Virtue's Last Reward (2017) Answered My Questions

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.

Deus Ex (2000): The Importance of Quick Save

Older PC games were wild. Developers had all these ideas, and down there on the keyboard were as many buttons as one needed to be able to translate those ideas into gameplay. As time went on a standard control scheme for most genres emerged, but to move to that standardisation, there were growing pains. Take Deus Ex for example. It uses what now is the classic WSAD to move. It even uses Q and E to lean, space to jump, and X to crouch… but then things get weird. Reloading your weapon is semi-colon. Zooming in with a sniper scope is left square bracket, and the most important button in the game, quick save, is the plus key on the numpad. Because this is a PC game, buttons can be remapped, but there’s something compelling about a strange control scheme, especially when you get used to it. What starts off as nonsensical or unconventional morphs into a sense of uniqueness and identity over time. Deus Ex is like that. It seems to take itself rather seriously, but the plot is pulpy nonsense, bringing in elements of the Illuminati, AI constructs, and Area 51. The gameplay is infiltration and violence, but the immersive sim nature of the game allows for unexpected outcomes while playing. It’s that unexpected nature of the game that interests me. Exploring the immersive sim aspect of Deus Ex, in conjunction with how much I used the quick save and quick load keys. That’s the crux of what this video is about. It’s just going to take a little while to get there. Enjoy.

My Experience Playing Deus Ex

Deus Ex is a game of choices. Even in the year 2000, that was not revolutionary. All games are technically games of choice. The player is making decision after decision, often split-second decisions. Success or failure is mostly decided by the merit of these decisions. So how is Deus Ex different? It’s in how it was created. In an interview developer Warren Spector talks about how he played an early build of Thief: The Dark Project, a game designed around stealth. He came across a section he could not defeat by sneaking. He wished that he had some combat options to get past this hurdle, and then be able to return to the playstyle required. Obviously since Thief is built around stealth, the development team were adamant in not giving the players combat options because they feared that most players would not choose to play stealthily. Even though Warren Spector had been mulling over the idea for Deus Ex in his head for years, this feels like the genesis of what made the game so unique when it was released.

And yet it’s not as simple as Deus Ex being a merging of stealth and FPS gameplay. There’s RPG elements in there too. When the game starts, the player is asked to spend experience points to mold the protagonist JC Denton into the kind of super soldier they’d like him to be. Such an upfront decision is why I’ve played a lot of RPGs with walkthroughs over the years. I have this fear of spending my points poorly. Considering how long most RPGs are, it’s always weighed on me that I could get 30 hours into a game and find out that not only have I stopped myself from progressing further, but I just had a sub-optimal 30 hours. I started Deus Ex with a walkthrough for this reason. I wanted to set myself up right and understand how the game worked. I stopped following it just after JC returns from Hong Kong, thinking that I understood the game by this point, and that I’d be able to enjoy the rest of it on my own. It certainly helped me build my character successfully. See, the RPG elements are not only in the choices the player makes to specialise their Denton, but throughout the game, the player discovers aug canisters (augmentation upgrades giving Denton’s nano-infused body additional powers). Each canister allows the player to choose from two augmentations, and then similarly to JC’s skills, these augs can be upgraded throughout the game to become more effective. Augs don’t enter the game until after the first level, Liberty Island, which while imposing as an introduction to Deus Ex, is there to give the player an idea of the type of playstyles they can choose from. Do they want to play lethally, or non-lethally?

This is the appeal of Deus Ex. Does the player want to play Cyberpunk Thief, or Cyberpunk Half-life? I find non-lethal play more rewarding, so I decided that was what I would go with. The thing about Deus Ex though is you don’t have to “stay in your lane”. While I started my game trying my best to play non-lethally, as the game kept going I found myself in situations where violence felt like the appropriate response. Whether I was becoming tired of playing stealthily, whether it was who I was up against, or whether it was how the game just kept going, I soon played Deus Ex in a hybrid style, and I have a feeling most players (at least most first-time players) adopt this approach.

Even using lethal force, I never became comfortable with how Deus Ex plays. It always felt like the plan I had to overcome the obstacle in front of me was wrong. There were multiple times that I thought the story was moving towards a climax only for the game to continue. This happened when I went to Hong Kong, at the New York shipyards, in the Paris Cathedral, and then at Area 51. At least in Area 51 I was right in it being the final level. Then there are the endings. When the player first enters the bunkers of the base, there are two options for end game, either plunge the world back into darkness Snake Pliskin style, or kill Bob Page and let the Illuminati take over the world again. Both sounded like terrible ideas and I was afraid all the time I spent in this game world was going to end unsatisfyingly.

And it kind of did. There is a third ending once the player reaches the final areas. Helios, the AI that was inadvertently created by the player wants JC to merge with it, giving a dispassionate machine that cares not for power the job of guiding mankind forward. Now this idea didn’t sound all too great either, but at this point it seemed the lesser of 3 evils, and as this is a cyberpunk game, the science fiction of an AI taking over the world felt the most interesting to me. Warren Spector said he wanted the final boss of Deus Ex to be a choice about the fate of the world rather than a boss fight, and he wanted the choice to say more about the player than it did about JC Denton. I don’t know if I’d call it successful, but after hours of playing through level after level wanting the game to finally end, such a choice was the narrative motivation I needed as a player to be excited enough to see the game through (you know, if I wasn’t going to complete it anyway for this critique).

Quick Save and Choice

Before I get into why that is, I want to mention one other positive that I marvelled at while playing through Deus Ex. Even as a person who makes mental allowances for old graphics technology in older games (mainly cause I was there to see it happen), Deus Ex does not look good. It’s not able to populate its spaces, and as large as some areas are, they are made smaller by having to carve them out into separate sections separated by load screens. Despite that I always marvelled at the vibe of the game. Through the sound design and architecture, I was able to feel immersed in the areas I was playing through. Whether it was the bar at Hell’s Kitchen, the streets of Hong Kong, or the Paris Cathedral. Facilities like The Ocean Lab or the Vandenberg Air Force Base felt large and foreboding despite that not being the case. Heck the first level, Liberty Island is a great showcase for just how large and imposing these levels can be until you start exploring them. Deus Ex’s scale is an illusion, with the game’s staggering amount of levels adding to its length more than the actual size of any of them.

