I bet if I look back at my own review of 999: 9 Persons 9 Hours 9 Doors, it'll sound like I was lambasting it for victory being totally arbitrary. But if you can get over that hurdle - if you can wrap your head around the fact that it's not even about victory (maybe it would help if you have unlimited time to put into the game), then the story is one of the most beautiful slow-blooming flowers you can have in this video game world of ours.
Aside: have we been reduced to low-grade story expectations? Are we eating the equivalent of dog food, and telling ourselves it's okay because the graphics are nice and shooting people is fun? If you're not satisfied with that, don't give up hope yet. Dragging the story out of 999 (either one) is painfully slow, compared to other video games, but (cliche time) the difficulty makes you appreciate it all the more. If you ARE satisfied with the story you're getting from other games, then 999 will be nothing but an endless whirlpool of punishment. That's what I was getting at with my original post. There's definitely a type of gamer who will have nothing but rage at the way the story unfolds over endless iterations over which you have no control.
Good news, though. The second 999, Virtue's Last Reward, allows you jump to any point unlocked in the story, at any time. If you make a choice and reach a dead end, simply click open the flow chart and select the branch point where you made that choice, and make the other choice. Simple as that. No more restarting from the beginning if you don't want, and all parts you've seen or heard before can be fast-forwarded through with impunity. That makes things faster and more sensible right off the bat. Now that I can SEE the possibilities, though, it looks like there are no less than 24 (!) different endings to this game, and I still don't know which one I need to do first to unlock the others. At least, when I do find the unlocking parts, I can head right to the end of the other branches and immediately keep pushing forward. In addition, none of the escapes have to be performed twice, because you can always enter the final passcode to waltz straight out of a room, without going through any of the motions - all passcodes you've found are permanently saved in the archive files.
Also, story portions are voiced in English and Japanese. That's valuable.
A third gold star is given for increasing the puzzle difficulty. The last game had somewhat token escape rooms - find five pieces of paper in the room and put them together, voila. This one has much more legit puzzles, and way less hand holding. There's an easy mode, for those who aren't old veterans like myself, but I hear some endings can't be achieved if you use easy mode, so no way I'm touching that.
So, mechanics are all looking good. Time to get into the story. Rest of posts will have spoilers.
