I cannot even begin to tell you how disappointed I am that this wasn't game no. 9. I debated with myself for a while if I should quickly complete another game in the meantime to make this the ninth game, but I decided it would be rather inefficient and kind of cheating to artificially extend the time spent on a game for the sake of a placing joke. And almost to rub it in my face, game no. 9 was a game that I actually beat in one sitting because it was only roughly an hour and a half long. But, you don't want to hear about this. So, let's begin with my playthrough of 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, and get some Japanese visual novel goodness. I promise this isn't a dating sim.
999 is the tale of nine people who wake up to find themselves locked in a room trapped on a sinking ship, all of them forcibly taken here and all of them adorning a numbered bracelet. After escaping their respective makeshift cells, they all unite in the central hall of said ship, where a mysterious person calling themselves 'Zero' informs them that they have been chosen to take place in what is known as 'the Nonary Game'. The rules are simple, there are nine numbered doors hidden throughout the ship. Each numbered door can only be entered by 3-5 people, whose digital root (the sum of adding up their individual numbers until they equal only one digit i.e. 1 + 2 + 3= 6 or 4 + 5 + 6 + 7= 22 and then 2 + 2= 4) is equal to the number on the door. Everyone who scans in must enter the door and everyone who enters the door must contribute to solving the various puzzles contained within. If you can find the door numbered 9 before the time runs out, the titular nine hours, you escape with your lives. Otherwise, you become trapped on the ship as it sinks to the bottom of the ocean. As well, Zero has decided to pull a Suicide Squad and place bombs inside the bodies of the "players" to assure their compliance. The bracelets contain a hidden detonator that activates as soon as the players enter the door, giving them 81 seconds to scan in another panel before the bomb detonates. The dude likes his nines if you couldn't tell.
The story of 999 seems very bare bones at first. But appearances being deceiving is an overarching theme of the game. Nothing on this ship or with this group is as it seems and, throughout playing, you'll discover all the various secrets and unravel all the various mysteries hidden within the Nonary game. It not starting exceptionally complex provides an excellent cornerstone to build off of, helped immensely by the fact that the player has a surprising amount of freedom on which direction the story can take for what is, essentially, an exclusively narrative and character driven game. And this freedom gives you a reason to play through the game a second, third or even sixth time, seeing every scenario the game has to offer and working towards discovering the truth of what's going on in the Nonary Game. And all of this coming from the same starting point.
The character work in 999 is flawless. You'll end up spending at least some amount of time getting to know each of the characters in 999 in each run you do and, while the individual runs may seem a little lacking, you'll end up knowing quite a bit about at least one character each run, if not more. And it kind of ends up having a snowball effect from there. You do another run with different scenarios to either see if you can learn more about this cool character you got invested in during the previous run or get invested in a brand new character. By the end, your favorite characters might be what were once originally your least favorites and vice versa. It's the kind of character development that makes you go back and through and smile whenever you see vague hints to what you learned in another storyline. And, honestly, all the characters are fairly likable, especially when their full stories are revealed(with one exception but that'd be a pretty huge spoiler for 999).
The puzzles in 999 are also fantastic. I was partially playing 999 alongside Soul Axiom and seeing some genuinely good puzzle work alongside that mess of puzzle game was a wonderful contrast. The puzzles are all very tight, giving you enough space to look around but still keeping the focus down to one or two rooms total. They lay a few hints around the environments as well, but never so many that it feels like the game is solving the puzzle for you. The game also has a decent sense of progression to its puzzles, keeping the more complex and obtuse puzzles for later on in the game, which is very welcome. They also allow you to play any of the puzzles from the title screen, allowing you to revisit a particularly entertaining puzzle at any time. Which is basically all of them, so that's a good thing. The game also, even in its more obtuse phases, never resorts to going full moon logic on you. The puzzles always are clearly laid out while not being overexplained. It's a perfect balance for this kind of puzzle game and it gives you a great sense of accomplishment when you understand how each puzzle works.
