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indigozealOverdue, I know. I'm going to be going back and forth between the cuts from spoiler talk to vague non-spoiler talk.
As I said in the music post, at its best, 999 is tense and gripping as hell. I don't have a copy of the original Japanese release, so I don't know if this is a faithful translation of a great original script or if Aksys just made shit up, but it's great shit they made up if they did. The music is excellent, tense and creepy and drawing just the right amount of attention to itself, and the character art is expressive and charming, liberally peppered with little evocative gestures like Lotus's dismissive hand flip or Clover's kiddish, pigtail-bouncing jumps for joy. The characters themselves are the game's big draw, illustrated with anime-inspired vibrance but grounded in real human fragility: Clover's a genki high-school girl, but she has spine and will, deeply loves her brother, and manifests the helpless worry of a genuine child (I don't mean that as a perjorative) when he seems to be in peril. Seven has heart and is direct but is also smart and shrewd, and he really likes people. Lotus has biting sarcasm and a refreshing streak of mercenary, self-serving cowardice but also a brain, curiosity, and a lady's upbringing. They have a lot of dimension for a bunch of would-be corpses in a horror title.
I also liked how the writers went out of their way to include stupid but subtly illustrative lines that served no big purpose but to provide a light, idle moment:
"I just can't bring myself to like the number 4. ...'Cause it's a half-ass number. Not the best or the worst. ...(9) is a way better number. So what if it's last place, right? Least it's not some lameass middle number."
"-- [picking up doll's foot] This is the left foot of the mannequin.
--[girl, earnestly] Do you think I'm better?
--Uh...what?
--Do you think my legs are skinnier?"
The game is also excellent at not tipping its hand in regards to the identities of its villains; the reveals are all the more shocking and chilling because their identities are a true but well-earned and satisfying-plotted surprise. Few moments in horror games are as chilling as the bit in the Safe ending when Ace's friendly, rumpled-lion face and father-bear frame give way to the crazed, lean eyes and wasted husk of a killer.
...But that excellence lasts only up to a point, and here's my first big gripe with the game: The final revelation as to Zero's identity was a bridge too far. When Ace the Serial Killer was escaping with his next victim and we had to gogogo right then, and then Akane had her little Victorian fainting spell to redirect attention to herself, I literally shouted "OH, GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK" at the screen. I don't recall ever having been so frustrated with a fictional character before. Part of the larger problem here is that the game, for all its nuanced characterization, has very old-fashioned ideas about the use of women as motivation; every single female character becomes a shrieking, helpless hostage at some point (well, Clover's not shrieking, but close enough), and the game expects the player to be willing to drop everything if the heroine is in even a modicum of discomfort. (You can even at one point condemn two people to what you at the time think is death just so that she won't be forced to separate from her knightly hero, with nary an objection or expression of guilt from her, the hero, or the game.) Yes, my logical mind understands that Akane's hyper-wilting-flower act is most of the time just that, an act, but my emotional mind, the lizard brain engaged in this thrilling story, just doesn't give a damn; the game broke my willingness to suspend disbelief on that character with that moment, and I outright rejected the story's attempt to sell her as this hypercompetent, cutthroat mastermind.
My other giant problem is with the gameplay, and this is where I pick up my narrative from my previous posts.
On my third playthrough, I'd finally picked up on the hints that 5-Minute Love Interest was supposed to be My Queen My Goddess My Inspiration and went through the same door as her for the first challenge. I always complimented her, laughed at all her jokes, said not a discouraging word at her going on & on about Kurt Vonnegut when we were about to freeze to death in a giant meat locker, and at the next branch, where I would be mandatorily separated from her, I opted to stay with the sister of someone who had apparently been recently killed, in the hopes of comforting her and maybe getting some information from her. I'd actually picked this branch during my initial, failed playthrough, but here, after my first, correct choice, she actually started opening up a great deal, and I learned a heck of a lot more about the backstory behind the game we were all playing. Thanks to the presence of a third party, though, she couldn't tell me everything, so she asked me to meet her later on for the rest of the story. I took that as a hint to join up with her at the third major door-choice, and the plot only thickened from there: she frantically traded notes on the past, we developed plausible leads as to who could be behind various dastardly deeds in our brief but agonizing stay on the ship, and the pieces started coming together on a few major outstanding plot threads. The mystery was gathering steam; I seemed to be on the right path! I was really excited.