And of course the frequent load screens serve to make the levels feel larger than they actually are. That and how the internal architecture is often spatially different compared to what the level looks like from the outside. Yes the levels are cut into smaller chunks in order for the game to be able to handle them, but the most frequent load screens the player will see will be self inflicted. I’m talking about quick saving and quick loading. We’re finally getting to what the title of this video promised. So why use the quick save and quick load so much? Ideally it’s used in a safe space so that if the next section of gameplay goes wrong, a player doesn’t have to restart the level. It’s a self-created checkpoint. Since the player has control over it, it has other uses as well. Late in the game with dwindling resources, I would quick save before using a lockpick or multi-tool to see whether or not the rewards behind the locked door or alarm system were worth using the resource. If not I quick loaded and moved on. I would also use this trick to avoid rooms full of enemies that featured rewards I wasn’t interested in. Why waste the bullets if I didn’t need to? For a game that allows the player to approach each problem in a multitude of ways, the quick save / quick load keys allow for experimentation, to see what approach serves the moment best.

This was a shock to the development team during testing. They were hoping that players would pick a playstyle early on and stick to that, but found instead that before each choice the player would save the game, try something, load, try something else, load, maybe try a third thing, then load and pick the best path forward. I guess you shouldn’t be shocked if you give a player an overabundance of choice and then they decide to sample everything before making a decision. It also differs from how I’ve used quick save and quick load in many other games. In Half-life or Thief, it’s because I have to keep trying to get past a difficult challenge in the game. I haven’t worked out the optimal way through (or in the worst case, I quick saved in a bad position, and might need to restart the level). In Deus Ex, it’s because there are multiple ways to approach every problem, so while I could keep attacking the obstacle in one particular way until I make it through (which I had to do on occasion due to an ill-timed quick save), it’s often more adventagous to try and approach the problem with a different mindset altogether.

The Inconsistency of the Immersive Sim

The whole point of stealth is that the player engages on their own terms. So I have a question. Aside from the high stakes tension of reloading a dangerous save, does the ability to quick save remove tension from gameplay? If stealth is all about choosing the right moment, is that undercut by the player having a safety net to fall back on if things don’t go the way they planned? If the levels are giant puzzles to solve with multiple pathways, guard patrols, and thanks to the immersive sim aspect of the game, a score of unconventional solutions, does the quick save diminish the enjoyment of the simulation?

Before I answer I would like to point out that this thought exercise has nothing to do with difficulty or accessibility. People should be able to play games however they want, with all the allowances that let them enjoy their experience. Now let’s talk about the immersive sim aspect of Deus Ex. Instead of the levels being a clockwork mechanism that the player can work out a perfect pathway though, Deus Ex is more complicated. Yes the levels are giant puzzles to solve, but each giant puzzle is filled up with small puzzles. Small puzzles with multiple solutions. Gaining access to any room or getting rid of enemy resistance can be accomplished multiple ways, but it goes further than just sneaking through or going in guns blazing. The point of the immersive sim is to build in a bunch of systems that simulate realism. There’s a joke that you know the game is an immersive sim if you can go into the bathroom, turn on all the taps and flush the toilet. These systems can interact and react to each other in unpredictable and fascinating ways. I think this is the joy at the heart of the genre and why so many people love playing these games, the unpredictability of playing around with such systems. It’s also at the heart of my frustration with Deus Ex.

If a level is a giant puzzle box filled with smaller puzzles, what does that say about the game and the genre when all of the solutions are inconsistent? Yes I used quick save and quick load to see if using a resource was a net positive, or if it was worth exploring a room full of enemies, but the majority of my saving and loading was in trying to execute an idea. I never had any issue working my brain around a solution to any problem in front in me. What I came up against time and time again is that the unpredictability of the systems in this Immersive Sim meant that no matter how good my idea was, no matter how long I had played the game for, I could never be positive that my plan would be executed without error. I think that would be fine if I wanted to try something unconventional, but no, this was every single time I wanted to take a step forward. Now perhaps that’s not nearly the problem I’m making it out to be because I was consistently moving forward. I finished the game after all. I was able to make this video, but when I think back on my experience with Deus Ex, yes I can recall the vibe, the sound design, particular levels and that choice at the end, but mostly I think about quick saving and quick loading.

Conclusion

A couple of years ago I read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. The book plays with time, and it’s one of those stories where you only have the full picture of the narrative after you finish reading it, so it almost requires a second readthrough to understand what’s going on. I feel similarly about Deus Ex on a mechanical level. I felt that way about The Witcher 3 as well. “Now that I’ve played through this and know how the game works, a second playthrough would be a lot more enjoyable because I now know what I’m doing”. Sadly, if I were to play Deus Ex again, I doubt things would be different. Yes I know more about how I’d want to build JC Denton up from the start, with which skills and augs to choose. Yes I know how I’d approach each level, where to go to complete my objectives and the best way to do so. I might even play around with the game a bit and see if I can change some of the narrative outcomes. The point is, I’d be better equipped to play the game and have a better time playing the game, but I think my core experience would be exactly the same. Thanks to the unpredictability of the simulation, I’d still be quick saving before each step forward, and quick loading when my attempts to put my plan into action enivitalby fail. Plus Deus Ex was just too damn long. I’ll say this, now that I’ve completed the original, I’m more excited to play through all the other games in the series. Yeah, even Invisible war, even Mankind Divided. Maybe sometime in the next couple of years. Thanks for watching.

