Recently, I finally started on the beloved franchise of escape room games, 'Zero Escape.' I binged my way through Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Virtue's Last Reward in a matter of days and then started on the third game, Zero Time Dilemma. While I can't share my overall thoughts yet, I want to explain how the game negatively impacted my motivation to continue playing it. This article is going to be pretty negative, but that doesn't mean I dislike the game overall. I just want to articulate four main reasons it's failing to capture me the way its predecessors did - once my final thoughts come out, I'll have good things to say as well.
It's Worse in Motion
Games like 'The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker' look alright in screenshots, but you can only truly understand the beauty of their artstyle when you see it in motion. Suddenly, it all makes sense. Zero Time Dilemma is the opposite - like Virtue's Last Reward, it depends on 3D models, and its 3D models are a bit nicer and more detailed (mind that this is merely a relative improvement) - but the animations are very choppy, buggy or outright dysfunctional. Movements are universally strange and robotic and it's extremely noticeable even if the camera is too embarassed to show moving limbs most of the time. Lip sync regularly doesn't work, with a character's voice playing over a closed mouth. When characters get fatally injured, the game occasionally uses a ridiculous blood spray effect that's hard to take seriously as well. Combine this with generally uninteresting environments, and the only thing that saves the game's visuals are decent character designs and some genuinely good interface design and motion graphics. The little animations that play when you have to make a choice, start an escape room and finish an escape room look great.
Grab Your Popcorn
In my prior articles, I discussed the structure of the Zero Escape games, and how they alternate between Escape Room segments and visual novel segments. This game has no visual novel segments, instead opting to use lengthy cutscenes between escape rooms and choices. The lack of control over the tempo, combined with the slow and awkward animations I mentioned earlier, make it a bit of a drag. It's one thing to have lengthy cutscenes, but to have those cutscenes replace one of the key elements of your game just seems strange to me. On the surface, a visual novel segment may seem like the same thing as a cutscene, but the way they convey information is very different. In the first two games, you could read the main character's thoughts and see them responding to many things in their head - with these lengthy cutscenes, I sometimes forget who the playable character even is, and there are three of them. I'll go deeper into the structure in my final thoughts about the game.
Everybody's Changing
In the interest of not completely spoiling it, I'll keep this ambiguous, but there is a returning character in Zero Time Dilemma. I liked this character's first appearance, but in this game, they've completely changed their personality to be jaded and cynical. There is an in-story justification for it, but it still feels cheap and contrived; it's a change that wasn't earned or developed, we're just informed that it happened and are expected to just believe this complete 180. If it wasn't annoying enough to have to sit through long cutscenes with really bad animations, it doesn't help when the characters themselves also don't seem to care at all. I'm not too impressed with the new additions, either. I'd say a third of the cast are horrible human beings, a third just aren't very interesting and another third are actually likeable.
Chrono-illogically
Once the initial events of the game happens, the player is actually given many options as to where to start. You can choose between the three teams (the characters are divided into 3 groups, more on this in my final thoughts), and the events you can access for each team aren't placed in a linear order, but in a circle, with each event marked 'new.' It was so overwhelming, I actually just stopped playing the game after it dumped that on me. It's one thing to let the player choose which team to start with, but it's going a bit far to dump around 15 events on them all at once with no clear indication of where to actually start. Now, there are story reasons why the game is set up like this. Each individual event does have a small flowchart, and once you complete it, you can see its place in the larger overall flowchart. I might consider this structure genius in retrospect, but it did make it much harder to get into the story.
But Let's Not Forget (Conclusion for now)
To summarize, Zero Time Dilemma frustrated me with its ugly animations, lengthy cutscenes lacking in interaction, partially uninteresting and unlikeable cast and confusing order of events. That's why I've been much slower about progressing through it than I was with the last two games, and why I haven't quite finished it yet. However, I still intend to continue and finish the game, because there are many redeeming qualities. I want to elaborate on those in full detail when I share my final thoughts, but for instance, you'll notice I did't mention the actual escape rooms in this article - that's because the escape rooms are still fun. Not all the characters, scenes or visuals are bad either... and the biggest point of discussion next time will be the overarching story. With all that said, those were my preliminary thoughts on Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma.
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And that was it for now! Thanks for reading. I wanted to capture my thoughts about the game and pin down what about it was frustrating me before I finished it, partially because I hope I'll change my mind. Maybe the animations get better when it really counts, maybe some of the characters turn out to be more likeable, maybe the game's structure will seem genius in retrospect. I look forward to writing my final thoughts and I hope you'll join me for those as well. Until then, have a good day!