I entered the stretch of the game where before I had met only DEAD ENDs. Our gang proceeded intact to the final exits, where we discovered that our decisions had enabled us all to go on to the final challenge, with no one left behind. We joyously prepared ourselves to go through the final gates - when SUDDENLY, one apparent ally made a DRAMATIC HEEL TURN, revealing themselves as Zero and abducting a few members of our party to go through the 9 door and leave me - and, noncoincidentally, all my best allies - alone and abandoned within the sinking ship with mismatched bracelets and no way of following. As those left behind started undaunted to run through possible plans of attack to try to take Zero down, my hero finally took notice of the giant coffin laid conspicuously on the altar at the head of the room instead of clammering on by like a clueless berk as he had in previous endings. Everyone's eyes followed, as the coffin had begun to shake with a thumping from within; the heroes all rushed it - because it's Snake inside, it has to be Snake - and 2+4+7+5=18=a root of 9, which means they can chase after Zero now, and Team Kickass is gonna finally reunite and bust the bad guys and save the day and-- And--
Wait, why is there a CG movie now? Cutscenes aren't full-on animated in this game, This seems an odd place to put a movie, you'd usually do that only if--
GAME OVER??
That's right: if you reach the good ending path in 999 too early, you'll be told by the story that you're not ready to see what happens and get a premature game over. You'll then be told you need to start over and take a separate route through the game, then come back once you've finished that path and redo the right route before you'll be allowed to see the ending you rightfully earned.
Imagine if FF4 had done this. You're at the final boss, your party's down and out, when, suddenly, all your past allies - Yang, the twins, even Tellah - come to you in spirit form and give you the energy and hope needed to fight on. The Prologue - the Final Fantasy song - is playing, the battle background is swept up in some kinda starfield-parallax that's awe-inspiring in 1992, Golbez cries "Zeromus! It's the end!", or whatever it is he says in the actually-coherent scripts, and--
--Wait, did you get the Pink Tail? You did get Adamant Armor for every member of your party, didn't you? No? What?! Oh, my! Back to the beginning for you!
Now, would you play through Baron and Mist and the Watery Pass and Damcyan and Mt. Hobs and Fabul and Mysidia and Mt. Ordeals and etc. etc. etc. again to see the ending? Yeah, probably. But a game gets only one chance to seize a great moment; it's never quite the same in reruns. What's particularly frustrating in 999 is that the party actually has all it needs to get past the roadblock, which makes the sudden stop in retrospect a particularly blatant fuck-you.
Only a couple of the text-based choices matter, and only if you're on the path for the best ending; your door choices are the big decider, and they're made largely blind, or are at least illogical enough to be blind. For the first branch: do you seek information about the life-or-death situation you're currently stuck in, or do you decide to hang around with someone whose face you couldn't even remember upon your reunion? If you slip up here, you've blown your whole game. The second choice is blind as well; you'd logically want to partner with the sister to get information at this juncture, but she's your partner in either available party configuration; counterintuitively, only the location matters (and you can't figure out which before you make your choice). There's a path if you squint and share the programmers' odd priorities, but the game nearly guarantees that you're gonna have to power through it a few times to figure out what's going on.
Part of the appeal of videogames is that they're an "improved" version of real life. Contrary to our world, there is a plot, your actions have meaning, and you do have a fighting chance of figuring out your current predicament or at least reaching some sort of resolution, even if the game is doing something like bringing your objective into question (No More Heroes, Shadow of the Colossus). In 999, though, I did everything right, and I still had no chance. I ultimately felt like my choices weren't relevant, which is a problem for a visual novel; making choices in a story is kind of the genre's whole thing.
(It's interesting to compare this to my Neo Angelique playthrough, where my choices didn't really matter, or at least had considerable room for error and exploration, until without warning they did very much so and one little slip-up in a very short window - a slip-up of whose nature I'm to this day not even sure - blew my whole game. The genre seems to waver between ending requirements that're so strict they dampen exploration and so obtuse that they're unfathomable - both of which, I suppose, encourage hintbook/artbook sales, a favorable outcome for the manufacturer. The genre's reliance on multiple playthroughs also enables these bad habits; the writers don't feel compelled to provide a satisfying play experience the first time through. I've never seen a genre so committed to playing against its strengths.)
