#fuckin there was so much in vlr to work with

[wherestarsarestillasleep]

sigma could have been such an interesting character if theyd more delved into his role making the ambidex project and the conviction mindset needed for that and and how his young -> old -> young iterations of himself feel about facing each other

sigma displays some of the most compassion of any ze character over the course of vlr and he's the guy who set it up but there's like little room for him to dwell on that with the pacing of the ending of vlr and the back to back reveals and ztd just like. there Isn't conflict and he's.. he acts different than vlr but in a way that he's just like. calmer and more serious more or less imo

when akane offscreen and in implication must deal with the horror of discovering she is the mastermind thats been tormenting the players of 999 she reckons with the fact that is a person she will grow into of her own volition. she will end up holding that conviction herself she Is zero, zero is her future. she'll end up a person who decided to do all of that herself

sigma isnt the same because sigma really is not zero. its just a title for him its still akane with all the driving will and planning, he is just executing her plans. sigmas role is to do what someone else told him. and she tells him to do something thats theoretically fundamentally against his rather strong sense of morality, to an end that does align with it. but it still must have had to shift significantly. it is not a plan on his own conviction and it is not an even plan between equals because akane always has her own agenda and she lies to him about it. but apparently she does it convincingly enough that sigma keeps a conviction that wasn't his own, one to follow instructions for a goal he's been given and accepted without much of his own thought in the moment we see him agree to it, for Forty Five Years

[colourful-void]

after opening vlr i have opted to close <3 vlr. i will return to it either tonight or in a few days. notes!

not.. loving... the cgi. girl who looks like the Real Santa's Sister seems neat but im. not liking the cg sprites here. im reminded of ace attorney.

why isn't sigma voice acted. i hope it is for wild lore reasons coming later in the game and not something stupid or unrxplained

i. really really don't like the UI. like 999 felt like an Old game, but it felt like an old computer game, with some parts where i was like 'ah yes, this was for the ds originally.' (mainly just the ending though). vlr at least so far in terms of menu-ing feels like ds game ported to computers. thats bcs it is but like. u coulda made the menu a lil nicer come on now.

took a look in the menu mainly, hvaen't even finished opening narration

wow thats one hell of a flowchart.hoh boy

the. built in notes function. it scares me. i mean obviously its bcs the game was meant for the ds but its still fuckin here on the steam release so was it like. lazy porting work just shoot it over or is the game so dense you really need that notepad?? ill probably take notes by hand (i did for 999!)

steam trading card spoiled me for the existence of alice and clover??? dont tell me anything but im confusd

im glad we have multiple save files but at what cost (nice ui)

as much as i gripe, its mainly bcs i really really liked the aesthetic of 999, it hooked me in real well even if the enviroments weren't the sort of thing i usually gravitate to in the minute to minute, and enviroment is essential to me in games like this.

despite that, i think there's a good number of ppl who like VLR? idk if its gonna be nearly as good as 999 but we'll see. if u like zero escape weigh in! do u like VLR more equally or less than 999?

live blogging will continue unless i get bored <3 still using void nonary game as the tag so feel free to block it. ill try and tag major spoilers as VLR spoilers as well

wish me luck! i hope i end up really getting into it!

[graceisprettygreat]

