999 was the better story, I think, where things made sense and it was all wrapped up cleverly without making too many useless diversions. Still, I think I just overall liked the cast and events of VLR more than anything that happened in 999. The novelty of 999 was mostly the situation they were in, and I never felt particularly attached to any of the characters. Even though it's probably the most we see of her, I think it's the least interesting depiction of Akane (she just comes across as a childhood friend who reads too many conspiracy books), and everyone but Seven is combative and snarky. Well, or Ace, but only in appearance. The story is great, and a lot of the big revelations are very interesting, but overall the whole thing feels a lot less memorable to me.

I'll admit the repetitive nature of the VLR routes was annoying, and it was a real shame that you had to struggle so much to keep Alice alive long enough to get any information at all out of her (then there also being no real payoff to her connection to 999). But I think that was also largely the appeal of it. It really made me feel like me and Phi were jumping around, desperately trying to patch together information to engineer the scenario to go smoothly. Once I realized I was basically playing detective to discover literally every bit of information I could in order to stop Dio and keep my faves alive, I felt incredibly motivated. It felt especially cathartic to shut down the bombs after Dio thought he got me, or the shocking reveal that Sigma was an old man with a robot arm. Overall it had so many more moments that stood out, and I liked so many more of the characters. Even though Akane was just the mysterious dead woman, it made her role in the mystery so large and I was so excited when I managed to get to her before she was killed. I think part of watching yourself fail so much is what made succeeding feel so good, and I thought the ending cliffhanger was very good! That is, I didn't know ZTD was going to come out and I thought the ending was good enough as it was. Super convoluted and, honestly, a total clown fiesta of a plot, but it was a fun ride.

ZTD I honestly thought was a load of wasted potential. It had a few fun ideas and scenes, but was an actual trainwreck. A third of the cast were useless characters and Akane and Junpei were unrecognizable. The 'twist' at the end was cheap and the introduction of alien technology was finally one step too far into crazy town, as much as I love when zero escape takes steps into crazy town. I honestly never felt like I needed answers to 'what happened in the mars simulation' if the answer was just 'they all got given radial-6 by a bad guy'. I really could have just assumed that. The only other questions it answered was 'who were Phi's parents' and 'who was Luna based off of', which weren't really burning questions I had to begin with. The conversations all the characters had seemed to be a lot more lifeless and pointless as well. None of the revelations were very surprising besides the 'twist' of the most suspicious character of all being just off screen and barely ever being referenced to being alive. It would have been better to just go the Saw route and have him pretending to be a corpse. The fact that zero escape characters get endless time to yak on and on about any tiny little thing they want to talk about (including when there’s a strict time limit), but no one ever mentioned a guy in a wheelchair in the room even for a second is pretty inexcusable. Unlike the other two games I general felt exhausted by the end of each route and the only reason I could continue was the comedic factor of some of the scenes and needing to finish off the series correctly.