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999: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors |OT| RED, DEAD, Redemption

I

iammeiam

Member
jgkspsx said:
Hardcore true ending spoilers, do not peek:
OK, why was ALLICE in a fake boat in the Nevadan desert anyhow???? I'm totally confused about the relevance of that whole subplot...
Click to expand...

Because, I think,
Alice was supposed to be on the actual boat (and her coffin was, just with a plant in it instead of a mummy. Since the fake-boat set had to be an exact copy of the 'real' one, the book about ALLICE and the coffin were duplicated to keep everything exact.
Really I think that whole thing was mostly a red herring, but then they threw in
Alice physically standing on the side of the road at the end
so...


Wouldn't it have been better to give Ace fewer ways to kill the innocent people?

What the hell is really up with "June"? Is she the real Akane, saved from the incinerator by changing the past? Or did Akane possess the mummy? If Seven was in on it, did he know that she didn't die? And if so, what was the point of running the game again?
Click to expand...

My interpetation is that
it's a stable time loop. Akane never died. In the original timeline, she psychically linked up with Junpei, he fed her the answers, she lived, hooray. This essentially forced her to conduct the second game in order to put Junpei in the position to feed her the answers, so she could survive and set up the second game, on and on.

The 'bad' endings didn't really happen; Akane mentions being able to see all the branching possilibities, and ultimately we follow her looking down each of these avenues while trying to find the information she needs to kick Junpei past his point of failure in the 'real' timeline.

For the people Ace offed... arguably, they weren't innocent. They were all involved in the original experiment, willing to put children in mortal peril to push their scientific agendas. Since the knife/submarine/axe endings didn't really happen (and couldn't happen, since they'd prevent Akane surviving and setting up the second Nonary Game), but were just avenues for events, the people killed there effectively "don't count".

Seven apparently knew everything the whole time, but also knew Junpei had to believe Akane's/June's life rested solely in his hands for it to work.

And depending on how tightly linked Akane's mind was with Junpei's during his game, she may have put in the people for Ace to kill based entirely on knowing he killed them in the game Junpei played to save her life.

At least, the above is my personal speculation/opinion on events, but it overall makes decent sense to me that way.
 
J

Jazzem

Member
Very tempted to import this...have been itching for the next great DS story experience. Is there very little chance of this getting a European release?
 
J

jgkspsx

Member
iammeiam said:
Really I think that whole thing was mostly a red herring, but then they threw in
Alice physically standing on the side of the road at the end
so...
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's more the point where they lose me ;)

For the people Ace offed... arguably, they weren't innocent. They were all involved in the original experiment, willing to put children in mortal peril to push their scientific agendas. Since the knife/submarine/axe endings didn't really happen (and couldn't happen, since they'd prevent Akane surviving and setting up the second Nonary Game), but were just avenues for events, the people killed there effectively "don't count".
Click to expand...

I would drop the "arguably" in the first sentence (although I don't know that that would stand up in a court of law...) I like your second point, especially since the safe ending supports it...
 
C

Celine

Member
Jazzem said:
Very tempted to import this...have been itching for the next great DS story experience. Is there very little chance of this getting a European release?
Click to expand...
Who knows.
It took more than 2 years for Theresia to cross the pond.
And now we are at the end of DS life cycle.
 
S

someguyinahat

Member
True ending questions ahoy!

So the 9th Man and Nijisaki were the only people who had implanted bombs, and presumably Akane put them there, waiting for Ace to off them in the appropriate way? Conspiracy to commit murder. That's pretty cold.

Maybe I missed it, but was it ever explained anywhere HOW Akane knew Hongou had prosopagnosia, to make the Snake ruse work? And why did she dress him in those ceremonial robes? (If it was just a switch, why the heck was Nijisaki wearing them?)
 
A

Akselziys

Aksys Games Dev.
someguyinahat said:
True ending questions ahoy!

So the 9th Man and Nijisaki were the only people who had implanted bombs, and presumably Akane put them there, waiting for Ace to off them in the appropriate way? Conspiracy to commit murder. That's pretty cold.

Maybe I missed it, but was it ever explained anywhere HOW Akane knew Hongou had prosopagnosia, to make the Snake ruse work? And why did she dress him in those ceremonial robes? (If it was just a switch, why the heck was Nijisaki wearing them?)
Click to expand...

Actually
the 4 Cradle Pharmaceutical guys all had bombs presumably. Only the "good" guys if you will were safe from that. As for the prosopagnosia thing, Zero may have known from the alternate timelines she viewed as Past Akane.

