting, and yet my thoughts towards Control aren't in line with the idea I just put forth about Bioshock Infinite. I love the combat in Control. Tearing chunks out of the concrete with the launch power and flinging desks at floating Hiss soldiers never got old. It's just with the strangeness of the setting, I would have appreciated more focus on the Bureau, and especially the characters, then the game being primarily about the combat.
Thinking back on it, that's one of the main reasons I didn't like Alan Wake. Bright Falls, and what's happening with Alan, Thomas Zane, and the shadows is intriguing. It's a great location that wears its inspiration on its sleeve, but then the game spends its runtime interfacing with combat I despised. Now if I had enjoyed the combat maybe things would be different because I have as little attachment to Jessie Faden as I do to Alan Wake. I think it has to do with genre. Alan Wake is a horror game so the combat needs to feel tense and stressful, whereas Control is an action game, so the combat needs to feel visceral and exciting. That's why I found the horror elements of the Alan Wake DLC in Control so annoying. After a whole game of feeling powerful, the game tries to take it away during the multiple encounters with the Hartmann creature, but it just doesn't work. Jessie is still as powerful, we just need to keep her in the light. The tension of these sequences was borne out of annoyance rather than fear, and I doubt that's the emotion the developers were trying to evoke.
The Bureau Needs More Character
As I kept playing Control, I kept hoping that the answers to my questions would be as satisfying as the gameplay. Considering how much I love the idea of a government agency dealing with things we don't understand, I was expecting to care just as much about the characters. After all, that's what keeps me invested in a game, at least for a game where we're actually playing a character. For games where the player character is supposed to be a stand-in for the player, things are different. Often the gameplay and setting is the story in those circumstances, but if I'm playing a game where I'm put into the body of a character with their own motivations, emotions, wants and needs, I need to form an attachement with them, especially if I'm going to be spending hours controlling their actions. Early on, I thought perhaps Control was trying to split the difference. Jessie has a being in her head she calls Polaris. In dialogue sequences, the camera will zoom in on Jessie's eyes as she speaks to it. The being never answers. I wondered if we as the player were supposed to be Polaris. As the one in control of Jessie, whether she lives or dies in every combat sequence, it's not too far-fetched to say that we are indeed her guiding star.
But neat idea aside, it doesn't work in getting me to care about Jessie. To care about Dylan. About Emily, or Marshall, or Arish. It feels like Control is a game of neat ideas but that’s all. A Bureau shrouded in mystery. Like the Oldest House, the story is in flux. We have impressions of what the Bureau does, of what the Hiss is, of the importance of Jessie, Dylan, and Polaris in this conflict, and of the failures of the previous directors and heads of research. I feel strung along because I can’t sense the connective tissue behind these ideas. How they link, and what’s holding everything together. Like the many members of the Bureau overtaken by the Hiss, everything is floating in the air. I understand all the pieces, but I don't care about the whole. It means that even when a moment is well executed, it falls flat. A good example of that is Marshall.
We meet her in the earlier parts of the game, in the research sector. She's leading a team to try and acquire more HRAs which the members of the Bureau need to wear to protect themselves from being taken over by the Hiss. After getting production running again, she’s called away on another assignment, and we never see her again, that is until The Foundation DLC. She appears on The Hotline, which leads Jessie to believe she's already dead, but we keep seeing glimpses of her throughout our time in the Foundation. She ends up being the final boss of the DLC. She's been taken over by the Hiss and we have to put her down. Now the lead up to this fight was well executed. The cutscene before the fight was well executed. It's my investment that was lacking. I didn't know Marshall. She doesn't have a relationship to Jessie. I got an outline of her character through our brief time together in the base game. She's no nonsense and takes her duty seriously. She seems to have sacrificed herself for the good of the Bureau. I just never became emotionally invested in the character. Instead of actually caring about her downfall and that Jessie has to fight a previous member of her team, I said to myself "well, that sucks", and proceeded to chuck hunks of rock at this boss encounter.
Conclusion
And that's why when thinking back on Control, only the combat and visuals stick with me. They're the only part of the game that has any weight to it. There's no mystery to how beautiful the game looks or how engaging the combat is. The Oldest House is a great location. Its odd, foreboding, and adds texture to a world you could make many games about. I just wish I had been able to connect with the characters. For being in Jessie's head I don't know that much about her. I get wanting to save her brother, and then taking on the responsibility of looking after the Bureau, but it feels surface level. The closest I got to something I could latch onto is the playful banter between Jessie and Emily at the end of the Foundation DLC, as they're both settling into their new roles and what feels like a budding friendship. I've enjoyed my time enough in Control to be interested in playing another game in this world, but I hope that alongside a game that looks and plays great, the sequel gives me a reason to care. Thanks for watching.
I wanted to like Zero Time Dilemma. My friends do not. One couldn't wait for me to play the game so he'd have someone to complain to about it. Another couldn't stand the art style and darker tone, giving up after a few hours. The vibe I got from my friends (and the internet at large) is that Zero Time Dilemma is a bad game, and a poor send-off to the Zero Escape Trilogy. That the good will built up through the excellent 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors, and Virtue's Last Reward was squandered. This negativity awakened a contrarianism in me. If people hated this game, I was going to do my best to love it. I was going to write about how Zero Time Dilemma is good actually...but I can't do it. There was a lot about Zero Time Dilemma that I liked, but there was also a lot that I didn’t, and I feel that ZTD’s weaknesses both overshadow and undercut its strengths. This video will be an exploration of my experience playing Zero Time Dilemma, what I find to be its strengths and weaknesses, and my overall thoughts on it as not only a stand-alone game, but the capper to the Zero Escape Trilogy. Enjoy.
