999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors - Nintendo DS Review

999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is a visual novel / adventure game that combines an interesting premise with solid puzzles that will keep you engaged for hours on end.

If you've never played a visual novel before you might have seen pictures of one on the internet. They usually have a big eyed, huge breasted anime girl with a large text box taking up the bottom half of the screen with her telling you about the depraved sexual acts you are about to perform. These games are made up of mostly text with small player decisions along the way that change the outcome of the story. The main focus being the plot and characters you interact with.

Like this but with much more item hunts and much less bukkake

999 is much like this but with point and click / "escape the room" scenarios in-between the dialogue. The story of 999 follows a group of nine characters that have been kidnapped and brought to an empty ship resembling the Titanic with the goal of solving puzzles to reach the final ninth door exit.

Each character is assigned a wrist band with a number from 1 to 9 and only certain combinations of numbers are allowed to enter certain doors. This is based on a digital root system where a numbers are added together until the last digit remains 3 + 5 + 8 = 16, 1 + 6 = 7. So a team equaling 7 can go through the appropriately marked door.

Behind these doors the player will find standard point and click adventure puzzles with the main goal of opening the exit. Items will be gathered and combined and are manipulated in 3D in the inventory screen to gather more information. The player will solve puzzles ranging from finding the correct key for a lock to math based number input devices. The puzzles are for the most part interesting with the common hurdles of point and click adventures present (pixel hunting, bizarre logic), but the real draw of the game is in the story.

While the characters themselves are mostly stereotypical (the huge strong man, the pigtailed lolita) the mystery around them and why they have been brought on this ship is always able to keep you interested. Without spoiling too much, the story involves such topics as Morphogenetic Fields (fields that connect all living things allowing transfer of information), Kurt Vonnegut and philosophical paradoxes like Locke's Socks.The story is surprisingly mature and is definitely not for younger audiences, not due to the graphic content (which there is) but the themes and ideas dealt with in the game.

The way the story is presented is also quite unique. Because of the requirements of entering the doors, it would be impossible to see everything on the first play-though. The player will ultimately fail during their first attempt to finish the game, usually resulting in death. But, after getting a "Game Over" screen you return to the beginning of the game to try a different path. With six possible endings in total (the final one being the "true" ending) players are allowed to try out different puzzle rooms and interact with different characters on each play-thorough. To speed up this process, text already read in previous games can be fast-forwarded though by holding right on the D-Pad.

While this is a better solution than having to sit through story parts you have already seen, it is still very slow considering the amount of text in this game. You'll be holding the right button for upwards of five minutes to skip dialogue and some rooms (especially the first one) will have to be played over and over again.

 

Despite this, finding out new aspects of the story and seeing parts unfold where you where previously absent is extremely entertaining. There is always some new twist or revelation and, this can't be stressed enough, without giving away anything, the entire multiple play-though mechanic is integrated amazingly with the gameplay and story.

BOTTOM LINE:

999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is an excellent adventure game with well thought out puzzles and one of the best stories presented on the Nintendo DS that will keep you up for hours on end to see its conclusion.

8.5/10

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds - Nintendo 3DS Review

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was my first ever Zelda title as well as one of my favorite games for the SNES. Now, 22 years later, Nintendo has released a sequel to the game on the Nintendo 3DS, set in the same world with the same top down gameplay. While this may not have topped the original, it still is one of the best titles for the system.

STORY:

If I was asked to tell anyone what the story of the game was, it would probably go something like this:

I had to look it up. This guy is called Yuga.

"This scary clown man starts to stir shit up by kidnapping the Seven Sages of Hyrule to revive Ganon. Link collects items while traveling back and forth between Hyrule and the dark "Lorule" (Fucking genius), completing dungeons to rescue the Sages and defeat the final boss."



Out of all the Zelda games I have played, the story in Link Between Worlds is probably the most inconsequential. Story was never a strong point of the series and Link Between World's narrative falls flat when compared to other titles in the franchise.

While this may be due to the more free-form nature of the gameplay, much of the feeling of being on an epic quest to save the land is lost and broken down into simply completing dungeon after dungeon to move closer to the ending (but it does wrap up quite nicely).

PRESENTATION:

Taken at 4AM after completing the game.

Link Between Worlds goes back to the top down 2D perspective of Link to the Past while updating everything with 3D models. The colors are bright and all the familiar elements from the original game, such as the red and green enemy knights, are brought out wonderfully in 3D. The game keeps the basic layout of the over-world from Link to the Past and it feels great to revisit these familiar locations.

The music this time around is a fully orchestrated, and while no new song particularly stands out, the music never gets tiring to listen to while hacking away inside the dungeons.


GAMEPLAY:

cr. Kotaku

This is where Link Between Worlds departs most from other Zelda titles. Instead of the regular game progression of "go into a dungeon", "find an item to solve specific puzzles in the dungeon", "defeat the boss" and "move on to the next dungeon", Link Between Worlds allows you to purchase almost all of the classic Zelda items from the begining (hookshot, bombs, hammer) and take on dungeons in any order your wish.

The items are all up for grabs in your home, in which after starting your quest, is converted into a store by a purple bunny man (I don't remember his name either). Items can be initially rented for a fee and then bought for an even larger fee. Rented items are lost should you ever fall in battle, but bought items are permanently kept in your inventory. These items can later be upgraded to more powerful versions with a collection side-quest.

So many elevators. So many floors.

It seems that Nintendo has taken a cue from the recent explosion of rogue-likes with this new open-ended as well as more punishing gameplay system. This also shows in the complete lack of tutorials that constantly bogged down other Zelda games ("HEY! LISTEN!). By this point you should know what an arrow does, if not, try it out.


 
The star of any Zelda game has always been the dungeons, and Link Between Worlds does not disappoint. The puzzles are truly clever, requiring multi-step and multi-layered thinking. The most interesting aspect of these new dungeon puzzles is that as you can bring in almost all the items into any dungeon, many of the puzzles have multiple solutions. There were several times I definitely "brute forced" may way past a spot using an item I'm sure was not supposed to be there.

Walk like an Egyptian

Another new mechanic brought into this game is Link's ability to flatten himself onto walls and become a living painting. This allows him to shimmy to places he was unable to reach before as well as travel back and forth between worlds. This is one new feature that must constantly be kept in mind after hours of trying to figure out a puzzle where the solution is to simply use your flatten power to slide around the outside of a building and through a crack.

BOTTOM LINE:

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds is a fantastic game. While the story might disappoint, the ingenious puzzles had me playing almost non-stop during my 15 hour completion time. It's the classic Zelda formula distilled into its most basic components and given a fresh new spin for the more mature audience who grew up with the games.

8.5/10