The robes weren't Nijisaki's they were actually the robes that Zero wears underneath her outfit :D

Zero never planned for Ace to kill anyone, she actually gave the 4 "bad guys" a chance to confess their crimes on video tape in order to escape without harm, it was due to Ace's bad choices that things turned out the way they did.

Hopefully that helps! :)
 
H

Hyunkel6

Member
lucablight said:
Also I just finished the game with the bad ending. Do I need to redo the puzzles again on my next playthrough?
Click to expand...
Unfortunately, yes. But then again, you can do them very quickly since you already know how to solve them.

I started my 2nd playthough last night, and went through door 3 this time around. The scene in which
June saw Snake's body and began to tear her hair and bang on the door until her knuckles bled was disturbing as hell. I thought for a moment that she would completely lose it and kill herself or everyone in the room.
:lol
 
M

Merovin

Member
Any chance of this coming to the UK? Or should I just jump on in and import? (Because if it is likely to be released here, I want to be able to support it to give Nintendo a push for other games coming over!)
 
A

Akselziys

Aksys Games Dev.
Merovin said:
Any chance of this coming to the UK? Or should I just jump on in and import? (Because if it is likely to be released here, I want to be able to support it to give Nintendo a push for other games coming over!)
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, not that I'm aware :( Better off importing :)



DiddyBop said:
Picked up the only copy at my EB. Gonna see what the hype is about tonight!
Click to expand...

Sweet! I hope you enjoy it like the rest! :D
 
H

hipgnosis

Member
So guys where can I find this game for the lowest price? Planning on importing this but the shipping costs from amazon.com are like 20 euros which is a bit too high.
 
D

dreamfall

Member
Alright I'm getting close! Just got the :

Safe ending! Who was in that coffin! Who knew Clover had such an important role?! And Santa MY GOODNESS- put that gun down!

Can't wait to get the true ending- it's been a steady diet of one playthrough every night- sleeping 4amish, and then to work! This is by far my favorite D.S. game ever!
 
S

Snytbaggen

Member
I just got the
submarine
ending, and now have every ending except for the
knife
ending. I just have a question about the ending I just got...
who was it that killed everyone? I've been running it through my mind several times and the only people I can think of are Snake and the captain (fake Zero). Snake seems very improbable since he's locked up in a coffin and I really don't think he'd murder Clover, so that rules him out. And isn't the captain locked up in door 1? Although he has an axe in the room... The captain definitely seems more plausible, but still... I can't get it to make any sense. And please don't say it was Alice :lol
 
A

Akselziys

Aksys Games Dev.
Snytbaggen said:
I just got the
submarine
ending, and now have every ending except for the
knife
ending. I just have a question about the ending I just got...
who was it that killed everyone? I've been running it through my mind several times and the only people I can think of are Snake and the captain (fake Zero). Snake seems very improbable since he's locked up in a coffin and I really don't think he'd murder Clover, so that rules him out. And isn't the captain locked up in door 1? Although he has an axe in the room... The captain definitely seems more plausible, but still... I can't get it to make any sense. And please don't say it was Alice :lol
Click to expand...

All signs point to Ace ;) They never did take his pulse ;)
 
S

Snytbaggen

Member
Akselziys said:
All signs point to Ace ;) They never did take his pulse ;)
Click to expand...
Ooooh, sneaky! I just assumed he was dead... Although I should have known better from the safe ending and the true ending... I feel kinda stupid now :lol

EDIT: And also, another question... (room 3 and true ending spoiler)
Why did June freak out so much when they found the body in door 3? I mean, she planned the whole thing so surely she would've known about it, at least from her "future memories" of the game? My theory is that she freaked out on purpose; it would seem a lot more strange if she didn't, with her personality. Or maybe she didn't know where the body was and therefor was genuinely freaked out. In fact, the more I think about it the latter makes more and more sense.
 
A

Akselziys

Aksys Games Dev.
Snytbaggen said:
Ooooh, sneaky! I just assumed he was dead... Although I should have known better from the safe ending and the true ending... I feel kinda stupid now :lol

EDIT: And also, another question... (room 3 and true ending spoiler)
Why did June freak out so much when they found the body in door 3? I mean, she planned the whole thing so surely she would've known about it, at least from her "future memories" of the game? My theory is that she freaked out on purpose; it would seem a lot more strange if she didn't, with her personality. Or maybe she didn't know where the body was and therefor was genuinely freaked out. In fact, the more I think about it the latter makes more and more sense.
Click to expand...

