It's been nearly a full year since the release of the conclusion to the Zero Escape trilogy, Zero Time Dilemma, so this seemed like a good time as any to look back on the series. I first got into the series before the decision came to actually make it one and rebrand it accordingly, the original DS release of 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors having been my choice for Game of the Year during my first year voting here. Though having had some limited experience with visual novel/adventure games, at the time I hadn't played anything quite like it, the story having stuck with me long after finishing it.
Yet, I can't say that I hold its successors in the same esteem, which brings me to the point of this thread. Not only would I say that Virtue's Last Reward and Zero Time Dilemma are disappointing follow-ups to 999, I also believe that I've in fact been far too lenient with them in retrospect. What's worse, when attempting to consider all three games as one long, continuous story, it's one that's ultimately as weak as it is inconsistent.
999
Vol. 1 of the Zero Escape trilogy, and ultimately the most straightforward in spite of its many twists and turns. You play the role of Junpei, a young college student who finds himself abducted alongside eight other people and brought to what appears to be a replica of the Titanic. There, he and the others are expected to play what their abductor, a masked assailant known only as Zero, calls the Nonary Game. The objective: make their way through the ship and escape from the various rooms by solving multiple puzzles, eventually reaching the door marked with a 9 within the next nine hours to make their escape or sink with the ship. Failure of participants to comply with the rules leads the bracelets that each has had affixed to his or her wrist to detonate an explosive planted inside of him or her, with said bracelets also numbered 1 through 9 and used to calculate the digital root of individual teams gathered to open each numbered door. Along the way, Junpei discovers his childhood friend Akane Kurashiki among the participants.
As the game continues, the threat of Nonary Game made readily apparent through the gruesome detonation of the participant only known as the 9th Man following his failed attempt to move on without the others, various topics ranging from math, to conspiracy theories, philosophy, science, and pseudoscience are brought up during discussions between Junpei and the other participants along the way, each of them relating to or otherwise serving as foreshadowing within the story as it unfolds. This eventually leads to a wide range of revelations concerning the cast and the overall story, many of which are limited to paths only seen through the multiple endings that the player reaches. However, this winds up being anything but how multiple endings are typically handled in games.
These multiple endings in fact tie in with a central concept discussed within the story called the Morphogenetic Field, with each ending in fact outlining one of many possible ways the Nonary Game could play out for the participants. Knowledge of these events winds up filtering through to Junpei throughout the story, who has no idea why he knows the various things that he does. The explanation ultimately turns out to be that the one who had been passing the information onto him was a 12-year-old Akane from nine years in the past, who had also been the one narrating the events of the game and had been solving the very same puzzles as Junpei and sharing that knowledge with him as well. This of course brings us to the reason for the Nonary Game: it was arranged by Akane as an adult, who is indeed the one known as Zero, in order to not only take revenge on the people who had made her participate in a previous Nonary Game years ago (which included not only the 9th Man and Ace, but also two other executives of the same pharmaceutical company whom Ace had found and killed behind the scenes), but to ensure her continued existence by guiding Junpei and the others to the end of the game in an effort to save herself from being burnt alive in the past. Junpei succeeds in saving Akane in the past, with the present Akane having disappeared with her brother Santa well ahead of the rest of the group from what is in reality a facility in the middle of the desert and not a ship, unable to face them for what they put them through in spite of not really having put bombs inside of anyone other than the people connected to the pharmaceutical company that ran the previous Nonary Game, with the decision having been made to take Ace in alive to answer for his past crimes.
The timey-wimey issue of Akane still being around even before the Nonary Game is a success aside, even with her continued existence having been threatened by events that prevented its conclusion (represented by the high fevers that incapacitated her at various points during the story), along with puzzles generally being on the easy side, 999 ultimately still had the least amount of problems in its execution. The cast was overall likeable with a reasonable amount of depth, the music memorable and put to great use, and the way the universe worked through the idea of being able to observe how one world could branch in various ways and being able to use that knowledge to one's advantage was intriguing, and the twist involving top DS screen representing Junpei in the present and the bottom Akane in the past was an excellent integration of gameplay and storytelling. As a standalone story, 999 works quite well.
