Virtue’s Last Reward (VLW) picks up a year after Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors(999) left off. While I think it is possible to follow the plot without having played the first game, you shouldn’t. Characters return, concepts are revisited, and the story looks geared for a third and final installment, so if you have any interest in the series, don’t start it here. 999 was one of my favorite visual novels, so I knew going in that I was going to love this game. I did. Heck, my wife even got in to the parts of the story she watched and expressed some interest in the genre. If a visual novel can pull off hooking in a non-gamer, it has to be doing something right.
VLW tells the story of Sigma, a young student who gets kidnapped by a mysterious figure in a gas mask and wakes up in a strange warehouse. After waking up, he and eight other individuals participate in “The Nonary Game, Ambidex Edition.” They must achieve a score of 9 on their wristbands and then escape through the Number 9 Door, but since everybody has their own wristband, there’s a chance not everyone will make it. To gain points, they can either ally with one another or betray each other to escape faster. If you played 999, you will notice this premise sounds remarkably similar. While they are both based around the Nonary Game, rest assured VLW is its own entity. Established early on, the story’s principle drama comes from the prisoner’s dilemma (a popular psychological/sociological concept). Who will betray who, and why? Will everyone play nice together, or should you not trust anyone?
VLW demands a little more thinking than the average video game if you want to solve mysteries ahead of time, but if any of this confuses you, the game explains it in very digestible terms, so don’t worry about it. The meat of the plot is introduced to the player with the device of Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment used here to explore the nature of causality. Not too far in to the game, you will inevitably get a Game Over or be unable to progress. After that, the game takes you to a flow chart, and this is where the brilliance ofVLW comes in. Jumping around and trying different choices during the game is actually canon. The main character will realize that he is witnessing alternate realities, and needless to say your head will probably explode piecing together all the clues the game throws at you. Saying much else about this would ruin the game, but I will say this: you must traverse the entire flow chart to finish the game for various reasons. This allows you to learn all about the characters and see all different sides about them until the narrative finally comes together in the end. 999 did some similar things, but VLW feels much more streamlined.
The game’s puzzles will also destroy your brain. I was stuck on this one about putting together a parallelogram for about an hour, and it wasn’t even the toughest puzzle. In fact, I would almost complain that the game is too challenging and could scare casual gamers off. Then again, we live in an age when anyone could just look up the answers, so perhaps the higher difficulty is for the best. Aside from that, my only real structural problem with the game was this awful slow animation that takes place every time you travel from one room in the facility to another. Apparently the game designer intends to improve this in Zero Escape 3, so that’s a relief at least.
Overall, I highly recommend Virtue’s Last Reward to anybody on the fence after playing999. The game has pleasing visuals and an appropriate soundtrack that sets the mood quite well. Likewise, the English voice acting is of very good quality (and only in the Vita version! I lucked out), and I have few complaints about the story other than it maybe getting too complicated toward the end. I felt that 999 was the more focused game and had a more entertaining cast, but in all honesty the two are both strong and I can accept someone thinking VLW has the better story. The Flow Chart feature does speed up the required replaying, so for some that could be the deciding factor between the two. Good luck, and watch out for strangers wearing gas masks.
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