I'm sorry, am I meant to be angry? Am I supposed to be mad that this game sucks ass? It is genuinely hilarious how bad every aspect of this game is. I can't help but laugh anytime I imagine someone who unironically thought Zero Time Dilemma was the best visual novel ever made back in 2012, waiting day after day that the sequel to your favorite series (which might I add only continued due to fan support) strikes lightning in a bottle twice, and when it finally does, you get this shit. How can I be mad? This is hilarious!

Zero Time Dilemma is the Shenmue 3 of Visual Novels, the Hunt Down The Freeman of mystery stories, and the fact that this was well recieved upon release only fuels my conviction that Uchikoshi is a hack with Naoki Urasawa Syndrome and can only write the same mystery story every time no matter how many stories he makes. The schadenfreude I get from shit talking this game is unparalleled, there's really no point in trying to make a coherent train of thought for ZTD but since it's so bad it warps itself into being funny, I think there are a few noteworthy thinks that make it an enjoyable experience compared to Virtue's Last Reward for me despite my score.

- The model quality is a surprising step up from VLR but jesus the animations on these are hilariously awful, Eric is always laughing no matter the occasion, the lip flaps aren't even close to matching on either language and everyone moves like puppets on a string, it makes Sonic Adventure 2's cutscenes look professional.
- What I tend to like the most about visual novels is how you can read the story at your own pace, be it a speedreader or an overanalyser, everyone can process the story at different intervals that make them comfortable with the experience. Throwing that out the window is a daringly bold move if you don't consider that they were trying to rip off telltale games's approach to gameplay with cutscene work that only rivals Yandere Simulator
- The escape rooms are pretty much the only thing that is consistent with the rest of the series to compensate for the neutered returning characters, but the flowchart is probably the worst one of out all, not only is it needlessly long, but the disordered nature of it's structure means you'll be clicking aimlessly through out of order events which feel like extremely inconsequential stepping stones until you reach that wet fart of an ending.
- It is clear that Uchikoshi wrote himself into a corner since VTL, and though I can feel pity on him, Zero escape is nowhere near the top 5 most convoluted and complex video game narratives, let alone for visual novels, so he only has himself to blame for making this jenga tower of a plot structure and failing to stick the landing.
- Multiverse theory is a load of horseshit and did irreperable damage to science fiction.

gosh. i have a million things i could say about this game, but i'll keep it fairly brief. (or at least, i have MUCH more i could say)

this game is so fucking insane. there's SO MUCH going on here, from the hilariously shitty animations, to the environments that look like they were rendered on my car's key fob, to the out of nowhere over the top plot twists. there's also SO MUCH about this game that i dislike. some reveals make things in other games uncomfortable, and some character personality changes are undesirable. it's not all bad for me though. i had a much more emotional experience playing this game compared to VLR. while i do still think VLR is better than ZTD, i enjoy the character moments in this game far more. also, the characters in this one are so much less gross personality-wise, and i didn't feel absolutely disgusted by random sexual harassment like i did in VLR. of course, there are still characters in this game i dislike. overall, even if the directions personalities go in and everything feel haphazard and arbitrary, i will not lie that i sobbed several times in this game and don't feel cheated out of enjoying those moments.

the structure of the game is cool!!! no notes there. at the start of playing the game i was like "oh fuck this is,,, yeah, huh.." but as i kept going, it makes sense why the game is like this (fragments, etc).

i think ZTD had really big shoes to fill after VLR. that's not to say that VLR was a masterpiece that can't be topped (because i do not hold that opinion), but because the scope of the Zero Escape series grew so goddamn much with VLR. you could argue that the whole series after 999 doesn't really "have a point" in more ways than one. but, at the same time, i think there's not really much else you can do to rectify everything. instead, we get a absolutely nutty bonkers game that had me saying "oh my fuck i love this game" to "oh my fuck i hate this game" every other hour.

puzzles are fine. that's it. they're fine. not enough of them, tho. i finished all of the puzzles like halfway through my playtime. worst puzzle design of the series for sure, but nothing is egregious.

i'm glad i played it, and i still had a good time, despite the numerous issues i have. i was consistently excited to play this game, even if i could tell that it kiiiinda sucks. zero escape is over. what the fuck.

🐌oops!

for how much this game goes violently haywire and coughs up blood the entire time there's actually a tragic amount of good stuff here.

to get it out of the way this game is just so decomposed beyond a functional state of like. working. the presentation is just absolutely horrible. the juxtaposition between concept/box art and the actual game is ridiculous. this game begs you to take it seriously which is absolutely impossible to do given the state of its animation. quite a few of the plot twists are frivolous, with at least one being so useless and extraneous that it's shocking to me it was left in. the pacing is both breakneck and overlong as a result of the cheap development. they could not afford to make even half of the scenes needed to tell this narrative properly, and for the ones they could afford, they wrung out every drop of time they could get. there are plot devices introduced to the series that are very stupid. they did not need to be here. perhaps most unfortunately out of all the characters that are brought back for this game half of them are so pathetically misused that i'm honestly just disappointed uchikoshi bothered at all. it feels like their personalities are altered arbitrarily to lend scenes conflict which is just pathetic. how are you strapped for conflict in a death game.