ZTD’s flowchart is lacking polish
I want to start this off by discussing the first criticism folks have about the game, the art and animation style. I'm not a fan. I don't think the 3d models look good, or move well. I think using models instead of portrait art makes it more difficult for the characters to be expressive, and even though the unique camera angles for every line of dialogue are engaging, I prefer the character art of the previous two games. I think lack of polish has a lot to do with it. I noticed many scenes where a character’s mouth wasn’t moving while delivering a line of dialogue. After a couple of hours I was used to the new look of the game, but I never got over the lack of polish.
If I was stretching myself, I could say that this lack of polish is thematic, but I'm not doing that. The way the game is structured is thematic enough without inventing explanations for what I assume is a troubled development. In Zero Time Dilemma we're playing the Decision Game instead of the Nonary Game, and it works differently. A team will wake up in a room. Their watches will tell them what time it is, but they'll have no memories of what has happened previously. There’ll be a puzzle room followed by a decision (which always has the threat of death behind it), there will be a small story segment, and then Zero will activate the team’s bracelets sending them back to sleep and wiping their memories. The sequence will appear on the flowchart where it fits in the overall story, and the player will pick a new sequence for one of the three teams, repeating this process..
Initially I loved the concept. It made me feel like the characters. I never knew where I'd be sent and since I wasn’t being injected with memory drugs, I could start to piece together the timelines in my head over the hours. The problem is this formula is used over and over again with little variation, and by about 8 hours in I was starting to tire of it. By hour 12 I was mad, because by this point there had been no story revelation. No narrative payoff for playing through over half the game, and looking back on the game as a whole, and how the other two games worked, I've pinned down why this frustrated me so much. 999 didn't have a flowchart in its initial release, but even without it, we were following a story down a path until we reached an ending. Then we got to restart and take another route. In Virtue's Last Reward we saw the shape of the flowchart. We could follow a path to its conclusion. True many paths were locked off until we found the keys, but it was easy to follow a story from start to finish and to uncover a revelation or two before the bigger narrative bombshells started to drop. Zero Time Dilemma is unmoored. We never know where in the flowchart a new gameplay chapter will take us. We're no longer following one pathway to its ending and then choosing a new one. We have to keep multiple story strains in our head as we play the game, so when a revelation does happen, we have the necessary groundwork for it to hit properly. Yes in Virtue's Last Reward the different paths of the flowchart symbolised different timelines, and the same is true for Zero Time Dilemma, but at least VLR's flowchart had some god damned flow to it!
The ethics of time travel
That leads me to my favourite part of Zero Time Dilemma. Virtue's Last Reward was about Sigma's power to shift betwen universes in order to find the one in which everyone lives. That's how Akane managed to survive as a child back in 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors. In ZTD almost every character can shift, and one of the purposes of the Decision Game is to awaken this power within all its participants. The death games have cleverly played with this. There's a game where you have to not push a button. If the button is pressed, the whole complex explodes. Of course I pushed the button, then reloaded the flowchart, and withheld my desire to push it. There's a dice game where if a 1 is not rolled on all 3 die, Carlos, Junpei, and Akane will...er...die. Statisicially there's a 1 in 216 chance of rolling this. The first time, they all died. The second time they all died, and then the game forces the right roll on the 3rd attempt. As a final example, Phi is stuck in an incinerator. Sigma is clamped to a chair with a revolver aimed at his head. Diana has to pull the trigger. If she doesn't, Phi will be burnt to a crisp. There's one bullet in the gun so Sigma has a 5 in 6 chance to survive. This decision has 3 different outcomes, one of which leads to the games' best revelation. Often we need to see every outcome of each decision game in order to gain the right information to move forward and reach the good ending in which everyone survives just like in 999 and VLR… but does everyone survive?
There's a sequence near the end of the game where Junpei and Carlos are forced to play the AB Game from Virtue's Last Reward. No matter which choice we make, one side picks betray and the other side is outraged before they die. Then a new path opens up on the flowchart. Before the game even begins Carlos has memories of being betrayed in the AB Game. We've already learned that as a firefighter, Carlos has relied on his intuition in order to rescue people and avoid death. It's how he was able to rescue his sister in the fire that claimed their parents’ lives. Carlos has always been able to shift, but not voluntarily. It is here that Akane explains their power and what it means...using the example of Back to the Future.
Akane says there are two types of time travel stories: the ones where any action taken resets the timeline as if it was always meant to happen, and those where every action or choice plays out in a different universe. Both are unethical because both involve murder. In the first type of story, which Back to the Future is, Marty changes the timeline and his Dad becomes a successful sci-fi author. Marty’s family is wealthy when he returns to the present, but he's retained the memories of his life before. So what happened to the Marty who grew up in that wealthy household? Well either that consciousness was erased when Marty came back to the present, or it was swapped with the original Marty's history, and since there's only one timeline in this type of story, that branch ceases to exist.
But what of the other type of story? The one that uses multiple universes? Well that's the type of story that the Zero Escape Trilogy is telling, and its no less unethical. It's far worse actually. In the previous type of time travel, only one consciousness was being erased. With a multi-verse, there are countless versions of these characters, countless histories for their consciousnesses to jump to. Each time our characters jump, they swap with the consciousness of the bodies they're jumping into, and seeing that it often takes life threatening danger to induce a shift, those poor other versions of them are being thrust into a different body in an unfamiliar situation, likely to die shortly after arriving. To survive the events of 999, Akane would have sent many different Akanes to their death. Similarly with Sigma in VLR. Zero Time Dilemma is compounded by the player controlling multiple characters with the power to shift. Heck, once Carlos realises that shifting is possible, C team subjects multiple versions of themselves to horrorific fates just to be able to escape. Yes the "good ending" is the one in which no characters die, but reaching that ending necessitates the murder of countless versions of the core cast in a multitude of other universes.
