VLR (spoilers)

So, I finished Virtue's Last Reward last night, and I figured I'd record my thoughts and feelings about the game. Obviously, this will contain major spoilers. I don't imagine this will be organized very well, since it will probably just be stream-of-consciousness style.

Whenever I read something like VLR, the thing that's usually on my mind most at the end is the unanswered questions, and in this game there are several large ones. Not quite as bad as 999, but still. This what I've been thinking about:

1. What happened at the Nevada Test Site? This includes why Radical-6 was there in the first place, in addition to the sequences that led to its being released on the world. Also, Sigma/Phi/Kyle's role in what happened.

2. Who is Phi? Phi is a pretty mysterious character, and we only get vague hints as to who she is. She mentions that she's an uncontrolled variable or something at the end, and I think that might relate to the next question. In the interview, Uchikoshi seems to imply that there are things you can deduce about her from hints dropped in the game, but I haven't come up with anything meaningful so far.

3. Who is "?"? Who is the person, or entity, who Kyle switches with at the end of the game? The game seems to imply that it's a person, but judging from previous games like Ever 17 and Remember 11, it's possible it's some sort of fourth-dimensional "perspective". Schrodinger's cat is mentioned several times during the course of the game, and I have a suspicion that the Nevada Test Site is supposed to be the cat box in this context. To take it a step further, ? is the observer, and the one who causes the possibilities of the test site to collapse into a single reality. They mention that the point of the AB Project is to send Sigma and Phi to the past to stop the incident at the Nevada Test Site, but the whole thing with Kyle and ? leads me to believe that that's not the entire story. Perhaps the reason that the incident happened is because ? observed it, and the purpose of the AB Project is not only to have Sigma and Phi infiltrate the facility to make things go right, but also to prevent ? from viewing the events. During the "headquarters" scene that you unlock towards the end of the game, young Akane seems to be prepping you to make another jump and do what you have to do at the Nevada Test Site. However, you never actually go there and instead receive the scene where you wake up in Kyle's body in the infirmary. In other words, the jump that happens isn't simply Sigma and Phi going into their old bodies, but also Kyle's consciousness jumping back and replacing the "perspective" that collapses the Test Site incident to the outcome portrayed in the game. Perhaps the AB Project had been attempted and failed many times in other universes, and Akane realized that the only way for it to succeed is to do it this way.

If I can deduce all that, you might be saying to yourself "Those questions don't look too unanswered to me." But the fact remains that there are no hard facts to support this. It's all just speculation, and honestly most of that came to me just now as I was typing it. Though, believe it or not the part about the Nevada Test Site being the cat box actually came to me as I woke up this morning. I guess my brain must have been thinking about VLR while I was sleeping.

So, now that I have that out of the way, I want to say that I think VLR is probably the best-designed VN I've ever read. The problem I always run into with VNs is that the multiple route thing is nice, but the overall structure of the game is pretty invisible to the user unless you dump hundreds of hours into the game trying out different choices and seeing how they affect things. Of course, it doesn't help that a lot of choices in most VNs aren't actually plot critical, so you'd waste a lot of time messing around with choices that are literally meaningless to the overall flow of the game. VLR not only cuts out pretty much all meaningless choices (there are still a few, like what order you visit rooms in or what action you choose to do when Phi tells you), but it also has the built-in flowchart which is literally the best thing ever. Being able to jump around to anything you've read before and showing the places where the story branches makes so much sense, and I really wish more games would do this. Can you imagine how frustrating this game would be if you had to figure out how to open the locks without the flowchart? You don't have to imagine, because that's what 999 is. Granted, there's really only one "lock", but if you get that ending first (like I did) you don't even know that there's supposed to be stuff after that point. Not to mention to get back there you have to slog through the ENTIRE GAME and redo all the puzzles, which is a huge waste of time. That's the other advantage of the VLR flowchart: you only have to do the puzzles once. I guess if you missed the gold file you go back and try it again, but > not getting the gold file on the first run. Also, I was really happy that the story turned out to be a lot different from 999, since I was kind of disappointed how similar the true ending/plot twist of 999 was to Ever 17. Combine that with the fact that 999 doesn't wrap itself up as nice as Ever 17 and it's pretty much just a worse game.

