Unchikoshi the GOAT (2)

Peak fiction. My favorite visual novel.

Every bit as much of a masterpiece as 999 is and then some.

A truly one-of-a-kind and unique story that could only work through the lens of a first person video game perspective.

Is the cat alive or dead? You will decide its fate.

Somehow a more ambitious story than 999. It'll blow your mind wiiiddddeee open. Mixed with some decent characters, and some of the best VA in anime games. BUT the dialogue and prose can feel repetitive and stretched out, filled with long explanations that are only semi-relevant/useful. I found myself skipping a lot of it. The game should be shorter.

2/3 of the game is story. The remaining 1/3 is a series of escape rooms, which is my favorite part (as someone who likes logic puzzles). VLR's puzzles presented a decent challenge and stumped me a few times. I loved diving headfirst into these rooms.

Zero Escape is the best series of VN games Ive played. I cannot decide if I like 999 or VLR more. VLR has harder puzzles and better endings/reveals. 999 has better characters and has LESS (not zero) needless dialogue.

Sadly a big step down from 999 in my opinion. The story is good and it has some interesting plot twists, but the whole game is built around those plot twists and so other factors of the game suffer for it. It took the multiple paths/endings idea from the previous game and absolutely went way too hard on it. The character cast is hugely downgraded (for example, they took one of the best characters from the previous game, Clover, and made her much worse in this one) and the presentation is honestly awful.

EDIT: This game honestly keeps going up my rankings in retrospect as time passes. Not really sure why. It's still not close to 999 but I think it's a really good game.

Man I really wanted to like this but jesus christ this just feels silly a lot of the time
30 hours of regugitating similar scenes, bad models, constant map transition scenes, bad effects, hit or miss puzzles just for the last 5 or 10 hours to have actual things happen isnt worth it. 999's structure made for a super enjoyable and fairly clever trip down alternative paths (with some pseudoscience) fun but the way this game attempts to accomplish that is obnoxious it feels like a good chunk of the game is just meandering through similar scenes to maybe get 1 or 2 useful pieces of information only for it to reach a final point in which its nothing but a nonstop of new, complex information to process. After a certain point in the final stretch I seriously wondered why this even really needed to be made? It's got some neat character moments, some puzzles are alright, its at least fairly forgiving with some QoL features (the flow chart/skip button). By the end the game gets interesting but would I say it's really worth the constant back-and-forth of the previous 30 hours, not really. Also god this game looks ugly like really, like christ this game would go up a point if I didnt have to stare at models that looked worse than mid-aughts gmod videos.

Write the craziest fanfiction of 999 you can think of. Add in 5000 crazy twists that defy all logic (one of the twists literally showcasing that the writer doesn’t know how gravity works and another that hinges on the main character and the people around him not noticing so many OBVIOUS things that it would make your head spin), make the story convoluted as hell (for the sake of it), Wikipedia unrelated scientific verbiage into your characters mouths so your story sounds smart and ambitious even tho it’s clearly padding that’s barley fucking connected to the actual plot that’s transpiring. Completely change a character from the previous game to the point where they feel like a completely different person and make another character from the first game have motivations so absurd that they borderline self parody. Now, add in constant loading screens and force the player to repeat plot points over and over again to advance the story. There’s a skip button, but it doesn’t work if a certain scenario is contextualized to a route, but the thing is, these changes are usually so minuscule that it’s basically you watching the same scene over and over and over again... Have half of the cast be BLATANT and obnoxious plot devices with barley ANY intrigue to them, and that’s VLR.

To put it bluntly, I don't think Virtue's Last Reward is as great as 999 was. 999 was simply a more engrossing game to the player compared to VLR, and the characters and story really stood out because of it. Although for what VLR is, I think it delivers. It still has an engaging story, and often I found myself playing it for hours on end to find out all the twist and turns it gave throughout. And the puzzles were also a great challenge too, despite being tedious, or furiously hard sometimes. The only clear drawback I have for this game though, is the 3DS game breaking glitch that happens when you save in escape rooms. And as long as you're cautious about your saving this is a great game to experience.