VLR
Vol. 2...okay, this is where we first start running into problems. Introduced as being set in 2028, one year after the events of 999, you're placed in the role of Sigma, who finds himself abducted while driving down the road one day and awakens in a room with a mysterious young woman named Phi. After they solve the puzzles necessary to escape, they're brought face-to-face with seven other people in a large facility, where they've been gathered to play what the A.I. program Zero III has called the Ambidex Game. Like with the Nonary Game of 999, each participant has been fitted with a bracelet, though rather than serving as detonators, they're instead capable of injecting the wearer with a sedative followed by a muscle relaxant to kill him or her. The numbers on each participant's bracelet represent a bracelet point (BP) total, with the colors of the bracelet's varying between rounds of the game to determine what doors can be opened by differing team combinations. At the end of each round of room escaping and puzzle solving, participants enter rooms to vote whether to Ally or Betray the people they've been grouped with, which affects their current BP accordingly (both Ally: +2 BP; both Betray: no change; one Ally, one Betray: +3 BP for Betray voter, -2 BP for Ally voter); should a participant's BP drop to 0, they die, should they get 9 BP, they can open the door to escape the facility, which is set to only do so once.
As the game progresses, it's revealed that it's not 2028, but in fact 2074, and the group is trapped in a facility on the moon following an outbreak of a virus called Radical-6 that wiped out most of the Earth's population, perpetrated by a terrorist religious cult called Free the Soul. Rather than making use of the Morphogenetic Field to share information, Sigma and Phi have the power to jump between timelines, known as SHIFTing, eventually leading the group to gather the information they need to prevent the participant Dio, an FTS cultist and part of their private assassins the Myrmidons, from destroying the facility. This eventually leads also leads to preventing the death of old woman Akane, who had orchestrated the game as part of the AB Project alongside Sigma, who is in reality Zero Sr. and no longer the young man he was prior to his abduction, but a 67-year-old man. This eventually leads Sigma and Phi to SHIFT back to 2028, in order to infiltrate the Mars mission test site on Earth from where the Radical-6 outbreak originated now that they've obtained the necessary knowledge through participating in the Ambidex Game.
Compared to 999, the cast of VLR is nowhere near as likeable. In fact, most of them are unsympathetic jerks, even returning characters from 999 such as Clover (who is significantly worse here). This is only compounded by the nature of the Ambidex Game, and thanks to continuing with the multiple ending structure of 999 with four times the number of endings that game had, will lead to plenty of cases where you will be betrayed and you will need to betray others. The most decent people in the entire cast, who never betray anyone, wound up being Luna and Quark, a very nice, soft-spoken girl who turned out to be a robot and a well-mannered child respectively. Even without being a villain, Alice (once the subject of occasional myths and a gag from 999's ending) was almost as awful a person as Dio, already having been rather unpleasant, but even having had the audacity to vote betray and wind up killing you after you had brought her the cure to Radical-6 (her fate being to lose it and kill herself on most timelines). Though the music was still good, it generally wasn't used as well as in 999, especially the returning track Imaginary. It was also very disappointing to go from the expressive sprites of 999 to the poorly-made 3D models of VLR, which are far below the standard of the transition represented by the Ace Attorney series in detail and animation, with the character designs themselves easily being the worst overall in the series. The twist of Sigma being an old man being something that the character himself never picked up on be it through hearing the sound of his own voice compared to when he was in his 20s, stumbling across a reflective surface far sooner than the ending, or even touching his own face reflexively is improbable, and relied upon his character being the only one without a voice actor to keep it hidden. I also found the puzzles to be needlessly obtuse more often than not. Having gone from such a personal story to a grand mission to save the world also led to VLR feeling less engaging than 999, with the sheer scale and complexity of the story having gone full Metal Gear Solid in its bloat and convolution. Furthermore, moving away from simply sharing information through the Morphogenetic Field to actually jumping between timelines in whatever direction Sigma and Phi pleased took away from the impact of how things unfolded compared to 999. It also made it clear that the way the universe of ZE works wasn't quite as logical by time travel fiction standards as its predecessor suggested.
