Say, Junpei... Have you ever heard of [Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors]? They say it's a game where you can solve puzzles... And they're actually really good... But not only that... The story is also supposed to be really good, too! It makes me wonder... What if the words I'm saying right now... Aren't even real? What if I'm not even a person... I could just be a [fake character] in a [pointless bit] at the beginning of a [Backloggd review for 999]! I'm not saying I believe that, of course... It's just something to think about.
I'm not as good at exposition dumping about pseudoscience as Kotaro Uchikoshi, but you get the point. Zero Escape's writing is easy to joke about, because it's very silly. The silliness, though, is targeted. It's crafted to serve a purpose, to build out a series of ideas that, over time, take shape as something with real meaning, and even beauty. You begin the game by chuckling over speeches about Ice-9 and glycerin. You end the game sobbing over a game of sudoku.
That's the thing about Kotaro Uchikoshi, the reason why he is my single favourite writer of video games. He doesn't just write deep characters and beautiful, thematically coherent narratives - he goes about it in a way that nobody else would ever even think to do. Nobody, nobody else is writing something like 999 but him. Nobody else is crafting a game in which the artificiality of player choice is expressed as an act of love. Nobody else is turning exposition into an inherent source of comfort and meaning. Nobody else is going to make you cry by asking you to physically flip over your Nintendo DS.
I'm not as good at exposition dumping about pseudoscience as Kotaro Uchikoshi, but you get the point. Zero Escape's writing is easy to joke about, because it's very silly. The silliness, though, is targeted. It's crafted to serve a purpose, to build out a series of ideas that, over time, take shape as something with real meaning, and even beauty. You begin the game by chuckling over speeches about Ice-9 and glycerin. You end the game sobbing over a game of sudoku.
That's the thing about Kotaro Uchikoshi, the reason why he is my single favourite writer of video games. He doesn't just write deep characters and beautiful, thematically coherent narratives - he goes about it in a way that nobody else would ever even think to do. Nobody, nobody else is writing something like 999 but him. Nobody else is crafting a game in which the artificiality of player choice is expressed as an act of love. Nobody else is turning exposition into an inherent source of comfort and meaning. Nobody else is going to make you cry by asking you to physically flip over your Nintendo DS.