A problem with multiversal storytelling
A couple years back I made a video on a game that features the multiverse as a plot device. In the comments a friend of mine gave his opinions on multiverse theory, but more importantly, how it impacts the storytelling of any tales that use it as a device. Basically the multiverse removes the stakes of a story. If a character makes a decision and dies, there's another universe in which they survived. If that’s the case, why should we care? Now in my mind the idea around this is simple, the story should make us care about this version of the characters and the fate of their particular universe. Of course that got me thinking why that would be the case. Just because we were introduced to this version of the characters first, they're more important than all the others? Well yes. We are more inclined to empathise with the versions of the characters we were first introduced to, especially if the story shows us stark differences between them and the versions of them from other universes.
In Zero Time Dilemma however there's little difference between how the characters behave in the different histories, at least on a personality level, and I think that's because the Decision Game is a closed system. For these characters to be trapped in this death game, they had to make certain choices to get to this facility. In all the histories the player encounters in ZTD, we're getting roughly the same Carlos, the same Akane, the same Sigma...you get the picture. Yes there are bad endings where a character loses their mind and goes on a rampage, but that's always in response to something else that happened. For example we don't get to see a universe where Akane is evil, just one where Junpei was butchered, and she thinks Carlos is responsible. And because all these characters are roughly the same from universe to universe, we don’t care about all the versions that end up dying as we try and reach the universe where everyone escapes the facility. If all the characters share the same goal throughout all these universes, why does it matter which version of them gets there in the end?
But that’s the problem. The use of shifting into other histories as a plot device lowers the stakes because it makes death so meaningless, even though this revelation of how shifting works changes the way we perceive the use of the narrative flowchart. On a mechanical level the narrative flowcharts in VLR and Zero Time Dilemma are an abstraction for the benefit of the player. A way for us to see which threads are left to explore and which is the best way forward. In Virtue's Last Reward I loved that Sigma was shifting his consciousness between realities because it created a narrative explanation for the actions the player is taking when they hop to a new node on the flowchart. After the ethics in shifting revelation in Zero Time Dilemma, it makes me look at Virtue’s Last Reward differently. In VLR Sigma was swapping consciousnesses with the Sigmas in those timelines, and I feel bad about how many versions of him had to suffer to reach the ending of that game. And the reason I feel bad about all the other Sigmas in VLR when I don't feel bad about all the other dead versions of the characters in Zero Time Dilemma is due to the context in which the games are presented.
In VLR we follow Sigma from start to finish. The narrative flowchart starts at the top and then branches out as decisions are made. This is technically true in ZTD as well. Both games have an initial decision that branches off into all the other timelines of the game. The difference is in VLR this is straightforward, and in Zero Time Dilemma it is not. The first Decision Game in ZTD is to choose which team of 3 characters to sacrifice. If a team is picked by both other teams, they die. Seeing the final door of the Decision Game only opens once 6 players are dead, killing the other players is heavily incentivised. I made my choices, and it resulted in a team dying, but then when choosing the first vignette to play through, the characters who were killed shifted into an alternate timeline in which they lived. This first Decision Game taught me two things: one, that no choice is permanent because when picking a vignette from any team, I’ll be travelling to a universe where they survived the first decision, and two, I would never have any idea where in the story I actually was.
This is why even though the revelation of killing an alternate consciousness upon shifting is impactful because it makes me think differently about the two previous games, the way those games are structured allows us to connect to the main characters (as those games have a main character). And when it comes to killing off alternate versions of these characters in ZTD, once again I ask why we should care? Zero Time Dilemma doesn't make me feel the effect of such a revelation because it doesn't matter to the characters, and it has little impact on the story. Yes the final decision of the Decision Game centres around the ethics of this revelation, but it's a false decision.
Why I didn’t like the reveal of Zero, or the ending
The complex is going to explode. All the characters have a choice. They can either shift to the start of the game, thereby saving their own lives and subjecting those versions of themselves to an unwarranted death, or they can stay in this history and be blown up. Choosing to stay leads to a game over. It’s a false choice. The only way to see the ending is to shift. I thought it odd that the first choice the player makes in ZTD results in Zero freeing everyone without having played the Decision Game. Now so close to the end, we see this happened so our characters have unblemished bodies to shift into. In this timeline, no one has died. The Decision Game never happened, but we see the consciousnesses of these characters get overwritten as the new versions shift into them. Those poor souls are about to be blown up without knowing why. Again, the ethics of shifting and how these characters are murdering other versions of themselves is a great moral quandary, especially as its the final choice of the game, but ultimately it doesn't mean anything because only shifting leads to the good ending. That, and our characters have already murdered countless other versions of themselves before reaching this point.