ZTD
Vol. 3...where everything finally came crashing down. As VLR suggested, the setting is the Mars mission test site in 2028 mentioned there. Rather than one player character, there are three, one for each team: D-Team, led by VLR backstory character and model for Luna, Diana, who's accompanied by Sigma and Phi; C-Team, led by a firefighter named Carlos, accompanied by Junpei and Akane; and finally Q-Team, led by a boy with a metal helmet on his head simply called Q, his teammates being prerequisite fan service character (in the vein of 999's Lotus or VLR's Alice) Mira and her boyfriend Eric. Following a coin flip, leading to either being let go by a masked figure going by Zero II or being made to play the Decision Game depending upon the choice the player makes, the final story in the trilogy begins in the event of the latter. Like the previous games, everyone gets a bracelet, this one's function being to tell the participants the time and inject a sedative that also makes everyone forget what happened in the last 90 minutes. Unlike 999 and VLR, the team assignments remain the same for the entire game, in spite of the escape-the-room and puzzle-solving elements still being a factor. Also unlike 999 and VLR, the Decision Game is deliberately structured to lead to its participants being killed in various ways over and over again across timelines, with the story unfolding in a nonlinear pattern through the new fragments system that has the player rotate between all three teams. As with VLR, SHIFTing is a factor.
This eventually leads to some endings clearing up questions posed by VLR such as ones detailing how Radical-6 got out, Radical-6 being an extremely small part of the story in light of how VLR had built things up, as well as the disconnect regarding why Junpei supposedly never found Akane before the events of VLR as the old man known as Tenmyouji. Unlike both ZE games before this one, Zero was not in fact one of the nine participants, but instead a tenth member part of Q-Team, an old supposedly blind and deaf wheelchair-bound man named Delta. Said old man is also the leader of Free the Soul known as Brother, and conducted the game to...ensure his own birth by seeing to it that Sigma and Diana were trapped in the facility, which eventually led to them conceiving both Delta as well as Phi. With no hope for escape, this led Sigma and Diana to use alien transporter technology in the facility capable of copying entire humans one at a time per pod, with months worth of downtime between uses, in order to send copies of the twins to a different timeline, leaving the originals and themselves to starve to death in their own timeline. Other than guaranteeing his own birth, this also allowed Delta to gain a power he called mind hacking, allowing him to control the actions of people telepathically and read the minds of SHIFTers to plan out his entire scheme since he himself can't SHIFT. Delta also turned out to be the actual person named Q, with the other group members insisting that they never referred to the boy, actually a mass-produced robot, we've been led to believe was Q as anything other than Sean. And finally, it's revealed that he orchestrated having Radical-6 released, leading to killing 6 billion people in order to...kill a different fanatic who would've killed 8 billion people somehow. With many more timelines having been created as a result of the Decision Game, including one where Radical-6 doesn't get released and wipe out most of humanity, the group is left with the choice of staying and dying in a timeline where the facility will self-destruct, or SHIFT to that timeline, SHIFTing having been established in the ZE universe as swapping places between a SHIFTer and one of their alternate timeline selves, essentially dooming them to die in his or her place. They choose to SHIFT, using their power to bring along Mira as well, a non-SHIFTer who by that point everyone is aware is a serial killer who's killed each of them at least once on other timelines (and killed Eric's mother which led to a whole tragic chain of events, up to and including the wrongful conviction and execution of Akane's father for the crime and her mother's suicide) and arrive in the timeline at the beginning of the game where their other selves won the coin flip, the ending leaving it ambiguous as to whether Carlos used the gun Delta gave him to shoot him or let him go.
