It’s been a couple of weeks since I finished Zero Time Dilemma already – I promised myself I would wait for some time before speaking out my mind about the game just in case I had missed anything or felt like contrasting my opinions with other fans, and now I think I am in a good position to write down my opinion of the game. This will be an extremely long post and I apologize for that! I hope you enjoy reading it. Of course, spoilers galore past this point!



Let’s start with the first two games, because I feel like most of my comment on ZTD will be conditioned on how much/what I enjoyed the most about 999 and VLR.



999 is my favourite videogame of all-time, and I love absolutely everything about it, both on writing and on technical aspects. VLR, on the other hand, is a bit harder to explain. While I still adore it, and feel like it improved and expanded on 999’s concept, I had a few problems with it – like the info dumping on the character ends, the blander atmosphere, the more straight-forward personalities of the characters as opposted to 999’s twists and reveals, or the abundant use of sci-fi themes instead of a more simplistic or realistic approach. Nevertheless, I enjoyed both games A LOT and I’ve been very nitpicky on my comment above (I’d still rate both games 10/10), but I feel like some things I didn’t enjoy in VLR came back in ZTD, which is why I mentioned them now.



Zero Time Dilemma took me 29 hours to finish – that is, including some idle time and live blogging, so I’d say it would be around 26-27h actually – the same amount of time I took to beat my first run of 999. I played on Steam (filling up my whole 2k screen with Zero Escape?! Hell yeah) with the Japanese voice acting. You can read how the whole process went on in my ZTD liveblog Twitter: https://twitter.com/siplick_ztd



Let’s get started!







GRAPHICS



The first thing I want to talk about are the character designs and illustrations, since it’s what hits closest home, as I am an artist, so if you want to skip this part and go straight into the character/plot stuff, please feel free to do so.



I have to admit it – I’m more of a Nishimura fan than a Tomono fan. I really like defined drawings and volumes, strong poses, vibrant colours and crazy designs, and Nishimura did all of those magnificiently. Rui Tomono, on the other hand, has a wonderful painting-like style and puts lots of attention to detail and atmosphere, but the character designs Tomono did for ZTD felt much blander and under-designed than their usual work. I’m assuming this is because of the 3D model limitations, but I still feel like they could have pushed the designs a bit further. I liked the jump into a more realistic and 3D-looking art style, especially with the male cast. As I said, I kind of miss the older designs and feel like recognizing older characters as their ZTD versions is kind of hard because they lost some of their most defining features in translation (except for Phi, but why glasses though?). The key art for ZTD is breathtaking, however, and even with everything said above, I like Tomono a lot, especially after digging a bit into the artbook that explained the concept and trials of each of the designs.



As for the game’s models, I felt like they weren’t perfect, but they were very expressive. Since I played on a screen with a huge resolution, the models looked very clean and well-defined. Not a single blurry texture or badly sculpted feature like I was excpecting! I was positively surprised. The lip movement and head motions felt a bit weird at first, but I got used to them very quickly and they never interferred with my enjoyment of the game. The lip synch was a bit weird when characters laughed, however, but overall it was pretty good.



I feel like I’m part of a minority on this, but I feel like switching from VN to cinematics did wonders to the game, besides setting up the Delta plot twist, because you get to see the character’s expressions, their body language, their interactions with each other and so on, you get to understand and learn more about the characters. Are they xpressive, are they calm, are they violent? How do they react when stuff goes wrong, and what’s their reaction when it all goes well? When you have sprites or still models on your screen with text boxes underneath, their personalities and interactions with the rest of the cast are affected, as they are left for your imagination to fill in the blanks. As such, I feel like ZTD helped me learn more about how the characters truly are, even in the scenes where the plot was running – although I wouldn’t change 999 or VLR’s VN parts into this, because I think they worked well for their respective games.