A smaller but significant side problem I had with the denouement: Time loops and paradoxes are not inherently interesting, and they take agency away from the characters, who now aren't acting according to their own motives and personalities but according to the demands of some infernal machine. Why did Akane put a gun in room 1? Because she foresaw that there was a gun there in her vision, and so she had to make it come true. How did she know that her genius plan wouldn't instead leave most everyone dead, as indeed happened in several scenarios? Because that's what the vision said would happen, etc. Plus, as the heroes & proto-villains get thinner, the real villains shrink accordingly; Ace the zoot-suited self-made billionaire who just wants to see faces is much more interesting than the master of eeeEEEEEeeeevil who cackles while throwing little girls into incinerators. (Heck, even Ace the cornered Scooby-Doo villain showed more dimension; Lord, that portrait was disturbing.)
(And why couldn't Seven go back the way he came to save Kanny in the bad timeline? Just throw the bedsheets down to her again, Christ.)
Side thoughts: Despite the above, I did like in a way the game's idea that "epiphanies" are just cheat information gained legitimately from selves from other timelines. (It reminds me, in fact, of the Dante-esque hell of Animamundi's "best" ending, where characters reckon not only with crimes committed in this timeline but in all others and seem from a cosmic perspective to be living out all their lives at once.) This is the first Japanese game I've played where the characters actually seemed way younger, not older, than their official ages. I imagine enough virtual ink has been expended on the Sudoku of Death so I'll keep this brief, but I was reminded of a scene from the bad direct-to-video Prophecy II. Christopher Walken as a dark angel Gabriel has revived a recent teen suicide because he needs a modern-day human to help him overcome a challenge that has proved a complete roadblock to the forces of divine rebellion. After her resurrection, Gabriel brings his new and unwilling assistant before the offending obstacle: a computer database. She stares at him disbelievingly: "You brought me back because you don't know DOS?!"
.
As I said in the music post, at its best, 999 is tense and gripping as hell. I don't have a copy of the original Japanese release, so I don't know if this is a faithful translation of a great original script or if Aksys just made shit up, but it's great shit they made up if they did. The music is excellent, tense and creepy and drawing just the right amount of attention to itself, and the character art is expressive and charming, liberally peppered with little evocative gestures like Lotus's dismissive hand flip or Clover's kiddish, pigtail-bouncing jumps for joy. The characters themselves are the game's big draw, illustrated with anime-inspired vibrance but grounded in real human fragility: Clover's a genki high-school girl, but she has spine and will, deeply loves her brother, and manifests the helpless worry of a genuine child (I don't mean that as a perjorative) when he seems to be in peril. Seven has heart and is direct but is also smart and shrewd, and he really likes people. Lotus has biting sarcasm and a refreshing streak of mercenary, self-serving cowardice but also a brain, curiosity, and a lady's upbringing. They have a lot of dimension for a bunch of would-be corpses in a horror title.
I also liked how the writers went out of their way to include stupid but subtly illustrative lines that served no big purpose but to provide a light, idle moment:
"I just can't bring myself to like the number 4. ...'Cause it's a half-ass number. Not the best or the worst. ...(9) is a way better number. So what if it's last place, right? Least it's not some lameass middle number."
"-- [picking up doll's foot] This is the left foot of the mannequin.
--[girl, earnestly] Do you think I'm better?
--Uh...what?
--Do you think my legs are skinnier?"
The game is also excellent at not tipping its hand in regards to the identities of its villains; the reveals are all the more shocking and chilling because their identities are a true but well-earned and satisfying-plotted surprise. Few moments in horror games are as chilling as the bit in the Safe ending when Ace's friendly, rumpled-lion face and father-bear frame give way to the crazed, lean eyes and wasted husk of a killer.
