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1. I hate the revelation that Mira caused both of the previous games. Did we really need that to be a thing? I mean, come on. 2. I love how Zero tells Akane to gently caress off with that "Only God gets to determine who lives and who dies" stuff. He played 999. He knows you're full of poo poo. 3. I love even more how Carlos goes through hell and back to save Junpei and Akane, and they both just tell him to gently caress off and presumably cut all ties with him as they go into their VLR plot. They really do deserve each other. Then again, does anyone really deserve to be pushed out of someone else's life, only to be catfished back in for convenience later on and having their son used for a hostage? Akane is really terrible is what I'm getting at. Also, I'm wondering how Akane got the needles out of the bracelet and managed to inject just enough soporil into Junpei for this ending to fit into the timeline. Blueberry Pancakes fucked around with this message at 09:24 on Jul 21, 2020 |
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Jul 21, 2020 09:22
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TheSoulian posted:I mean, given that time travel is now just A Thing, who's the say Delta can't end up being both? Given the recent plot revelations, it would seem so.
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Jul 21, 2020 09:24
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Blueberry Pancakes posted:Then again, does anyone really deserve to be pushed out of someone else's life, only to be catfished back in for convenience later on and having their son used for a hostage? Akane is really terrible is what I'm getting at. I think with Akane it's a 'this sucks, but I have to do it because it's what history has ordained it to be'. Anyway, since we just saw Akane solve the anagram in the lounge, here's the other, really really dumb part that if you've played/watched VLR, you'll both love and hate: 'Zero Time Dilemma' unscrambles to 'Me? I'm Zero. I'm Delta.'
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Jul 21, 2020 09:50
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Akane is very good at going "yeah, let's just satisfy the stable time loops and not look for a better solution".
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Jul 21, 2020 09:57
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Quackles posted:I mean, there's the question of whether the transporter has a way of targeting the version a timeline that will branch in a specific direction. Yes, so long as the effects of the transporter's use aren't evident within any of the timelines in question. We saw that in VLR, when Sigma went to the past of all of the timelines, but his actions only affected one branch from the first choice. All of the timelines proceed from circumstances that appear identical to any observer who is not directly affected by the effects of the SHIFT/transportation, but in truth, they were different all along. When the group made choices that led to this outcome, Carlos was waiting outside the whole time. When they made other choices, he wasn't. Nothing in the game indicated that either was the case until now. Schrödinger's box finally opens here.
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Jul 21, 2020 10:28
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Nidoking posted:Yes, so long as the effects of the transporter's use aren't evident within any of the timelines in question. We saw that in VLR, when Sigma went to the past of all of the timelines, but his actions only affected one branch from the first choice. All of the timelines proceed from circumstances that appear identical to any observer who is not directly affected by the effects of the SHIFT/transportation, but in truth, they were different all along. When the group made choices that led to this outcome, Carlos was waiting outside the whole time. When they made other choices, he wasn't. Nothing in the game indicated that either was the case until now. Schrödinger's box finally opens here. But that puts the whole concept of "Free will" into question: if you can choose a history with THAT granularity, where the actions of everyone are essentially set in stone... well Akane makes a lot more sense if you consider it that way. What even is the point of anything if everything is already pre-determined?
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Jul 21, 2020 10:41
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Regallion posted:Actually, now that we had the transporter used a few times i have a question on how does it work. The extra Carlos is staying with Maria. That way, she'll always have at least one brother around.
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Jul 21, 2020 10:48
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DKII posted:Part 75: Apocalypse This moment, right here, is why Carlos is my favorite. He's such a good boy about keeping his promises that he forgets the obvious solution of just stopping Zero before he can start, directly leading to the deaths of six billion people. Few people will ever have the chance to gently caress up on the scale that Carlos just did.  Here's the video of the scene, I don't think the text gets across just how fed up Akane and Junpei are with Carlos's bullshit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4N6GJBApdk sirtommygunn fucked around with this message at 12:18 on Jul 21, 2020 |
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Jul 21, 2020 12:14
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Cyouni posted:Akane is very good at going "yeah, let's just satisfy the stable time loops and not look for a better solution". I think a large part of Akane's character is her inability to separate her choices from what she can perceive through the morphogenic field. When you think about it, sticking to a specific path that she saw in the field was how she survived the incinerator as a child, so I can see why she focuses on the stuff she knows rather than searching the field for other answers. She treats the futures she sees like the script of a play, and is afraid to ad-lib in case it leads to something she cannot predict. That being said, I also don't think Akane's as strong as she thinks she is. Mainly because she's not falling victim to the Reverie Syndrome like other espers, who could potentially be much more powerful than her, like Maria. Otherwise, she might be a bit more comfortable with searching the field for more possibilities. After all, there are endless alternate universes and endless options out there. Akane just mainly limits herself to the ones she can directly see.
