Overall I liked 999's story and characters more. But for the puzzle/game side it really cuts out all the bullshit tedium from 999. In 999 you had to replay puzzles in different playthroughs, and I think you had to hold down a button to fast forward past text after you finished the game once, and the text speed to begin with was slow. In VLR you just hit square twice and it fast forwards automatically until you hit new text. All puzzles are unique.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
I don't think 999 was meant to be the first of a trilogy, so it felt complete, ignoring the jokes like Alice*. VLR ends on a pretty big cliffhanger and the third game has been announced. I didn't know about it going in so I spent a good 10 minutes looking around the branch menu to see if I missed anything. I already had all the trophies and secret messages and checked both 'beginning or end' teasers. It felt like "here's the big twist, now wait two years for the rest of the story"
*Alice, who was stranded in the desert, dressed up for some reason. Also, never explain why her and Clover dressed that way. They hinted that Clover might be a stripper or bartender or something for her cover, but ahh wahtever. how do gravity and sound work.
Cyan door spoilers: spoiler (click to show/hide)
Felt a bit like the movie Primer.
I actually cleared every path *because* I wanted learn everything there is to know.
However, in 999 I was able to unlock the true ending in two playthroughs, then leisurely uncover the rest of the game, but in VLR they sorta increased the number of necessary locks/story-checks, and therefore I was only able to see the true ending after pretty much clearing everything, which felt like a bit of a drag.
Now I'm sure there could have been shortcuts here and there, but one example of what I'm talking about is that you had complete multiple routes to uncover...
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the bomb passwords and computer logins
... Which were needed (unless I'm mistaken).
platinum'd it at about 32 hours (my first plat.)
True Ending mega spoilers: spoiler (click to show/hide)
It seemed like Kojima style madness to me. Someone confirm or deny my perception of the ending: So Sigma and kyle's souls keep jumping to different points in time in order to stop this outbreak? and the chick from 999 ran the experiment with Sigma, who is really Zero, who is in Kyle's body for most of the game, but doesn't remember anything until the true ending. Tenmyouji is Junpei from 999? Clover survived 999, but in the true ending, she gets stuck in the shitty future with Alice, on the moon. The ending with Akane and Sigma is right before the outbreak...maybe that's where the next game picks up--they have to go through another weird Zero puzzle to prevent the outbreak?
In any case, I immediately started a 999 playthrough yesterday in hopes of making some more sense of the ending.
and done with 999. I'm glad I played VLR first, considering a lot of the plot point and plot device similarities. I liked VLR much better! Not just for the UI advancements, but the story and characters too. spoiler (click to show/hide)
but I'd be lying if I said I understood how all this psychokinetic time travel stuff actually works in the game's universe. Now I'm just along for the ride in this series. As far as my enjoyment having played the sequel first-- it seems like the stories cancel each other out-- VLR spoils a lot of the twists in 999, 999 obviously spoils almost all of the plot twist devices waiting to happen in VLR. So, when Sigma and Phi start freaking out when they "remember" stuff from other paths of the story I had already played--I freaked out with them and thought that was the coolest thing because I just assumed only one story was actually being told in the context of the game. Had I played 999 first, stuff like that, random dead bodies showing up, people getting killed, etc. would've all been expected! So, 999 was great but just didn't impact me as much as VLR since I had an idea of what to expect. and it works vice-versa: for a lot of things in VLR, I'm sure they weren't as novel to people who had already played 999.