Zero Time Dilemma

[Joe Molotov]

Got ZTD on Wednesday and I've put about 8 hours into it already. I decided to stick with one team and play it as much as I could before switching to another team, so I've been playing Diana's team. I've cleared 5 (6?) rooms and I've almost done as much as I can on that timeline for now. Really loving it.

[Joe Molotov]

yeah just started that yesterday, shit game, I beat it in 5 minutes and there was only one dumb puzzle, ends on a bad cliffhanger 

Getting the Ending Credits before you get the Opening Credits. 

Playing on Q's side now. So far I haven't used a guide, but I'm sure that will change before the end (it always does, I'm so weak  :'( )

[Joe Molotov]

Got my first "real" ending in ZTD.

D-1 Ending:

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Phi, Sigma, and Diana escape, with Sigma crippled and Phi injected with Radical-6, resulting in the future remaining unchanged.

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[Vizzys]

I'm liking it so far about 9 hours in

some of the puzzle rooms are obscure as fuck though

anyway heres the best new song imo

[kick51]

After VLR, no more puzzles for me in VNs. Guides all the way.  Ill do the actual puzzles like a sudoku, fit all the shapes in, bloom all the flowers, etc. But none of this cold guessing "use the salmon on the sun painting to reveal a code with the natural oils that occur on partially rotted salmon which react to the pigment in acrylics" bullshit.

Having a lot of fun with this. Team VLR is the best of course (and im thinking that'll still be my favorite game in the series by the end of this.) Hopefully finish it all by sunday.

[kick51]

The control room music 

[Joe Molotov]

The cutscene after the Study. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[kick51]

Spoliers for that^

spoiler (click to show/hide)

I was waiting to find out how perfect 10 Mira was with 0/10 Eric. It did not disappoint.  i thought she would be related to Alice somehow (because...exotic boobs i guess? lol) nope, just a sociopathic serial killer. Also, i did Mira, Eric, and Nobody for the stand off, then looked up the last one but didnt watch it because i'm not supposed to see it yet.

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Havent finished, just starting to get to the final shit.

[Joe Molotov]

Some thoughts:

1. Zero needs to cool it with this super-powerful anesthesia that puts people to sleep in 2 seconds. That can't be healthy getting hit with that shit like 5 or 6 times in a row without even a doctor's supervision.

2. If you know you're gonna get hit with a super-powerful anesthesia that puts you to sleep in 2 seconds, you should try to assume a crash position instead of just dropping like a sack of potatoes every time.

3. Eric is a human dumpster fire.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

"Wah wah, my yandere girlfriend is dead and I don't understand teleportation or SHIFTing or anything else that's going on. I'm gonna find the real killer, which is obviously not me, the shitbag with anger issues who already tried to strangle someone earlier in the game because I have a dad that strangled his little brother and still feel super guilty about it and I'm all fucked up inside." *flails gun around everywhere* 

I assume they're going to try to rehabilitate him somehow before the end of the game, because thus far he has contributed precisely fuckall to story other than being an oblivious shithead, but I kinda hope they don't. 

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[Joe Molotov]

Beat the game.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Eric is still shit and lmao at everyone just being chill at the fact that Mira is a serial killer. Come on Planeteers, let's save the world! Earth, Wind, Water, Fire, MURDER!

Also wtf at Zero killing the dog for no reason.* What an asshole. 

spoiler (click to show/hide)

*Unless you consider Gab being the evil mastermind behind everything to be a reason. Son of a bitch Gab, I know it was you!

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The ending kinda sucked. Everything up to the ending was pretty badass, but then the very ending was just kinda like "...that's it?" Game didn't even let you pull the trigger on that dog-murdering old fuck. I kept checking the timeline to see if there was an epilogue that unlocked somewhere, but I got all the cheevos so I guess that's it.

I still really liked the game, all-in-all really great, but the ending just left me kinda "Huh."

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Oh, and I didn't have to use a guide for any of the puzzles. 

[kick51]

Yeah just finished too

spoiler (click to show/hide)

the only loose end really is whether mira's going to kill all of them to look at their hearts.  Especially if she knows they can just jump back to before she killed them. ZE4 would just be an endless cycle of mira killing them and them jumping back and being like "ok THIS time, don't kill us and look at our hearts.  We really gotta go kill bin laden now thanks."

And yeah Eric had nothing to do with anything and Mira's presence was not really justified. They just needed to fill out Q team's bench.  It was really funny waiting for the other shoe to drop on that relationship.

So, there were a lot of good individual parts (sigma and diana holy shit  :'( :'( :'(  possibly my favorite scene in the whole series) and i understood the ending, but it was really skirting the edge at the end, particularly with mind hacking.  Then again, the endings of the previous 2 games felt exactly the same...like it was all constantly on the brink of going off the rails, last 2 eps of Evangelion style.  Still, mission fuckin accomplished in terms of ending the series. A small miracle that it all somehow makes sense in the end. Not if you reallllly think about it, but if you just accept it, aided by having gone through mind-fuck anime shit before. Btw i fucking love delta's crazy old man character model. 