AUDIO



The music was GOOD. I love Shinji Hosoe’s work so much and ZTD’s sountrack is no exception. I liked the new music and LOVED the remixes from previous tracks, especially those from 999 that didn’t pop up in VLR, like Extreme Extrication. My favourite tracks are Nostalgic Scenery and Interminable Dilemma, which are both heartbreaking, but extremely beautiful in my opinion. I’m really pleased with the music in this game and feel that, even if it didn’t have any title that stood out as much as Morphogenetic Sorrow or Bluebird Lamentation, it was really solid and on par with the rest of the series – I’d even say that I liked it more than VLR’s music for the most part. It managed to keep me on the edge during tense moments, to make me feel nostalgic, and to bring a grin out of me when the 999 and VLR remixes brought me back to the previous games’ scenarios. Zero flaws here!



Voice acting-wise, I think that the Japanese VAs were pretty good. I felt like that maybe Tatsuhisa’s voice was a bit too rough for Junpei (I was expecting him to use his softer tone for him), and Diana’s pitch got a bit annoying every now and then, but I think that the acting was handled nicely – the expressions fit the voices and body languages properly, and the VA picks were great. I watched a bit of the English dub after I finished the game and didn’t like it as much because the tones didn’t feel too fitting and I don’t like some of the VA picks, so I’m glad I went with JP.







PUZZLES AND GAME MECHANICS

I’d like to say, first and foremost, that I feel like puzzles didn’t fit too nicely into ZTD’s plot, considering they weren’t really necessary for the story to go on, if I remember correctly – they were used to make people bond more in preparation for a potential mission to Mars (as said in one of the Q-Team fragments), but wasn’t their coexistence at the beginning of the experiment used for that already? Puzzles were used to set up the decision scenes most of the time, when I (and a few other people more, I have noticed) expected them to be something more. That aside…

I felt like most of the puzzles were pretty intuitive, fun, and easy to solve. I only got stuck in a couple of them (the Rec Room took 2 full hours to beat). ZTD was easy to complete 100% in comparison with the extra passwords in VLR – which I never had the patience to complete myself. The Pod Room’s puzzle was probably my favourite, and one of the most original ones in the series, in my opinion. I also liked the Transporter Room’s (and gosh do I love the birdman symbol). I missed going through puzzle rooms during the last part of the game, decisions aside, and was expecting some sort of Incinerator or Q room once more, but unfortunately the game only used a decision as the last “puzzle” – my comment on that particular scene will come later on.

The Decision moments where definitely one of the strongest points of the newly introduced aspects of the game. They no longer were simple answers, but setters for potentially deathly, and often morally ambiguous questions. Not to mention, the SFX and music from these scenes made me scream in excitement in the inside everytime they popped up. We didn’t get the “Seek a way out!” jingle remixed this time, but I feel like these parts made up for that. I liked how keyboard inputs were exploited in the sense that you just weren’t asked to choose an option between a limited number of answers. For example, during the Triangle fragment you could shoot any of the characters you could look at from your screen. However, inputting “Q” and getting a “What’s Q’s name?” for that to change to an error message when you input “Sean” made me question the whole game more than once. I feel like decisions were cleverly introduced and used, and wish there had been more throughout the game.

And even if the passwords were a minor thing, I liked how they referred to some of the characters’ features and hinted to some happenings in the story, although I wish Delta’s X-Passes had been a little more revealing (a FtS reference, maybe?).





CHARACTERS

Characters are one of the things I enjoy and therefore focus on the most – Zero Escape is mostly a character-driven story, so I’m going to speak about all of the characters separately instead of just bumping them together. Using the participant numbers (ish?) for their order.

Carlos:



Not gonna lie, I expected him to be a Left clone when the designs first came out, and in one trailer there was a frame of him grinning with a red filter on, so I expected the worst, but at the same time I was very curious about him. What I got in return was a genuinely good guy, a heroic character with the only flaw of being TOO good at some times. I wish his whole story hadn’t revolved around his sister to ridiculous points sometimes, but with that aside, I felt like he was a good lead character. Kind-hearted, friendly, and decisive. His brotherly appreciation towards Junpei and Akane and his pushy behaviour towards their relationship were very cute and made me appreciate him a lot, although I wish his backstory was a bit more elaborated.