While the cast is preferable to VLR's, Q-Team is easily the weak link in the chain, with Eric being a mentally unstable, occasionally murderous jerkass which the game waffles between making an antagonist and expressing the desire to make look more sympathetic based on his upbringing, and Mira is a literal sociopath with no comprehension of human emotion and quite often kills on a whim, not always adhering to her MO of carving out people's hearts as the story establishes. Even worse, no one ever calls Mira out on who or what she is at any point in the story. D-Team is handled best overall, and is apparently the only one that series creator Kotaro Uchikoshi wrote himself in this game. C-Team can be a mixed bag, with the newly cynical Junpei bearing little resemblance to his 999 self a mere year later, and Akane surprisingly not particularly different from her 999 self in spite of putting on an act at many points in its story. Though the character models (and designs) are an improvement over VLR's, they still don't approach the quality of what one would see in Ace Attorney, and make it rather clear that the game was made on a budget. Completely ditching the VN approach in the game's presentation in favor of nothing but cutscenes was also a mistake, with the lack of insight that narration in such games usually provides (be it things like environmental observations or what that character is thinking or feeling) contributing to a more impersonal feel. Not as much stood out with the music, with a lot of tracks being reused material, but Carlos' theme was one of the more memorable new tracks. The puzzles struck a good balance in overall challenge. While the same variety of topics as 999 and VLR factor into conversations with ZTD, by and large they aren't as integral or relevant in the grand scheme by comparison. Even with amusing anagrams taken into account, including that of the game's title (Zero Time Dilemma = "Me? I'm Zero. I'm Delta."), the twist in ZTD felt cheap, and was very much poorly handled. The very existence of Delta according to how he came to be also makes no sense whatsoever, even next to how Akane was still alive for 999's events, and having planned to kill 6 billion people in hopes of maybe, possibly stopping someone who planned to kill 8 billion couldn't be more ridiculous. The disjointed nature of the fragment system also contributed to making the story less engaging. Many questions from VLR also go unanswered, be it the significance of the brother that Delta supposedly had in Left, from whom Dio was cloned, the reason neither hide nor hair was ever seen of characters such as Snake or Santa from 999 (the former's sister still missing after being abducted for the AB Project and the latter being an even stranger absence given his sister Akane's prominence throughout the trilogy), where Radical-6 came from in the first place (be it a natural virus or man-made), or the completely dropped plot points of Sigma's clone Kyle from VLR and the character referred to as "?". Also, the epilogues included are rather underwhelming and come across more as fan fiction than anything else.
With the way that the universe of ZE works firmly established by ZTD, the overall story wound up in an even worse place. With there not being one world that can be reshaped in various ways, but rather an infinite number of worlds that only keep growing, nothing feels particularly consequential. Death is not a tragedy when it occurs here, but merely an inconvenience. Seeing as neither Akane nor Sigma wound up actually accomplishing anything, having essentially danced to Delta's tune, and there was nothing significant that they could do in VLR's timeline based on how the universe in ZE works in spite of that game arguably having been poised to be the prologue to something grander and more important than what it actually amounted to being, I have no idea what the point was to any of it. Basically, Akane and Sigma wound up throwing away their entire lives by devoting decades to fixing things that were never meant to be fixed by them, with the only solution in ZE's universe being to be a SHIFTer so that you can run away and make a crappy reality someone else's problem, with even that last ditch effort with Akane's attempt at a Back to the Future allusion to try to make jumping between timelines a moral question falling flat in yielding an emotional response. It just feels all so empty, really.