...But that excellence lasts only up to a point, and here's my first big gripe with the game: The final revelation as to Zero's identity was a bridge too far. When Ace the Serial Killer was escaping with his next victim and we had to gogogo right then, and then Akane had her little Victorian fainting spell to redirect attention to herself, I literally shouted "OH, GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK" at the screen. I don't recall ever having been so frustrated with a fictional character before. Part of the larger problem here is that the game, for all its nuanced characterization, has very old-fashioned ideas about the use of women as motivation; every single female character becomes a shrieking, helpless hostage at some point (well, Clover's not shrieking, but close enough), and the game expects the player to be willing to drop everything if the heroine is in even a modicum of discomfort. (You can even at one point condemn two people to what you at the time think is death just so that she won't be forced to separate from her knightly hero, with nary an objection or expression of guilt from her, the hero, or the game.) Yes, my logical mind understands that Akane's hyper-wilting-flower act is most of the time just that, an act, but my emotional mind, the lizard brain engaged in this thrilling story, just doesn't give a damn; the game broke my willingness to suspend disbelief on that character with that moment, and I outright rejected the story's attempt to sell her as this hypercompetent, cutthroat mastermind.
My other giant problem is with the gameplay, and this is where I pick up my narrative from my previous posts.
On my third playthrough, I'd finally picked up on the hints that 5-Minute Love Interest was supposed to be My Queen My Goddess My Inspiration and went through the same door as her for the first challenge. I always complimented her, laughed at all her jokes, said not a discouraging word at her going on & on about Kurt Vonnegut when we were about to freeze to death in a giant meat locker, and at the next branch, where I would be mandatorily separated from her, I opted to stay with the sister of someone who had apparently been recently killed, in the hopes of comforting her and maybe getting some information from her. I'd actually picked this branch during my initial, failed playthrough, but here, after my first, correct choice, she actually started opening up a great deal, and I learned a heck of a lot more about the backstory behind the game we were all playing. Thanks to the presence of a third party, though, she couldn't tell me everything, so she asked me to meet her later on for the rest of the story. I took that as a hint to join up with her at the third major door-choice, and the plot only thickened from there: she frantically traded notes on the past, we developed plausible leads as to who could be behind various dastardly deeds in our brief but agonizing stay on the ship, and the pieces started coming together on a few major outstanding plot threads. The mystery was gathering steam; I seemed to be on the right path! I was really excited.
I entered the stretch of the game where before I had met only DEAD ENDs. Our gang proceeded intact to the final exits, where we discovered that our decisions had enabled us all to go on to the final challenge, with no one left behind. We joyously prepared ourselves to go through the final gates - when SUDDENLY, one apparent ally made a DRAMATIC HEEL TURN, revealing themselves as Zero and abducting a few members of our party to go through the 9 door and leave me - and, noncoincidentally, all my best allies - alone and abandoned within the sinking ship with mismatched bracelets and no way of following. As those left behind started undaunted to run through possible plans of attack to try to take Zero down, my hero finally took notice of the giant coffin laid conspicuously on the altar at the head of the room instead of clammering on by like a clueless berk as he had in previous endings. Everyone's eyes followed, as the coffin had begun to shake with a thumping from within; the heroes all rushed it - because it's Snake inside, it has to be Snake - and 2+4+7+5=18=a root of 9, which means they can chase after Zero now, and Team Kickass is gonna finally reunite and bust the bad guys and save the day and-- And--
Wait, why is there a CG movie now? Cutscenes aren't full-on animated in this game, This seems an odd place to put a movie, you'd usually do that only if--
GAME OVER??
That's right: if you reach the good ending path in 999 too early, you'll be told by the story that you're not ready to see what happens and get a premature game over. You'll then be told you need to start over and take a separate route through the game, then come back once you've finished that path and redo the right route before you'll be allowed to see the ending you rightfully earned.
Imagine if FF4 had done this. You're at the final boss, your party's down and out, when, suddenly, all your past allies - Yang, the twins, even Tellah - come to you in spirit form and give you the energy and hope needed to fight on. The Prologue - the Final Fantasy song - is playing, the battle background is swept up in some kinda starfield-parallax that's awe-inspiring in 1992, Golbez cries "Zeromus! It's the end!", or whatever it is he says in the actually-coherent scripts, and--
--Wait, did you get the Pink Tail? You did get Adamant Armor for every member of your party, didn't you? No? What?! Oh, my! Back to the beginning for you!