But before I can talk about the ending, I have to talk about the reveal of Zero. Half of my dislike of this revelation is due to my expectations based on the previous two games. The other half is what I feel is poor execution. In 999 and VLR, Zero is one of the participants of the Nonary Game. In both games, finding out Zero's identity is shocking, and well executed. The reasons for why they put together the Nonary Game are compelling, and the revelation puts the entire game in a new context. I'm a firm believer in a narrative revelation or twist being successful if it makes you think about the story so far in a new context. Zero Time Dilemma does not do this. Zero is not one of the partipants. Well, he is, but in a way that I find to be cheating. During the research phase of this video I came across all the supposed hints that lead up to this reveal, but even though seeing the seeds planted is cool, it just never worked for me. Zero is Delta, the other child of Sigma and Diana in the history where they're trapped inside the game, sleep together, and use alien transporters to send their children back in time. This revelation of Phi being the other child is great. It's my favourite part of the story, and it foreshadowed the Zero reveal. Zero had to be the other child, but which member could it be, and what was their motivation? Seeing I didn't think it was one of the characters from the previous games, I thought it was either Carlos or Eric. Yeah, that wouldn't have made much sense, but it's better than what we got.
Phi and Delta were sent back to the early 1900s, but the scientists who extracted them from the transporter sent Phi forward in time as part of another experiment. Meanwhile Delta spent all this time using his mind hacking abilities (yes, you heard that right) to learn that some people had the ability to shift realities, and that a great calamity was coming. Not Radical-6, but something that would wipe humanity completely off the map. So it may be obvious, but none of the participants of the Decision Game are an old man. At least none that we can see. We thought the boy with the Yoko Taro head was named Q, but he was actually Sean. Q is Delta, who has been there the whole time as the head of Q Team. He was in the Dcom facility with them, but the player doesn't get to see him until he appears for the reveal. It's basically a "Ta-da! I've been here all along." moment, and boy howdy is it some bullshit.
But let’s move past how infuriating the reveal is. So what is Delta's motivation for putting together the Decision Game? Well one reason was the game had to exist for him and Phi to be born. That's the same logic that Akane had to follow to survive her Nonary Game as a child. Delta also wanted to strengthen the ability of a team of shifters. That was one of the motivations behind the Nonary Game in VLR, but Delta’s greatest motivation was to get everyone to a point where they were determined to make a difference. Yes, this is how the game ends. As you might imagine, the characters are incensed once they make their final shift and Delta appears. The thing is, in this reality, Delta has done nothing wrong. No one has died and there's no longer any evidence of the Decision Game. Also by thwarting the creation of Radical-6, instead of leading humanity down a path where only 2 billion survive, the history they are in now leads to the annhilation of everyone. But our characters don't buy that. Because of what they went through, they have the drive to change the future. There's a "We'll make our own future" speech, before Delta hands Carlos a gun saying that the final Decision Game is if they want to kill him for all he did in the other histories. And then credits. That's how the game ends. No sir, I don't like it.
I don’t like it because the motivation of Delta to send them through such horrors to strengthen their resolve followed by what I felt was such a weak rallying cry of "We'll stop what's to come!" didn't work at all. I found it purile. They're ok with doing what it takes to save humanity because they were put in a situation where they chose to murder alternate versions of themselves to survive? How does that work? Not to mention that one of the characters Mira is an actual serial killer who undergoes no arc of growth during the game. I think that's my problem. Because the story is told out of order, even if I felt that these characters underwent a significant change in their personality and outlook (which I don’t), I wasn’t able to follow their journey. Then instead of anything definitive in the game’s final moments, instead of a resolution to not only this game’s story but the story of the three games that have been leading up to this moment, Zero Time Dilemma kicks the can down the road. The events of this game were a precursor to a future calamity that needs to be stopped. And despite the intended positivity of a rallying cry, It actually ends things on a down note. Virtue’s Last Reward was about creating a good timeline by travelling back to the Mars testing site to save humanity, and now when Zero Time Dilemma ends we find out that this “good timeline” is even worse. All we’re left with is the resolve of our characters to stop it from happening, whatever it is. No wonder I feel like my time was wasted.
Conclusion
So despite enjoying elements of Zero Time Dilemma such as the ethics of shifting, some of the Decision Games, and the revelation of who Phi is, it was overshadowed and undercut by the Zero reveal, the weak rallying cry, and the non-ending. Luckily it doesn’t lower the love I have for 999 and VLR. Heck the revelation of what happens when a character shifts adds texture to those games, which will make me think differently about them in the future. As a game I found Zero Time Dilemma disappointing. As a send-off to the Zero Escape Trilogy I am ambivalent. As its the final game, a player can just play 999 or VLR and still enjoy the highs of what Zero Escape has to offer, but even as disappointing as I found ZTD, I think its a worthwhile inclusion to the series due to how it links to the previous games. And looking forward, it’s feasible that creator Kotaro Uchikoshi could make a 4th game based around the calamity that’s to come, but I don’t know if I’d want to play it. After revisiting this series, I think all of these characters deserve a break, and some peace. As do I. Thanks for watching.
"Hi, my name's Dave and I play games on their easiest difficulty setting". "Hi Dave"! Heh, well I used to, and Persona 4 is the game to get back to that headspace. You see, ever since I started the current incarnation of this channel 6 years ago (I've been doing this for 6 years?!) I made the decision to play games on either normal or the default setting, so I could get the "intended developer experience". I thought this was needed to be able to purposefully talk about the game. Before the channel I would play games on their easiest difficulty setting because I wanted the least friction in getting through them. I rarely completed video games because too many of them outstayed their welcome. Even with cheat codes and walkthroughs I felt too many games outstayed their welcome. Heck, part of the reason for starting to critique games on my channel instead of just my impressions videos is I thought it would force me to actually complete some god damned video games. And it has. In the past year I've completed Dark Souls, Planescape: Torment, The Witcher 3 with its DLC, and Deus Ex among others. Some of these games I've been playing the first hours of over and over again for years. Funnily enough, one of the games I did complete back in 2011 was Persona 4. On the Ps2. There was something about this game that had me returning to it daily, and even if I only spent 20 minutes to grind up some levels so I could get through the next boss, I kept going. Despite how obvious it actually may be, when the game asked me who I thought the killer was and then after thinking about it for a hot minute, I came up with a suspect, picked them, and turned out to be right, well I will forever cherish that memory. Persona 4 was a special game, and even though I wanted to initially play through and write about Persona 5, Atlus is dragging their feet on a PC port if such a thing will ever happen, so I decided to play my PC copy of Persona 4: Golden, and make a video on that instead. Persona 4: Golden. The game that taught me that difficulty is only an impediment to a game's experience. Let me tell you about it.
