Telltale’s The Walking Dead was, to most people, the first of its kind — a story game! With big moral decisions! I can’t count with both hands the number of times someone has fangasmed to me about how amazing Telltale’s game was and how it redefined the meaning of ‘video game’, as if ‘amazing story with multi-faceted characters and harrowing moral conundrums’ had never met the gaming world before April 2012.

I’ve played equally horrifying visual novels (Saya no Uta comes to mind) that wouldn’t even get a second look from some Telltale fans, simply because Telltale does such an amazing job of putting all these elements into one easy-to-swallow package. You’re watching a movie, but also playing a game — what’s not to enjoy?

I’m not saying that Telltale’s The Walking Dead and its following installments (plus their expansion into other fandoms) are necessarily bad, in fact I enjoyed both seasons of The Walking Dead immensely. But for some reason their success seemed to flip a switch in the gaming world where now suddenly every game (or comic book) (or TV series) has to have some kind of Telltale-esque format, with comic book-esque art, shiny cinematics and somewhat cliche “save A and kill B? or save B and kill A?” types of scenarios.

This article was incited by the news that Zero Time Dilemma, the third in the Zero Escape trilogy, will be fully cinematic, a drastic turnaround from its original visual novel cum escape room style. It kind of irks me that such a huge modification to the format was even deemed necessary. According to the creator of the series, Uchikoshi Kotaro, this move was indeed inspired by Telltale’s The Walking Dead, in a bid to widen the appeal of what was previously squarely in the niche genre of “room escape visual novel”.

I liked the visual novel format. I mean, I really, really liked it. Maybe I grew up playing visual novels, and learning how to make visual novels (my first foray into coding anything which sadly didn’t come to any fruition). Playing the first two games, Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward, in this style was great.

Being such a story-heavy game, with an unexpected reliance on jargon and technical terms, the ability to read text as it scrolled along the screen as well as access a past log of everything previously said was straight-up useful. You could cross-check past dialogue with whatever was displayed on the screen. If you missed something because you were spacing out? Just scroll back. So convenient. Saved my life when I was playing the game. My pet peeve about pure cinematics is that once what someone says is gone — you miss it, for whatever reason — it’s gone. And you have to deal with it. A character with an accent you can’t make out? Deal with it. Read the subtitles and deal with it. You can’t even turn to the friend who’s playing with you and remark about what just happened without missing something on screen. Sigh.

Perhaps gamers these days are just not so fond of the idea of reading. How much intricate research and loving detail is put into codex entries or little notes scattered about a level in a game, only to have players pick them up for completions sake, leaving them unread for the rest of the game? An argument can be made that having these paragraphs of text suddenly thrown at you can be distracting and break up the flow of the game — but in the case of visual novels, the text is integral to the plot. The text is the plot. Virtue’s Last Reward, the second in the trilogy, was fully-voiced to boot, giving you the option to skip reading entirely if you were so inclined and just listen to voices ramble on as sprites on-screen animated.

Another issue I have with the change to cinematics is that of (one of) the game’s intended platform, the Nintendo 3DS. Evidently, from the trailer, the 3D rendering capabilities of the Nintendo 3DS are not fantastic. They weren’t, in the short 3D animated cutscenes of Virtue’s Last Reward, and they still aren’t particularly… nice. The animation is unnatural and I can see way too many blurry textures for my liking. This is just going to be distracting in the long run — especially for those who have experienced the smooth 2D sprite art in the first game, and not-so-smooth 3D sprites in the second. It’s not as if great-looking 3D modeling and animation are impossible on the 3DS — Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies is an amazing example of 2D to 3D transitioning in the way of sprites. A part of me wishes that Zero Time Dilemma would have improved on those in Virtue’s Last Reward and gone down this route instead. (Also, the first two games had great illustrated stills, a staple of any visual novel. Hopefully these still exist in the new format.)

If I have anything positive to say about this change, it would be that common filmmaking techniques can now be applied to the cinematics. Things like high/low angle shots and shaky cameras, if used well, could add a lot to the tension in a situation. The footage also seems to be rendered in real-time, as compared to the crappy pre-rendered videos in Virtue’s Last Reward, which is much better and would explain the tradeoff in quality. I also acknowledge that not everyone reads as visually as I do, so there is merit to showing scenes play out exactly as they are meant to.

I understand that Zero Time Dilemma was only made possible with the outpouring of support from Zero Escape fans outside of Japan, and that Uchikoshi would want to acknowledge that and consider Western tastes when developing the game. Cinematics aside, what I’ve seen of Zero Time Dilemma remains very true to the core of Zero Escape, the same morally ambiguous decisions, the heightened tension, the betrayal and deception… and I’m still looking forward to this game with extremely high hopes.

I just wish that the visual novel format wasn’t completely abandoned — after making all my points, the one that resonates with me most strongly is merely that for nostalgia’s sake. I had never played a game remotely like 999 or Virtue’s Last Reward before I did, and its visual novel format is what I strongly associate the series with now. While I am sad that this had to change, for admittedly valid reasons, I can only say that I’m sure that this decision will help widen the game’s reach and hopefully, influence people (in terms of thinking, philosophy and judgement) the way the past two games have influenced me.

A final word to the developers: please tie up all the loose ends in this final entry in the series. I don’t want to stay up till five A.M. scouring speculative forums for answers again…

~ Niki