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Jul 21, 2020 13:31
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SimplyUnknown1 posted:I think a large part of Akane's character is her inability to separate her choices from what she can perceive through the morphogenic field. When you think about it, sticking to a specific path that she saw in the field was how she survived the incinerator as a child, so I can see why she focuses on the stuff she knows rather than searching the field for other answers. She treats the futures she sees like the script of a play, and is afraid to ad-lib in case it leads to something she cannot predict. I think Akane, emotionally, isn't as strong as she thinks she is. She's trying very hard to be a cold and pragmatic person via the Nonary Game, the AB game, but consider that she, Sigma and Phi came to D-Com to stop Radical-6's release... nothing in this game has actually been about doing that. In fact that's another negative for me. VLR feels... really loving pointless.
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Jul 21, 2020 13:42
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Onmi posted:VLR feels... really loving pointless. This is my biggest mark against ZTD. Radical-6 has shown up one time so far, and it was in the VLR timeline. In every other timeline, it's not even a footnote in people's memories.
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Jul 21, 2020 14:02
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Carlos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73O2NUM88mQ
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Jul 21, 2020 14:26
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Cyouni posted:Akane is very good at going "yeah, let's just satisfy the stable time loops and not look for a better solution". New question: Why weren't Diana and Sigma rescued? Did Carlos bump into Akane, think "Oops, wrong timeline" and then after realising he must be the only living Carlos in this one, just gently caress off back home to find another get rich quick scheme to save Maria? Actually, that's almost certainly the answer. Never mind.
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Jul 21, 2020 15:27
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Oh, and since gripes with ZTD were brought up, mine is that everyone except Carlos and D-Team are just constantly unrelentingly terrible. This game made me retroactively not give a single poo poo about Akane and Junpei because they're awful.
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Jul 21, 2020 15:34
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Sean is alright. But yeah, if you don't fall in love during the game like Sigma and Diana and already have a romance, you're kinda lame. Tenmyouji was good because he wasn't 135% about Akane.
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Jul 21, 2020 15:35
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And he actually got over her at the end of the game once he realized he had on rose-tinted goggles!
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Jul 21, 2020 15:38
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Gab is also all right, don't forget him.
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Jul 21, 2020 15:39
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Personally I think Carlos is leaving out the part where he woke up in the pod as the one who didn't teleport, engineered it to explode and SHIFTed into the him that had actually teleported just for maximum shenanigans.
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Jul 21, 2020 16:12
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If I am getting this right, Delta/Brother asked Akane to meet him later, wearing Free The Soul Robes. In the VLR ending we meet Akane wearing those robes and she says that they need to prepare for VLR. Did that means, that VLR events were planned by Akane together with Delta? Does that mean that Dio being sent by Delta was actually part of the plan? If this is true, then Delta directly or indirectly had a hand in all games we know about: By sponsoring Ace he caused original Nonary Game, which in turn caused 999, he run ZTD directly and planned VLR together with Akane.
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Jul 21, 2020 16:13
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I'm hoping there's more to Delta's motivations than what we've seen, because otherwise Free the Soul's existence doesn't really make sense to me (Both from an in-universe and out-of-universe sense). So I'll wait to comment on that for now. In the meantime though, something I noticed: X-Door. X-Passes. X is the Roman Numeral for ten. Arkanian fucked around with this message at 16:27 on Jul 21, 2020 |
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Jul 21, 2020 16:16
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I have never been angrier at a game than when it was pointed out to me that while 999 and VLR are - in universe and out - referred to as Nonary Games, ZTD is a Decision Game. Uchikoshi you complete gently caress. That's not how this works. You can't just I'm sorry I need to step back for a minute--
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Jul 21, 2020 16:21
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Fedule posted:I have never been angrier at a game than when it was pointed out to me that while 999 and VLR are - in universe and out - referred to as Nonary Games, ZTD is a Decision Game. Uchikoshi you complete gently caress. That's not how this works. You can't just I'm sorry I need to step back for a minute-- I mean it's an Uchikoshi game, you should be aware of their dumb worldplay by now. Was there a similar rage when the fact that Zero Time Dilemma was an anagram was revealed.