Why I chose to play on ‘very easy’
I started my playthrough of Persona 4: Golden like any other game on my channel. I picked the normal difficulty option, and started playing. It was a little ways after the first dungeon, when Kanji was about to get thrown into the TV, that I started rethinking what I was doing. Now a quick recap for how time is structured in Persona 4. Once a dungeon opens up, you can enter it to rescue the person thrown in. If you're strong enough, you can even do it in one day of game time, but that's not the experience most first-time players will have. After a few floors or less, you'll run out of SP, won't be able to heal anymore, and it's time to exit the TV and rest. You can always come back tomorrow. But can you? Suddenly the game is asking you to join a sports club and a culture club. The friends you're making want to hang out after school, and it's important to dedicate time to all of this because by increasing your social links, you'll be able to fuse stronger personas which makes surviving the dungeons easier (such as your party members gaining bonus abilities that can trigger during combat). I found myself torn between wanting to rescue Yukiko from the dungeon, and maxing my social links. Now this is by design, but in the end I had to ask myself if I was enjoying this push and pull, in a game that's steeped in the fear of missing out.
Part of this fear is not knowing the right way forward. Each fight needs experimentation to find the enemy's weakness, and mistakes can be costly (in terms of healing items, SP, and just your patience). Meanwhile there is an optimal path in each social link scenario to gain the most points for unlocking the next social link. Often this will have to do with telling the person what they want to hear, but not always. It's never easy to know the right thing to say in the moment, and saying the wrong thing can waste multiple days of hanging out with the person in question instead of being able to level up the social link optimally. If you really stuff up, you can move back down the social link scale, and then with the female characters, there's the added minefield of dancing around the romance options which often branch off to their own scenarios. There's a year of in-game days to solve the game’s mystery and to max as many social links as possible. Here I was in month 2 and I already felt like I was playing suboptimally. I wasted far too much time in the dungeon (let alone having to fight the boss more than once), and it felt like I was constantly saying the wrong thing while trying to max my social links. I was playing sub-optimally, and because I didn't feel adequately rewarded in my time with the game thus far, the knowledge that things were just going to get harder as time went on (because that's how games work), caused me to despair.
So because I was playing the Golden version of the game, I had a radical notion. Why don't I start over on 'very easy'? I'm only 8 hours in, and if I follow a day by day guide, I can attack the dreaded ‘fear of missing out’ on two fronts (damn FOMO). I was hoping I'd be able to curbstomp the enemies in the dungeons, while perfectly navigating not only the social links, but the ways to boost my stats (as it turns out many of the social links use stats as gates for progression). So did it work? I mean I did end up beating the game on this difficulty, so it must have right? Well I know none of you are in suspense so I have to throw a curveball at you. Yes it worked, but not in the way you might expect. The game's design rebels against the notion of a perfect playthrough, so I had to contend with that, but most importantly, playing the game on 'very easy' made me love what Persona 4 has to offer as a game even more.
An aside on the annoyance of levelling social links
You know how I mentioned that some of the social links are gated through stats? Well the levelling of stats features a degree of randomness. Eating at the Chinese diner, reading a book, studying, folding origami cranes...this all will level up a stat, but sometimes the game will throw a bonus in there, and in the case of the diner, the stats that are levelled up are random as well. To get around this the guide that I was following recommended saving before any stat boosting activity, and to reload the save until the maximum stat boost is achieved. Fuck that. I mean yes, later in the game I kept reloading a save so I could catch the Sea King without wasting more than one day on it, but that's different! What this means is that for some of the social links, I was behind where the guide needed me to be, and then things just kept snowballing from there. It didn't help that once Nanako gets taken, the ability to increase the social links of Nanako and Dojima are taken away until right near the end of the game. I was able to max them after that point, but for the longest time I had thought my window for finishing their stories was over and I would have to complete the game not knowing how they ended.
Keeping on the social links for a moment, I was not able to max out every social link. I got close. I only left two on the table, Ai, and Maree. I was close with Ai too. I didn't prioritise Maree because during December in-game, I didn't know I got January to wrap up loose ends. I thought I needed to rush all the social links before the final dungeon. At that time I had Naoto, Maree and Ai left (with Nanako and Dojima out of commission). I thought that if I couldn't finish any one of these, I might as well get as far along with all of them as I could. I had no idea Maree left in early January. Yet another thing the game doesn't tell you. I at least got Naoto's story done. I like the character and was never able to max out the social link on my original playthrough (largely due to how anyone is meant to solve those riddles without a guide). Yes I even maxed out the Fox, Margaret, and uncovered the Hunger arcana. I was able to focus so much on the social links (my favourite part of the game), because now everything else was a cake walk.
