Some (spoiler free) thoughts on the latest game I've completed, Zero Time Dilemma.

A LOT was lost in the transition from the visual novel to the cinematic format. I sorely missed the discussions on quantum physics, psychology and philosophy that would usually take place in 999 and VLR. In those games, Schroedinger's Cat, Ice-9 and the Ganzfeld experiment (to name only a few elements) might not have seemed incredibly relevant to the overarching narrative at first glance, but they would ultimately become the glue that kept the plot thematically cohesive. Not only that, these elements also kept me thinking about the game, and encouraged me to do some light reading on stuff like the Morphogenetic Field and the Multiverse theory.

ZTD does have a few moments of interesting science talk, but, again, the cinematic format gets in the way. Alongside narration and dialogue, 999 and VLR provided a lot of visual aid to help drive the point accross, with files, diagrams, and illustrations. ZTD, on the other hand, expects the player to grasp complex concepts (like the Sleeping Beauty paradox, or the Monty Hall problem) while unpleasantly zooming into the faces of the talking character.

As far as the presentation goes, I discovered that ZTD looks the worst on the 3DS. The animations were unflattering, especially while gesturing and running -- it reminded me of characters from The Sims 2. And although there's a clear intent of being mature and shocking, even the bloody scenes in ZTD would come accross as humorous. 999 did a much better job of setting up a tense atmosphere using only narration. The environments and puzzles also have an inferior quality, with their biggest fault being not having a unifying theme that could integrate the plot and gameplay as seamlessly as the previous games did. The puzzles were also the portion where most of the humor from the previous games was located, but character interactions during these is ZTD are stripped down to the point that they're almost exclusively concerned with solving the puzzle.

This brings me to another point that really bothered me. In ZTD, nine people are trapped and forced to play a Decision Game with their lives on the line. While some of the participants are familiar faces from 999 or VLR, with some new additions, you could hardly tell they're supposed to be different people looking through the game's script. Even though they're inteded to be nine distinct individuals, they always have the exact same reactions. In each story segment, regardless of what team you're playing as, you'll watch the characters take turns saying essentially the same thing. "Oh, we woke up. Look, it's HOURS:MINUTES right now. Did we sleep for that long? Or maybe we just forgot?". You'll hear something along those lines at least ten times throughout the game, only with slightly different inflections. It gets old really quick.

Speaking of things that get old quick, the Decision Game isn't much more exciting either. The binary choices you have to make have, for the most part, predictable outcomes, where you can easily determine what is the "right" and the "wrong" decision. Having to go back and make a decision that will undoubtedly lead to a bad ending just for the sake of completing the flowchart was an issue in VLR, but it is aggravated in ZTD.