Junpei 9 13 15 24 36 49

9. Scene that first made me love (or hate) the character Sadly this is really really hard for me since I first played almost a decade ago. I can't say for certain. i defintiely dont know when i first liked him but i think i can say i probably first LOVED him during safe end. even without voice acting him yelling SNAAAAKE sent chills down my spine. probably 13. Dumbest thing they’ve ever done let his baby falls off his truck LIKE DUDE. THEY WERE AN INFANT. COULDA GONE SPLAT 15. Worst thing they’ve ever done the sister joke in ztd. dude. (half-serious) for real. maybe betraying clover in luna route's on vlr. i fully get why he did it. and wouldnt have it any other way for his character. but MAN. that fucking stings 24. Most annoying habit not sure if this is a real answer but as someone also raised by my grandparents, i hard relate to quark in having certain phrases that annoyed me to NO END as a little kid for truly no reason. like 'if i were me (where would i have put that)" andd i was always like YOU!!! ARE YOU!!!! so i think him saying 'a little scotch should scratch the itch' would also annoy to me to no end. but dont get me wrong I LOVE IT SO MUCH ITS SO CUTE I LOVE HIM i love this phrase i love both the jp and the eng version. hwoever. relate too hard to quark to not say it 36. Their favorite season (no i dont know why this one is bolded) i think this changed a lot through his life. as a kid im of two minds, summer for festivals and being out of school, or fall for seeing akane again. then as he was a young adult, im not so sure. i think he prefers sunlight to not so spring/summer? post-999 winter so he has an 'excuse' to be inside all day. and once the post-apocalyspe exists in earnest. i have done a LOT of climate study into this, what the climate of their world would be like. and have no solid answer (MOSTLY BECAUSE OF TENMYOUJI AND QUARK'S OUTFIT DURING JANUARY ARE BAFFLING) but i have to think summer/fall. more daylight to work and earn by. more crops. less dangers of the cold and ice. 49. Favorite toy as a child all i can think is rubix cube bc of snow's comic and i love it so much. however i also want to say that he would have fuckin loved foam/toy swords as a kid.

[ct-multifandom]

Nirvana Initiative open discussion post

I want to start a convo here on tumblr with all you AI enjoyers because so few people are talking about all the interesting content we’ve gotten and are still getting. I’m encouraging you all to rb, comment, whatever and go over this stuff with me! I wanna talk about AI!

Below I’ll rant about some things that caught my eye (pun not intended).

When the first AINI trailer came out I wanted to make an analysis and theory post but then I thought about it and was like. Wtf do I even say. I don’t have Twitter so I had to read up on Hidden Bats here and I watched Ryan Geever on YouTube’s videos about the ARG which I highly recommend because his explanation is very thorough and his theories are really onto something.

He talks about a lot of good stuff like the Philadelphia Experiment, the plot of an old, similar series this writing team worked on, and the relevance of the Lemniscate ARG, which I would not have connected on my own. I won’t retype everything he said, but I’d love to discuss some of the extremely solid connections he made.

Through his videos, I also found out the achievement list has been leaked. I took a look at it myself, but I won’t say anything about it because of potential spoilers. There’s some stuff that interests me on there, though.

I’ll make a bulleted list of questions I have:

Obv question: what’s the timeline here in relation to the events of AITSF?

What happened to Saito? And Yagyu’s body?

Why’d Date give up PSYNCing? What is he up to now, still ABIS or something else? Is he taking oxytocin without Aiba’s administration?

Did Iris recover from her brain tumor or not?

Is Komeji’s head a futuristic mascot suit that can emote where his forehead dot is the eye hole or is he just Shovelforge George irl? Is there a secret guy in there or is that his actual body?

Are the VLR spacesuits a cameo or do they have significance?

The game is made by “Team Zero Escape” and has more ZE references than usual. The ARG also has references to SHIFTing. Will the ZE universe be relevant to the story?

I’m behind on Hidden Bats, but is the current arc kind of like the ambidex game where the girls have to trust each other to get the best result, and Lumi trusts Mari, but Mari doesn’t trust her back?

Whereas the choice between Aine and Binato was between two second degree murderers, maybe this choice will be that Lumi did something in the past to hurt Mari, but Mari is holding a grudge in the present and is willing to endanger her as revenge, and we have to decide which is worse (like obv tAI the vote but y’know)

Okayyy nvm *edit* I caught up and it looks like as of now Lumina is just a normal nice girl and Mariha is a fuckin ass. I guess the voting this time won’t be trying to decide the lesser of two evils or neither, but to decide whether to treat a good and bad person equally or to deem Mariha unworthy of saving as some sort of extreme “justice”.

The last two characters’ names and pics were dug up by tech whizes from the website code and I like their designs. Wonder what their whole thing is gonna be.

Tokiko and Naix being real is very interesting. Dk what to say, but Iris was clearly right that they exist and are shady. Perhaps it’s true that her tumor-induced psychosis made her construe some stuff as it applied to the last case, but they’re very much involved in this one. How did Iris even find out about it?

Another obv one but why does Ryuki look so similar to Yagyu and why do they have similar naming conventions?

I’m curious about Gen, Shoma, and Kizuna because they’re new, but we don’t know a ton about them. Also Chikara sus.

