This is a Post About 999

Having read And Then There Were None, the first thing I figured out about the mystery was that Snake wasn’t really dead. It was way too easy for a major character to just extract himself from the story when no one was looking. No one sees him die. When his body is found, it’s mangled beyond identification, and even his bracelet is broken. This could easily be a fake death. This did also make him my prime suspect for a short time, at least until I saw where he was hiding.

The way to get improved endings in the game wasn’t exactly clear to me at first. I was seeing repeat bad endings before I finally hit up GameFaqs for a spoiler-free check to see what I was doing wrong. Yes, I know, it is the shame of a puzzle gamer, but at least I admit it. It starts to get tedious solving the same room escape puzzles over again. 0263 CLICK 7485 CLICK is now in my long-term memory.

Basically it turns out that to get any reasonable ending, you need to criss-cross your steps in the first two rooms. This makes sense in retrospect (ie, obviously I would need the clover bookmark first if I wanted to give it to Clover, and obviously, I should do that), but not so much while playing (I can only give it to her in the operating room? Sure, not the split lab, because we’re separated, but why not the wheelhouse? Is she just too far gone by that point?). I’m sure there are plenty of people who got the better endings without cheating, but it seems like it’d be easier to stumble on them or brute force to them than get them through deduction.

Part of that is because Junpei, Anime Protagonist, is selectively dumb. It never occurs to him to pick up the 9 bracelet, even though as Ace demonstrated it is an incredibly useful thing to have. Yes, he was squicked out by the dead body, but the bracelet itself was blown clear. Since he specifically went into Door 5 to check out the body (provided that was the choice you made) it’s at least annoying Junpei never tried lifting the bracelet. In order for Ace to get the bracelet, he had to do some severe backtracking.

Also, if you’re en route to the Coffin Ending, it doesn’t seem to occur to Junpei to ask Clover, “Hey, what’s the note that you found upstairs say? Maybe it’s a clue.” Instead he has to pluck the answer out of a telepathic field from a previous ending, or get no answer at all. (The answer about how he actually gets information from alternate realities is the second-most Zybourne Clock thing I’ve actually seen in a real video game. I almost wonder if it was deliberate.)

Another thing that wasn’t too difficult to figure out, to me, was the true identity of Zero. How the game gets there is weird. But after Snake was eliminated (by virtue of being locked in a box) June/Akane was my prime suspect. Aside from bracelet number confusion, this is for basically three reasons:

• When she first enters the game, she makes this grand entrance gliding down the stairs so elegantly separately from everyone. So mysterious!
• People occasionally say things like “You’ll be betrayed by the person you trust the most.”
• Zero was probably a woman, because of external clues like the huge cloak, gas mask, and voice-changer. Yes, anyone in disguise would’ve used these things, but these clues really said “girl” to me. Clover and Lotus are already eliminated as suspects for various reasons (among them, Lotus is too pragmatic, and Clover too unstable). This leaves June.

• Even assuming Santa/Aoi was helping out, how the heck did Akane manage to kidnap a guy the size of Seven?
• What exactly is the chain of events in the Large Hospital Room? If we add things up, every person was searching eight individual rooms in a long connected hallway. During that time, people got up to all sorts of betrayal. This already seems unlikely since the rooms were all in the same hallway (no one saw Ace, June, Snake or Santa come and go from that hallway at any time?). But in order for the game to turn out how it did: 
1. June used that time to abduct Snake from a single room using the gas (again without anyone noticing – let’s assume she didn’t have to change clothes because he was blind). 
2. June then switched Snake’s clothes with “Guy X’s” clothes, and switched Snake into an Egyptian-themed outfit she had laying around. Santa might’ve helped with this part, but this presumes they had Guy X (Nijisaki) already tied up and drugged somewhere no one was searching for him.
3. During all this, Ace backtracks and gets the 9 bracelet. He knew that Seven wedged open the doors, for Reasons. 
4. June (or Santa) takes Snake down an elevator, past Door 6, into the chapel, and locks him in a box with a double-secret passcode.
5. Santa (or June) pushes Nijisaki out into the large hospital room at just the right time to have Ace/Hongou push him behind Door 3. This is obviously after he had the bracelet (which they would have had to know he had, which he also literally just got) and could have only been entirely premeditated on their part. They planned for this exact thing to happen.