How ‘very easy’ makes combat exciting
Now returning to choosing the 'very easy' difficulty, how did that impact my experience playing the game? Well for starters, the dungeons were now fun. One of my favourite elements of any RPG is returning to an early area late in the game, and rolling over everything with how powerful my party is. I could now experience this all the time. For the first dungeon I clicked the rush button and my team would just hit the enemies until they died. Resistences to physical attacks be damned! Later on when the enemies reflected physical attacks I relied on strong magic (usually the wind spell from Yosuke as he often went first or the almighty damage spell), because by that point with the money I was making it was easy to pay the Fox to regain any spent SP, and then when Rise started revigorating HP and SP after every battle, I didn't even have to worry about that. The only time when I actually had to plan out my attacks was in the final dungeon and then the secret dungeon, and even then it was more of a "this is the best way to get the fight over quickly" rather than a "This is how you survive to fight another day". The best part of all of this was getting to a dungeon miniboss, reading the guide on all its attacks and the best way to survive, and then just punking it with high-grade physical attacks for a round or two until it fell. Even though I think the power fantasy of Persona 4 isn't in its battle system, playing on ‘very easy’ made me feel powerful. Seeing a levelling up screen after almost every fight during the first couple of dungeons felt great.
And along with all that added experience comes added money. I never had to worry about summoning personas from Margaret, I never had to worry about buying new weapon and armour upgrades, and I could buy as many books as I wanted, alongside healing items from the shop. The only time that money was a concern was during the couple of game sessions I devoted to maxing Margaret's social links, and even then I was never in danger of running out, I just didn’t have as much in my wallet as I was used to having.
So I bet some of you are now asking, "Well, you've made the game part of the game 'very easy'. The dungeons aren't a challenge, you have more than enough money to deck out your party and summon the strongest personas. Since you're following a guide, you know how to spend your time, and what to say to further social links, so how does this all make the game even better than playing it "properly" on normal? It's because the gameplay of Persona 4 is its most tedious aspect. Half the reason the game is so long is due to how much time it takes fighting monsters and grinding out levels in the dungeons. Especially if you take more than one day to either rescue the person trapped, or if you're spending time going back to a dungeon to grind, or collect items for side quests. I've also spoken about how much time can be wasted if you don't know how to navigate the social links, or if your stats aren't high enough. Playing the game on 'very easy' and following a guide made the most tedious aspects of the game trivial, which allowed me to revel in and enjoy what I found so compelling about the game originally, and on this replay.
The power fantasy of Persona 4
See, the power fantasy of Persona 4 isn't in its combat system. Oh I've already mentioned how cool it can feel to steamroll enemies and recieve a new level after almost every fight, but that's not what made me feel powerful. No, the power fantasy of Persona 4 is 3-fold: having a positive high school experience, helping those around you grow and become better people, and having mastery over one's time. Now I know what you're saying, "Dave, you're so suave, handsome, articulate and amazing in these videos on the internet where you talk about video games. Are you telling me you didn't have a good time in high school"? Yes dear viewer, as hard as it may be to believe, I did not have a positive high school experience. There are many reasons for it, but one of the greatest is culture shock. Moving from the US to Australia hurt me in such a way that I wasn't even in a place to accept the difference of the Australian people until I was in university. Add to that the general attitude of teenagers to those who seem like oddball outcasts, and who aren't especially academically or physically gifted, and yes, I would say my high school days sucked pretty hard.
But in Persona 4 that's not the case. Having the special power of the Fool Arcana, Yu attracts people to him (and we'll touch on this more when we discuss the personal growth aspect of the power fantasy). Spend enough time studying, and your peers will marvel at your test scores. Sure most of your friends in the game are only attached to you through the Midnight Channel case but by the end these same people are literally willing to die for you, and the game takes many occasions to just have the group hang out and enjoy each others company in a series of vignettes. Some folks dislike these moments. They find them quote "too anime", and yeah, quite a lot of the humour doesn't hit for me, but some of it does. The game can be really funny, but most importantly, the game keeps reinforcing the bonds of friendship and how great your high school days can be, filled up with sports, culture, a part-time job, and spending time around those you care about. My dearest teenage memories are also linked to fun times with friends and family, and Persona 4 is able to make high school a comforting and positive experience.
The friends you spend time with, and the people you meet at your part-time jobs are how the social links start. There are 28 social links total. Not every link is a story where Yu helps someone grow past their trauma or what's holding them in place, but most of them are. People open up when they're around Yu, and as long as you say the right thing to them (mostly telling them what they want to hear), you'll be the sounding board that will help them grow. I've been trying to work on my listening skills for years now. I used to be a serial interruptor (and still am to some extent), but I want to work on my listening skills because I want to be able to allow people to open up when they're around me. I want to be able to react to what they say rather than try to give advice or immediately launch into a story of mine similar to what they just said (another thing I've been working hard to overcome). It was empowering to be that character in Persona 4. To be silent for the majority of conversations, and to only talk when my advice was wanted, and then to be able to say the right thing that strengthened our relationship and help them take the next step on their journey of personal growth. This is why social links are my favourite part of Persona 4.
Well almost. Taking one step back to the macro level, Persona 4 is about using one's time wisely. As we're playing a high school student, each day is mostly like the last, with the familiarity of classes and then plenty of time afterschool, in the evenings, and then on weekends. The game is in how the player uses this time. Without the guide I once again will say that I feared using my time suboptimally, because that's how I use my time in real life. When writing this paragraph, it's been about 2 weeks since I wrote the last part of this script. Sure, I was sick for a week inbetween, but I've often let weeks go by without working on a video project. That’s why these come out so infrequently. Time is not my ally, and most of my life I’ve been trying to find ways to wrangle it in order to dedicate daily practise to things I want to get better at, with often poor results. In Persona 4, if I want to max a social link, I can keep spending time with that person every day that they're free. If I want to increase a stat, I can dedicate a block of time to that until it levels up. Due to the segmented nature of the game systems, and that each block of time offers the choice of how to use it, even without a guide it’s easy to further the parts of the game the player is interested in. It won't be as efficient, but you'll always be making progress. I mean you can go straight home and go to bed, effectively wasting your blocks of time, but at least how Yu is spending that time has to be better than I am, whittling hours away on Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube.
