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indigozealPre-cut thoughts: does Santa act and look like Zephel, or what? Zephel's not mercenary like Santa, but the other stuff certainly fits.
I'm one of the last to play 999, but I want to preface this with a strong recommendation for the game: the pacing is tense, the plot is genuinely creepy (particularly with that music), and the translation is excellent. I'm perpetually skeptical of the adoration heaped upon the Atlus/Aksys/XSEED Holy Trinity, but Aksys did a bang-up job here.
I seem to be having issues, though, in how the endings are parceled out. In brief: a group of strangers have been abducted and locked in aboard a seemingly abandoned ocean liner. Their (unseen) captor announces over the loudspeakers that the ship's being sunk in nine hours, so they'll die if they don't find an exit before then. Their path out is blockaded by a series of locked doors, which will open only with certain combinations of the explosive bracelets with which everyone's been cattle-tagged. Every captive's wearing a different bracelet, and the combinatorics soon make it evident that not everyone's going to be able to pass through all the locked doors and make it to the end.
OK, so you eventually reach a spot where the group has to split into three search parties. You're given three options of parties to join - 2 in which you'll be the missing link needed to unlock their particular door (but leaving the other groups in a someone's-gotta-be-left-behind scenario) and 1 in which you're the odd man out and no one can unlock their doors. I chose the third option, thinking that this'll force a personnel reshuffling that won't leave anyone behind and will thwart the captor's sadistic intentions - and I was right! ...Whereupon the game rewarded me post-puzzle with a "Congratulations! You're been arbitrarily, fatally stabbed, having learned no useful information about your predicament!" bad ending.
I think where I'm going wrong is in not caring enough about the perfunctory Love Interest. Though she has a frustrating Perils-of-Pauline swoony streak, she's a serviceable character and even has a welcome dose of frivolity & college-age libido, but they have the lead going from not being able to remember whom she was from his childhood days to AH MY LOVE MY LOVE MY SOULMATE in literally five minutes. That's too much to ask any character to sell. I was a bit more focused on discovering the whys and wherefores of our predicament and thus opted for following the most likely suspects on the occasions the larger group was split up instead of making time with my instantaneous girlfriend, which I guess is the wrong priority according to the game. I might be wrong, though - but it's frustrating all the same. It's to the game's credit, though, that I restarted nigh-immediately upon my premature demise.
For the villain, I'm thinking Snake - he has the right personality for the role and fulfills the most crucial And Then There Were None criterion and "I'm blind" my entire ass, but recent events point more to Ace. He's one of the villains, at least (and don't he and Snake seem to share a familial resemblance?).
Oh, God, the stuff about the sentient glycerin crystals that communicate telepathically is going to end up being TERRIBLY IMPORTANT, isn't it? I'm not normally one to get uptight about bad pseudoscience in my entertainment, but this is ridiculous. "The control group's rate jumped only 2%, which isn't statistically significant, but the experimental group's rate went up 3% - a big jump!!!" Groan.
I don't get how everyone's harping on how OLD OLD OLD Lotus is at the ripe ol' age of late 20's/early 30's. They certainly seem OK with using her "shriveled-up raisin skin" (actual quote) for eye candy.
.
I'm one of the last to play 999, but I want to preface this with a strong recommendation for the game: the pacing is tense, the plot is genuinely creepy (particularly with that music), and the translation is excellent. I'm perpetually skeptical of the adoration heaped upon the Atlus/Aksys/XSEED Holy Trinity, but Aksys did a bang-up job here.
I seem to be having issues, though, in how the endings are parceled out. In brief: a group of strangers have been abducted and locked in aboard a seemingly abandoned ocean liner. Their (unseen) captor announces over the loudspeakers that the ship's being sunk in nine hours, so they'll die if they don't find an exit before then. Their path out is blockaded by a series of locked doors, which will open only with certain combinations of the explosive bracelets with which everyone's been cattle-tagged. Every captive's wearing a different bracelet, and the combinatorics soon make it evident that not everyone's going to be able to pass through all the locked doors and make it to the end.
OK, so you eventually reach a spot where the group has to split into three search parties. You're given three options of parties to join - 2 in which you'll be the missing link needed to unlock their particular door (but leaving the other groups in a someone's-gotta-be-left-behind scenario) and 1 in which you're the odd man out and no one can unlock their doors. I chose the third option, thinking that this'll force a personnel reshuffling that won't leave anyone behind and will thwart the captor's sadistic intentions - and I was right! ...Whereupon the game rewarded me post-puzzle with a "Congratulations! You're been arbitrarily, fatally stabbed, having learned no useful information about your predicament!" bad ending.
I think where I'm going wrong is in not caring enough about the perfunctory Love Interest. Though she has a frustrating Perils-of-Pauline swoony streak, she's a serviceable character and even has a welcome dose of frivolity & college-age libido, but they have the lead going from not being able to remember whom she was from his childhood days to AH MY LOVE MY LOVE MY SOULMATE in literally five minutes. That's too much to ask any character to sell. I was a bit more focused on discovering the whys and wherefores of our predicament and thus opted for following the most likely suspects on the occasions the larger group was split up instead of making time with my instantaneous girlfriend, which I guess is the wrong priority according to the game. I might be wrong, though - but it's frustrating all the same. It's to the game's credit, though, that I restarted nigh-immediately upon my premature demise.
For the villain, I'm thinking Snake - he has the right personality for the role and fulfills the most crucial And Then There Were None criterion and "I'm blind" my entire ass, but recent events point more to Ace. He's one of the villains, at least (and don't he and Snake seem to share a familial resemblance?).
Oh, God, the stuff about the sentient glycerin crystals that communicate telepathically is going to end up being TERRIBLY IMPORTANT, isn't it? I'm not normally one to get uptight about bad pseudoscience in my entertainment, but this is ridiculous. "The control group's rate jumped only 2%, which isn't statistically significant, but the experimental group's rate went up 3% - a big jump!!!" Groan.
I don't get how everyone's harping on how OLD OLD OLD Lotus is at the ripe ol' age of late 20's/early 30's. They certainly seem OK with using her "shriveled-up raisin skin" (actual quote) for eye candy.
.