and yet for all this game crashes and burns i can't help but be awestruck by some of the stuff the game does successfully get away with. scores of funyarinpa worth of ink has been spilled about the way the narrative is presented but i think it is unilaterally great. experiencing a story in a seemingly random order not only gives a disorienting effect analogous to the characters' experiences but also creates one of the only legitimately fun mysteries to put together out of all of uchikoshi's catalog. the masked child is pretty great (and not just because we can't see any shoddy facial animations). to be honest, i actually quite like this game's original cast with the exception of mira. uchikoshi isn't especially gifted at character writing but there was something about most of the cast that felt so much more human and desperate this time around.

the death games finally unshackle themselves from being about picking a group to go through a door with or doing repeated basic game theory exercises to being a much more freeform set of fucked up decisions. they're bountiful set pieces especially in the bizarro zero escape world and it creates an environment from the start where it's impossible to know what's coming next. also, the final stretch of the game kinda just rules.

uchikoshi's most masterful trick however is that instead of being an elucidating perspective of a victim of one of these death games, the voyeuristic view the player gets of this often meaningless cacophony of decisions and causality that make up this game elucidates a different perspective altogether. the sense of apathy and desensitization to all the stupid decisions that go into this narrative evokes the perspective of the characters who have peered into the web of causality and lost touch with the people and world around them. zero time dilemma makes you that person.

it lays bare that in the grand scheme of the messy chain of events that make up all possible realities, we are sometimes victims at the hands of fate, we are sometimes violent opportunists, we are sometimes even decomposed by the grandiosity of it all.

but most of the time, we just trudge along, unaware of our surroundings. we're small, we're weak. we're a dog that follows its training, blissfully unaware of any danger. we're an unhinged idiot who can only safeguard against the unknown with violence. we're a child who is incapable of understanding the self, much less death.

we're a snail, inching forward just a little bit at a time and obliviously causing ripples in the world around us.

What a bitter way to end a trilogy...

Zero Time Dilemma almost feels like a Zero Escape game. All the things I liked about them are missing in this one.

The escape rooms are boring, some overly complex, others too easy, they have nothing to do with the story. All of them, made just a obstacle to be passed and forgotten.

The story tries to tie up all the loose ends of VLR, in the worst possible way. There are cool moments, but the balance is very low. The characters are disappointing. Those we already know and love are held back by poor plot flow. The Q team? Why the hell are they there? THEY ARE TERRIBLE AND USELESS.

It's a game that you'll probably like a little if you liked the first 2, but it's the weakest of them, and it ends the trilogy in a way that I wasn't satisfied with.

Being the third game in the Zero Escape series, you probably know what to expect by this point. However, this is different from the first two in that it completely ditches the VN-style presentation for more cinematic cutscenes. This doesn't really pay off very well considering the animations are pretty bad. You can tell they had like no budget when making this game because the presentation is a big step down. The models themselves look fine, though I do miss the Kinu Nishimura designs of the first two games.

The story structure is quite a bit different from VLR, where instead of every choice splitting off into a new branch, the flowchart is sort of random. You don't know beforehand where on the timeline each scene takes place, (assuming you're not using a guide) so it's like filling in pieces of a puzzle, the puzzle in this case being the flowchart. It's an interesting direction, but not a straight upgrade from VLR since there are fewer branching points.

Now, about the story itself... it's okay, I guess. It starts off really interesting, but it gets kind of ridiculous towards the end. It's cool to see events that were alluded to in VLR play out, and I enjoyed a lot of the character moments, but some of the twists are just bizarre. There are also a lot of unintentionally funny moments because of the awkward animations. I can't decide if the big reveal at the end is really stupid or actually genius.

I wouldn't say ZTD was disappointing, in fact I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, but it's really not as good as the first two. There are parts that I'm not sure were planned from the beginning, or if they were decided last minute because of budget/time constraints. I guess you could say, "Life is simply unfair..."

🐌/10

A mess of a trilogy closer, downgraded on every front from its progenitors, unable to meet its high ambitions. It's not without merit, but it's extremely hit or miss. Its approach to chronologically ambiguous storytelling is maybe its only unmarred highlight. Its character beats, puzzles, and twists (of which there are many) peak at "not as well done in the previous two games" and bottom out unfathomably low.

Its attempt to tell a much more harrowing tale than the previous two games is seriously undercut by its mawkish writing, awkward character animations, and stiff voice acting (which reeks of poor direction, not a slight on the VA's talent). Because of these, it often ends up as a farce - comic when it grasps for tragedy, and something to laugh at when it asks the player to laugh with it.

I held hope that Zero Time Dilemma would reward enduring until the end. I wanted to know how ZTD would try to justify the time spent playing it. Unfortunately, that desire was left unfulfilled. No puzzle left a deep, lasting sense of satisfaction. No character development or plot arc gave any kind of meaningful insight. No twist or mystery electrified my mind racing with excitement or fascination. All that it left was a beleaguered shrug of exhaustion: "Well, I guess that happened."

Life is simply unfair, don't you think?