Conclusion
And so through bypassing the aspects of the game I was disliking through the difficulty options, I was able to engage more thoughtfully and reflectively on the aspects of the game I love. I was able to hangout in Inaba, living an idyllic highschool life with friends, a part-time job, and lots of wacky adventures. All this while uncovering a dark tale of a shadow realm threatening our existence and the murderer that was using the realm for their own sick entertainment. When I did have to engage with the combat and levelling up systems, I was able to breeze through them effortlessly and go right back to what I enjoyed. When I played the PS2 version I often had to force myself to play because there'd be whole evenings where I would have to grind to get past a difficult boss, and I knew if I put the game down for a few days I would never pick it back up. This is a game I wanted to finish, and so I knuckled down and got it done. Such discipline was not required for this playthrough. It was all too easy to keep returning to Inaba day after day and I look forward to returning in the future, and yes it will be on 'very easy' again. Thanks for watching.
When I played Virtue’s Last Reward back in 2013, I was left unsatisfied. Yes I had just spent an amazing time playing through a visual novel / puzzle hybrid with an engaging premise, intriguing characters, mostly enjoyable puzzle rooms, and an embarrassment of plot revelations, but in the eyes of my younger self, the game had committed a sin. It posed questions that it had not answered. Not everything was wrapped up. Sure the same thing had happened with 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors, but 999’s unanswered questions are about its future. What happened to its characters after the game ends. Virtue’s Last Reward’s unanswered questions, are about its past. Replaying Virtue’s Last Reward, that memory weighs on my mind. What questions did the game pose, which did it answer, which were left unanswered, and most importantly, were the unanswered questions as big a deal as I made them out to be almost a decade ago. That’s what this video is about, and if you haven’t played VLR, don’t worry, except for one section which can be skipped, this video only contains mild spoilers. Let’s begin.
Dramatic Questions
After every gaming session I take notes. Notes on what happened, my feelings about what happened, and any ideas I have regarding what happened. Rereading my notes for Virtue’s Last Reward, it paints a picture of speculation. As the reveals started revealing themselves I made predictions. Most of these predictions turned out to be wrong, but the fun is in seeing where my mind was at that point in time. Even better is that early on in my playthrough I wrote down a series of questions that I wanted answered. They are as follows: Why is this Nonary Game taking place, and why were these 9 participants chosen? Why is K in the suit? Who do Clover and Alice work for? Who is Zero? Why does Phi know things she shouldn’t? Who is the old woman, and why was she murdered? And finally, What day or year is it when the game takes place?
That’s a lot of questions isn’t it? I like that VLR bombards the player with mystery. Even though I want these questions answered, they end up floating into the background due to the drama of the moment. It feels like the longer one plays, the more logs are added to the drama fire. The old woman’s body being found is an example of this, but then the characters find bombs planted through the facility, and Quark and Alice are infected with a virus known as Radical-6. And though these logs do increase the drama fire, VLR’s most potent fuel is the fallout from each round of the AB game.
The AB game is the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In this rendition the 9 participants are split into 3 groups of 3, a solo playing against a pair. Everyone starts the game with 3 points. Each side enters an AB room and chooses whether to ally with or betray the person they’re playing against. If both sides ally, everyone gets 2 points. If one side allies and the other betrays, the side who betrayed will get 3 points, and the side who allied will lose 2. If both sides betray, nothing happens. The scores stay the same. The game is won when a player reaches 9 points. They’re able to open the number 9 door and escape, but the door will only open once. If any player’s points hit 0 or below, they die.
In an ideal situation, each team would pick ally. They’d only need to play the AB game for 3 rounds, and then all 9 can leave. However, the best strategy is to pick betray. If you can’t trust the person you’re playing against, the only way to protect yourself is to betray. In the best case scenario you gain 3 points. If you’re able to do that twice, you could open the number 9 door in 2 rounds instead of 3. Betraying works defenisvely too. Staying at your current score is preferable to losing 2 points, especially when it can kill you. So while picking ally is the best communal strategy, the best individual strategy is to pick betray. I think you can see how such a game could result in conflict, especially when people’s lives are on the line and everyone’s motives are not always clear.
An Example
Another benefit of the heightened stakes making me forget about the questions I had, is that the narrative reveals are all the stronger. I’d like to use one particular string of reveals as an example. These reveals have nothing to do with the questions I asked earlier in the video but it’s also the reveal that hit me the strongest. Consider this a warning. If you don’t want to be spoiled, skip to the start of the next chapter. Ok, let’s do this.
There’s a Gaulem in the Gaulem Bay. Who’d have thought? He mentions that thanks to the advancement of ABT (which is artificial tissue indistinguishable from skin), one of the 9 participants is a Gaulem, a robot, and no one would be able to tell just by looking at them. “Oh this is going to be interesting” I thought. I had completely forgotten that one of the characters was a robot and I had no idea who it could be.