I wound up writing far more than I intended to, still not quite having aired every single individual grievance. I have no idea if anyone will actually bother reading any of this, let alone sift through all of it, yet not venting wasn't doing me any good either way.
tl;dr: Zero Escape had a promising start, but suffered from not being planned as a trilogy from the very beginning, leading to a very lackluster overall story that's well below what should be acceptable standards for science-fiction/fantasy dealing in time travel and mechanics related to it.
Yet, I can't say that I hold its successors in the same esteem, which brings me to the point of this thread. Not only would I say that Virtue's Last Reward and Zero Time Dilemma are disappointing follow-ups to 999, I also believe that I've in fact been far too lenient with them in retrospect. What's worse, when attempting to consider all three games as one long, continuous story, it's one that's ultimately as weak as it is inconsistent.
999
Vol. 1 of the Zero Escape trilogy, and ultimately the most straightforward in spite of its many twists and turns. You play the role of Junpei, a young college student who finds himself abducted alongside eight other people and brought to what appears to be a replica of the Titanic. There, he and the others are expected to play what their abductor, a masked assailant known only as Zero, calls the Nonary Game. The objective: make their way through the ship and escape from the various rooms by solving multiple puzzles, eventually reaching the door marked with a 9 within the next nine hours to make their escape or sink with the ship. Failure of participants to comply with the rules leads the bracelets that each has had affixed to his or her wrist to detonate an explosive planted inside of him or her, with said bracelets also numbered 1 through 9 and used to calculate the digital root of individual teams gathered to open each numbered door. Along the way, Junpei discovers his childhood friend Akane Kurashiki among the participants.
As the game continues, the threat of Nonary Game made readily apparent through the gruesome detonation of the participant only known as the 9th Man following his failed attempt to move on without the others, various topics ranging from math, to conspiracy theories, philosophy, science, and pseudoscience are brought up during discussions between Junpei and the other participants along the way, each of them relating to or otherwise serving as foreshadowing within the story as it unfolds. This eventually leads to a wide range of revelations concerning the cast and the overall story, many of which are limited to paths only seen through the multiple endings that the player reaches. However, this winds up being anything but how multiple endings are typically handled in games.
These multiple endings in fact tie in with a central concept discussed within the story called the Morphogenetic Field, with each ending in fact outlining one of many possible ways the Nonary Game could play out for the participants. Knowledge of these events winds up filtering through to Junpei throughout the story, who has no idea why he knows the various things that he does. The explanation ultimately turns out to be that the one who had been passing the information onto him was a 12-year-old Akane from nine years in the past, who had also been the one narrating the events of the game and had been solving the very same puzzles as Junpei and sharing that knowledge with him as well. This of course brings us to the reason for the Nonary Game: it was arranged by Akane as an adult, who is indeed the one known as Zero, in order to not only take revenge on the people who had made her participate in a previous Nonary Game years ago (which included not only the 9th Man and Ace, but also two other executives of the same pharmaceutical company whom Ace had found and killed behind the scenes), but to ensure her continued existence by guiding Junpei and the others to the end of the game in an effort to save herself from being burnt alive in the past. Junpei succeeds in saving Akane in the past, with the present Akane having disappeared with her brother Santa well ahead of the rest of the group from what is in reality a facility in the middle of the desert and not a ship, unable to face them for what they put them through in spite of not really having put bombs inside of anyone other than the people connected to the pharmaceutical company that ran the previous Nonary Game, with the decision having been made to take Ace in alive to answer for his past crimes.
The timey-wimey issue of Akane still being around even before the Nonary Game is a success aside, even with her continued existence having been threatened by events that prevented its conclusion (represented by the high fevers that incapacitated her at various points during the story), along with puzzles generally being on the easy side, 999 ultimately still had the least amount of problems in its execution. The cast was overall likeable with a reasonable amount of depth, the music memorable and put to great use, and the way the universe worked through the idea of being able to observe how one world could branch in various ways and being able to use that knowledge to one's advantage was intriguing, and the twist involving top DS screen representing Junpei in the present and the bottom Akane in the past was an excellent integration of gameplay and storytelling. As a standalone story, 999 works quite well.