And all the phi/sigma "art" that i'm sure is out there retroactively got super creepy 

All in all, i put it just below VLR and above 999, which was good but hampered by not being able to skip around and akane talking like a 5 year old (she went ham in ZTD, that was awesome. That bttf scene was amazing.) Nothing can really beat the experience of playing VLR totally blind. Yes, im one of those VLR before 999 plebs


But i think this one had the coolest structure of all 3. Iwent totally random with fragments and it somehow worked out just fine. Pretty ingenious stuff.

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[Vizzys]

check the files after you beat it theres some epilogue-y stuff

[kick51]

Cool ill check it out

Apparently hardcore zero escape brahs hate this game

Sucks to be them i guess.  I think if you think too hard about the series all 3 are a bit equally stupid, what i like is how fun it is to play them + being in the middle of the shitstorm.  That's how a lot of gimmicky VNs are.  If you go read a text description of 999/VLR it sounds mind numbingly stupid.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

and the occasional moments of brilliance like Diana+Sigma being trapped in the shelter or finding out you're on the moon in VLR

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[brob]

999 had the best gimmick with the dual screen set up of the DS. VLR didn't really come through with a nice gimmick but it had a sufficiently insane story that it made up for it. I guess this one just continues the insane story and that's not good enough?

[kick51]

it has something similar to the 999 twist, but it's definitely not as slick. 

Hard to pinpoint what the complaints are about exactly and how legit they are, except that there are some loose ends just ignored from VLR.  Otherwise, it's basically all the same stuff, same tricks, in a different package. 

[Joe Molotov]

Read all the Epilogue stuff.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Mira turns herself in, gets prison married to Eric, and then Sean breaks her out of jail so she can use the Transporter to go back in time and prevent herself from becoming a killer.

But didn't Zero just tell them that Mira's first murder was what set in motion the entire chain of events that led them all to this point? #TimeTravelHowDoesItWork #WouldYouMurderBabyHitler

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[kick51]

oh shit, i gotta get around to reading the epilogue stuff.  also missed 4 quest files.  I want my second platinum dammit.  the first being VLR.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

stays with Eric the ice cream man    Easily the least believable thing in the whole series.

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[tiesto]

Local GS didn't have a copy so I ordered one online.

[The Legend of Sunblade]

This game is ok on its own, but it's pretty terrible as the finale to the Zero Escape series. Lots of shit that doesn't make sense, dropped plot threads and all around really shitty design decisions when previous games did it better. Makes me grumpy cuz ZTD's poor writing retroactively makes all the escalation that happened in VLR seem utterly pointless.

The fragment system for picking routes sucks. VLR had the best flowchart I've ever seen in a visual novel type game, so I don't know why the didn't just copy/paste that. It's disjointed, messy and confusing.

I don't know why they felt the need to make the game so gory. Previous games usually showed you the aftermath of people's deaths, but not the actual act of people dying. Takes away a lot from the mystery of it all.

The puzzle rooms in this feel super forced, like they're in just because the last two games had them. You could cut them entirely and nothing would be lost from the story. Also, 999's Nonary game and VLR's Ambidex Edition >>>>> ZTD's "decision" game.

Idiot Hero Carlos is the best new character. Q team is utterly forgettable, with Mira and Eric being pointless characters.

Do not click if you haven't beaten the game:

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Introducing ALIEN TECHNOLOGY at the 14th hour, in a series really hard to actually explain shit with scienc-y techno babble, is the biggest writing cop out.

VLR makes a huge fucking deal about Radical-6 being this world ending virus that wipes out most of humanity and is a forgone conclusion to the events of ZTD, but you only ever even LEARN that it exists in one route of the entire game and purely as an item in a puzzle room. And also that timeline's Akane and Junpei are dead, so the ones that survive and make it to VLR are replacements from an entirely different timeline. The fuck?

Where's Clover and Alice?

Akane, Junpei, Sigma and Phi act nothing like how we've come to know them. Akane somehow reverted to her 999 personality even though she's from the future. Sigma and Phi do jack all to actively prevent the disaster they're there to stop. Junpei heel turns into an asshole less than a year after the events of the first game.

YOU'RE A SHIFTER. AND YOU'RE A SHIFTER. AND YOU'RE A SHIFTER. AND YOU'RE A SHIFTER.

Delta is a terrible villain, sorry D.C. Douglas. His COMPLEX MOTIVATIONS are stupid and MIND HACK is such a dumb power. Brother and Delta being the same person makes zero sense and smells like a last minute change to poorly try to wrap things up. "What am I guilty of?" asks Delta, being the leader of a fanatic criminal organization that has had people killed.

Where the fuck is Kyle

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[The Legend of Sunblade]

Read all the Epilogue stuff.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Mira turns herself in, gets prison married to Eric, and then Sean breaks her out of jail so she can use the Transporter to go back in time and prevent herself from becoming a killer.

But didn't Zero just tell them that Mira's first murder was what set in motion the entire chain of events that led them all to this point? #TimeTravelHowDoesItWork #WouldYouMurderBabyHitler

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spoiler (click to show/hide)

People are theorizing that Mira IS Eric's Mother. She gets taught how valuable smiles are in the present, gets transported back to the past and teaches the same thing to kid Eric before getting killed by her younger self. It's also why only the Mom and Eric's hearts are the only ones that ever make her happy.