And then a lot of time passed. I entered the Gaulum Room on my first path about 6 hours in, but the payoff for the seed that the Gaulem planted didn’t bud until 22 hours later. In this timeline Sigma catches up with Alice as she’s about to commit suicide. Those infected with Radical-6 have their brain processing slowed down by the root of one sixth. A side effect of having the world appear as if everything is fast forwarding is the urge to kill oneself. Sigma finds Alice in time and wrestles the scalpel away from her, having his palm cut open in the process. Later when in the AB room with Luna, Sigma finally looks at his cut palm. A white liquid is oozing out of the wound. That’s not blood! With all the different timelines I jumped to in my 22 hours, I had forgotten about one of the characters being a robot, and never would I have guessed it was Sigma.
Except that it’s not! In order to learn the truth, Sigma agrees to have himself scanned by Luna. It turns out Sigma isn’t a robot, he just has cybernetic arms. This is a surprise to Sigma as he has no memory of ever needing to get replacements, and even remembers breaking his arm as a child. Still, what a fake-out. There wasn’t a robot in the group. It was just Sigma and his cybernetic arms. Boy I fell for that one. I thought the matter was resolved. I guess it’s because the next reveal didn’t hit until 7 hours later that I was able to put it out of mind.
One of the participants is a Gaulem after all. It’s Luna. The one who scanned me. The one who told Sigma about Asimov’s 3 laws of robotics. In retrospect I should have seen a lot of these reveals coming, but all I remembered going into this playthrough was who K is, and the truth behind Tenmyouji and Sigma. Now did the reveal hit me so strongly because I had forgotten about it from my first playthrough, or was it due to the time between the initiation of the mystery and its pay-off? Or did I just luck out and choose the paths that led to the gaulem reveal having its greatest impact?
The Intended Path
As I played, I kept coming back to the idea of the intended path. Which choices on the branching narrative chart would lead to the ideal storytelling experience? Which path would impart the right information at the right time? I marvelled at the work that would have gone into creating such a story. Making sure the right combination of characters go with Sigma in the right puzzle rooms to reveal the right pieces of knowledge needed to move the story forward, and how each round of the AB game would play out based on these combinations. The thing is, through the reveal I just told you about, I’ve learned that the order of things truly doesn’t matter. In fact, coming across a piece of information early on and then not having it pay off until almost 30 hours later can result in a stronger effect. In the end the player is going to travel down each path regardless, frantically searching for the keys to all the locked gates that start appearing in their way.
During a GDC talk, Kotaro Uchikoshi mentioned that VLR was inspired in part by a visual novel from the mid 90s called Komaitachi no Yoru. It’s a murder mystery. The player has the ability to name the killer right at the start, but if they cannot, the game continues, their choices leading to any number of bad endings. The information the player gains in these bad endings are clues. Clues that should lead a player eventually to be able to name the killer and get the good ending. The issue that Uchikoshi saw with Komaitachi no Yoru is that the information used to get to the good ending is not known by the main character, it’s only known by the player.
Hence why the player and main character are able to jump to different realities in VLR. Naming the killer in Komaitachi no Yoru is what we could call an invisible gate, but in VLR the gates are visible. The player will be working their way down a narrative path, a crisis will occur, and ‘To be continued’ will flash on the screen. Just like naming the killer, the player doesn’t have the information they need to continue, but because Sigma and the player can jump timelines due to the narrative flow chart, we can pursue another path, and once we have the knowledge we need, the black lock symbol will be replaced by a green book symbol, and we can continue down that path.
And since most of the character endings with their revelations are behind one of these locked gates, it doesn’t really matter the order the player goes through them, because the important reveals are meted out at the appropriate time. This explains why so many of the answers the game has to its questions are backloaded in the last few hours. Oh, and despite the entire design of VLR being a response to the way Komaitachi no Yoru works, there are invisible gates as well. Luna’s ending is behind one, as is Phi’s. Seeing the player has to write down codes to access these final two endings, my guess is that Uchikoshi wanted to test that the player was paying attention, and not just relying on Sigma’s gift to remember what happened in alternate timelines.
Conclusion
But despite the visible and invisible gates, when I hit credits, I was more than satisfied with Virtue’s Last Reward. After my first playthrough VLR felt like a setup for a larger story, and that too many questions were left unanswered. Replaying it, I do not find that to be the case at all. All the questions I wrote down near the start of my playthrough, the ones I listed earlier, were answered. The only questions I have left are “Who is Phi”, and “Just what happened in the Mars Mission Simulation test facility”, and I am confident that the final game in the series, Zero Time Dilemma will provide me with those answers. VLR didn’t pack the emotional punch that the DS version of 9 Persons, 9 Hours, 9 Doors did, but it shines just as brightly through the care it puts into its narrative flow chart, and how its many many reveals are portioned out over its lengthy runtime. Although I might be more forgiving of the lingering plot threads now as I know there’s another game in the series to answer all of my questions. Thanks for watching.
But what do you think? Were you satisfied with your path through Virtue’s Last Reward? Which reveal hit you the hardest? Let me know down in the comments. I would now like to thank the interviews and analysis that helped inform this video: Narrative Design in Virtue's Last Reward by GDC, and I Love Zero Escape by Hoeyboey. Links to both are in the description. So, what’s next? Well, just like with my 999 video, I don’t want to jump right into Zero Time Dilemma, so I thought I’d play a shorter game in the interim. The next video will be on Persona 4: Golden. That was a joke, I say, a joke. About the game being short. The next video will be on Persona 4: Golden. I started playing the game last year and while I haven’t returned for a few months, I was a ways into it, so I don’t think it’ll take too long to complete seeing how quickly I got through the 30+ hours of VLR. I hope you’ll join me for that one. Finally, if you enjoyed the video, I’d appreciate a like, a comment, and sharing it with your friends, and until next time, I hope you’re all having a wonderful day.