Questions, thank yous, and what’s next

But what are your thoughts? If you’re one of the many folks who love Deus Ex, how do you get past the inconsistency of execution? What ending did you pick, and what is your reasoning behind it? What is your preferred playstyle? Let me know down in the comments. I’d like to take a moment to thank the developer interviews and game analysis that helped inform this video. Let's Play Deus Ex with Warren Spector, Sheldon Pacotti and Chris Norden, GDC’s Deus Ex Port Mortem, I’ve Played Deus Ex. She Hasn’t. Now We’re Playing It Together by Kirk Hamilton and Leigh Alexander, and Deus Ex - An Entire Series Retrospective and Analysis by NeverKnowsBest. Links to these works are in the description. At the end of my last video I said I wanted to take a break before I tackled Virtue’s Last Reward. I have now taken that break. Coming up next will be the continuation of my playthrough of the Zero Escape series. I’m looking forward to revisiting this one, so I hope you will all join me for it. 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.

9 hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors (2017) is not what it once was

I’m going to start this video on the first game in the Zero Escape trilogy by telling you a story about playing No More Heroes on the Nintendo Wii. Before the first boss, Player character Travis Touchdown is walking down a long hallway when he receives a phone call from the girl he’s after, Sylvia Crystal. I could only just make out her voice. It didn’t take me long to comprehend that she was talking to me through the Wiimote speaker. I smiled as I lifted the controller to my ear like a cellphone. Then she started yelling and I had to pull it away. The rest of the conversation took place and I continued playing the game with a huge grin. It was such a small interaction with the Wiimote but to this day I think fondly of that interaction, and remember No More Heroes as a great experience largely because of it. So much so, that when I saw it was ported to the PS3, and then heard about it coming to Steam this year I shook my head. I said to myself, “It’s great that more people are going to be able to play it, but without the Wii, they won’t be able to have the same memorable experience I had”. Now, if such a small interaction affected the way I consider ports of No More Hereos, what about a game like 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors, where the emotional climax is built around the hardware of the Nintendo DS? That’s what I’m going to be talking about in this video. I’ll start by explaining why my initial playthough of 999 on the DS in 2012 was so impactful, and what I think of the changes that had to be made to the 2017 remake in order for it to work on a single screen. Let’s get to it.

Why 999 made such an impression

You know, I cannot remember what made me pick up 999. It might have been one of those listacles. “5 games with excellent stories that you have to play on the Nintendo DS”. Something like that. All I know is I got a copy of the game on a whim, and I was hooked. I mean I’m already predisposed to liking a good story in a videogame, and I will put up with a lot of tedious gameplay if I find the story, and more importantly, the characters and themes engaging. As 999 is a visual novel, I used a walkthrough to make sure I was making the right choices and going down the right path, and the guide I was following covered every ending, spacing them out in a way that the writer thought was narratively intriguing. It worked. I made my way through the bad endings, the normal ending, and then the true ending. Before writing this paragraph I went back and had a look at the guide to see if I replicated the order of endings it laid out this time around. I thought it would be cool if 9 years after originally playing the game on the DS, I subconsciously picked the same path. It would make it more intriguing when I finally start talking about morphogenetic fields. Sadly in this replay not only did I play the bad endings in a different order, but I even got the dummy ending before unlocking the normal ending and then the true ending. Sheesh.

Let’s talk about morphogenetic fields. Honestly, they’re the heart of the game. It’s a theory by a biologist named Rupert Sheldrake. It’s similar to the ideas of the collective unconscious or that humans can share information through fields similar magnetism. Here’s a simplistic example. I’ve only recently started solving the New York Times crossword. According to the idea of the morphogenetic field I should be solving the crossword as late in the day as possible. The more people who solve the crossword, the more the answers to the crossword will be spread through the morphogenetic field, allowing those who haven’t solved it yet to have an easier time of it. The answers are out there in the field, and are able to be plucked out of the air by those staring at the clues. Now, imagine if a person with a lot of money wanted to prove the morphogenetic field existed, and he wanted to do it because of the power and control one could have if they could influence what was broadcasted or received through such a field.

Gentarou Hongou is the CEO of Cradle Pharmecuticals. In his younger days he was a participant in the Nonary Game, a sick escapade run by a billionaire and his cohorts to have people that were deep in debt solve their way out of an escape room in order to save their lives. Hongou wanted to prove the existence of the morphogenetic field theory in part to cure his prosopagnosia, a condition where the afflicted are not able to recognise human faces. Cradle kidnapped 18 child siblings, and held a Nonary Game at two locations, the idea being that through the threat of death, the kids in one location would be insprired to solve the puzzles and free themselves, and then transmit that knowledge to their siblings in the second location through the morphogenetic field. The game was interrupted by a detective, but while he was able to rescue the other children, one girl was left behind, forced to solve a puzzle in an incinerator or be burned to death. She didn’t make it. That girl’s name was Akane Kurashiki.

9 years later the player finds themselves in a new Nonary game as Junpei. One of the participants is a young woman named Akane Kurashiki, who Junpei recognises as a childhood friend. Through the Nonary Game, the player chooses what doors to go in as well as which characters to travel with as they try and find door 9 to escape the game with their lives. If the player chooses certain doors, Akane will feel feverish and have to rest. These pathways result in most of the characters being murdered and Junpei suffering an untimely demise. In the DS version of 999, the bad ending is saved to the player’s file, and the game begins again. By the end of my final playthrough, I knew most of the solutions to the puzzles off by heart (especially the code to the door in the room Junpei wakes up in). Repetition breeds familiarity. Having to replay the game multiple times was a criticism of 999, and in the sequel Virtue’s Last Reward, a narrative flow chart was introduced, so that at any time a player could teleport to an earlier node and follow a different path. For the remake of 999, this flow chart was added, removing the tedium of having to replay puzzle rooms over and over again. Here’s the thing though, in Virtue’s Last Reward, the ability to hop around the timeline is baked into the narrative, and in the DS version of 999, having to replay the game over and over again is the same.