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ZERO TIME DILEMMA

[kick51]

hey, people wanted a 3rd ZE game, they got it!  They are all driven by deus ex machina and mcguffins galore.  At times it works great, other times, it's almost tongue in cheek.

agreeing+disagreeing on your spoiler:

spoiler (click to show/hide)

I agree on Clover, Alice, Kyle missing being dumb.  They definitely didn't completely clean house with this game.  I don't know if it's rushed or if he didn't actually have a plan for all those characters in a 3rd game.

The alien machine is dumb, but also, see above about the whole series having shit like that.  Morphogenetic fields and shifting were just as tongue-in-cheek when I first heard about them.  They just look less ridiculous now that ZTD utilizes them from the start. They needed a literal machine to wrap the story up, I've allowed so much ridiculousness to happen without putting the game/series down yet, so I just shrugged and went with it 

Radical-6 is not a foregone conclusion in ZTD, they prevent it in the final ending.  Now they have to go kill a terrorist or something....I really don't know if I want ZE4, but some kind of non-escape room psychic shifting terrorist hunt might be interesting.

Akane is not the same "EHH JUMPY KAWAII SEX JOKE" she was in 999 at all.  Maybe not as on point as the older version in VLR, but by the end she takes control of pretty much everything up through the ending and becomes the defacto leader of the whole group. Not sure how anyone playing missed this.  I think I did C team last so there was a pretty clear progression there to me.

I thought they pretty clearly explained why Junpei was the way he is and it's not much of a heel turn, he's just cynical after having to go through terrible shit to save a girl who disappears.  Then he does classic risk-taking behavior with his detective job that makes him even more hardened.  I can see it.  Reality is that not everyone comes out of a traumatic event all positive and filled with anime determination.  Sigma is a pretty melancholy guy in the same way.

Phi and Sigma knew what they were doing and were there to assist Diana and keep her from the one ending where she brings Phi to the top.  Makes sense that the they show you the one that leads to VLR.

As for the villain, he's honestly no more stupid than Akane and Akane/Sigma from the previous games, who also devised ridiculously convoluted and extremely evil plans to accomplish some greater goal.  I don't understand how one could hate him and not the others.  He's right in line with Zero not actually being some ultimate evil, but actually a good guy in disguise.  He's just more on the edge and not as motherly as Akane in explaining everything.

Mind hacking was definitely silly as fuck though.  Delta is silly as fuck but kind of hilarious. 

also I found Eric and Mira to be very memorable, but definitely pointless 

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[The Legend of Sunblade]

I'm glad that ZTD exists purely for having a sense of closure, but i just hate that the ultimate goal in the game is not actually conflict resolving. 999's purpose is to save one of its characters, VLR happens as a result of what supposedly happens in ZTD and hypes that up, but then ZTD's supposed purpose and its main villain make the whole thing stupid. To quote a post on GAF:

spoiler (click to show/hide)

The games are now on some insane paradoxical loop.

Original Nonary game and 999 happen because of Delta. These two nonary games allow VLR to happen because Akane realizes her powers. Moreover, VLR happens because ZTD happens. But ZTD happens because VLR happens as that allows Sigma to come back to participate in the Decision Game and have Delta with Diana. Delta creates Free the Soul which hosts the original Nonary game, which leads to 999....

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more spoiler talk:

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The problem with Radical-6 not being a foregone conclusion is that not only is there an entire game in the series centered around it escaping into the general populace and eliminating most life on earth, but its central to the entirety of the main villain's plan. His entire goal and purpose for why Delta/Brother created Free the Soul is to use the virus to save mankind by killing the majority to save some rather than lose all of them. He used his MIND HACK to see futures where this would happen. But then in ZTD, Radical-6 is only present in three vaccines in one puzzle room, and never come into play until the forced ending that has to tie into VLR. Delta is utterly incompetent and his entire scheme / purpose for establishing Free the Soul is utterly terrible.

In the end, his entire thanatos gambit is supposedly to "motivate" the cast to catch the fanatic without resorting to Radical-6. Nevermind that Sigma and Phi came back to the past for the express purpose of saving mankind, so they were plenty "motivated" already. But the guy that has MIND HACK powers that let him read the minds of millions of people, including other SHIFTers in order to ascertain events that happen in the future, has access to alien technology that lets him transport anyone and anything back to any timeline, and has mass wealth and resources due to being the apparent leader to the biggest criminal organization in the game's universe, is unable to do that without the help of 5 young adults, a mass murderer, a normal fucked up guy and a robot that he built.

There's suspension of disbelief, and then there's streeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeetches.

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[kick51]

yeah, that sums it up 

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Radical-6 is a snail...in one timeline ...eyah 
I mean, if we really think about all these incredible god powers these people have, it seems like there's probably a very simple way to create a happy end timeline (after all, they're not saving every single timeline, just making one all nice and pretty), though I can't really be bothered to think about it.  I just roll with Uchikoshi's wild ride. 

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