Edit: forgot the locksmith guy even existed for a sec wow

What’s very curious is how Amame is getting such a major upgrade from being a background character like the driver or receptionist to being an actual major player. I love when stories elevate minor characters to the major cast for new arcs, but hmm…

Why isn’t Pewter in jail? This could point to NI being in a whole different timeline from TSF if he never did anything illegal in the first place.

The six years ago/six years later thing they have going on is confusing when you’re trying to analyze trailers. The leaked achievements tell us which protag’s story has which somnium, but which characters are associated with which time period?

Interested in how Sunaiku and the Hidden Bats victims will play into the game and to what extent. The last ARG was kind of unrelated to the plot of TSF, but everything there was included, albeit with a twist. Also, the last ARG feels somehow more relevant to this game than to the last? If there’s an AI3 will Hidden Bats be relevant to that as well?

Timelines aside, please let Ota keep his TSF character development. Also, Mayumi hasn’t appeared in any trailers and that’s making me sad because y’know,,,

I hope they talk more about the Wadjet system. Can Aiba and Tama use it to communicate with each other? Can they intentionally simulate ESP across time using it?

Do all PSYNCers have AI balls or is it just the two? Did Ryuki exist as one of the unnamed other PSYNCers in TSF and we just didn’t meet him yet?

Oh here’s one: in the character trailer, they list the VAs of the four PCs, Mizuki, Aiba, Ryuki, and Tama. They don’t list anyone else’s name. Maybe I’ve got my tinfoil hat on, but what if knowing someone’s VA would be a spoiler, 13 sentinels style? Maybe someone “new” is actually someone else who has the same VA as before?

Ik Mizuki was playing 999 in the very first trailer, which implies that ZE is a video game in the AI world, but could they exist in the same reality through worldline SHIFTing bs? Digimon vibes

Ooo, edit, but I noticed they told us Binato was “removed from reality”, not killed, which I just found out Uchi tweeted about too. Did they teleport him to the backrooms? Are they experimenting on him? I’d suggest my beloved sci fi horror trope that they erased all evidence of his life, but his disappearance is still listed on the Sunaiku news page, so that’s not it. It’d be cool if the post updated to just be about Aine after the vote was over, though, and his twitters were deleted as well as all mention of him on Aine’s. Is he stuck in some place between realities or in a different one?

Sunaiku and Aine both have Ai in their names *puts red thread on my detective photo wall*

I’ll add more stuff if I think of more, but I want to talk about this, so let’s treat this post like a discussion board! Let’s include spoilers for the first game as well as Zero Escape, but not leaks from this one. So excited for AINI.

[deathdesu]

Zero Escape ask meme: 1h, 2a, 3c, 5f?

1h. Favorite quote: is it too basic if I say that it’s ‘SEEK A WAY OUT’?  it’s just really memorable to me and I always sing it to the little tune that plays when it shows since the amount of syllables and the amount of notes are the same. seek~ a~ way~ out~ 

2a. Least favorite character: Quark, I guess... I just think he’s more plot device than character and he’s kind of boring. He didn’t feel very defined outside of his relationship to Tenmyouji and he was missing for half of the game he was in. I hated having to look for him over and over. And the way they tried to paint him as sinister and then he wasn’t at all, which was kind of pitiful. Vent Goblin Quark would have been worth the hype they built up around him!  3c. Rank the ZTD teams: Q-Team Best Team > C Team OT3 > Dial D for DISASTER  

but honestly, this order only exists because D-end 2 is just THAT BAD. Unlike D team who I loved for the whole game until that ending soured me on them irreparably, I disliked C-Team for most of my first run and they only grew on me later. I hated the design change for Akane and Junpei - their characterization in ZTD was a bit grating but I understood it. But physically, they were unrecognizable to me. Akane’s face used to be so jolie-laide in 2D pics like this - her long features! her world weary heavy eyelids! nowhere to be found in ZTD design, she was a purple haired doe eyed moe girl. And Junpei already looked like death in 999, obviously there were ways to show his jadedness without turning him into a goth. On both teams the third wheel character was the saving factor. Carlos is pure himbo perfection and Phi just deserved so much better than the shit she was dealt. 