At this point I need to explain how 999 was designed with the Nintendo DS in mind. In fact, the game’s twist is built around it. It has to do with the morphogenetic field, and how the text is divvied up between the top and bottom screens of the DS. For the whole game dialogue from all the characters is displayed on the top screen while Junpei’s inner thoughts, reading like the narration of a novel is displayed on the bottom screen. It’s only right before the final puzzle of the true ending do we learn that the bottom screen has not been Junpei at all. The original Nonary game was successful at proving the ability to manipulate others through the morphogenetic field, only not across space, but across time. As Akane made her way through the Nonary game as a child she linked up with Junpei 9 years in the future. Everything the player has read about Junpei’s thoughts were actually Akane’s as she’s guiding Junpei safely through the Nonary game. Since Akane is the bottom screen, that means that every puzzle Junpei solved is actually Akane showing him the solution. All except for the final puzzle, she was never able to solve that on her own, and that’s why she died.

This is why when the player accompanies Akane down a path that results in a bad end, she becomes feverish. Junpei is heading down a pathway that results in Akane not being able to solve the final puzzle and so in this timeline, she no longer exists. Without her guidance, the Nonary game goes awry and Junpei and many of the others die too. That’s why restarting the game is so important. Every bad end results in Akane retracing her steps after her projection didn’t work out, and following another path. That’s why the player is able to so easily solve the puzzles they’ve been through many times before, because Akane has also been through them many times before. When this was revealed I was floored at 999 using the two screens of the DS in such a thematic manner. It’s an effective twist because it changed the way I had perceived the whole game up to that point, and yet, 999 wasn’t finished with using its two screens in service of emotional impact.

Akane has been helping Junpei solve every puzzle up to this point but she was never able to solve the final puzzle. Now with the player at that same puzzle, it’s time for Junpei to return the favour. The final puzzle, appearing on the bottom screen is upside down. On the top screen is an image of young Akane crying her eyes out. The player needs to turn their DS upside down in order to solve the puzzle. Suddenly Junpei on the top screen is able to help Akane on the bottom screen. The player solves the puzzle, Akane lives, and her and her brother Aoi are able to live their lives planning out the Nonary game that must take place 9 years in the future for Akane to live. This use of the hardware of the Nintendo DS to aid the storytelling of 999, to give its ending such impact is why the game made such an impression on me, and why I knew I had to play Virtue’s Last Reward. I did. It was excellent and it became one of my favourite games, but that’s for another video. When Zero Time Dilemma finally came out in 2016 I felt I needed to replay the first two games to prime me for the final game in the trilogy, and wouldn’t you know it, The Nonary Game collection came out the next year. By this point I knew I had to make videos on every game, so I’ve held out until now to play them all. All this time I was worried about how a game that built its twist around the hardware of the DS was going to fare on other systems, and now having played the remake, I see I was right to worry.

How does the remake compare?

Let’s start with the positives of the remake. The art is upscaled, and it felt like more animations were added to the characters. There’s voice acting, and it’s pretty good. I think it added appropriate weight to certain moments and I like the casting choices. The flowchart is a trickier addition to praise. It’s true it made the game a lot easier to play. I appreciated only having to play the first puzzle room the one time. I appreciated seeing which lanes of the chart I still had to explore, and when I realised how to interpret the lock and key images, I appreciated how easy it was to enter a puzzle room, experience the new dialogue options, and then leave for the next room, but looking back on my playthrough now I can see how thematically unfulfilling it is. Having to replay everything for new information was part of the point. It makes the ending have more resonance. It’s one of those quality of life vs thematic importance decisions, and I can only assume that the ease of play was more important to the dev team than forcing the player back through the game multiple times in order to give greater weight to the twist. I can understand that. It could be rewritten to make sense too. Instead of going back to the start each time there’s a bad end, Akane could just jump to a choice point, but to my knowledge, this change wasn’t acknowledged. The bigger problem is that the lack of two screens robs the climactic moment of meaning.

The remake does try to accommodate the original’s layout with two modes the player can switch through, adventure mode (which is the default) and novel mode. Adventure mode is Junpei’s top screen, novel mode are Akane’s thoughts. The player can switch between them with the press of a button but I never did because I didn’t realise what was going on with the two modes as I was playing. The game started me off in adventure mode so I just assumed that they had changed the twist to work within one screen. I actually thought that everytime the wavy blue lines appeared and Junpei’s voice went through a filter, it was alluding to Akane’s influence from the past. Oh how wrong I was. Seeing that the novel mode is Akane’s thoughts, and we only get to hear Junpei when he’s talking, the solution reached is that more dialogue would be added to Junpei voicing his thoughts as the player makes their way through the game. A lot of players found this solution cumbersome and quite unnatural. I find it odd that I didn’t. At the time I did think that certain sections of the game were longwinded but I just put that down to my inexperience with visual novels, and that there would be an overabundance of what I found to be obvious exposition. Also, I talk to myself all the time. Like all the time, so if this is considered unnatural, I certainly did not pick up on it.

Because most players would not be checking out novel mode as they wouldn’t see a reason to (until the game forces it, which it does very infrequently until the ending), and that Junpei voices a lot of what would be covered through Akane’s eyes in the original game, it’s obvious to me now that the blue wavy lines are the few times when Junpei is able to think to himself without Akane’s influence. So in this remake here’s what we have. The player is able to switch between the two screens of the game, but because it rarely forces this perspective shift, most players won’t spend time in novel mode. To counteract this Junpei is going to voice his thoughts a lot more, and using a voice filter and wavy blue lines will note when Junpei is actually thinking on his own. Here’s the issues I see with this solution. Having Junpei voice many of the observations made on the bottom screen through Akane’s eyes, dampens the shock of the twist when the player finds out Akane has been solving the puzzles for the player all this time. Although we have been playing as Akane influencing Junpei, this isn’t as easily made aware to us. Even knowing the twist I was questioning just what the significance of the wavy blue lines were because often Junpei’s thoughts didn’t seem to be that important or revelatory. Now imagine if I hadn’t originally played the game on the DS. I feel I’d have no idea what was going on.