Eric:



I both love, and hate this guy. The “hate” part is obvious – he is childish, annoying, and not the most brilliant mind of all the cast. He is clingy, he is moody, and, for the most part, doesn’t even have an opinion of his own. But I’m really intrigued by his past and how it affected him as a character. Eric is broken – he’s had his wounds open for years, but he himself isn’t enough to get them to close, and thus they still affect him. The episodes he suffers, his suspicious nature, the way he lets his father’s abusive behavior reflect on himself… they’re all very interesting sides of a character I wasn’t expecting to experience in Zero Escape. He wasn’t just a jerk like Dio, or aware of a condition he wanted to fix like Ace, but his past still hurt him and shaped him in a morbid way. For this reason, and while he bothered me for a good chunk of the game, I found him pretty intriguing, although I wish his problems had had some kind of closure.

Phi:



Phi was, unfortunately, the only returning character that left me down. She was one of my favourite characters in VLR – she was mysterious and intelligent, and we knew absolutely nothing about her besides her personality, and so learning about her identity was one of the things I was looking forward to the most in ZTD. In the end, we got our answer, but I was disappointed, perhaps because I expected something else that wasn’t just reducing her to “she is Sigma and Diana’s daughter”. I wish she’d had more screentime and a bigger relevance to the plot, because the only moment I can think of that left an impression on me would be the scene at the trash disposal room, and the hug scene with Diana. I wish her relationship with Delta had been explored, too. And I also wish her parallels with Aoi were explained (hair, features, colour scheme, design picks, even some of their skills match up). That aside, I have to say that I absolutely adore her in-game model, and that it definitely was an upgrade from her VLR model.

Sean:



Sean was one character I felt bad for, seeing as Eric kept blaming him for every little thing, and how he was confused through most of the story. I noticed his superhuman strength as soon as he picked up the forcequit box and from then on, I got even more interested in him. The scene in which the repurposed Sean popped up after C-Team tried to trick the system surprised me a lot (it was hilarious). Him being a robot let me down a bit, because I was expecting a mind-fucking reveal like Kyle’s in VLR, to the extent where I even theorized that he could be Clover before the game was released (a ZE game without Clover?! IMPOSSIBLE). But even like that, I liked him because of how intelligent he was.

Junpei:



I freaking love Junpei. I loved Junpei back in 999 and enjoyed a lot playing as him, hearing his shitty jokes, watching his witty tricks, and overall experiencing the game through his eyes. I was extremely happy to see him back, not as a jaded old man with no hope left in him, but as his younger self – and even more when we found out that his personality had taken such a leap. And I completely understood how someone would go from your regular joyful guy to an angry and hateful person after the one he cared so much about manipulated and then abandoned him for her own selfish purposes. I liked it because the progression felt real and logical, and I feel like the tension he created between himself and Akane was spot-on. Junpei was really annoying at first with his childish attitude and snarky comments, but once he began to warm up and amend his problems, the old Junpei shone through him and I really enjoyed that. And needless to say, but the ring scene broke me in half. It was so cute and I’m glad those two got to be happy together in the end :’)

Akane:



I was pleasantly surprised by ZTD’s Akane, in contrast with the bits of her personality we saw in 999 and VLR. I was surprised by her personality being so close to “June”, instead of being cold and manipulative like my mind had assumed taking into account her actions in 999 and her plans and methods in VLR. Akane felt more human, closer to the naïve girl she was described as, and far away from a heartless person who would harm others if that meant achieving her goals, and she was still as informed on theories and other facts as usual. The only thing I found a bit weird about her personality would be the chainsaw scene and when she hit Carlos to death during the AB scene, and the fact that she brought up quantum suicide when she herself encouraged SHIFTing in the previous games, but otherwise I didn’t find her OOC like some people have pointed out. Aside from that, but still in the topic of continuity, I was lacking a bit of information on how Junpei would have forgotten about Akane in VLR, so it’s great that that got addressed – I personally found it heartbreaking.

