Hm, if K is either a clone or twin of Sigma, and Sigma has magic time travel powers, then K may be the esper blocking Clover's powers.
Did not expect a Cockney robot to be in this game. He starts talking about how they can have skin over their skeleton bodies that you can't tell apart from humans, okay. So, someone's totally a robot. Obvious options are Sigma (voiced with beeps), Phi (no backstory), Quark (Tenmyouji snorted when asked if he was in elementary school), or K. But I doubt it's K because we already have clones, and you don't need clones and robots to explain why he looks like Sigma. Most of Luna's deaths don't appear to have blood, but I remember the ending where everyone kills themselves except K, and they all seemed to have blood, which definitely does indicate K.
Wait, Phi is supposed to look thirteen? Bull**** she looks thirteen, she looks like she's twenty.
Oh my God, did Dio literally just fall for the "there's someone behind you" trick? That's like kindergarten stuff, man.
I'm actually kind of surprised that K votes ally when Phi locks Dio out of the voting booth. I think K has voted betray in every single vote up to this point, hasn't he?
You know, I still don't know what Luna's job is that's "like" a doctor. Probably another cloning scientist.
Tenmyouji also knows about someone's bracelet being bloody, and says whoever it is is Zero Sr. But I already know it's Dio! Dun dun dun?
So Luna was in the room with the old lady's body and could have killed her, but my time travel powers tell me (the player) that Dio admitted to doing it.
Dio claims that he has a kid who will die if he loses the game. I like how no one believes him for even a second.
K knocks us out to force us into a door to save our lives, but by pure coincidence, an ambulance sped by my window with its lights blaring at the exact moment the punch sound effects played, which spooked me.
I activate another escape room, but decide to go back and do an earlier route instead. I actually have noticed how there's a Steam achievement for escaping 16 times, and there are 12 rooms you can access pre-locks, which is a pretty big indication that there are 3 more rooms you can access after unlocking stuff and then a final true ending room. I've actually been thinking that for quite a while.
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Not changing this sig until I decide to change this sig. Started: July 6, 2005
I forgot to mention this earlier, but yes, I did notice from the very start of the game that we never see Sigma's face except in the flashback to when he's abducted. Even in group shots, he's always absent. I know that's going to be important for the same reason as him not being voiced, I just don't know how.
Man, betraying Luna is actually kind of sad. She's the only character so far where I actually didn't want to hit betray. I totally still did, though.
Wondering who Brother is. Quark's the most suspicious.
Man, Alice just cannot stop stabbing herself in the boob ring. By the way, I call it that because there's literally nothing else I can even think of to call it.
Phi: "I just... know that you're important. Somehow." Phi confirmed for having protagonist-detection powers. Again, I'm trying to make a pun of Protagonist and Radar and it is just not coming to me. Prodar?
I'm actually shocked that there was a way to get out of the 9 door without opening a lock first, I thought that would be true ending stuff. It's also funny that it's literally the last of the non-locked routes I took.
Jesus Christ, Phi, you cannot believe both that a virus may have wiped out mankind and that you've only been in the facility for six days. Then she gets her consciousness replaced by another timeline's Phi or whatever and Dio's like "okay I'm going to explain the entire cultist backstory and how clones work, get settled in," then that one guy from Pokemon shows up to complain that both his cult and this cult had the same idea of wiping out humanity to leave only a superior group behind. Okay, seriously, what was the first thing to have that idea? The first one I can think of is Moonraker, but you can argue it's at least as far back as Frankenstein.
I like how in this empty desert that has zero detail, Dio found the only rock.
Was... was it just a coincidence that I happened to choose this route, the route that explains the most stuff, last? Because this route explains waaaaaay more than any other no-lock route. There were entire routes where I learned nothing new, and now I'm getting as much as I got in like four other routes combined.
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Not changing this sig until I decide to change this sig. Started: July 6, 2005
I go to do what I will eventually learn is the Alice ending.
I cannot believe Clover is stupid enough to show Dio the extremely suspicious poison pill-looking thing she found in his coat after realizing he's evil. Jesus Christ, if this is one of your best secret agents, you deserve for the world to be destroyed.