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Jul 21, 2020 16:42
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ApplesandOranges posted:I mean it's an Uchikoshi game, you should be aware of their dumb worldplay by now. I would normally be inclined to believe that's a coincidence, but not in this series. Also, since they know it's coming, there has to be a better way of tracking down the terrorist Zero wants to stop other than unleashing Radical-6, which is probably what the true ending is gonna be about. Rabbi Raccoon fucked around with this message at 16:59 on Jul 21, 2020 |
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Jul 21, 2020 16:49
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ApplesandOranges posted:'Zero Time Dilemma' unscrambles to 'Me? I'm Zero. I'm Delta.' Motherfucker
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Jul 21, 2020 16:54
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Regallion posted:But that puts the whole concept of "Free will" into question: if you can choose a history with THAT granularity, where the actions of everyone are essentially set in stone... well Akane makes a lot more sense if you consider it that way. What even is the point of anything if everything is already pre-determined? Oh, you have to believe in free will. That's easy to prove, provided we can agree that "It is better to believe in what is true than to believe in something false." Suppose that you don't believe free will exists. If you're right, you're right. But if you're wrong, then you hold a false belief, and it would be better to believe in free will. Now suppose that you do believe that free will exists. If you're right, again, you're right. But if you're wrong, then it's out of your control. You didn't choose to believe in a concept that doesn't exist. That choice was made for you because you have no free will. So believing in free will can be right, but it can't possibly be wrong. I think the real answer is that when the magician shows you the paper that tells you which number you chose, they aren't showing you all the other papers where they wrote all of the other possible choices and hid them in other places. They just opened the one that had the answer you gave and claimed it was what they'd written in advance. Your choices reveal which future you're in out of the possible ones, and the elements that don't match that future just never materialize. Being able to travel into the past is already inherently paradoxical in most interpretations. You just kind of have to accept that you didn't notice the differences while you were living through it the first time, and that anything you don't perceive directly can technically exist in any permissible state until its effects become known. It's the cat box. Everybody's trapped in the cat box.
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Jul 21, 2020 17:00
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Finally I can post this chart I found on tumblr a while back.
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Jul 21, 2020 17:11
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Blueberry Pancakes posted:1. I hate the revelation that Mira caused both of the previous games. Did we really need that to be a thing? I mean, come on. I don't think it's quite that simple. Mira didn't "cause" the previous games, it was a confluence of events cascading on top of each other which included, among other things, Akane's parents being dead. That Mira was one of the principle actors leading to that specific occurrence (and others) is little more than a coincidence. Akane's dad being implicated in Eric's mom's murder is just a case of bad luck. "Life is simply unfair" is one of the main themes being explored in this game after all. The fact that Mira and Eric and Sean are part of this game now is a separate issue entirely because Zero arranged for them to be there with full knowledge of how they're connected to each other and to Akane. So it's less trying to pin the entirety of the series on Mira and more Zero needing to recreate the conditions of his own birth and tracing several of the people involved back to one arbitrary event that collectively shaped their future histories. Which yeah, is something of a copout given the nature of time loops but again, just gotta roll with it. What's really confusing me now is what's going on with Phi. Phi and Delta getting sent back via the transporter was a good answer right up until the point where Zero threw a wrench in everything by saying they got sent to April 1904. So Delta is a rickety old man but Phi is a young adult woman?  Sure, if we were talking about the Infinity series Uchikoshi previously worked on that'd be easy to believe for reasons people familiar with that universe will understand immediately, but there isn't really anything established here that would allow a person to live for an extremely long time while maintaining their youthful appearance, not in the 20th century anyway. Not unless you suddenly take the whole Ice-9 tangent from 999 at face val-- wait, noooooo  I don't think even Uchikoshi would be THIS much of a mad man.
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Jul 21, 2020 17:12
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Nidoking posted:It's the cat box. Everybody's trapped in the cat box. Did Schrödinger ever use the term “cat box”? Before I started reading VNs, I don’t feel like I ever saw the phrase used when discussing the thought experiment. I honestly just thought it was a Ryukishi07 thing. (If anybody here has gotten to the end of Uchikoshi’s Wild Ride and doesn’t already know about the masterpiece that is Umineko no Naku Koro ni, it’s all up on the archives and hits many of the same “murder mystery meets metafiction” notes the Zero Escape series does. It’s also maybe a secret literary masterpiece! Highly recommended.)
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Jul 21, 2020 17:13
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TheSoulian posted:I think there's a 10th player that the game's trying to be coy about. This is also really dumb, but this is called the decision game, and deci is associated with 10. Lmao @ the fact that this was right in the end.
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Jul 21, 2020 17:23
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ApplesandOranges posted:'Zero Time Dilemma' unscrambles to 'Me? I'm Zero. I'm Delta.' I'm just laughing at this so hard because of course it does.
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Jul 21, 2020 17:28
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Super Jay Mann posted:What's really confusing me now is what's going on with Phi. Phi and Delta getting sent back via the transporter was a good answer right up until the point where Zero threw a wrench in everything by saying they got sent to April 1904. So Delta is a rickety old man but Phi is a young adult woman?