The dialogue in this game was very mixed for me. For the most part, it's fine. You get a good grasp of a lot of the characters from how they act and react to scenarios and a lot of the dialogue, especially late in a specific run, ends up being very meaningful and emotional. It's overall a well-written game. Except for the fact that this game fills itself with a lot of heavy exposition about seemingly unrelated topics that only inform the experience totally when you play through all of 999's numerous endings. It's astonishing how they seem to just totally not understand how people would talk during a life or death scenario. The game will keep taking detours to have such important conversations as 'Why doesn't carbon dioxide liquify naturally?' "What happened to the Titanic's sister ships?' 'What are your opinions of the Ship of Theseus Paradox?' 'Did you know that each leaf on the four-leaf clover has a specific meaning?' 'Is telepathy real in relation to the collective subconscious?' And that's not even scratching the surface of all the weird things that are discussed in this game. The weird part is that this is all stuff you need to know to fully understand this game but the way this information is communicated at seemingly random points is just bizarre. It doesn't end up breaking the mood and I did learn quite a bit from playing it but it is just not how I feel humans would react in this scenario. Unless they're grad students. Who arguably aren't people anyway.
I cannot explain to you how wonderful the various twists of 999 are. The game kept me guessing the entire time while playing it and I never felt like I was learning information faster than the characters were. One of my pet peeves in a lot of media is when a big reveal happens long before the characters in the show discover it. I've always felt that it causes the storyline to lag overall, as the audience is now waiting for the characters to catch up before we can both proceed. 999 does a good job of keeping its info close to the chest until it was time to let the characters know. It also allows the actual players a lot of room for speculation, especially when it's learned what connections the nine main characters might have to each other to explain why they were all taken. I can almost see this being a great detective novel in the vain of a Hercule Poirot story in another life, especially given one of the endings where one of the main characters does go all parlor scene on the others which was kind of campy but in all the right ways.
999 was very likely the oldest game in my collection that I had never played. I picked it up near the end of the DS library with the intention of playing it right away, but I always ended up having a higher priority game to play, like the fifteenth release of Kingdom Hearts. This may have actually caused my experience with this game to be heightened overall. I may not have been in the place in my gaming life at the time I picked up this game for visual novels and escape-the-room puzzles. I think at the time my favorite game was Mario Galaxy 2, which is no longer even one of my top ten Mario games, much less top ten games. Sometimes you have to have a game hit you at just the right moment for it to click and 999 certainly managed that.
999 will probably be the oddity of the 52. Unless I get, like, Kirby's Dream Land 3 or whatever, this will probably be the only game on the 52 I complete 100%. Part of this was that I just felt the game wasn't complete until I saw all paths, experienced all dialogue choices and partook in all endings. Technically speaking, I beat the game three days after starting it and you could argue this is actually game number 6. And you technically wouldn't be wrong. But I feel like the nature of this game, being a multi-ending adventure novel where other endings inform future playthroughs as well as your ability to get the true ending, justifies my holding off until I fully beat it. It may have been beaten, but it wasn't finished, in a sense.
999 may very well be the best game I play on the 52, I can't stress that enough. I was engaged from the first moment I picked it up to the moment I finally hit the credits. I'm fully on board with everyone finding this game and playing it. I can't wait to pick up the game's sequels and, hopefully, this time won't wait until they show up on the cookie five years after I buy them to play through them. It's hard to talk about without spoiling anything and I'm trying to run spoiler free so, seriously. Get this game. You most likely won't regret it.
...okay, yeah, I finished up quickly because I wanted the actual review paragraphs to number 9. I didn't get my placing joke, okay? Let me have this. It does have a little to do with how hard it is to talk about this game without spoiling anything but it was mostly just me doing a numbering joke. I hope you enjoyed this look at 999, the vaguest post in the world. Trying to talk about this game spoiler-free, man. Anyways, thank you for reading and catch you next time for the actual game number 9, Frederic: Resurrection of Music. AKA pure unadulterated insanity. See you then.
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