"May Brother live in everlasting glory..." He does, Dio, he does. Even now, I remember him carrying my team in FFX.
Alice, you said that the first bomb you found could destroy the entire facility, how do you plan to survive four bombs by entering the white doors? I guess it doesn't matter, but come on.
What a pointless ending. Everyone just dies and accomplishes nothing? You just wanted to have an ending named after each character and didn't know what to do for Alice's, I see through you, game.
Next I do the lock where you accuse Dio of planting the bombs. What an incredibly awkward scene where Sigma holds down Dio without the camera seeing his face. I can't wait for the reveal of Sigma's face.
Dio says Brother is an "old fart," so Brother is definitely either Tenmyouji or Quark.
Start another lock, Sigma's hand gets slashed and he starts bleeding white liquid, so yeah, he's the robot.
I vote betray just to get it out of the way, and Sigma's like SOME OTHER FORCE IS CONTROLLING ME BEEP BOOP
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Not changing this sig until I decide to change this sig. Started: July 6, 2005
Stopping for the moment, but I'm going to throw down an official Anagram Prediction for the game's remaining story. Obviously, don't tell me how wrong I am.
The crazy cult made a virus that makes you want to kill yourself by making you too aware of things from the morphogenetic field, so Alice and Clover were sent to stop them. But they were captured by Zero and the virus was released, killing most of humanity. K's father created this entire thing (in the Mars mission replication dome) to create a Schrodinger's Cat scenario that will let certain people come together and "predict" things into being fine when they open the 9 door to escape, with the aid of Phi's and Sigma's powers. Whatever number of decades or years pass, the world is destroyed, and the people are released, but Dio sneaks in and kills one of the participants, the old lady, but this may have been part of the plan anyway. Also, the old lady doesn't show up in the cyan door route, which is the route I'm pretty sure has the true ending in, so she might not be dead-dead. K was born after the world was destroyed and his father (who is Tenmyouji, who was in love with the old lady) designed everything. Either Tenmyouji or Quark is Brother (probably Quark), Luna is the original robot mother created for K that he rejected (my evidence is that every time someone gets killed, the game is not shy about showing blood except for her) and probably knows everything going on. Zero is one of Tenmyouji, Sigma, Luna, Quark, or K, probably K because he was designed to take over for his father but he doesn't even know himself that he's Zero. K created Sigma with the purpose of replicating time travel powers and squashing Clover's ability to communicate telepathically so she can't realize they're in the far future by noticing her brother is dead. The fact that Dio has clones of himself will come into play somehow, though I don't know how yet. Finally, Sigma's face will obviously not be the Sigma we've seen in his memory, but the memory is a fake anyway or else someone else's. It's hard to predict what his face will be, though, but it can't be the face of anyone else in the game except possibly a younger Tenmyouji or an older Quark.
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Not changing this sig until I decide to change this sig. Started: July 6, 2005
Phi could be the original mother bot, though I'm still more confident in Luna. I still don't know Phi's deal, she's the hardest to figure out.
Sigma's face could be Junpei from the first game. It would explain why he has psychic powers, why they don't want to show his face, and why earlier in the game someone brought up the survivors of the first game.
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Not changing this sig until I decide to change this sig. Started: July 6, 2005
Luna takes Sigma to the garden and is like "you're a robot bro," and I'll be honest: this is not quite the dramatic reveal I expected.
Game, I'm not sure it's okay to have the dramatic "protagonist revealing who the bomber is by remembering it from another timeline" shot twice.
Before the bombs can go off, Luna scans me and is like "okay only your ARMS are robotic, here's an X-ray of them with spirals in them" and then Nintendo says "robot arms with spirals in them???" and gets sued.
Luna is like "lol okay this will only take 5 minutes" and then it takes 14 minutes so we can't get to the doors to save ourselves, and it's like, okay, I get that Luna has ulterior motives here, but it's not that hard to tell the difference between 5 minutes and 14 minutes, Sigma, this is basically your own fault.
Luna's so calm as they die, I was totally right about her being a robot, at least.
