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.
