Japanese video games. When I was a kid, these three words (yes, video games is /two words/) always brought an immediate grin to my face. Super Mario Brothers 3, Shining Force II, Phantasy Star IV... Some of my all time favourite games were (and are) Japanese. Somewhere along the way, Japan and I started spending less and less time with each other. We still hung out a lot, but most of the time, we didn't really get along. We were just going through the motions.
I don't mind Agarest War. I kinda like Ar tonelico. ...But these games and a lot of other Japanese games just don't thrill me the way games used to. A lot of my game playing these days is taken up by Western games like Diablo, XCOM, Mass Effect, etc. I totally enjoy these games, but... sometimes you miss your first love. You don't really love your current fling like you do that first love.
Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is one of those games - one of those /Japanese/ games - that doesn't come around that often anymore. It is a video game that makes you remember playing video games when you were a kid. It makes you remember the way you used to feel when playing Japanese games.
The title is not something for kids though. It explores a sick and twisted plot where you - and eight other prisoners - work to escape your imprisonment after being abducted. The scenario grows grimmer when you realise that if you do not escape within a certain amount of time, a bomb that has been inserted into your body will detonate.
You quickly find yourself at the mercy of an enigmatic masked man calling himself Zero. He reveals that you are taking part of something called the Nonary Game and this is where the mechanics take hold. You are tasked with clearing a number of rooms to progress, but each room contains a host of puzzles that need to be solved. The basis of the majority of these puzzles is a mathematical process called the digital root. Basically, any number can be reduced back to a single digit by adding all digits together. So if you have been listening to too much Iron Maiden and you have the number 666, you would add 6+6+6 together for 18 and then you'd add 1+8 to end up with nine.
The puzzles are very simple at first, but they get harder as you go on. In fact, the difficulty is one of the very few flaws the game suffers. Some of the later puzzles are /amazingly difficult/. Some of the math involved is nuts and as someone who failed every level of math in high school several times, I was glued to a FAQ the whole game. Binary numbers and sudoku were two of my fiercest foes to vanquish.
999 also has heavy adventure gaming elements and like adventure games of the past, some leaps in logic have to be made to get through. Sometimes the suspension of disbelief has to not only be dropped, but flung completely out through the window. When I got to a particular puzzle where I had to flush one toilet X times and a second toilet Y times to continue on is when I was like "whatever" and realised it wasn't the puzzles why I was there.
And this, the story, is why I love 999. You have nine protagonists and all nine of them are amazingly cohesive and dynamic. I found myself rushing through puzzles to hear the next sarcastic remark from Lotus, the next quip from Santa, the next ridiculous anecdote from June. Don't get me wrong, the puzzles (while extremely hard) are well made. I just wanted more story, more characters, more plot. And there is so much story, character growth, and plot that you won't mind blazing through the puzzles.
The game has multiple endings and I enjoyed the game so much that I played through it five times consecutively to get all of them. Which brings us to another gripe. Now, while you will want to get all of the endings to get the full story (and you will want to get all of the endings as there /is a plot device to validate it/), you will need to play several puzzles several times. The game has a wickedly smart way of letting you skip previously read dialog, simply by holding right on the D pad. Any time you get to new dialog, the fast forward will stop and any new choices of path progression will show in white while previously selected choices are in grey. This is great, cause it lets you get to the new stuff /fast/. ...But you still have to play through all of the same puzzles again. Which basically puts a door up between you and the new content.
Despite brutally hard math and despite repeatedly played puzzles, Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors was one of the best gaming experiences (Japanese or otherwise) I have ever had. Not only did I finish the game five times in a row, I immediately picked up and started the sequel Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward literally minutes later.
999 left me realising that you can still love Japanese video games and not be ashamed to say it.