Eventually the difference between the two modes and the two screens is made explicit. In the ending of the game, adventure mode is changed to ‘Junpei vision’ and novel mode is changed to ‘Akane vision’. The game can’t pull the same trick it did with the final puzzle either. Player’s can’t rotate their monitors or televisions 180 degrees, nor would they need to with only one screen available. I understand that the final puzzle was not going to be as emotionally resonant due to this change, but I have no idea why they changed the puzzle itself. In the DS version, it was a Sudoku. Thematically brilliant. A puzzle with 9 rows, 9 columns, 9 squares to cap off 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors. So what do we have instead? A puzzle where each surrounding square needs to equal the digital root of 9. I haven’t explained digital roots yet, but they’re a big deal in this game. Basically a number will be broken down into its separate digits and added together until we reach one digit. For instance the number 39 would be broken into 3+9, which equals 12, and then 1 + 2, which equals 3, so the digital root of 39, is 3. But the digital root isn’t the only point of the final puzzle. The player also has to spell out a word with the tiles at the bottom of the screen. The word it spells is “password”, and then once the puzzle is solved, the player is asked to enter a password. I took a random shot in the dark, and entered 9. It turned out to be correct. Compared to the beautiful simplicity of the Sudoku, this new puzzle just let me cold during the game’s climax, and there was no image of a young frightened Akane to remind me of what I was solving the puzzle for in the first place.

Conclusion

And without that emotional resonance, I think the ending of the game, in which Junpei, Clover, Snake, and Lotus are driving off in order to catch up with Santa and Akane bothered me more than it did back on the DS. I wanted closure, and instead all I got was a tease for a new story. That’s how I feel about this replay. Unsatisfied. I enjoyed my time playing it. I like the puzzles, I like all the discussions about interesting yet odd topics, but the remake felt like I was kept at arm’s length, and I wonder if my prior experience is to blame. If I had not played the DS version 9 years ago, would I think more highly of this remake, or would I think less of it? Just like any port of No More Heroes will be compared to my original experience playing it on the Wii, any playthrough of 999 will be compared to that original playthrough on the DS. I can’t say this remake is bad, because I still enjoyed my time with it, but I will say that The Nonary Games remake of 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 doors, is not what it once was. Thanks for watching.

Questions, thank yous, and what’s next

But what are your thoughts? If you’ve played both versions, how do you regard the remake? If you’ve only played the remake, how did the story, and the twist affect you? Should games that are built around unique hardware just never be remade? I’d love to hear all about it down in the comments. As always I would like to thank everyone whose work inspired this video. Famitsu’s interview with Kotaro Uchikoshi translated by Sceneryrecalled, Kayjulers’ “999 - The pinnacle of immersive storytelling”, and ItsyourpalJacob’s “999 Port - Lost in translation”. Links to these works are down in the description. So, what’s next? Well I’m not going to jump right into Virtue’s Last Reward. Because not everyone watching will be interested in my thoughts on the Zero Escape games, I thought it best to break up the series with other critiques inbetween. So earlier in the year I played through Planescape: Torment and was happy to have finally completed such a classic. I aim to do that again. Another game I’ve attempted so many times over the years. A touchstone for so much of modern game design that it feels ridiculous that I haven’t made a video on it yet. I’m going to be playing 2000s Deus Ex. The original. I hope you join me for that one, and then we’ll get to Virtue’s Last Reward. Finally, if you enjoyed the video, I would appreciate a like, a comment, or sharing it with your friends, and until next time, I hope you’re all having a wonderful day.

Why I Didn’t Enjoy Playing Outer Wilds (2019)

Even though the player in Outer Wilds is trapped in a time loop, they are not trapped in a clockwork solar system. This solar system is messy. Planets morph and change, and while one would expect everything to act the same each time through, it doesn’t. Oh the end result is always the same 22 minutes in with the sun going supernova, but there are always slight differences each loop. Upon waking, the probe seen overhead will shoot in a new direction and that’s just the beginning. Whether or not a player will enjoy their time with Outer Wilds is dependent on how curious they are about the extent of micro changes within a macro framework, and whether that level of curiosity and adventure is enough to propel them to find the answers to all of the games’ secrets and to sustain them as they work towards those goals. Based off the title of this video, you would be correct in assuming that my curiosity and sense of adventure was lacking as I made my way to the end of the game, and exploring the reasons behind this lack is what I’ll be addressing. I’ll begin by making some critical observations about Outer Wilds based on my time playing through it, and then in the second half of the video I’ll be examining my feelings of the entire experience more closely. Let’s get started.

My experience playing Outer Wilds

All progress in Outer Wilds is self-motivated. There are no markers to follow except the ones the player enables themselves. Every problem has a solution, and my mistake early on was thinking that I would find upgrades as I played. I mean developer Alex Beachum has talked about being inspired by The Legend of Zelda series (and I did just play through Bloodstained). I thought that my suit or ship would be enhanced, allowing me to walk through ghost matter, to withstand the electricity of Giants Deep, and to survive the Anglerfish of Dark Bramble. What I came to understand over many gruelling hours of trial and error, was that this is not the case. There is no upgrade hidden on a planet that the player will take back with them through the time loop. Well ok, there is, but it’s an abstraction. The upgrade is knowledge. The more the player explores, the more they follow the rumours on their ship’s computer, and the more Nomai writing they decipher, the more the world starts to make sense. The Nomai’s notes hint toward solutions that may require a leap in logic, but everything the player needs to complete the game is there from their first voyage out among the stars. For most of us, and for me especially, it’s just going to take dozens upon dozens of time loops before that knowledge seeps in.