999 did introduce Akane though, and omg she is still my favorite character in this series. I don't really see how she could NOT be your favorite. I think part of why I like her so much is because I believe that you never really see her true personality in either 999 or VLR. In both games, all of her appearances are part of some larger plan where she has to put on a facade in order to achieve her goal. I might accept that what you see of old Akane isn't much of an act, but I'm quite convinced that the Akane you see in 999 and the headquarters scene in VLR are not who she really is. What is her actual personality like? That's up for debate, but I imagine that she's actually quite dark inside. Of course, there's the part where she exacted a rather brutal revenge on the men who ran the first Nonary Game, but there's also the part where her she's never had the pleasure of enjoying a normal life. I suppose up until she got captured for the first Nonary Game her life was probably pretty normal, but after that the Nonary Game BECAME her life. First she was forced to participate in it. Then she had to spend the next ten years of her life preparing a replica of that Nonary Game to stop herself from dying. And even after that, she didn't have any time to rest because she had to get things rolling for the AB Project so that human civilization as we know it doesn't get wiped out. She couldn't even spend time with Junpei. So, yes. I think that Akane probably has a lot of dark/bitter/regretful thoughts regarding her life. But at the same time, she has an extraordinary willpower to still be able to keep moving despite all that. She can still joke around with Junpei in 999, and put on a smile for Sigma when he's transported back into his newly-roboticized body.

Well, I think that's enough about Akane. I guess I should comment on the dub, since I did actually play the entire game with English voicing. I was originally intending to have the Japanese voices on, but with the way the game was localized it proved to be too jarring to have the text and voices worded so differently. For the most part, the voices were pretty fitting. I think my biggest complaint was probably Clover, though she wasn't bad. I guess from 999 I imagined her sounding a bit different, though. I think she's actually the only person in 999 that I had a somewhat solidified voice for, which was largely inspired by her sprites. I think the issue with her VLR voice is that it's too..."gentle"? I guess I imagined her sounding a little more like a bitch, haha :V I like Clover, though. She's cool. I was actually surprised by how much I ended up liking Phi towards the end of the game, though. Intelligent, serious, but also knows how to joke around. I don't think she really falls into any moe/fanservice archetypes, but is still really cute and awesome. Going back to the voices, though, I had the same issue with some of the voicing that I've had with other dubs, which is that the way some of the lines are read sounds unnatural. Like, the emphasis and intonations that were used feel like something that I wouldn't ever hear someone actually say in that context. It wasn't all of the lines, though, and like I said before the voicing was pretty good in general. The intonation thing just bothers me, though. I had the same issue in Persona 4.

Finally, I think I'll share some theories I had while playing that turned out to not be true. One theory I had pretty early on was that Luna would turn out to be Akane. They look kind of similar and her clothing is colored similarly to Akane's in 999, and the fulfill a similar role of the soft-spoken girl. Another theory I had, around the time I went to the GAULEM Bay was that everyone in the Nonary game were actually just robots. This is kind of related to another theory I had, which was that the point of this Nonary Game was to transmit information back to people at the Nevada Test Site about how to avoid the calamity that happened by showing them how to defuse the bombs or something. Since most of the population had been eradicated, they decided to use robots for the participants. I also thought that the robots in the Nonary Game were based on the people in the Nevada Test Site, and I guess that turned out to be true for Luna at least (I still don't know where in the game it says that she was based off of someone from the Nevada Test Site, though; I only found out about that from the Q&A). I guess now that I think about it, I don't know how robots are supposed to access the morphogenetic field. Reproducing a past event in the future to make it look the same and transfer info to the past is a very Ever 17 plot twist, though. Because of that I was able to determine pretty early that this wasn't taking place on Dec. 31st, 2028. The magazine in the lounge pretty much confirmed that, since it was like "Hey, you know what day this is supposed to be? It's this! Right here! Why would it be anything else? ...Right?" I did think for a long time that the Radical-6 thing was going to turn out to be a hoax, though. It was too hard for me to rectify the fact that no one in the Nonary game seemed to know about the outbreak. On a related note, there was a lot of talk about how your actions in the future change the past, so I thought that when they escaped from the Nonary Game in the true ending that there was going to turn out to be no Radical-6 outbreak, since they had succeeded in transferring the information about how to stop the outbreak to the past. The reason why Dio knows about the outbreak in the Dio ending is because they failed in that timeline, and so the outbreak actually did happen. When Sigma had the white fluid coming out of the cut on his hand, I thought for sure that was going to confirm my theory that everyone was robots, but then it turned into suspicion that just Sigma was a robot, and eventually that he just had cybernetic arms. That lead me to question whether Phi had cybernetic legs, which were what let her jump so high. Now that I think about it, I don't think I really had any theories about K. He was too mysterious the whole time. I also like how no one questions how Akane was able to mimic Kyle's voice, but I guess a voice changer wouldn't be too hard to use or something. Kind of surprised they never even mentioned it, though. For a while I wondered how Akane was able to imitate Kyle's personality so well, but I guess it's already been shown that she's pretty good at acting.

...Anyway, I think that's enough of this for now. I dunno if anyone will ever read this, but if you ever wanna talk about 999/VLR or share theories/information let me know.