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Not changing this sig until I decide to change this sig. Started: July 6, 2005
Tag just to say ZTD is awesome, VN fans have really bad opinions in general. I can't imagine seeing that one ending in the context of this year.
Also 999 is by far the best written. It's the best as a standalone story, but the whole trilogy is good as a whole too. It's just really rough around the edges.
Go to another timeline, get a puzzle that says SHE KNOWS EVERYTHING and I WAS YOU WILL BE ME. Very foreshadowy.
Uh-oh, Sigma's vision got blurry, and Phi started talking really fast. Either Sigma has Radical-6, or Phi has the disease from that one episode of Star Trek that makes you live much faster than normal.
Clover wrote numbers on her thigh: 016. Of course! The killer is... Leon Kuwata!
K and Dio noooo actually I think this is the first K death
A knife with "Myrmidons" written on it. The name of the super secret organization no one knows about. Okay.
We get into the director's computer, and learn that one of the robots... is Luna! Dun dun duuuuuuuid anyone not see this coming?
We set Luna's bracelet on the ground outside of the voting booth so we can vote, but Luna is suddenly right there with a goofy music sting!
"You can't write a message on your right thigh with your right hand." Jesus, this is just like that one Encyclopedia Brown book I read as a kid where the plot twist is that you can't grab something from your pocket with your other hand, and I just groaned and put down the book.
Look, game, I'm willing to accept that Luna's serial number just happens to be 016. What I'm not willing to accept is that Clover would write Dio's name as "dIO."
Then I go back and hit betray, and Luna and Quark escape, leaving us. Why'd Luna do it? We may never knowwwwww but it obviously is about Quark.
And now the only endings left for me to get are Phi, Tenmyouji, and Quark. Which are exactly the three I would have guessed would be the last... Maybe I'd have guessed Sigma would be last, if I'd thought about it. But I didn't, so we'll never know.
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Not changing this sig until I decide to change this sig. Started: July 6, 2005
"You can't write a message on your right thigh with your right hand." Jesus, this is just like that one Encyclopedia Brown book I read as a kid where the plot twist is that you can't grab something from your pocket with your other hand, and I just groaned and put down the book.
Sigma grabs Dio by the leg to stop him from escaping, and Phi, Clover, and Luna do literally nothing to help. I mean, I understand K, he has to run across the 9 Door, but come on, guys, you're RIGHT THERE.
I don't really get the purpose of this lock. The lock was about how to stop Dio from escaping? Then Sigma is like "I can stop him with my robot arms," but he doesn't? He just mildly inconveniences him as he escapes anyway. We don't even get an explanation for how he survives the poison bracelet, which Luna went out of her way in another timeline to say would totally still affect him. Anyway, my point is that they put this lock here just to block you from discovering the old lady's keycard.
Dio calls Sigma a "senile old f***." Curious, eh.
Oh no, the old lady has Akane's last name, is involved in wacky timeline experiments, and the first game's survivors were mentioned several times as having ambiguous fates. This must be... Akane's great-aunt!
Alice killing herself ends this timeline... why, exactly? She's the character who dies the most often in this game, and it never ends things except this time. And there is no reason for this to be the Quark end, he does nothing but say "lol hi."
Well, all this leaves is the Tenmyouji and Phi endings.
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Not changing this sig until I decide to change this sig. Started: July 6, 2005
I don't really get the purpose of this lock. The lock was about how to stop Dio from escaping? Then Sigma is like "I can stop him with my robot arms," but he doesn't? He just mildly inconveniences him as he escapes anyway. We don't even get an explanation for how he survives the poison bracelet, which Luna went out of her way in another timeline to say would totally still affect him. Anyway, my point is that they put this lock here just to block you from discovering the old lady's keycard.
Okay fine, I did forget that part. That still doesn't explain why there had to be a lock in the first place if Dio escapes either way.
Because using this trick to prevent the poison from spreading reveals that he has a cybernetic arm. You need to know that he has the cybernetic arm before you can see this. And also, having the cybernetic arm in the first place makes this maneuver easier to survive - he could have lost a flesh and blood arm, I suppose, but he'd be bleeding a lot, pretty bad news.