Everything went according to keikaku :3 haha

Yeah, her, Santa, and Seven were most likely putting on an act for most of the time to trick the rest ;)
 
R

robotzombie

Member
A couple of questions after getting two endings so far:

1. So far I got the Axe and Safe endings, can I go straight for the True ending now?

2. Will the true ending give me enough info to understand what is actually going on, or will I have to go for the rest of the endings as well?
 
A

Akselziys

Aksys Games Dev.
robotzombie said:
A couple of questions after getting two endings so far:

1. So far I got the Axe and Safe endings, can I go straight for the True ending now?

2. Will the true ending give me enough info to understand what is actually going on, or will I have to go for the rest of the endings as well?
Click to expand...

Yes, you can get the true ending now :D

The true ending will give you a boat load of info, but there is some info that you can only learn from other endings :)
 
A

Akselziys

Aksys Games Dev.
So listen up guys! We just put up a new section of our site that allows you all to ask the creators of 999 a question!

http://www.aksysgames.com/999/

You can see the link at the top of the page.

We'll be assembling all the questions together in a few weeks and passing them along to Chunsoft. Hopefully we can get the majority of them answered one way or another ;)

I know you all must have a zillion questions, but please try to keep it one per person :D

Thanks, all our loyal 999 fans!

The TVs on the site have a nice little cameo on the bottom of them if you haven't noticed ;)
 
Laughing Banana

Laughing Banana

Weeping Pickle
Well, last night I've just reached the end of my second playthrough.

An improvement, to say the least!

While in the my first ending Junpei got stabbed by a knife after watching Lotus' dead body, in my second ending EVERYBODY DIED, including Junpei.

Like I said, improvement.

Maybe on my next ending the world will blow up or something :lol :lol :lol
 
A

Akselziys

Aksys Games Dev.
Obsessed said:
Woo, just got the
coffin ending. Jeez, Santa needs to chill the fuck out.

I can't wait to find out who is in the coffin. :D





Neat. I'll keep this in mind.
Click to expand...


I'm excited for you to find out everything and then to submit a question after ;)

I'm sure you'll have some :D
 
H

Hyunkel6

Member
Laughing Banana said:
Well, last night I've just reached the end of my second playthrough.

An improvement, to say the least!

While in the my first ending Junpei got stabbed by a knife after watching Lotus' dead body, in my second ending EVERYBODY DIED, including Junpei.

Like I said, improvement.

Maybe on my next ending the world will blow up or something :lol :lol :lol
Click to expand...
I just finished my 2nd playthrough a few minutes ago, and I got the exact same two endings than you.

Does everyone have to experience those two endings at first? Also, what primarily affects the endings you get? The choices of doors?
 
J

jgkspsx

Member
Here's some advice for those who want to get to the true ending fairly, without using that wonderful spoiler-free flowchart.

1. Try something new each time. (Well, duh.) Even the meaningless decisions have sometimes hilarious dialogue around them. There's a conversation at an elevator that is well worth answering stupidly.

2. Some conversations are likely to stand out as weird. There are sometimes choices around these conversations, and sometimes you'll even get a takeaway from them. Observe which conversations particularly stand out, and figure out how to chain them together.

3. There are only a handful of decisions that affect the outcome, and the choice is often simply whether to listen to somebody. As far as I know, there's never a reason not to listen to your companions.
 
Laughing Banana

Laughing Banana

Weeping Pickle
jgkspsx said:
Here's some advice for those who want to get to the true ending fairly, without using that wonderful spoiler-free flowchart.
Click to expand...

I think for my third playthrough I would just use that flowchart. You see, I have this (very) weird rule of not skipping story sections even during my subsequent playthrough. I do this so I can absorb all the necessary information fully--if I skipped/fast-forwarded through the events, I feel like I might forget about important revelations gained from the previous walkthrough and thus did not get the full 'impact' of the story.

And
getting everybody killed on my second ending
did not encourage me well to play for the third time :lol Hahaha--guess I am just a tad impatient on getting the full story of this game.
 
J

jgkspsx

Member
I dunno, I thought that fast-forwarding through the story parts was actually pretty effective at reminding me of what happened before. It was also aesthetically interesting, and had some interesting resonances with the full plot.

There's nothing wrong with the flowchart. I feel a little bad about using it, but the plot was still new to me.
 
L

lucablight

Member
I've only got the safe, coffin and true endings to go. Is there any point in doing both the true and coffin ending? I've heard the true ending incorporates the events of the coffin ending as well?
 
