This may not be the best game on the DS, but is one of the best DS games. Although this game has been ported to traditional platforms, the DS is the only platform that has the game's complete soul.
The concept of the game is solid and on the tin: 9 people have 9 hours to make their way through 9 escape rooms, or die. The character writing has a small dusting of anime flavoring, but the translation is a wonderful example of fun localization. The DS version is voice-less, but later ports contain full voice acting in English and Japanese.
Only 3 rooms can be explored per play-through, and the game expects many runs to find its final puzzles in the true ending. Full and partial replays are easier tracked and accessed in the game's re-releases.
Ports of the game may feature "updated graphics," but I personally think they make the elements of the game less visually harmonious. The low pixel count of the DS helped unify the flat drawings with the pre-rendered 3D environments you explore and the 3D puzzle items you interact with. Seeing these low polygon models on more powerful consoles makes the game look dated in a way that's more easily glossed over in the now retro feel of the original platform.
Every puzzle is designed with the DS' touch screen in mind, a feeling that cannot be perfectly captured with cursor controls. Many puzzles involve inputting passwords, arranging keys, or examining objects for clues in a way that is inherently less engaging, and remove the light role-playing element of mimicking the frantic note-taking of the player character.
Most crucially, 999's true ending has a twist that will make or break the player's experience - and is built around the DS's two screens. Narratively, it is a bit of a genre jump, and makes little sense on paper. In practice, on the DS, a highly dramatic scene shows two sides of a conversation, with one perspective per screen. The impact comes from switching the player's focus from the internal thoughts of one character to another as the last words spoken aloud of the other remain on their screen. In later ports, this exchange is reduced to showing one screen at a time, sequentially, which is incredibly clunky and hard to follow by comparison.
There are other moments like this that show intense awareness on the developer's part on how people would be playing this game on the system it was released. One puzzle flips the screens' displays, forcing you to hold the system upside down to solve it. A harmless gimmick that is cute on a handheld, but obviously cut from the later versions.
In my rating system, an average game is 2 stars. I award Zero Escape: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, 3 stars on the Nintendo DS, a solid B rank game. The plot is engaging enough, but the experience of playing the game on the DS elevates the script and the types of puzzles contained. When I played it on the PS4, it felt like a 2 star game. Still fun, but if it were my only experience with the game, I'd be wondering why this game was remembered so fondly.
The concept of the game is solid and on the tin: 9 people have 9 hours to make their way through 9 escape rooms, or die. The character writing has a small dusting of anime flavoring, but the translation is a wonderful example of fun localization. The DS version is voice-less, but later ports contain full voice acting in English and Japanese.
Only 3 rooms can be explored per play-through, and the game expects many runs to find its final puzzles in the true ending. Full and partial replays are easier tracked and accessed in the game's re-releases.
Ports of the game may feature "updated graphics," but I personally think they make the elements of the game less visually harmonious. The low pixel count of the DS helped unify the flat drawings with the pre-rendered 3D environments you explore and the 3D puzzle items you interact with. Seeing these low polygon models on more powerful consoles makes the game look dated in a way that's more easily glossed over in the now retro feel of the original platform.
Every puzzle is designed with the DS' touch screen in mind, a feeling that cannot be perfectly captured with cursor controls. Many puzzles involve inputting passwords, arranging keys, or examining objects for clues in a way that is inherently less engaging, and remove the light role-playing element of mimicking the frantic note-taking of the player character.
Most crucially, 999's true ending has a twist that will make or break the player's experience - and is built around the DS's two screens. Narratively, it is a bit of a genre jump, and makes little sense on paper. In practice, on the DS, a highly dramatic scene shows two sides of a conversation, with one perspective per screen. The impact comes from switching the player's focus from the internal thoughts of one character to another as the last words spoken aloud of the other remain on their screen. In later ports, this exchange is reduced to showing one screen at a time, sequentially, which is incredibly clunky and hard to follow by comparison.
There are other moments like this that show intense awareness on the developer's part on how people would be playing this game on the system it was released. One puzzle flips the screens' displays, forcing you to hold the system upside down to solve it. A harmless gimmick that is cute on a handheld, but obviously cut from the later versions.
In my rating system, an average game is 2 stars. I award Zero Escape: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, 3 stars on the Nintendo DS, a solid B rank game. The plot is engaging enough, but the experience of playing the game on the DS elevates the script and the types of puzzles contained. When I played it on the PS4, it felt like a 2 star game. Still fun, but if it were my only experience with the game, I'd be wondering why this game was remembered so fondly.