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Jul 21, 2020 17:30
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Rabbi Raccoon posted:I would normally be inclined to believe that's a coincidence, but not in this series. Guys, now I know I lied about this being an experiment...no, there's no $500k like I promised...and right, I also I lied about there being three separate wards...and I invented fake watches to mislead you...and okay fine, I get it, I've lied to you about every loving thing in this entire experiment. But seriously guys, this time I'm being honest! There's a world-destroying religious fanatic terrorist who's trying to end the world! Um, no, not Brother, that's me, I meant the other world-destroying religious fanatic. You're probably right that the true ending is going to be about that...but the true ending *should* be about time-traveling Carlos going "oh, good point Akane, didn't think about that, we should have time traveled back to just stopping this rear end in a top hat" and using the teleporter one last time to bash Zero's skull in.
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Jul 21, 2020 18:09
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Rabbi Raccoon posted:I would normally be inclined to believe that's a coincidence, but not in this series.  MagusofStars posted:You're assuming that Zero isn't full of poo poo about this mysterious 'other terrorist'. What are the odds that one of the followers of the Free the Soul cult is the terrorist that wiped out humanity? I mean, a religious fanatic wiping out humanity just as it seems to be approaching some kind of metaphysical singularity? It could be an unrelated third party who discovered their ability to SHIFT drawing entirely the wrong conclusions, but somebody who subscribes to that idea about humans existing outside of their physical bodies and simply transmitting their consciousness into a physical body could have similar motivations.
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Jul 21, 2020 18:37
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Super Jay Mann posted:What's really confusing me now is what's going on with Phi. Phi and Delta getting sent back via the transporter was a good answer right up until the point where Zero threw a wrench in everything by saying they got sent to April 1904. So Delta is a rickety old man but Phi is a young adult woman? I don't think that Uchikoshi has that brand of madness. I do think, on the other hand, that he has the brand of madness that would lead to a plotline where Phi (and possibly Delta) would be transported to the future and end up raised by an old pair of researchers that have German birth certificates dated to 1904....
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Jul 21, 2020 18:46
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OddHaberdasher posted:I don't think that Uchikoshi has that brand of madness. I do think, on the other hand, that he has the brand of madness that would lead to a plotline where Phi (and possibly Delta) would be transported to the future and end up raised by an old pair of researchers that have German birth certificates dated to 1904.... The only thing I remember with any clarity from VLR is Tenmyouji's incredibly out of proportion head. Is this an actual plot point?
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Jul 21, 2020 18:52
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Rabbi Raccoon posted:The only thing I remember with any clarity from VLR is Tenmyouji's incredibly out of proportion head. Is this an actual plot point? Phi mentions in the Incinerator Room fragment (specifically, Don't Shoot, the one where she burns) that she was raised by an old couple. Relevant quote: DKII posted:
EDIT: She also mentions that it was the old woman of that couple who gave her the brooch. OddHaberdasher fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Jul 21, 2020 |
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Jul 21, 2020 18:57
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An old couple raised me. They were researchers. But we weren't related by blood at all....
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Carlos spent 10 months killing himself in various ways and figuring out how to save Akane and Junpei just so they could go all Magic School Bus "Carlos!!" on him.
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Jul 21, 2020 19:44
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Wait, weren't they all in this facility for a few days before it became a deathtrap? I mean, they remember everything from before being locked in, so shouldn't they have realized the wards were all connected?
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Jul 21, 2020 20:00
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Rabbi Raccoon posted:Wait, weren't they all in this facility for a few days before it became a deathtrap? I mean, they remember everything from before being locked in, so shouldn't they have realized the wards were all connected? No. They were in a completely different location during their isolation simulation. That's when they were behind bars and where the first coin flip (and the first ending) takes place.
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Jul 21, 2020 20:04
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Blueberry Pancakes posted:This is my biggest mark against ZTD. Radical-6 has shown up one time so far, and it was in the VLR timeline. In every other timeline, it's not even a footnote in people's memories. I'm pretty sure this is in fact, the first time Brother/Free the Soul was mentioned in this game, and possibly only because VLR said they were responsible for the Radical-6 release. None of what we learned about them in VLR is matching what's in this game (other than Brother being an old man). ApplesandOranges posted:I mean it's an Uchikoshi game, you should be aware of their dumb wordplay by now. I wonder how much of that was Uchikoshi and how much was the Aksys localizers. I assume Uchikoshi just did the Japanese wordplay and Aksys would've translated the anagram "result" and made up the English sentence that works with that. So who came up with the name "Zero Time Dilemma"? MagusofStars posted:You're assuming that Zero isn't full of poo poo about this mysterious 'other terrorist'. Don't forget the "Fanatic Bio R" virus that's obviously a reference to this "other terrorist" (Fanatic in the name, 100% death rate, cancelled out by Radical-6) that anagrams to "Fabrication".
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Jul 21, 2020 21:51
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