Diana:



Diana was my least favourite lead, and if it wasn’t because of her son, she would probably be my least favourite character in the game, too. While Luna ranked very high in my favourite VLR characters list and I shed rivers of tears while playing the Luna End, I felt like that personality didn’t fit yet another character – I wanted something more out of her, instead of just being a Luna copy (although that was supposed to be her thing – Luna was based off her, after all). During one scene, it was mentioned that Diana might’ve had a split personality, and I was eager for that to be true since I wanted Diana to be more flawed than her artificial counterpart. But instead, all we got was a drunk scene that lead to alien pod sex. D-END 2 was… really weird.

Mira:



From the order I played Q-Team’s fragments, I knew that she was Heart Ripper just a couple of minutes into the game, and I also noticed how she stayed awake once the drugs were injected to the rest of the team, so her reveals and the mysteries she originated in the rest of the teams weren’t too shocking to me. I felt like she had plenty of protagonism within the story (the piranha explanlation, the Heart Ripper story, being one of Delta’s allies), but I can’t help but feel she was a bit detached from the rest. The fact that she injected Radical-6 into Phi and thus spread the virus and killed so many people was an unexpected thing, and I really liked that scene (D-1 was fantastic in general). I liked how Mira behaved towards Sean too, and I can see where the motherly vibes Eric got from her came from. I wish I could have seen her interact more often with the rest of the characters.

Sigma:



Sigma wasn’t so enjoyable as a protagonist in VLR as Junpei was in 999, in my opinion. I never liked VLR Sigma particularly, but after ZTD, I like him so much more. I felt like his older consciousness gave us an old and tired, but more experienced and trustworthy version of the Sigma we already knew, and I liked that aspects in him a lot. Once I finished ZTD, I found that he was one of my favourite characters in the game. His experience and selflessness in scenes such as the D-END 1 almost brought a tear to my eye, and all in all, I feel like ZTD managed to improve him greatly and show us a side of Sigma that we hadn’t –and probably didn’t excpect to– seen before. His relationship with Diana felt pretty forced to me, and let’s not even talk about the talk he gave on the twins, but at least he didnt’ forget about everyone that surrounded him in the time of VLR. Where did Kyle end up at, though?

Delta:



My opinions on this dude are pretty… complex. Starting from just his design, which doesn’t look too fitting into the Zero Escape cast, he doesn’t feel like he’s part of the story, although he technically was from the very beginning, and even during VLR. But the fact that he popped up at the last part of the last game in the franchise as the pretty much “final boss” of Zero Escape when we had never seen him before was a little off-putting. Considering the amount of theories online saying that he could have been Light, and that I was really eager for him to reappear and that some in-game text about him could have fit that theory perfectly (remember the “I wanted to see through your eyes”, the “but he is blind!” out-of-context mentions of him?). His reveal was very shocking (although I managed to see his protrait beforehand in the Triangle text log and so I was expecting his appearance), but I felt like we weren’t given any clues on his situation.

I felt like all the little clues towards this guy’s identity were properly exposed, but not given enough attention for us to tie all the loose strings together and make something out of it. The fact that SO MANY THINGS pointed towards his identity – the foreshadowing (LITERALLY), the amount of DEC- words and Xs indicating a tenth participant, the bird theme (memento, costume, snail story), as well as the delta-triangle clues that were all over the place – I felt like it was brilliant, and I got to tie it all together.