Part of this learning is because of time. The Hourglass Twins and Brittle Hollow, the two planets that require the greatest exploration (as these are the planets that the Nomai built cities on) are changing over the course of each time loop. Sand from the Ash Twin is being sucked up over to Ember Twin, burying the planet’s secrets inch by inch. Meanwhile over on Brittle Hollow the volcanic moon is pelting down fire rocks on the planet’s surface, causing chunks to break apart and be sucked through the black hole at the planet’s core. While exploration of Ember Twin is time based due to the rising sands, Brittle Hollow’s destruction is random each time loop, meaning it can be a matter of luck whether or not the areas the player wants to explore will be accessible this time around. It took me a long time to learn that the greatest sense of accomplishment in Outer Wilds is achieved by setting a goal at the start of a time loop (often by reviewing the ship’s computer), and then working towards completing that goal. While the changing nature of some of the planets impeded such goals, slowly chipping away at what I wanted to accomplish until it was done was always possible, even when it felt like the simulation didn’t want to co-oporate.

Eventually I learned about the nature of the Ash Twin Project and what the time loop actually is. By linking with the Nomai statue at the start of the game all my space farer’s memories are being transmitted to the project, and when the sun goes supernova, the energy of the blast powers the project and sends all those memories back in time 22 minutes into the heads of those who are linked. My head kind of hurts wondering just how this works, because it doesn’t feel like actual time travel. I understand it as a straight line of consequence. Each new loop of the game, all the memories, all the knowledge gained is sent back, so my character wakes up at the campfire knowing everything that their previous incarnations went through, but that’s what confuses me. The final time my Hearthian wakes up, all the knowledge of the previous lives is dumped all at once. This would happen everytime of course, because it’s a linear process. It just feels like such a dump would send someone mad, especially taking into consideration all the memories of painful and horrific death. Perhaps Hearthians are just made of sterner stuff than us humans. They certainly have a flair for adventure and scientific exploration that I know I lack.

That’s a lesson that the game slowly taught me. A lot more slowly than it should have, but what can I say? I’m stubborn and it takes me a while to understand concepts. Seeing that my character can die and just start again, there’s no point whatsoever in being safe. The spirit of the Hearthians is that of adventure, and I needed to rise to meet that challenge. I can’t let a little thing like death stand in my way. Arguably this was a lot easier about two thirds through my playthrough when Gabbro taught me to meditate. It’s a lot less stressful to be able to peacefully reset the time loop then look for ways to end it violently. That spirit of adventure is what allowed me to access the Quantum Tower on Brittle Hollow, to reach the High Energy Lab, and to find my way to the core of The Interloper. I needed to boldly go where no Hearthian has gone before, and if that didn’t work, I could always just die, adjust my trajectory, and try again.

The goal I thought I was ultimately working towards the whole game was to either stop the sun from going supernova, or to leave the solar system with all the Hearthians on board. I later learned that the only way out was to use the crashed Nomai vessel in Dark Bramble, and that I would be leaving all the others behind. This did not sit right with me. What I only learned later is that rescuing the others wouldn’t have made a difference. It’s not just this solar system’s sun that’s going supernova, it’s everything. Outer Wilds takes place at the end of the universe, and there isn’t a restaurant in sight. The only move forward is to use the warp core from the Ash Twin Project, power up the Nomai vessel in Dark Bramble, and use the coordinates from the probe to travel to the eye of the universe. This is where things got strange.

The Nomai theorised that something special might happen if a consciousness was ever to come in contact with the eye. I got the feeling that my character suddenly existed outside of time and space, outside the universe that was about to blink out of existence. Using the consciousness within it, all the Hearthian astronauts, and the last remaining Nomai were either transported to this place, or recreated. Whichever it is, they are here, and it’s time for a song. It’s time to create something beautiful out of nothing, and in this place, this communal act of creation not only results in music, but in a new universe. The credits roll after our character is obliterated by the big bang. After the credits, 14.3 billion years later, we see the beginnings of a new solar system, with signs of new life. The cycle continues.

Ultimately the game felt hopeful in spite of catastrophic calamity. The Nomai were wiped out by an errant comet containing the deadly substance ghost matter. Years later the Hearthians were able to use the Nomai’s research and technology to further their own understanding, allowing one Hearthian to flee the heat death of the universe. In this new space, with help from those who came before, the player succeeds in creating something new, something they will never live to see. The reason this touched me is that I’m feeling an overwhelming despair these days about the state of our world, and our future. I don’t see good times ahead, mainly because I don’t see us doing enough to solve the problems we’re facing as a species. I feel like we’re on a similar precipice as the character we’re playing. Like we don’t have long left. Maybe like a sun going supernova, our problems can’t be fixed. It’s little solace knowing that if we do not survive, perhaps in the future what we’ve accomplished as a species might help others create something new, but a little solace is better than nothing. Maybe that’s enough.

What I didn’t like about Outer Wilds

I’ve heard it said that the strength of a story is reliant on its ending, and for me the ending of Outer Wilds redeemed the frustration it took to reach it. Seeing how beloved the game has ended up being, that might be an odd statement, but I know that a lot of you clicked on this video to understand why I didn’t enjoy this masterpiece, and it’s time for me to get into my reasoning. To begin with, I am not scientifically minded. I can appreciate math in the abstract. I can understand the joy of problem solving, and I also share a curiosity for the unknown, but the concepts of math and science have never come easily for me. I think that I was not able to fully appreciate what Outer Wilds is and what it accomplishes because I was not understanding the level of accuracy that went into this solar system simulation.

A lot of the video essays on Outer Wilds gush about the physics of the game. How the orbits work, how gravity works, and how the game tracks and handles the quirks of all the planets no matter where the player is in the system. There’s the pocket dimensions of Dark Bramble, the random bombardment of Brittle Hollow, and then there’s the Quantum Moon (an off-shoot of the eye, where all the quantum rocks come from in the first place). Some concepts were more easily understood than others. For instance, landing on the Quantum Moon and travelling to its secret sixth location was a highlight of the game for me. I felt like I had understood the lessons taught about this scientific principle in a way that never really clicked with flying around the planets in my lander or with my jetpack. Luckily in those cases, hours upon hours interacting with thrust, orientation, and gravity taught me a lot about how such systems operate through game feel rather than understanding the science.

