The Story
December 25, 2028. A 20-something year-old man named Sigma, the main character of the story, can be seen sitting in his car until sleeping gas fills it up. The last thing Sigma sees is a figure with a gas mask and a raincoat standing on the streets, just like what the victims in the first Zero Escape series saw. Later on, Sigma wakes up in what seems to be a worn-down elevator. Along with him, there's a woman named Phi whom he'd never met before, neither has she met him, however, the woman knows without a question what Sigma's name is. Both Sigma and Phi have bracelets on their wrists that they can't seem to get off no matter how hard they try.
Not long after, a screen that's above the elevator buttons starts to work and a rabbit appears on it claiming to be Zero the Third / Zero III. "The king of this kingdom," telling the two of them that he, Zero, is going to give them a game to play known as the [Nonary Game: Ambidex Edition]. The elevator that the two of them are on is going to fall soon, Zero claims, and disappears. In order to escape, they have to solve how to escape from the deadly room.
Sigma and Phi meet up with a group of other people. They all have wristwatches / bracelets on them that showcase numbers; all of them showing the number three and a word below them. The color of the "3" is different for each individual or a group, however. And yes, there are colors of three based on whether they are 'solo,' meaning alone, or as a 'pair' in the [Nonary Game: Ambidex Edition].Zero III, the rabbit on a screen, appears in front of the group and identifies itself as an AI (Artificial Intelligence) being ran by a quantum computer, also, the one who created it, the real Zero, is apparently one of the nine in the group right now, faking to be a participant.
The rabbit tells the group that there are rules in order to escape [Nonary Game: Ambidex Edition] you have to go past the door with number [9] on it, which happens to be right in front of everyone in the room at the beginning of the game. However, obviously it's not going to be that easy. The "3" 's that are on everyone's wristwatch are known as Bracelet Points (BP's), and in order to go past the door with the number nine on it, the participants are required to get 9 or more BP's.
The way to get BP's is to go inside [Ambidex Rooms] that are the 'elevators' that they came from, however they are now locked. In order to get through ambidex rooms, the group has to split and go through three different colored doors. The 'Chromatic Doors' (CD)'s / Secondary Doors in order to find the way to enter the [Ambidex Rooms]. The doors open by themselves after a certain amount of time, and if the characters push the buttons on their bracelets, they can see the time that's remaining until the CD's open.
The doors can be entered by a limit of about three different people. By combining their wristwatch's colors, they can get a color that matches the door's. If they do that, they can enter the Secondary/Chromatic Doors. For example, red + blue = magenta.
Ambidex Edition of the [Nonary Game] requires people or a pair that have gone through the Chromatic Doors to battle against each other by choosing whether or not the other person that they went through CD's with can be considered an Ally, or someone to be Betrayed. This decision will either raise your BP or lower it, and do the opposite of what happened to you, to the other person/duo.
If one breaks the rules of the game or doesn't want to play the [Nonary Game], they will be penalized with death that is caused by deadly needles that come from the wristwatches. Break the rules and you get put to sleep by a drug named Soporil from the needles of the wristwatches, and nine minutes later the deadly poison gets injected.
Thoughts
Virtue's Last Reward is definitely filled with a lot of good but a lot of bad as well. The writing of the game felt proper enough, most of it was competent and there was definitely far less plot holes that I could notice (can't say I noticed any, only some discrepancies between actions of characters in some paths, but those can be explained easily) in comparison to 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors. The game was filled with more substance as well than its predecessor as the puzzle parts of the game where you have to find your way out of the chromatic doors are filled with more than just puzzles; there's information about the world and characters as well as the survivor game the characters were in.
The cast of characters of VLR are not that much better than in 999. While that previous game was kind of stopped by the infodump moments about seemingly random worldbuilding elements that appear in that game, VLR is stopped by each of the character explaining their purpose and motivations for doing what they do, I guess. It gets really annoying at times when you try to go through the game and have to get to feel each of the character the same way instead of see them act different ways. I thought that we'd get to see different sides to the characters but instead I got nothing special. The amnesia plot once again had a twist behind it but I was not that surprised by it to be honest.
The terrorist organisation that plays a heavy part in VLR's story is massively disappointing; as I played I made theories about Brother, the leader of that assumedly villainous organisation, but as the game reached towards its ending, I quickly realized: That plotline never ends in this game. The fact that they repeated the plot with a terrorist in the group of the game's cast led me to believe that the organization would play a bigger role, but instead the game just repeated the same plot countless times for no real reason.
And that's not all, characters such as Sigma, what really went down with the old lady in the past, or even the little boy Quark... All of them seem kind of... Oddly handled and empty. They tried to throw some reasons for why the characters were chosen to be part of the [Nonary Game] but it was never showed why exactly they were as necessary as they were made out to be. It's just all talk but no walk, felt almost like excuses from the authors, felt as if they didn't really manage to make up any relevant reasons behind their existence.
From the very beginning of the story, the plot deals with a certain old woman without a bracelet. No one knows who he is, but she's found dead in one of the AB rooms that two characters came from. She was murdered after being stabbed by an unknown assailant that hides in the group along with Zero, their kidnapper, and the woman's death is the only one that cannot be changed throughout the game, so it's the core idea that kicks everything off. In the end I was not too happy or surprised by all the things that revealed what the deal with the old lady was, but some parts did make me raise my eyebrows.
However, aside from the old lady, the game barely, once again, has enough tension going on. The mystery and adventure aspects of the game were not gripping in the slightest due to the game repeating far too much. Seriously. This is the part that I want to talk about the most. The game annoyed me damn too much for its repetitive nature. I thought 999 had it at a decline from some parts almost being a repetition, but VLR is definitely in the high negatives from it. The authors could have come up with a lot more to excuse the game being two times longer than 999, but instead the paths you choose are all just incredibly similar to each other, some revealing bigger things you'd not expect to see until the end, but nothing enough to make the journey itself feel worthwhile. It is an adventure game as well after all, and the adventure was disappointing as all hell. I don't dislike episodic content or call those 'repetitive,' I dislike authors copying and pasting content and try to pass it as new content or important content due to some timeline nonsense. Rather than trying to be clever, try to make the whole thing more enjoyable.
Lastly, the change of colors as well as the solos/pairs of the participants' bracelets gives a nice change to the game from the absolute numbers that won't change that were in the first game, but they also make the game feel a bit too... limitless, I'd say. Rules and limitations exist in this game that are still very similar to the first game, but these kind of give too much freedom to the writers to make up stuff along the way. Zero III even says that the assignments are all random without rules at the beginning of the game, which is not cool for the player. But the fact that the Chromatic Doors (CD's) work similarly to the first [Nonary Game] but instead of number combinations, the characters have to utilize color combinations, is pretty neat.
To wrap it all up, while the game had a lot of good writing in it, it never really managed to go past 999 for me aside from not being as filled with plot holes. The artful aesthetics are completely gone in this game in comparison to 999. The characters felt blander. The long length of VLR did not do any favours to it either; it's hella monotonous. The ridiculous amounts of repetitive content and dragged out feel that the game oozes really killed my interest in it, and most of the mysteries were repeated far too many times. I also felt that the character plotlines may have been far more open-ended in reality than what the writers intended, which, if true, would be terrible because the game felt like it took an eternity to finish. I think I disliked this more than the previous game. Sad.
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