K

knkng

Member
iammeiam said:
My interpetation is that
it's a stable time loop. Akane never died. In the original timeline, she psychically linked up with Junpei, he fed her the answers, she lived, hooray. This essentially forced her to conduct the second game in order to put Junpei in the position to feed her the answers, so she could survive and set up the second game, on and on.
Click to expand...

Yeah, this is how I saw it. Actually, after I knew what was going on, I kind of got a
Back to the Future
vibe from it all. You know how Akane kept burning up and having those fever spells? I saw this as being like the part
where Marty starts disappearing while playing the guitar. Her fate was in the balance throughout the entire game, and her body was essentially reacting to this, prepared to die off at any moment.
But maybe that was just obvious.
 
B

Belisarius

Member
knkng said:
Yeah, this is how I saw it. Actually, after I knew what was going on, I kind of got a
Back to the Future
vibe from it all. You know how Akane kept burning up and having those fever spells? I saw this as being like the part
where Marty starts disappearing while playing the guitar. Her fate was in the balance throughout the entire game, and her body was essentially reacting to this, prepared to die off at any moment.
But maybe that was just obvious.
Click to expand...
I liked to think of it as sort of a cross between
Run Lola Run and Back to the Future. My theory was that Akane did sort of die 9 years prior, but managed to shunt herself, or some element of her consciousness, into some sort of extra-temporal place (presumably the morphogenetic field) and connect with Junpei in the future. She's essentially running simulations to figure out which situation results in the quasi-paradox that allows her to live 9 years ago. That also explains how Zero knows exactly what each person is going to do in each situation: She's watched them all do it many times before. She can predict who will do what with frightening precision. I also kind of like that theory, because although she gives each of the founders of the original Nonary Game a chance to make amends and escape with their lives, she knows from watching them that they'll all die—but not because she killed them. Akane gets her revenge and never has to dirty her hands. When you fail (and shut your DS in anger to go console yourself with
delicious ham
), she restarts the that timeline. Once she gets the right one, the timeline possibilities collapse, and the only one that happened was the "real" one, where there are no paradoxes, because she lives.
 
A

Akselziys

Aksys Games Dev.
Laughing Banana said:
Damn it, all these black spoiler tags are killing me!

Highlight... don't... highlight... DON'T....
Click to expand...

Yeah, you REALLY don't want to peek ;)

Distract yourself from temptation by playing more 999 :D!
 
K

knkng

Member
Tuesday said:
I liked to think of it as sort of a cross between
Run Lola Run and Back to the Future. My theory was that Akane did sort of die 9 years prior, but managed to shunt herself, or some element of her consciousness, into some sort of extra-temporal place (presumably the morphogenetic field) and connect with Junpei in the future. She's essentially running simulations to figure out which situation results in the quasi-paradox that allows her to live 9 years ago. That also explains how Zero knows exactly what each person is going to do in each situation: She's watched them all do it many times before. She can predict who will do what with frightening precision. I also kind of like that theory, because although she gives each of the founders of the original Nonary Game a chance to make amends and escape with their lives, she knows from watching them that they'll all die—but not because she killed them. Akane gets her revenge and never has to dirty her hands. When you fail (and shut your DS in anger to go console yourself with
delicious ham
), she restarts the that timeline. Once she gets the right one, the timeline possibilities collapse, and the only one that happened was the "real" one, where there are no paradoxes, because she lives.
Click to expand...
Ah, I see.
So all the alternate endings we witness are her trial-and-error runs played out through the morphogenetic field. This also explains why we have to follow a specific path of gameplay to get to the true ending.
It's quite brilliant, especially how they make use of the New Game+ feature as a core gameplay element.

I must admit, when I was going through my initial playthroughs, I really thought the game was going to take a more "breaking down the fourth wall" turn of events.
I assumed they would end up incorporating the gameplayer (you and me) as being the one who is feeding the information into Junpei. We are the ones who exist in the field, or something like that.
I couldn't quite figure out how they were going to make that work, but thankfully the true ending to the game was about a hundred times better than what I had imagined. :D
 
H

Hours Left

Member
So I just stayed up all night getting the true ending. All I can say is wow.

This game is phenomenal. It's a MUST play for anyone with any interest in adventure games, visual novels or just extremely excellent video game experiences.

I'd like to talk more about it, but now I must sleep.
 
H

hipgnosis

Member
Imported this from Play-Asia, hope they will get this in stock soon.

So Akselziys is there any way us non-US customers could get that preorder watch delivered here in the EU? :D
 
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