Among the 3 zero escapes games, this is probably the weakest of the bunch and that's saying a lot considering 999, the first in the series, had nearly nothing tied to VLR and ZTD besides the characters and few other mentions, had many simple puzzles, no voice acting and so forth.
This game basically fails on 3 levels: characters and story, gameplay, and technicalities.
The 9 charactersAmong the 3 zero escapes games, this is probably the weakest of the bunch and that's saying a lot considering 999, the first in the series, had nearly nothing tied to VLR and ZTD besides the characters and few other mentions, had many simple puzzles, no voice acting and so forth.
This game basically fails on 3 levels: characters and story, gameplay, and technicalities.
The 9 characters are now split in to 3 fixated groups of 3, which already causes a bit of an issue: in both 999 and VLR the 9 people would be mixed depending on the occasion and this caused different story bits to open, giving more development time. In here it's not the same and it's a problem when certain characters are simply not engaging:
Q Team is one of the worst of the 3: Mira and Eric are probably two of the worst because not only Mira is "not **** enough" when she needs to, she also has a twist that doesn't feel fitting and feels out of place, while Eric looks like he needs a chill pill or something. Q is alright, although he always acts like a scared dog for some reason.
C Team is fine for the most part, with Carlos being one of the best of the new characters, while Akane and Junpei got worse: Akane is just too weakly and silly, almost like a silly anime character - EVEN THOUGH she has a crush on Junpei ever since school - and Junpei, a very likable character from 999 (and I'm not going to say much more) is now a broken mess of a character who acts tough, angry, depressed, and so forth. He gave us an explanation as to why he's like this but it doesn't feel natural and, obviously, it's not likable. I have played depressed characters before and they still tried to be relatable: Junpei is just annoying.
And D team is alright for the most part: Phi comes back in her constant haughtiness, Sigma now has a voice actor and he's pretty good and smart (if you played VLR you know why) and Diana is relatable and decent enough, even after her backstory explained.
Beyond the cast being debatable, few other issues mine the experience however and they're hard to ignore: for example, the dialogue cutscenes are not only too many but also BADLY paced and always have tiny breaks between dialogues that always slow the gameplay, which wasn't an issue in the previous games. Infact this also causes the graphics to show off their ugliness and how cheap the animation are, which isn't worse than VLR BUT they got away thanks to being a semi-visual novel game, which animation was to a minimum but had better drawings and pacing. More to that later.
The game also doesn't have a linear plot, instead of making you play several scenes separated from each other and only later they'll be matched to be one storyline split into several paths. It's an interesting approach but still feels not as immediate than VLR, which was still a lot better, and 999 which only had the issue of forcing you to constantly restart the game in order to get all endings. On top of that several twists felt...weird, like the transporter, the snail and the reveal of Zero - which is so odd I can't say it was genius or just silly.
Overall the story is just okay, but definitely a stepback from the previous games and, on top of that, this game does require having played the first 2 games - or at the very least the second - to know what really happens in here, as there are tons of references to the previous games.
The gameplay is decent enough: the puzzles are much simpler to learn than VLR and not as easy than 999 - which were jokes - and there's no hard mode in this game, which helps a bit and makes the game flow better. However...the game is also a bit shorter and the actual puzzle rooms are fewer, with about 13 puzzles to play (instead of the 21 in VLR) and not requiring a lot of writing either. Most of the remaining puzzles are either typing down stuff from other timelines, like numbers or names (the 3way stand-off has a freaking funny ending if you type "his" name) and other details.
But overall, it's okay, no complains.
And last, but not least, the game has very bad animation and the graphics aren't totally bad thanks to the celshading, which doesn't totally hurt the eye, but like i said earlier in VLR and 999 the games were set as visual novels, making the graphics not stand out and instead stylized as 3d anime - and the first game was totally 2D instead. In here it's shot like a cinematic game - which has a reason to be like this - and it's hard to follow due to the slow pacing.
I could say more but really, if this wasn't the final chapter of the Zero Escape series (at least I hope so!) I would definitely rate it lower but it was already a miracle we got this game and finally got closure: I can highly recommend it if you need to see the ending but if you didn't, get the first 2 games and get to them first, and THEN play this one.
It's not the best, but you just don't look a gift horse in the mouth, right?… Expand
Zero Escape: Zero Time DilemmaYour Score0 out of 10User Score