VLR
Vol. 2...okay, this is where we first start running into problems. Introduced as being set in 2028, one year after the events of 999, you're placed in the role of Sigma, who finds himself abducted while driving down the road one day and awakens in a room with a mysterious young woman named Phi. After they solve the puzzles necessary to escape, they're brought face-to-face with seven other people in a large facility, where they've been gathered to play what the A.I. program Zero III has called the Ambidex Game. Like with the Nonary Game of 999, each participant has been fitted with a bracelet, though rather than serving as detonators, they're instead capable of injecting the wearer with a sedative followed by a muscle relaxant to kill him or her. The numbers on each participant's bracelet represent a bracelet point (BP) total, with the colors of the bracelet's varying between rounds of the game to determine what doors can be opened by differing team combinations. At the end of each round of room escaping and puzzle solving, participants enter rooms to vote whether to Ally or Betray the people they've been grouped with, which affects their current BP accordingly (both Ally: +2 BP; both Betray: no change; one Ally, one Betray: +3 BP for Betray voter, -2 BP for Ally voter); should a participant's BP drop to 0, they die, should they get 9 BP, they can open the door to escape the facility, which is set to only do so once.
As the game progresses, it's revealed that it's not 2028, but in fact 2074, and the group is trapped in a facility on the moon following an outbreak of a virus called Radical-6 that wiped out most of the Earth's population, perpetrated by a terrorist religious cult called Free the Soul. Rather than making use of the Morphogenetic Field to share information, Sigma and Phi have the power to jump between timelines, known as SHIFTing, eventually leading the group to gather the information they need to prevent the participant Dio, an FTS cultist and part of their private assassins the Myrmidons, from destroying the facility. This eventually leads also leads to preventing the death of old woman Akane, who had orchestrated the game as part of the AB Project alongside Sigma, who is in reality Zero Sr. and no longer the young man he was prior to his abduction, but a 67-year-old man. This eventually leads Sigma and Phi to SHIFT back to 2028, in order to infiltrate the Mars mission test site on Earth from where the Radical-6 outbreak originated now that they've obtained the necessary knowledge through participating in the Ambidex Game.
Compared to 999, the cast of VLR is nowhere near as likeable. In fact, most of them are unsympathetic jerks, even returning characters from 999 such as Clover (who is significantly worse here). This is only compounded by the nature of the Ambidex Game, and thanks to continuing with the multiple ending structure of 999 with four times the number of endings that game had, will lead to plenty of cases where you will be betrayed and you will need to betray others. The most decent people in the entire cast, who never betray anyone, wound up being Luna and Quark, a very nice, soft-spoken girl who turned out to be a robot and a well-mannered child respectively. Even without being a villain, Alice (once the subject of occasional myths and a gag from 999's ending) was almost as awful a person as Dio, already having been rather unpleasant, but even having had the audacity to vote betray and wind up killing you after you had brought her the cure to Radical-6 (her fate being to lose it and kill herself on most timelines). Though the music was still good, it generally wasn't used as well as in 999, especially the returning track Imaginary. It was also very disappointing to go from the expressive sprites of 999 to the poorly-made 3D models of VLR, which are far below the standard of the transition represented by the Ace Attorney series in detail and animation, with the character designs themselves easily being the worst overall in the series. The twist of Sigma being an old man being something that the character himself never picked up on be it through hearing the sound of his own voice compared to when he was in his 20s, stumbling across a reflective surface far sooner than the ending, or even touching his own face reflexively is improbable, and relied upon his character being the only one without a voice actor to keep it hidden. I also found the puzzles to be needlessly obtuse more often than not. Having gone from such a personal story to a grand mission to save the world also led to VLR feeling less engaging than 999, with the sheer scale and complexity of the story having gone full Metal Gear Solid in its bloat and convolution. Furthermore, moving away from simply sharing information through the Morphogenetic Field to actually jumping between timelines in whatever direction Sigma and Phi pleased took away from the impact of how things unfolded compared to 999. It also made it clear that the way the universe of ZE works wasn't quite as logical by time travel fiction standards as its predecessor suggested.