Meanwhile, Q team just grew on me lightning fast with their hilariously murderous found family vibes. They were such a delight I actually felt begrudged having to do anyone else’s fragments. I had never been more endeared to zero escape than I did playing as them. Eric’s fish out of water normie schtick is so great in this cast of hyperintelligent psychic weirdos and his PTSD + losing everyone he ever loved adds depth and sympathy to his largely antagonistic role. Sean is pragmatic but a huge sweetie and just a really well rounded character, and so interesting as a character that both of the other members of his team can see a part of themselves in - he is the perfect leader for Q Team in terms of both having enough empathy to truly attempt to understand them and work with them to be better people, and  being a super-strength robot who is absolutely not taking shit from them once enough becomes enough. You kind of start the game out going ‘oh no who left this small child with the assholes, please save him’ to realizing that actually, he’s got this! AND MIRA. Look, I have wrote my big analysis on how she highlights the themes of ZTD so well, and just. she’s murder wife. I made my animal crossing island Mira-themed what do you fuckin expect from me tbh.  

So if you averaged out my experiences then in truth

 Q team >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> C team = D team 

Sorry, not sorry 🔪❤ 

5f. Rant about something you disliked about the games: Again!? Well alright, let’s see... I’m just going to come out and say it. The payoff of VLR is extremely good, but playing the actual game is torture. I’m honestly convinced it is by design.  The events are so similar throughout, that all the timelines blur together in your memory and it’s hard to discern which events happen when. The bland ass sci fi shelter contrasted to 999′s gorgeous Titanic replica. And unlike in 999 where the character moments were blended masterfully into the escape rooms themselves and what you found at the end tended to differ by a lot, in VLR besides the escape rooms/your partner, you just repeat the same set phases of the AB game until at the very end one character tells you their backstory out of the blue in a monologue. There are also a million same-y bad endings where someone besides Sigma gets enough BP to ditch everyone. God. It’s just... so much. 

There is a certain degree of brilliance to it.  We experience every moment Sigma does, encountering all of these horrible situation where for the time we are powerless. And it's SO frustrating. You really feel what he would be feeling. The complete torture of enduring the nonary game over and over and over with no victory in sight. Like, I hit every plot lock in the game before I got a single ending, so I basically WAS Sigma. But you know....I don’t like being tortured! I hated it! It took me like two years to beat the game because it made me so unhappy to play and I procrastinated on it forever. If I hadn’t been on a flight where I discovered all the other games I brought besides VLR made me motion sick, I don’t think I would have ever finished it. Of course, the catharsis of reaching the end was immense. But it was a cliffhanger, so the kind of immense that also invokes berserker rage...? I really can’t imagine how fucking unhinged I would have become if I was one of those Zero Escape fans who played it ten years before ZTD came out. I finished it a comfortable six months before and I STILL would have fought an army for VLR young Sigma (but NOT OLD SIGMA.) 

[morphogenetic]

@9thdoor​ (xkit hasnt fixed replies yet im sorry i have to do this this way lkshsdg)

yeah it’s uh. really fuckin bad for first timers. if you’ve played it before it’s whatever but like. adventure mode (ie the “voices only” mode for the non-puzzle-room segments) is just HORRIBLE for a visual novel that’s built so much on descriptive text

and then novel mode does have everything but just smashes it entirely into one screen, which. yknow. doesnt work for obvious spoiler-related reasons

also a lot of the humor that came from some of the puzzles having descriptive dialogue on the top/the item on the bottom is lost. see: the cards of the 9 faces. that shit is SO much funnier in the original and the port kinda loses some of the charms

i also have a bone to pick w the flowchart system that they added to the port, like yes i will fully admit it’s useful but a) not knowing how many routes there are/which doors lead to what initially is part of the charm b) replaying puzzle rooms is kind of annoying but skimming through similar paths over and over again is LITERALLY what (redacted) has to do to get the true ending and In My Personal Opinion, while it’s obviously a limit of the DS to some extent, it’s also A Narrative Choice and the port loses that entirely by letting you skip around. (vlr is different about this bc it shows you the flowchart from the beginning and skipping around makes more Sense)

(also ‘safe’ is now ‘zero lost’ which is the dumbest fucking change on the planet but w/e)

also they changed the final puzzle for literally no fucking reason and the password being ‘password’ still irritates me so fucking intensely (i’ll spare you from the details bc you can look it up on youtube but my god its. so fucking bad and they DIDNT EVEN NEED TO CHANGE IT)

and the sprites got changed to drawings and i think some of them are pretty ugly (santa’s eye is pretty fucked up in one of his main sprites for example) and lose the charm of the sprites but that’s more a personal opinion

[cteranodon]

1, 5, 7, 8!