In my Witcher 3 video, I talked about how in order to not become overwhelmed by the scope of that game’s open world, focusing on one quest or one goal at a time, and enjoying the moment became the path to success. That is also true in Outer Wilds. Earlier I talked about self-motivation. When I decided on a course of action, I would often leave a gaming session with a happy feeling, like I had made significant progress. There were times when I had the wrong idea or had no idea how to proceed next, but as long as I had a question I wanted answered, and remembered to look at the rumour wall and map of the solar system to find out where I could find such answers, I was able to move forward. However, Outer Wilds doesn’t make this as easy as it could be.

I take responsibility for having to be pushed to be adventurous. It’s a personal problem. While I enjoy exploration in games, and I am curious about the world, I’m also scared of the unknown, of leaving my comfort zone and trying new things. You would think that after a lifetime of playing games, of understanding how easy it is to try again through lives, continues, or checkpoints (especially in a game with a time loop), that I’d be more disposed to throwing caution to the wind and trying something just to see if it works. That is not the case. Failure still terrifies me. It’s one of life’s hurdles that I have to keep working on overcoming, and yes, it easily seeps its way into playing videogames. I think part of Outer Wilds’ appeal is the mixture of self-motivated discovery and exploration paired with how easy it is to start again. How the little victories of discovering a new Nomai wall to translate can be just as satisfying as answering the big questions the game poses.

But accessing the answers to these big questions was often beyond my comprehension. I made it to the Quantum Moon by myself. I reached its sixth location by myself, but every other significant answer I had to Google. Sometimes I felt silly, like understanding how to warp to the sun station. The answer is so easy, and yet, I never would have thought to travel to the sun tower on Ash Twin before it’s excavated. Can you believe earlier on, I thought I might have to master jetpacking and fly through the cactuses? My attempts did not go well. Or how about how to get to the core of Ash Twin? The roof is broken so if the player walks onto the warp panel while the sandstorm in overhead, they get sucked up onto Ember Twin. I don’t think I would have ever figured out that all I needed to do was hold down the reverse thrusters on my jetpack to counteract the pull of the sand. Finally there was the Anglerfish on Dark Bramble. I thought I would have to do something special to get past them, and while that’s technically true, watching folks on YouTube speed through the mazes of the Bramble without issue was something that took many tries and far too much swearing to accomplish.

What this experience reminds me of is getting stuck while playing adventure games. Often upon looking up the solution to a puzzle, I will have a binary response. I’ll either say “oh, of course, it’s so simple. I’m an idiot” or, “I would have never figured that out”. Outer Wilds had me combining the two. I don’t think I would have worked out these solutions on my own (although who can say? Given enough time my brain might have stumbled upon what I needed to do), but when I found out what I had to do, I did feel like an idiot. Talking about adventure games, Outer Wilds made more sense to me when thinking about it as an adventure game, specifically the games of Cyan Worlds such as Myst, Riven, or Obduction. Those games are set in alien worlds with odd technology that the player needs to decipher over time. Usually the people who have come before have left notes, cluing the player in on how everything is supposed to work, and as the player explores, there’s puzzles that the player needs to understand how to solve before getting to the work of solving them. They’re also games where I love the worlds created, but don’t feel smart enough to make my way through them on my own. And while these games are static, the player moving slowly through them, Outer Wilds has the player dealing with its science first hand through space travel. It makes things more exciting but it also makes them more complicated.

Conclusion

Through its ending, and my research into the game afterwards, I have grown an appreciation of Outer Wilds that I did not have when I was in the midst of playing it. Not only do I feel that I lacked the sense of adventure required to interface with the game, but my understanding and appreciation of its science and simulation was absent. Throw in having to look up the solutions to two of its puzzles, and taking far too much time to work out everything else, and I walk away from Outer Wilds with it in that nebulous wishy-washy category of “this game is “not-for-me””. Despite what I said just before, even thinking of it as an adventure game doesn’t really work. When I’m stuck and frustrated in an adventure game, I consult a walkthrough and enjoy the narrative pacing. In Outer Wilds, discovery and understanding is the core of the game. Even when I looked up the solutions that were eluding me, I was close, only missing one piece of the puzzle, and I think that’s why I felt so foolish. If I had gotten to the ending with a guide, I think the power of said ending would have been dampened. It’s only through the hours of my fumbling, that the realisation that I wasn’t going to be able to save everyone, and the despair that resulted in, slowly built up, giving the emotional power of the finale signifigance. I just wish I could have had that sense of significance for my entire playthrough. Thanks for watching.

Questions, thank yous, and what’s next

But what do you think? Did you enjoy your time with Outer Wilds? What are your thoughts about the ending? Was I able to adequately explain my position? Let me know down in the comments. As usual, I would like to thank all the critics and journalists who helped inform this video. Noclip’s ‘The Making of Outer Wilds’, Gameskinny’s interview with Mobius Games, Thomas Jenkins’, ‘Why I can’t stop thinking about Outer Wilds’, Bryn Gelbert’s ‘Outer Wilds Helped Me Understand the Relationship Between Progress and Purpose’, Superbunnyhops’ ‘The Wild Astrophysics that Outer Wilds simulates’, Jacob Geller’s ‘Outer Wilds: Death, Inevitability, and Ray Bradbury’, and Errant Signal’s ‘How the heck do we talk about Outer Wilds?’. Links to all these works are in the description. So, what’s next? Well it’s time to start a project that will span over 3 videos, I’m starting a series on the Zero Escape trilogy, so the next video will be on the first game, Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors. I hope you’ll join me for that one. Finally, if you enjoyed the video, I’d appreciate a like, a comment, or sharing it with your friends, and until next time, I hope you’re all having a wonderful day.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (2019) - Playing It Safe

