ZTD thoughts spoilers

I went into ZTD with a bit of hesitation. In addition to obviously hearing a bunch of negative things about it, I was also sort of in a TASing mood and not so much a casual gaming mood. However, I still wanted to give it a fair shot.

My opinion of it is basically almost awesome. It does some really great things. But every so often something questionable comes up that hinders the experience.

For example, the start feels really slow and my choices didn't help. I chose blue after the coin toss and got a seemingly pointless ending right away. Admittedly it does come into play again much later but it sort of delayed me getting to the meat of the game. Then after choosing the other option on the coin, I had to go through 3 rounds of voting to get to other fragments, and sat through Zero's explanation for each one. I have no idea how people call this a fast start.

Zero randomly introducing aliens into the series was honestly really stupid.

Who Zero ended up being was fun, but I don't like that he was just slightly off camera for the whole game.

I liked a lot of the emotional stuff. I cried at some bits (D-Team especially). I was a little iffy with Junpei at first but felt the explanation he gave for the change was reasonable enough.

Having to go through multiple executions is kinda stupid and the game doesn't seem set up right in that regard. I voted D-Team with two teams, than Q with the last... Q-Team got executed??? What? At least getting D-Team afterwards wasn't hard. The unlocks were really weird in general tbh.

Fragments felt weird at first but grew on me.

The graphics were fine. I don't really have qualms.

Not quite a fan of how much of the game was cutscenes instead of dialogue boxes I could manually advance. Meant I needed to take an extra step whenever I wanted to pause in the middle of a scene. Also makes it feel less of a Visual NOVEL which was eh to me.

I don't like that they don't actually show Carlos's decision at the very end but the screen fades to black after Carlos points the gun at him.

I really don't like that most of the music is just slightly altered VLR songs.

Overall it's almost a great game up there with VLR and 999. But it just has these questionable things that hold it back for me.