1. What was your first fic and could you stand to read it today?

150-ish chapter Legend of Zelda fic posted entirely to a Midna-dedicated phpbb forum (yes, we’re talking about back when phpbb forums were the shit). I had about four readers, and it went unfinished because it became so convoluted that I lost even my four readers. Needless to say i could NOT fucking read that now.

A few highlights include copypasting a twist from the show House, turning all the MM bosses into nice friendly humanoids for some reason, bringing Gohdan into Twilight Princess-era events and making him evil for some reason, and ignoring all constructive criticism.

5. Is there any fic that makes you super happy to reread and remember you wrote that?

Turnabout Honeymoon, to be honest. It’s not that infrequent that I go back to reread a scene and get excited about it again. It’s not exclusively the villain reveal scene, but that’s the most frequent one - that scene absolutely has it all, and writing it was such a relief for myself and the villain in question, who finally got to do all the dramatic monologuing that they badly/secretly wanted to do in the entire fic up to that point but had not been allowed to do on account of trying to appear not evil.

7. What’s the fic you most want to continue (unfinished or no)?

Oof. The three big highlights:

the cl@ypollo christmas piece of which 2 of 3 chapters are posted. Spoilers, probably gonna aim to post chapter 3 this coming december 25

the VLR Luna Game Over 2 ending extension. that one is high on my list to work on

the ace att0rney AU which I dubbed the #gregory vs diego death match au. I wrote an entire 95k part 1 draft, and then I got caught between “wait to post until i write part 2 so that i can capitalize if the interest spikes” vs “wait to write part 2 until i post so i can see if anybody fuckin cares about it at all” so you can IMAGINE how that might have stalled, but eventually i’ll come back to it and start posting

8. What’s the oldest fic you most want to continue (unfinished or no)?

i mean... there is always that dave/kat piece... i always think about finishing it up but i’ve improved SO much as a writer since then and i really would have to do a thorough edit of chapter 1 first even though it’s already posted.

granted this is really the kind of thing where i would benefit from knowing that somebody is actually interested in me finishing it fsjdl

thanks so much for the ask!

[horrible-monstrosity]

Adventures in reviewing games I haven't actually played

so it took me something to figure out why i really didn't like danganronpa, and that something was 9 doors 9 people 9 etc. i'm totally not just salty that chihiro dies early, r e a l l y

to begin with without even comparing I can already say Danganronpa is visually... terrible. The characters look mildewed, for lack of a better term. The backgrounds are clunky as shit, weirdly proportioned, brightly colored eyesores. Usually I'm pretty down for thing in weird unrealistic reality-breaking styles, but this just looks like... chunky ass...

Next, the characters... aside from looking completely unappealing, they're all bizarre unlikable stereotypes. I remember seeing someone claiming that's the "point", that the characters seem like stereotypes and treat each other like stereotypes because you supposed to get to know them and then you care when they die, and also they barely interact with each other because only you know their true selves because it's a deep meaning thing about stereotypes, but... it kinda doesn't seem like they actually manage to get beyond that. And also then of course they eventually die and then they stop developing. But we'll get to that. On the other hand, compare that to the 999 characters... it's a vibrant cast of tropey but still fairly unique characters with nice eyecatching designs. You get a taste of their personalities immediately via first the main guy's stupid little nicknames for them all and then through their reactions to his little snap assessment of them. Throughout the game they banter with and bounce off each other and continue being vibrant lovable characters and it's fucking beautiful. You could probably compare it to Higurashi with the great contrast between the characters dicking around with each other and the deeply serious and horrifying moments... hah, no wonder I liked 999 so much P:

And the final problem is that, and this is gonna sound really fuckin stupid for a sec, it's that people keep fucking dying in Danganronpa. No, really, lemme explain. So first off characters are slated to die regularly not only to fuel the court thing but as a direct result of it. If you're expecting at least two characters to die ever chapter or arc, it becomes routine. Plus the fact that the murders are slightly contrived- just put a bunch of people in a building and be like "lol kill each other", and instead of outright fighting and rioting you get single distinct clean murder events? It's fucking weird.