ZTD
Vol. 3...where everything finally came crashing down. As VLR suggested, the setting is the Mars mission test site in 2028 mentioned there. Rather than one player character, there are three, one for each team: D-Team, led by VLR backstory character and model for Luna, Diana, who's accompanied by Sigma and Phi; C-Team, led by a firefighter named Carlos, accompanied by Junpei and Akane; and finally Q-Team, led by a boy with a metal helmet on his head simply called Q, his teammates being prerequisite fan service character (in the vein of 999's Lotus or VLR's Alice) Mira and her boyfriend Eric. Following a coin flip, leading to either being let go by a masked figure going by Zero II or being made to play the Decision Game depending upon the choice the player makes, the final story in the trilogy begins in the event of the latter. Like the previous games, everyone gets a bracelet, this one's function being to tell the participants the time and inject a sedative that also makes everyone forget what happened in the last 90 minutes. Unlike 999 and VLR, the team assignments remain the same for the entire game, in spite of the escape-the-room and puzzle-solving elements still being a factor. Also unlike 999 and VLR, the Decision Game is deliberately structured to lead to its participants being killed in various ways over and over again across timelines, with the story unfolding in a nonlinear pattern through the new fragments system that has the player rotate between all three teams. As with VLR, SHIFTing is a factor.
This eventually leads to some endings clearing up questions posed by VLR such as ones detailing how Radical-6 got out, Radical-6 being an extremely small part of the story in light of how VLR had built things up, as well as the disconnect regarding why Junpei supposedly never found Akane before the events of VLR as the old man known as Tenmyouji. Unlike both ZE games before this one, Zero was not in fact one of the nine participants, but instead a tenth member part of Q-Team, an old supposedly blind and deaf wheelchair-bound man named Delta. Said old man is also the leader of Free the Soul known as Brother, and conducted the game to...ensure his own birth by seeing to it that Sigma and Diana were trapped in the facility, which eventually led to them conceiving both Delta as well as Phi. With no hope for escape, this led Sigma and Diana to use alien transporter technology in the facility capable of copying entire humans one at a time per pod, with months worth of downtime between uses, in order to send copies of the twins to a different timeline, leaving the originals and themselves to starve to death in their own timeline. Other than guaranteeing his own birth, this also allowed Delta to gain a power he called mind hacking, allowing him to control the actions of people telepathically and read the minds of SHIFTers to plan out his entire scheme since he himself can't SHIFT. Delta also turned out to be the actual person named Q, with the other group members insisting that they never referred to the boy, actually a mass-produced robot, we've been led to believe was Q as anything other than Sean. And finally, it's revealed that he orchestrated having Radical-6 released, leading to killing 6 billion people in order to...kill a different fanatic who would've killed 8 billion people somehow. With many more timelines having been created as a result of the Decision Game, including one where Radical-6 doesn't get released and wipe out most of humanity, the group is left with the choice of staying and dying in a timeline where the facility will self-destruct, or SHIFT to that timeline, SHIFTing having been established in the ZE universe as swapping places between a SHIFTer and one of their alternate timeline selves, essentially dooming them to die in his or her place. They choose to SHIFT, using their power to bring along Mira as well, a non-SHIFTer who by that point everyone is aware is a serial killer who's killed each of them at least once on other timelines (and killed Eric's mother which led to a whole tragic chain of events, up to and including the wrongful conviction and execution of Akane's father for the crime and her mother's suicide) and arrive in the timeline at the beginning of the game where their other selves won the coin flip, the ending leaving it ambiguous as to whether Carlos used the gun Delta gave him to shoot him or let him go.
