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The more time I have to think about the story now that I've completed it, I think I'm a little disappointed. The interactions with Akane and Junpei were erratic as gently caress. I know we're talking about different timelines, but they would ping pong between being close and bickering over if they should kill the other teams or not. Considering Akane's past with using people as pawns to get what she wants, I didn't quite understand her reluctance to do what was necessary to move forward in the game. You can argue that she did what she did in 999 for the greater good, and in the true end she didn't cause anyone to die, but even in Q&As Uchikoshi implied that Akane is a lot more cold than she lets on, so having Junpei be the cold one and Akane being the voice of reason felt a little odd. There were several points where I was hoping Junpei would call her out on what she did to everyone a year ago when she was being a goody two-shoes. Speaking of doing things for the greater good, can we just have one game where people do lovely things because they're lovely people? Zero 1 was Santa/Akane who made everyone play a death game in order to save Akane's life in the past, so she wasn't actually bad after all! Zero 3 was Sigma/Akane, who made a death game to train Sigma on how to SHIFT so that he could use the power to stop a terrorist organization from killing 6 billion people, so he wasn't actually bad after all! Now Zero 2 turns out to be the leader of the terrorist organization who killed 6 billion people, and he makes people play a death game so that he can kill those 6 billion people to save 2 billion people from dying(so retroactively, killing 6 billion people wasn't bad), oh and also give 9 people the motivation, knowledge and powers to try and stop a fanatic from killing everyone on the planet, retroactively removing the need to kill the 6 billion people, so I guess he wasn't actually bad after all! In VLR, Junpei points out that these timelines people jump away from are still real for the people left behind, they still happen, and ultimately these people are putting several different versions of themselves through hell just so they can get to the history they're comfortable with, and in that sense everyone involved in this story is a bad person, but we never have an antagonist who is out and out evil. Morally grey areas are good and interesting, but I never felt like I got a real pay off of turning it around on my tormentor in any of the games, except maybe 999 and Ace, who was, in my opinion, a secondary antagonist. I went through the stories, found a way to make things better, and the guy who put me in this awful situation then goes, "Thanks bro, you did exactly what the world needed you to do" and pats me on the back. The only real antagonist in the Zero Escape series is fate. An unfeeling, uncaring, intangible concept that the Zeroes of the series have been fighting tooth and nail to stop from killing humanity. And even that's not true, they're just fighting to make a history where it doesn't happen to them. Fate doesn't win or lose, and beating it doesn't feel satisfying. The journey of these games have always been amazing, but I feel like they don't always stick the landing when it comes to the destination.
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Jul 1, 2016 14:21
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Him calling his mind control and mind reading powers "MIND HACKING" sounded like an old man trying really hard to be cool and hip for the kids. That might be the canonical reason he called it that, but it still was kinda lame.
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Jul 1, 2016 15:30
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Epsilon; the secret third child from a history we didn't get to see
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Jul 1, 2016 17:01
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Every time the characters SHIFT they're loving over another version of themselves. It's really inconsistent character writing, because they voiced their concerns about it several times (like the first SHIFT into C Team that just rolled all 1s) and determined they needed to do it to save everyone. Then they talk about how they shouldn't gently caress over other versions of themselves for their own selfish needs, ignoring that loving over other timelines is basically the baseline of every character's plan in these games. More than in the other two games, ZTD had a lot of issues like this, where characters would do and say things that didn't mesh well with their developed character up to that point. Then it would just be kinda ignored, and only so much of it can be explained away by ~mind hacking~
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Jul 1, 2016 19:02
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