On its surface, the genre of the Metroidvania seems obvious. It’s a combination of the Metroid series, and the Castlevania series. Specifically, Super Metroid and Symphony of the night. Take the map based exploration of Super Metroid, with its hidden secrets, ability upgrades, and backtracking, and combine it with an RPG system. The character levels up, and has a huge array of weapons, equipment, and spells to choose from. This allows the player to express themselves in how they wish to tackle the many enemies and bosses as they explore the Metroid space. The genre has gained a resurgence in popularity over the last decade, especially in the indie scene, but as the more astute of you may have noticed while thinking about the two games that inspired the naming of this genre, and thinking about the titles that have gained popularity in the genre (Hollow Knight, Axiom Verge, and Guacamelee for instance), that most of the genre doesn’t actually qualify as a Metroidvania. They’re just Metroid-likes, specifically Super Metroid-likes. Without the RPG mechanics, without the levelling up and the choice in weapons, equipment, and spell usage, these games are building their identity on the foundation of Super Metroid, just like Symphony of the Night did back in 1997.

Which brings us to 2019, and Bloodstained: Ritual of the night. A spiritual successor to not only Symphony of the Night, but the games developer Koji Igarashi made afterwards (as these titles took Symphony of the night as a foundation rather than Super Metroid). Bloodstained is a Kickstarter success story, crowdfunding over 5 million dollars from players who wanted Igarashi to make the type of game he hadn’t been able to make for years. A Symphony of the Night-like in everything but name. Yes, a Metroidvania. The term applies. Let’s talk about it.

The player controls Miriam, a shardbinder, one who is able to absorb the powers of demons. Her good friend Gebel, the only other Shardbinder left in the world has gone rogue. He has summoned a castle full of demons with the goal of destroying the world as revenge for the horrors inflicted upon him by the guild of alchemists. In the town outside the castle, and within its walls, Miriam meets other characters that help and hinder her in her quest to stop Gebel. The player spends their time charting the castle as they explore its halls, collecting shards from defeated demons, and acquiring and crafting all manner of weapons, armour, and accessories. Certain sections of the castle are blocked off until the player finds a specific shard to progress, and like Symphony of the Night, fighting the person you came into the castle for can be the end of the game, but if you have a specific item equipped, you can open up more of the castle and reach the true ending.

Symphony of the Night isn’t the only game Igarashi has taken inspiration from however. Well, calling it inspiration is a bit tongue-in-cheek as Igarashi was producer on most of the side-scrolling Castlevania games after Symphony. Aria of Sorrow has the Tactical Soul system where enemies have a chance to drop their souls when defeated, allowing the player to use their special powers. Hello shardbinder. Order of Ecclesia meanwhile displays glyphs on the main character’s arms and back like tattoos. Both ideas inform the lore of Bloodstained, what Miriam is, and she how interacts with the game. I should also mention that each weapon type in Bloodstained has special techniques that be can accessed through fighting game inputs. These reminded me of the spells Alucard was able to use in Symphony. I remember them being a great help in that game, but rarely used any of them in Bloodstained.

And all this influence ends up leaving Bloodstained with little of its own identity. It’s odd to say that as it has nothing to do with Dracula, Belmonts, or that long-standing world of gothic horror, but even though the lore has been changed, any player who’s played any of the Metroidvania titles in the Castlevania series will feel right at home. This is by design too. Igarashi has said, quote: “I was figuring out how to approach a game for fans who wanted to play another exploration-based action game. This is also the first game I would be making after becoming independent, so I made it my motif to create a traditional game that would meet their expectations”. Endquote. It sounds like Bloodstained was made to directly appeal to the fans of his previous Castlevania titles, and to ensure that such fans got what they wanted, Igarashi didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. That’s why Bloodstained borrows heavily from those other games, and why it felt to me like it lacked its own identity.

But what of the future? Seeing how Bloodstained feels like a “greatest hits” from the Castlevania days, I initially thought that Bloodstained might be Igarashi’s swan song, one last Metroidvania for the fans before riding off into the sunset wearing his cowboy hat. From the interview quoted, it sounds more like Igarashi wanted to make what he was sure would be a success based on past successes before venturing off in a new direction. Does this mean there will be another Bloodstained? If so, will Igarashi move in that new direction? How will the fans react? Igarashi’s feelings were correct because I think the success of the initial Kickstarter was the fans wanting a game like the ones they remembered loving from the past. Reactions to Bloodstained are mostly positive (excluding the Nintendo Switch version), with criticism either being levelled at bugs and performance instability, or that it adheres too much to the design of the past and doesn’t do anything new.

I echo that sentiment. Bloodstained felt like I was playing a spiritual sequel to Symphony of the Night. I loved the variety in shard and weapon choice, and how tense the game became when I was low on health in a new area desparetly searching for a save room. Sadly the story and characters made little impact, and I had to google the way forward on more than one occasion. It sounds like fans got exactly what they wanted, an old school Castlevania game on modern systems. It was fun to play. Good, not great. What I’m interested in now is what’s next. What can Igarashi do when he’s no longer looking at past successes. I’m looking forward to finding out. Thanks for watching.

But what are your thoughts? Was Bloodstained what you were hoping it would be? How do you feel it holds up next to other Castlevania games? What are your favourite Metroidvanias? I’d love to hear all about it down in the comments. I would like to take the time to thank the sources that helped inform this video. There are two. Kris Graft’s interview with Igarashi over at Gamastura, and the video ‘How Bloodstained kept its promise’ by The Sphere Hunter. Links for both are in the description. So what’s next? Well we’re continuing to focus on exploration, but with the next game it’s more about uncovering an understanding of the game world than filling in a map. I’m going to be playing Outer Wilds (not The Outer Worlds). I hope you join me for that one. If you’ve made it this far, thank you for your time and interest. If you enjoyed the video, I’d appreciate a like, a comment, or sharing it with your friends, and as always, I hope you’re all having a wonderful day.