Because using this trick to prevent the poison from spreading reveals that he has a cybernetic arm. You need to know that he has the cybernetic arm before you can see this. And also, having the cybernetic arm in the first place makes this maneuver easier to survive - he could have lost a flesh and blood arm, I suppose, but he'd be bleeding a lot, pretty bad news.
No, dammit, I mean that it has almost no consequence. Dio escapes either way, so the only consequence is that Sigma survives long enough to see the name and password on the keycard. Which is fine, sure, I'm sure that'll come up in another timeline, but it has nothing at all to do with Quark in the Quark Ending. I assume this is because Quark's real identity will be so huge that it can only be shown in the true ending of the game (which I assume is in Phi's route), but as far as a Quark ending goes, this is all completely inconsequential to Quark as a character.
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Not changing this sig until I decide to change this sig. Started: July 6, 2005
Ah, yeah, I guess it's kinda the ending least associated with the character it's named for. But I mean, there's still consequence to Sigma surviving and finding out that stuff because obviously that comes up later.
Tenmyouji has a photo of Akane as a little kid from the last game. Oh man, is he Junpei? Argh, I didn't even consider that. If he's Junpei, I'm going to look like a huge idiot.
As soon as we're out of the Director's Office, Temnyouji and Quark are like "We need to go back, but don't follow us, this is highly suspicious in this murder game but it's totally cool."
A hologram of an old man in a pirate trench coat shows up and says he's Zero, and like, dude, he looks exactly like an older version of Sigma. Which is fine, I get that Sigma is going to be revealed to be old (I've known since Dio called him an old fart one time a million years ago), but surely Sigma would notice that this guy looks exactly like him, right?
Quark, this is the longest letter ever, you could not have written it on just two pages.
You know, I just realized: if Clover gets angry so often about who killed Alice, couldn't Luna have just proven every time that it was Radical-6 using the ADAM?
If either Sigma or Tenmyouji is Junpei, or a clone of Junpei or whatever, there'd better be a really good reason why Clover doesn't recognize him. I know they're old, but your face doesn't change THAT much.
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Not changing this sig until I decide to change this sig. Started: July 6, 2005
Go back to the rightmost route that I'm sure will be the Phi end.
Sigma says he wouldn't mind some swimsuit time with the girls, dude, Clover is wearing maybe 15% more than a bikini as it is.
The mysterious Q room. I was going to make a Star Trek joke, but then the room is just a big white space like Star Trek Q once took Picard to after he "died," so... I don't know if this counts as a reference or not? Probably not.
So the room is all white, and my companions here are Phi and Tenmyouji. If Sigma also has white hair from being old, then everyone here will have had white hair. Coincidence???? Probably.
Actually, in the other timelines, the other characters must have seen this room, but none of them were ever like "lol did you see that room that was like that one episode of Spongebob?" I would probably talk about this room more than I talked about the Director's Room or whatever, is all.
Yeah, see Tenmyouji recognizes Akane immediately even though it's been 50 years since they met.
Ha, I KNEW the flowchart would reorganize to put something in the front of it rather than the end. I should've called that, though. Oh well.
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Not changing this sig until I decide to change this sig. Started: July 6, 2005
I like how the game made a huge deal out of Dio stealing Akane's bracelet, but her character model while talking doesn't have the bracelet.
Are we really saying that Akane tied a key to Sigma's ankle at the start of the game, and Sigma never noticed? Like, the key isn't even taped on there, it's on a string. That key is absolutely hitting his ankle as he runs around.
Sigma, seriously, stop asking the girls to wear swimsuits, Alice's boob ring exposes more than a swimsuit would anyway.
Game, I'll accept that we're on the moon, and that Radical-6 made us not notice the gravity thing, all of that is very clever, but your explanation doesn't cover how everyone should notice things weighing less. And I have a hard time believing that no one has jumped at any point except Phi.
"Let me begin at the beginning."