Now, would you play through Baron and Mist and the Watery Pass and Damcyan and Mt. Hobs and Fabul and Mysidia and Mt. Ordeals and etc. etc. etc. again to see the ending? Yeah, probably. But a game gets only one chance to seize a great moment; it's never quite the same in reruns. What's particularly frustrating in 999 is that the party actually has all it needs to get past the roadblock, which makes the sudden stop in retrospect a particularly blatant fuck-you.
Only a couple of the text-based choices matter, and only if you're on the path for the best ending; your door choices are the big decider, and they're made largely blind, or are at least illogical enough to be blind. For the first branch: do you seek information about the life-or-death situation you're currently stuck in, or do you decide to hang around with someone whose face you couldn't even remember upon your reunion? If you slip up here, you've blown your whole game. The second choice is blind as well; you'd logically want to partner with the sister to get information at this juncture, but she's your partner in either available party configuration; counterintuitively, only the location matters (and you can't figure out which before you make your choice). There's a path if you squint and share the programmers' odd priorities, but the game nearly guarantees that you're gonna have to power through it a few times to figure out what's going on.
Part of the appeal of videogames is that they're an "improved" version of real life. Contrary to our world, there is a plot, your actions have meaning, and you do have a fighting chance of figuring out your current predicament or at least reaching some sort of resolution, even if the game is doing something like bringing your objective into question (No More Heroes, Shadow of the Colossus). In 999, though, I did everything right, and I still had no chance. I ultimately felt like my choices weren't relevant, which is a problem for a visual novel; making choices in a story is kind of the genre's whole thing.
(It's interesting to compare this to my Neo Angelique playthrough, where my choices didn't really matter, or at least had considerable room for error and exploration, until without warning they did very much so and one little slip-up in a very short window - a slip-up of whose nature I'm to this day not even sure - blew my whole game. The genre seems to waver between ending requirements that're so strict they dampen exploration and so obtuse that they're unfathomable - both of which, I suppose, encourage hintbook/artbook sales, a favorable outcome for the manufacturer. The genre's reliance on multiple playthroughs also enables these bad habits; the writers don't feel compelled to provide a satisfying play experience the first time through. I've never seen a genre so committed to playing against its strengths.)
A smaller but significant side problem I had with the denouement: Time loops and paradoxes are not inherently interesting, and they take agency away from the characters, who now aren't acting according to their own motives and personalities but according to the demands of some infernal machine. Why did Akane put a gun in room 1? Because she foresaw that there was a gun there in her vision, and so she had to make it come true. How did she know that her genius plan wouldn't instead leave most everyone dead, as indeed happened in several scenarios? Because that's what the vision said would happen, etc. Plus, as the heroes & proto-villains get thinner, the real villains shrink accordingly; Ace the zoot-suited self-made billionaire who just wants to see faces is much more interesting than the master of eeeEEEEEeeeevil who cackles while throwing little girls into incinerators. (Heck, even Ace the cornered Scooby-Doo villain showed more dimension; Lord, that portrait was disturbing.)
(And why couldn't Seven go back the way he came to save Kanny in the bad timeline? Just throw the bedsheets down to her again, Christ.)
Side thoughts: Despite the above, I did like in a way the game's idea that "epiphanies" are just cheat information gained legitimately from selves from other timelines. (It reminds me, in fact, of the Dante-esque hell of Animamundi's "best" ending, where characters reckon not only with crimes committed in this timeline but in all others and seem from a cosmic perspective to be living out all their lives at once.) This is the first Japanese game I've played where the characters actually seemed way younger, not older, than their official ages. I imagine enough virtual ink has been expended on the Sudoku of Death so I'll keep this brief, but I was reminded of a scene from the bad direct-to-video Prophecy II. Christopher Walken as a dark angel Gabriel has revived a recent teen suicide because he needs a modern-day human to help him overcome a challenge that has proved a complete roadblock to the forces of divine rebellion. After her resurrection, Gabriel brings his new and unwilling assistant before the offending obstacle: a computer database. She stares at him disbelievingly: "You brought me back because you don't know DOS?!"
.