And since Ace/Hongou is in fact the king jerk, why didn’t Seven… arrest him nine years ago? He had all the evidence. He didn’t have amnesia at that time. I guess we can assume some court nonsense happened (“they’re too powerful, the law couldn’t stop them”) but this isn’t exactly stated.

Other unanswered questions that I have, though they’re not exactly plot holes:

• Why was Lotus wearing that outfit? I know, fanservice. But, serious question. Lots of people pick fun of her ridiculous outfit, but nobody says: hey, why are you wearing that, anyway? This is not an unreasonable thing to ask her. At first, I assumed the same thing Junpei did – that she’s a working belly dancer and was kidnapped after a show. But then I saw what Alice is apparently wearing (provided that is her, in the ending) and it’s pretty similar to what Lotus is wearing. So did someone put Lotus in that outfit? Because that is weird.
• Why did Lotus even need to be there, anyway? Maybe this is all explained in the sequel. I realize her daughters were among the original experiments there, but why specifically punish her for that? I guess it’s possible she was needed because she could brute-force a computer password, and it was necessary for her to transmit that solution telepathically to her daughters in the past. That this is a reasonable assumption just shows how wacky this game is. (But somehow that seems more reasonable than “an 11 year old in 2001 knows how to brute-force a computer password.”)
• Why put Snake and Clover in the Nonary Game? Maybe the reason is “they played before, so they know the rules.” But then June immediately tells Snake not to tell anyone anything, eliminating that usefulness. And then she abducts him mid-game anyway. 
• What’s the deal with Snake’s hand? Did Akane not notice it was fake, or just not care? Is he a cyborg?
• The final door is marked with a lowercase q instead of a 9. When Junpei has a flashback to remember that sequence, he suddenly realizes “Oh, Zero wasn’t saying, look for the door marked with a 9. He was saying, look for the door marked with a q!” This looks okay in text, but spoken, as if through a loudspeaker, it makes no sense. Those words do not sound like each other.

There’s one other little hiccup I disliked with the localization, which was the cute nickname bits that Junpei and Akane were using for each other. This is something likely predicated on Japanese suffixes, and in this particular case, when it’s a plot point, I guess I favor the Persona 4 method of just using the damn suffixes. It’s a little clunky, but I’m not sure “Akane-chan” would’ve been any weirder than “Kanny.” There’s a particular bit where Junpei is hemming and hawing over what to call her exactly in private. All the angst over this is just so Japanese since Americans don’t really care.

Other than that, I loved the localization, and I have to give it props for deft handling of some difficult material. Stuff that was particularly fun:

• All the interactions in the kitchen. I got a double-whammy of “Excuse me Princess” and “Why so serious,” yet it was fairly clever and not annoying. Also genuinely laughed at the unexpected “pot” pun.
• Interactions in the library. Yeah, I had to click every shelf, but the reactions to doing that were at least entertaining. I found it particularly cool that the Kitab al-Azif was in there.
• Long innuendo-filled conversation between Junpei and Akane about what it meant exactly to “go down” (in an elevator) and would it be “wet down there” (because it was flooded).
• Santa just swearing all the damn time, which I know had to be a “localization of a dialect” kind of quirk, but actually made him sound like a real person talking. I was a tiny bit disappointed he only said “I’m Santa Claus” at the end with the gun, and not, like, “I’m motherfucking Santa Claus, bitches” because that would’ve been great. But, can’t have everything.

Obviously, I really liked the game and story, or I wouldn’t be thinking about it so much. So if this sounds like a litany of complaints for the most part, it’s only because that’s how I organized my thoughts this time. Definitely a thought-provoking game with a cool story. A few twists left that I actually didn’t spoil. I’m glad I tried it and it’s going to be stuck in my head for a while!

Well, now that I’ve started 2013 off with a bang by writing a huge story-analysis post that no one is likely to read, I guess I should roll back into doing some actual work. Watch this space this year as usual for my rambling diatribes, or Tap-Repeatedly if you want more organized and thoughtful stuff.