The other problem is, if you introduce a cast of characters we're all supposed to like and put them in mortal danger, people're gonna want to see them all come out alive somehow. DR addresses this with... a deus ex machina where you can get the key to the fucking exit out of a vending machine at the start of the game and just fucking leave. lol whut I dunno, maybe that was in one of the other games, not the first one which is the only one I ever bothered to even try watching. But the point is, the writers/designers decided to pander to the audience, but instead of thinking it out and allowing you to maybe affect events somehow I don't fucking know they went with a fucking stupid magic plot token.

In 999 meanwhile, while there's indications you've taken the wrong path long before you get to the killin', the whole point is to get as many people as possible out alive, so that problem is nipped in the bud. Not only does that lead to a more satisfying good ending, the bad ends are a wild fucking ride of bloodshed and death and it's fucking amazding okay

I... I dunno, man, the things just bug me.

... But as it turns out, that whole thing was just prologue to me bitching about 999's inferior sequel Virtue's Last Reward!

So VLR is like... basically, it's like if the writers decided to do exactly the same thing as the first game but amped up to eleven, and put no thought into it beyond that.

Immediately out of the gate you can tell the characters just aren't up to snuff. Compared to 999, the group introduction is just... like, there? It's like, oh, here's a person, here's a person. It's pretty weak compared to its predecessor. And then robot comes in with unconscious Clover because why. As far as I can tell, there's no reason for her to be unconscious except le drama, and in exchange... well, her character introduction is even weaker than everyone else's. Because she's unconscious and can't do shit. Her character and the writing are undermined for nothing of any worth. I mean maybe they'll hack up a reason for it later, but I really doubt it'll be as good as say June collapsing with a fever whenever you made a bad choice in 999, for two reasons. For one it's just... a one-trait plot point. June's collapses are interesting because, as it turns out, she has a fever then because she's literally burning up in another timeline. But Clover is just... out cold. Just that. It's literally a boilerplate sitcom drama trope. It's nothing. And then secondly it only happened once with no apparent cause so even bothering to explain it would be a waste of fucking time. So I almost hope it's never explained or even referred to again, except that's still stupid so I guess we're just fucked either way huh?

After that, the game's own design prevents anything like the interactions between groups in 999 by forcing the cast off into minimal itty bitty little groups of three. Man, that just damages it. There's very little of the cast interacting with... well, each other. Yeah sure you get to see enough of each character individually throughout the story branches when you pair up with them but they really don't feel genuine as a group. It's really lacking.

Oh, but then we can get into something that's just the pinnacle-example of the writing problems with VLR... the door-choosing scenes. Just... no, oh no... Every single damn one of them... there's a time limit. The characters know damn well there's a time limit, but they manage to get right up to the very last second boringly agonizingly going over every single combination of who makes what color... then boringly arguing over who goes which what... one time they literally just turn to mister main character at the last second and tell you to choose and they all just go with it because lolwritinghowdoidothisshitfuckingkillme In 999 meanwhile, a lot of the group/door deciding scenes *start off* with characters laying out who they do or absolutely don't want to group up with, or with characters picking out which door they want, and *then* trying to work out groups... you know, the *characters* take precedence rather than the look at muh clever plot mechanics u guise did u know that basic colors? The main character being the arbiter because he's a conduit for the player's input was done much more naturally, usually due to you being the tiebreaker vote or the like. And yes, once they get through the doors there's a silly little time limit thing while they run around looking for the second bracelet thing, but it's given much less focus so it's fine. Ugh... it's just, it's so painful to watch this game trying to go through the motions of its predecessor so exactly (the characters must choose a group for the doors but there's conflict!!) and still failing so hard. It's not so much the same motions as it is following the same path by writhing along the floor and occasionally sticking its ass in the air and screeching.