Oh no Sigma is old who could have predicted thisssssss although I didn't expect him to have a robot eye. Man, he looks pretty okay for 67. Especially his arm, which is funny because the game's close-ups on peoples' arms specifically show Tenmyouji's as being old.
"He was to be your spare if something happened to you," dude, didn't you just say that you grabbed Alice, Clover, Tenmyouji, and Quark because you knew they had to be here for time shenanigans? Yet you didn't know for sure that Sigma would survive?
So Radical-6 also makes you able to stay up for 36 hours without getting tired? Fine.
I'm gonna have some questions about how these alternate timelines work re: changing the past after I beat the game, but for now I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and assume it will make sense later.
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Not changing this sig until I decide to change this sig. Started: July 6, 2005
Game, I'll accept that we're on the moon, and that Radical-6 made us not notice the gravity thing, all of that is very clever, but your explanation doesn't cover how everyone should notice things weighing less. And I have a hard time believing that no one has jumped at any point except Phi.
There are a few points in the game where the characters all muse about "feeling weird" or "floaty", but you have to be paying attention to catch it.
* * Oh no Sigma is old who could have predicted thisssssss although I didn't expect him to have a robot eye. Man, he looks pretty okay for 67. Especially his arm, which is funny because the game's close-ups on peoples' arms specifically show Tenmyouji's as being old.
Obviously his arms are robotic, so they look younger. I cant remember if that was on purpose though. Since your arms and hands are the part of you, you'd see the most with your own eyes ---
Sigma time travels back to the virus destroying the world in 2029, and apparently is watching a crappy TV from what looks like 1960. Who owns this hipster TV?
"You must master genetic engineering and artificial intelligence programming, among other disciplines." Not only that, he has to do it on the moon without the benefit of a university.
Sigma, bro, look. You've been having this whole conversation with Akane, there's no way it took you this look to realize you had Terminator robot arms and an eyepatch. Speaking of which, I'm glad to see prosthetics evolve so much in the next nine years.
"Go look at the mushroom cloud from the nuke that dropped one second ago."
Zip back to the far future
Kyle wakes up, but he doesn't FEEL like Kyle. Assuming that clones let you inhabit their bodies or whatever, I'd been thinking this for a while because there was no other obvious reason to include clones in the game. But I'm not sure it's Sigma, because Kyle has a normal voice instead of text beeps.
Tenmyouji, I get your philosophical argument against changing the past, but the world was blown up. I agree that things accomplished under hardship still have value, but like six billion people are dead, man.
You know, I just realized that Sigma should be the same age as Snake.
So who is the person inside of Kyle, if it's not Sigma? "Don't play dumb," Akane says. Is it the player as a concept? Japanese games love that kind of meta twist.
So I actually had to PM paratroopa to ask where I go next because nothing new opened up in the flowchart, and he was like "that's the end of the game, the rest is in the next game, which for a while people thought might not even happen." This goes beyond mere sequel bait or non-endings; I legitimately did not even realize the game was over. They must have known what they were doing, right? The ending even says "ENDING ALTERNATIVE," like you got an alternate or bad ending. I'm halfway between saying that's unforgivable and applauding the sheer audacity.
I was planning to give my thoughts about this game compared to the first one, but I guess now I really can't because the story is incomplete. I don't have time to play a third game, though, so I guess I'll make a new topic for it at some point in 2021? I'm sorry, I just can't believe this game ends like that. I can't even post my questions about the game's story because they might be answered in the next game! So, this playthrough will end as abruptly as the game itself does.
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Not changing this sig until I decide to change this sig. Started: July 6, 2005
There is no game ever made with a more balsy and risky sequel bait ending that VLR.
The games sold like shit in Japan, and though they reached cult status over here its not like they did real numbers. The art direction shift between 999 and VLR was straight up "make designs that will pander more to Otaku, or we're not gonna make any damn money". Pointless, since the franchise is almost entirely supported by western sales.
Like, this is literally the circumstances in with the end of this insane trilogy was announced to even exist, which many thought would never even happen.
And it does end on an incomplete note that doesn't feel totally satisfying, but I guess it's meant to be a set up for the third game (which nearly didn't get made).