As for his powers, mind hacking felt like a very absurd thing, mostly because of its name and approach, although it does make sense in connection to the Morphogenetic Field. I felt that, even though its origins and effects were explained, it still felt out of the powers in ZE’s reach. Perhaps because manipulating other people sounded too overpowered in comparison with the more down-to-earth Field access, or with the seemingly impossible SHIFTing that needed many powerful ESPers close together in order to resonate and be effective. This guy just walked in and got inside pretty much everyone’s brains on his own.

And last, but not least… why thet hell did he have black sclera?!





Overall, I feel like most of ZTD’s characters’ personalities were pretty established from the beginning. And while the characters grew and opened up throughout the story, there wasn’t too much room for major changes in reappearing characters. This was because reappearing characters needed to stay in-character, and there’s only much you can do with them that will surprise the audience without throwing the characters’ persinalities out of the window. There wasn’t much room to surprising twists. And even like that, I still missed seeing some of the old characters. We heard about Aoi and Seven enough to assure us that they’re doing okay, same thing goes with Lotus and Ace. But how about the Field brothers? It was promised that we would get more information on them in ZTD, but they weren’t even mentioned – in fact, since Junpei didn’t mention them at all, all it did for me was to fuel my theories on Light and Clover being part of ZTD in some way, and was dissappointed to find out that not only they weren’t, but they had been forgotten completely despite their huge importance in 999. The same thing goes for Kyle.

If there’s something that I would have enjoyed seeing, that would be more interaction between all the participants during the game – I understand that the team mechanics worked this way and that animating larger groups of characters at the same time would be very time and budget consuming, but I feel like we would have been able to learn more about the characters this way.





PLOT DEVELOPMENT

Before I begin writing my opinions about the story, I would like to clear something up: I believe that Zero Time Dilemma’s execution suffered a lot because of time and budget problems. Even with a mind-blowing story with all loose threads tied together, faulty proofreading, cut scenes or ignored character plot points can seriously hurt a story – and I believe that that was the case with Zero Time Dilemma. Perhaps I am wrong, but it does look like that some things didn’t feel as polished as before not because the plot wasn’t as strong as in the previous games, but because some parts were skipped or cut off, so we didn’t get to experience the explanations that lead to it, or had enough time to empathize or understand the charaters. I wish we could see some sort of ZTD novel in the future in which everything was explained without the restraints of converting them into a game.

I think that ZTD’s biggest problem when it comes to its plot and development comes from all the expectations Virtue’s Last Reward set. Not because, as the great game it was, it set the bar too high, but because VLR NEEDED ZTD to happen in order to have its story completed, to properly explain the events that occurred in the game and before it. Many things that were promised to be answered in the third game never came, especially those that relate to VLR’s final cliffhanger (Another Time END), or more information on 999’s characters and their future.

I also think that aiming ZTD to “new players” was not a good call. The reason would be because heck, Zero Escape is a story-driven game, and Zero Time Dilemma is its third installment. It was needed to fully answer 999 and VLR’s questions, so the players SHOULD know about what happened in the two games before it. By censoring important details, such as Akane being the first Zero, we didn’t get some explanations or characterizations that would have made the series and character development much more consistent, and instead they just skipped over that to keep ZTD as spoiler-free as possible. I wish that those little things that were never explained by the characters themselves had a bigger importance during ZTD.

Aside from that, ZTD’s plot felt a bit weaker and not as surprising as 999 or VLR’s, at least in my experience. I felt like I called most of the twists even though I hadn’t spoiled myself on anything, and as such I didn’t get as many surprises as I would have expected out of a Zero Escape game – in fact, 999 and VLR managed to surprise me many many times even though I spoiled myself on a couple of things for each one (Light being still alive and Tenmyouji’s identity, respectively), and the only thing I had going on with ZTD were the fans’ crazy theories (still can’t believe Phi’s identity got predicted because of her eyebrows).