Mechanically, 999's "morphic resonance" and its interaction with the player's ability to replay scenarios with different choices is... one-for-one replaced with a much more generic and obvious concept that's then massively overused. In 999 morphic resonance is very much a unique trait of the narrative- it's built up to with various odd stories and conversations, based on events both real and invented, leading to the climactic moments where it's first revealed to be the lynchpin of the entire story and then used to save day. Not to mention it's a concept I don't think I've ever heard of outside of the game. It's pretty fucking fascinating, I'm saying.

In VLR meanwhile it's just like... hey, guys, quantum mechanics! Every second of every day, it's quantum mechanics!... But guys, guys, did I mention... quantum mechaniiiiiiiiiiiicfs- meh. Seriously, I'm... almost entirely sure I've seen a branching paths story use quantum mechanics to be "meta" with the fact that the game you're playing has the game mechanics in it before. It's basically baby's first smart-sounding complicated science thing that everyone basically already has a basic idea of (entanglement and spooky distance and shit).

But to make up for underdoing it on the actual ideas front, they decide to just massively overuse it. Nearly ever fucking "ending" I've seen so far has been "ha ha go quantum fuck yourself in another branch before you know how to do this one". Apparently  only two endings out of go fuck yourself so many can actually be obtained from the start, and there's no real indication of which path you should take to get them (and it is *should* take unless you think perpetual bullshit and disappointment is some sort of necessary game and story feature). There's one fucking "ending" where the way out is to just fucking immediately go back a scene and watch it again. Just one. It's the one where Alice stabs herself, which happens in other timelines (or she tries to anyway) but only in this one do you do this thing because... it's a fucking misused overused gimmick! And look how clever we are in this single idea- what, polishing it? lol nope man go fuck yaself! aaaaaaaaaauuhghg- Also, you'd think *someone* would have thought "man all this quantum connectedness bullshit sure never happened to me in my normal life, I wonder what changed?" Again this isn't a problem in 999 at all because they use it sparingly instead of spamming it all over the place. Instead we get people wondering if the entire fucking universe outside of the box they're trapped in isn't the REAL shcrodinger's box *sarcastic mind blown ptcheeeeeww*

And then this is all just boilerplated on over the original Nonary game concept. Like, why does it still have to be the number nine? You're talking about quantum pairs and the binary between ally and betray, but the quantum entanglement system has to be awkwardly grafted onto the group of nine by having only some of them pair up and aaaaahksdjhguhdkhgkjdhgudrhg Why not change it to something relevant, like a power of two?

... No, seriously, let me just fix this entire setup in a hot fucking second. Let me introduce to you... THE BINARY GAME. So to fucking start off with you have eight characters, or fuck it have sixteen of them. If you want to "sequelify" things compared to the previous game just go fucking whole hog into it. Besides, having more characters might help with having smaller groups interacting at a time. So now your smaller groups are... larger. Anyway, you have eight or sixteen or maybe fifteen characters (because something zero indexing). They're quantum paired off and made to share their "destiny" or whatever the rabbit said (basically forced to ally regardless of how much they might dislike each other). Those pairs then pair off with another pair for the puzzle rooms who they can choose to betray/ally later on, forming a double standard of sorts that could be interesting. If you go with fifteen characters, the "zero"th one is the one missing (because of course). The 15th or whoever ends up without a partner has some dead relative/loved one as a backstory element and are particularly lonely or isolated, or are seen as suspicious by the others, but this is just thematic/a red herring and they aren't connected to New Zero.

And after you've got all that sorted have Alice-standin stabbing herself and you undoing it be the first significant quantum bullshit event that happens, effectively serving as a tutorial moment instead of shoehorned "look how clever I am u guise" bullshit.

After that, all the bullshit about "but what if humans are the real robot??" can be actually tied into the "binary" theme- New Zero's trying to make the "point" that if you boil a person's thoughts and feelings down to only two options (the prisoner's dilemma game) it supposedly becomes predictable, and all humans are just meat robots and shit. This is probably delivered in an extremely cynical way, like that people who'll always betray are proof humans are all evil and people who always ally are overly trusting fools. And people who'll ally or betray depending on the opponent or the situation, well they're just etc etc The player's ability to go back in time and change their choice is a "shrodinger's cat", in that no matter what you do the bunny will claim he knew you'd do that all along. And of course the final statement of this thing is that if you accept all the complexities of le human you'd see they're so much more than roburts. And then you just fucking play with the concepts. Binary numbers, binary options, binary pairs, quantum particle entanglement, going beyond two options like some quantum computing shit, do the gender binary by making Luna a trap, whatever! And for the endings you have like two or three or four that lead to "true" endings and are "to be continued" off if you don't get some of the bad endings and find out things first. You know, instead of the opposite of that.

