Gamasutra: ''Outside of fans of obscure Japanese games, Virtue's Last Reward gets short shrift. It's a shame, because its writing and game design are extremely nuanced. Virtue's Last Reward does an incredible job of intertwining gameplay and story together into a whole, exposing the strength of the Japanese visual novel genre.
Some say visual novels -- stories told via text and images -- aren't really games, but in director Kotaro Uchikoshi's view, this view of "game" is too narrow.''
Developer Kotaro Uchikoshi is not shy to speak his mind he gives an interview for the release of World's End Club on Nintendo Switch scheduled for later this month.
The Zero Escape series is classic and should come to Nintendo Switch.
Or better yet, they should bring the two first games, pretend the third never happened and make it again with better writers who actually know the characters.As a big fan of the series, I couldn't believe how bad Zero Time Dilemma was not only with its writing, but also its messy game structure, unsatisfying conclusion, ignoring the greatest mystery of the second game, bad new characters, and an epilogue that's actually hidden and made by just some text.
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And let's not forget the addition of sudden alien technology shoehorned into the plot.
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EDIT:
"and the final game in the series, Zero Time Dilemma, won our 2016 Game of the Year award"
Oh wow, now I'm truly questioning your site's taste. At least at some point in the article you recognized it's the weakest of the three.
I enjoyed the third, but I completely agree it was a bit of a let down. The characters were so weak.
Agreed. It would be perfect on the Switch. I especially loved Virtue's Last Reward.
Noisy Pixel interivew Kotaro Uchikoshi about his upcoming adventure game AI: The Somnium Files, coming to PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
I love that game, only got to play it because it was free with PSN+ otherwise I wouldn`t have known about it. It`s an underrated game.
cant wait for the 3rd one!
How many times do I have to google search "Virtue's Last Reward sequel" for information to come up!! I'm even more excited for it than I was for VLR after I played 999.
I love these games, and though the dialogue can be a bit cheesy and even cringy (rarely), and the plot can be based on pretty basic ideas while treating them like the most advanced stuff ever (i.e. Shrodinger's Cat, a theory which most physicists are embarrassed by) they're still so compelling and addictive, atmospheric, intriguing, and tightly written (if a bit convoluted sometimes seemingly for its own sake). The story is just such a puzzle and its a joy to decode it all. The characters are well realised too. The sense of satisfaction from 100% understanding the plot is just awesome.
The third and final game is going to be amazing. Although I hope **SPOILERS AHEAD** the secret ending didn't mean to imply that the "player" is the unknown variable. That'd be hella cheesy, and would make so little sense.
For one, why would they send the player's consciousness to Point C and Kyle's consciousness to Point A? This means that when the third game begins, the "player's" body that has now been occupied by Kyle's consciousness isn't the player at all, but completely ignorant. Kyle doesn't know a thing about what happened in VLR (he was asleep the whole time in the main timeline, since Akane put him in the pod and got in his Robot suit), but the unknown variable / player does (which is the main reason people think it's the player.) What would be the point of sending the completely ignorant Kyle back to what is supposedly the player's body? We the actual player know exactly what happened in VLR, but Kyle doesn't, so it couldn't be the case that the unknown consciousness that appears in Kyle's body at point C is the player- because that would essentially signify that OUR OWN consciousness as the player is trapped in another time, and unable to participate in the third game, but obviously that won't be the case, and it'd be stupid if it was.
Nah, that'd be a dumb plot twist, and would spoil the series if you ask me. I think the body that has received Kyle's consciousness is a character from 999 with special abilities that make them an "unknown variable" that entered the Crash Key's "closed system". I'd prefer to see a familiar face, not a dumb meta plot twist that isn't smart and is also nonsense. It'd imply an infinite regression- a player (us) exists beyond their plane of existence, and because their world is just like our own, it implies there's also a "player" of our own world too, and on and on forever. That's dumb and kind of defeats any value or morality the game tries to espouse, because the meaning of each world is deferred infintely to another- deferred to a player, then to a meta-player and on and on.
The game merely metatextually comments on player agency, but I don't think it has any bearing on the plot. Anybody who thinks that would be cool is an Inception loving pillock. A smart movie for dumb people.