I felt that the Delta plot twist (the fact that we were playing as him during the entire game) was not hinted enough, or felt something too simple/something that anyone could’ve thought that would happen. Predictable. The fact that it was a new character (even though it was related to D-Team) that only got properly shown in the last part of the game made it feel like he wasn’t “worthy” of being the last Zero in the trilogy because of his irrelevance to the overarching plot. I felt like Akane and Sigma’s motives were much stronger and tied to the plot better than Delta’s, which felt more nonsensical and anchored to ZTD’s events.

On the other hand, I believe that Q not really being Sean could have been handled much better if several official resources hadn’t called him “Q” in promotional material, although the game itself makes sure not to mix Sean and Q up at any moment. And speaking of hands and Q – the real Q, this time – I was very interested in the “alien hand” syndrome, and in the alien technology in the transporter room. So many things pointed towards aliens in ZTD – even Phi’s status doll looked like an alien! But that was never addressed, with “aliens” being a way of leaving things unexplained because they wouldn’t make sense in any other way. Although I’ve seen many people complain about aliens existing in the ZE universe, I would have loved to see something like that being explored in the game, and would have been very interested in how much it would have changed the plot and characters.

I liked how the snail story tied all the characters together, and how Akane learned the way in which her parents had died (instead of the lie she was told). The only characters that I think felt a bit out of place were Mira and Eric, which only tied to the story because of Heart Ripper’s actions, but otherwise, I think that the relation was pretty nice.

As for the rythm, the game felt a bit slow and confusing at first, when so many fragments were unlocked at once. I wish that in this aspect, ZTD had been a little more linear and avoided major plot points (such as the Heart Ripper introduction/reveal) until a bit later on. SHIFTing also became a bit confusing and I felt like it was an abused device after how much more difficult it seemed in 999 and VLR – I felt like it lost a bit of its meaning, and the quantum suicide question that Akane brought up at the very last moment in the game made no sense after pretty much all the characters had committed such a thing more than once. On the other hand, I have to say that the ending that tied to VLR was brilliantly written, and it was one of my favourite parts in the entire game.



I also wish there had been an extra ending after unlocking everything in sight, just like VLR did with Another Time, because I felt like the ending lacked a bit of closure, regardless of the ending files - it was a bit too open for my taste, with too many things left to the players’ interpretation. What happened to Free the Soul, to all the clones, who was the fanatic that wanted to kill so many billions, did Crash Keys catch him, how did the future split up if they didn’t?







OVERALL OPINION

When I read ZTD’s reviews before the game came out, everyone was praising it as the best game in the Zero Escape series, which is my expectations skyrocketted – and why I was expecting it to be EVEN BETTER than 999, so I will be honest – I was disappointed with it. But with that aside, and even though it feels like the weakest game in the series in my opinion, I think it still was a very solid game, and I enjoyed it a lot.

I really cannot believe that this game got made thanks to the fans’ support, and I’m amazed that such a small amount of people managed to develop such a great game with a limited budget and just one year for development, even if it isn’t the most polished thing in the market, or even if it’s a bit weaker than the games that preceed it. I really enjoyed ZTD, had my own fair share of shocking moments, emotional moments, moments in which I wanted to set every puzzle on the face of Earth on fire and moments in which I actually thought I was good at solving puzzles (plot twist: I am not). I’m very happy we got to experience a Zero Escape game once again, and I’m happy that we got to see the characters in action once more, because ZE means a lot to me and I’m incredibly grateful this game was even done in the first place. I’d definitely recommend playing ZTD to anyone – not before finishing 999 and VLR first, though.

I’m sorry if I wasn’t too concrete or technical with some of the stuff in this comment – I think I should have replayed ZTD before writing all this down, but unfortunately I don’t have the time, so something might be a little blurry in my brain, and I’m not an expert when it comes to doing this kind of comments. Anyways, I hope that you have enjoyed reading my opinions on Zero Time Dilemma. I’m always open to talk about ZE – from contrasting opinions to screaming about how much you like the games. So if you ever feel like sharing your version of this review, or just chatting about ZE with me, please don’t hesitate to do so! Thank you for reading.