Look, there, I fucking fixed it. fucking hell

What else can I bitch about?... Well, there's some just dumb shit like the one time some of them found a HWACKEY QHWACKEY AUSTRALIAN ROBURT that talked about deep philosophical shit with a wacky accent! Or it tries to, anyway, all it says is some boilerplate I'm-14-and-this-is-deep shit about how *maybe you're the robots* because... like, your arms move, or something. Seriously, that's it. And it just goes on and on for fucking forever, saying nothing of any fucking value in any of it.

Clover and Alice as far as I can tell are just there as like continuity-bait characters. Like hey guys remember that time we had a good game and these characters were there (or Clover was there and Alice was kinda this... thing)??? Remember how you liked them?? Well, now they're here, too! Effort done, everyone likes the sequel now, we can stop trying. It hasn't been covered in the game yet but apparently Alice's backstory is... fucking stupid. Like, the obscure fictional "all-ice" rumor from the original games that was an invented piece of deepest lore that informed the plot and feel of the game... uh now it's just some rumor everyone knows and kids tease Alice because she was kangs n Alice and shiet. It's like they tried to surpass the most obvious, boring, boilerplate thing they could do with that girl who appeared as a gag at the end of 999 and create a character truly out of nothing. And of course it doesn't fucking mean anything, it's just look at how clever we are obsessing over random shit from out previous success. Did Trigger write this game?

Everyone seems to fucking hate the main character. If you choose to downvote someone everyone gets bitchy at you about it, including Phi who probably told you to do it when she's partnered with you. But if someone downvotes you they're all just like "it's perfectly understandable to look out for yourself I don't know why you're upset lol". If anyone else (so far Quark and Phi) gets 9 post karma, which is what you need to get out of there, they'll just let them wander around because they totally wouldn't abandon us here lol but if you get 9 points they FUCKING MURDER YOU. And this one fucking baffled me for a while- despite loving to go on and on about the most useless of fucking shit all of the fucking time the game decides to not remind you that opening the 9 door kills everyone who doesn't have 9 points yet until fucking forever later (or, given that it's multiple paths, just at some completely random point in the story). So for the longest fucking time it just seems like they decide to kill you out of spite.

Oh, and everyone also seems to also fucking hate Dio. Like, wow, he gets kinda snippy with people and votes "betray" all of like twice in each timeline before people start physically assaulting him to prevent him from voting. It's not like people might get selfish and snippy when they're in a life-and-death situation, nooo, that's not totally understandable at all. Better yet the thing goes on about the prisoner's dilemma as this great big moral... dilemma- oh, do you choose "ally" or you choose "betray"?? oh man the choices!!- but when Dio is just like "fuck it I pick betray" and everyone just goes HOW FUCKING DARE YOU REEEEEEEEEEEEE--- (And yes, I've read the spoilers about him... it sounds absolutely fucking retarded.)

Speaking of which Dio's "I'm a ringleader lol" shctick seems like an entirely weaker imitation of 999's wacky character designs. 999 had characters who were eyecatching but not too over-the-top in appearances, which the main character raised an eyebrow at at the beginning but it becomes strangely normal as you go along. Sounds great, right? Well in VLR we have... ringleader guy for no reason, kid with cinderblocks on his fucking head, Clover and Alice looking FUCKING TERRIBLE... and then completely normal boring designs like old man guy. What the fuck? Seriously, in 999 you look at Lotus and in one second you know she's dressed as a bellydancer. You don't know why she is, but she is. In VLR you look at Alice and she's a... what? She doesn't even look like a stripper like Clover kinda does, she just looks retarded.

[ninthextrication]

every time i think of the Worst au(tm) i just get an intense feeling like “i abandoned my boy! i abandoned my boy!!” but instead of abandoned it’s “i broke my boy! i broke by boy!!!!”

he deserves so much better that au is endless pain