While the cast is preferable to VLR's, Q-Team is easily the weak link in the chain, with Eric being a mentally unstable, occasionally murderous jerkass which the game waffles between making an antagonist and expressing the desire to make look more sympathetic based on his upbringing, and Mira is a literal sociopath with no comprehension of human emotion and quite often kills on a whim, not always adhering to her MO of carving out people's hearts as the story establishes. Even worse, no one ever calls Mira out on who or what she is at any point in the story. D-Team is handled best overall, and is apparently the only one that series creator Kotaro Uchikoshi wrote himself in this game. C-Team can be a mixed bag, with the newly cynical Junpei bearing little resemblance to his 999 self a mere year later, and Akane surprisingly not particularly different from her 999 self in spite of putting on an act at many points in its story. Though the character models (and designs) are an improvement over VLR's, they still don't approach the quality of what one would see in Ace Attorney, and make it rather clear that the game was made on a budget. Completely ditching the VN approach in the game's presentation in favor of nothing but cutscenes was also a mistake, with the lack of insight that narration in such games usually provides (be it things like environmental observations or what that character is thinking or feeling) contributing to a more impersonal feel. Not as much stood out with the music, with a lot of tracks being reused material, but Carlos' theme was one of the more memorable new tracks. The puzzles struck a good balance in overall challenge. While the same variety of topics as 999 and VLR factor into conversations with ZTD, by and large they aren't as integral or relevant in the grand scheme by comparison. Even with amusing anagrams taken into account, including that of the game's title (Zero Time Dilemma = "Me? I'm Zero. I'm Delta."), the twist in ZTD felt cheap, and was very much poorly handled. The very existence of Delta according to how he came to be also makes no sense whatsoever, even next to how Akane was still alive for 999's events, and having planned to kill 6 billion people in hopes of maybe, possibly stopping someone who planned to kill 8 billion couldn't be more ridiculous. The disjointed nature of the fragment system also contributed to making the story less engaging. Many questions from VLR also go unanswered, be it the significance of the brother that Delta supposedly had in Left, from whom Dio was cloned, the reason neither hide nor hair was ever seen of characters such as Snake or Santa from 999 (the former's sister still missing after being abducted for the AB Project and the latter being an even stranger absence given his sister Akane's prominence throughout the trilogy), where Radical-6 came from in the first place (be it a natural virus or man-made), or the completely dropped plot points of Sigma's clone Kyle from VLR and the character referred to as "?". Also, the epilogues included are rather underwhelming and come across more as fan fiction than anything else.
With the way that the universe of ZE works firmly established by ZTD, the overall story wound up in an even worse place. With there not being one world that can be reshaped in various ways, but rather an infinite number of worlds that only keep growing, nothing feels particularly consequential. Death is not a tragedy when it occurs here, but merely an inconvenience. Seeing as neither Akane nor Sigma wound up actually accomplishing anything, having essentially danced to Delta's tune, and there was nothing significant that they could do in VLR's timeline based on how the universe in ZE works in spite of that game arguably having been poised to be the prologue to something grander and more important than what it actually amounted to being, I have no idea what the point was to any of it. Basically, Akane and Sigma wound up throwing away their entire lives by devoting decades to fixing things that were never meant to be fixed by them, with the only solution in ZE's universe being to be a SHIFTer so that you can run away and make a crappy reality someone else's problem, with even that last ditch effort with Akane's attempt at a Back to the Future allusion to try to make jumping between timelines a moral question falling flat in yielding an emotional response. It just feels all so empty, really.
I wound up writing far more than I intended to, still not quite having aired every single individual grievance. I have no idea if anyone will actually bother reading any of this, let alone sift through all of it, yet not venting wasn't doing me any good either way.
tl;dr: Zero Escape had a promising start, but suffered from not being planned as a trilogy from the very beginning, leading to a very lackluster overall story that's well below what should be acceptable standards for science-fiction/fantasy dealing in time travel and mechanics related to it.
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