You Probably Shouldn't Play
Zero Time Dilemma

Zero Time Dilemma is not a good game, and while here is where a spoiler warning would go, just don’t play it. If you’ve played the first two games in the Zero Escape series, stop there.

Actually, on second thought, I will give you a spoiler warning for the first two games in the Zero Escape trilogy; Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Virtue's Last Reward. I'll be discussing plot points from both games, and I do recommend both.

What I Like

The fragmented storytelling is a nice idea, and though it means a lot of repeated information, with refined execution, you have an interesting way to uncover a narrative, and because players can complete pieces in an order they choose, each player would have a unique experience, and because fragments are locked and unlocked based on what information the player has, they would experience the story in the intended way.

Having the game’s big bad hanging out with the protagonists the entire time is something that can work, and it’s something the first game did to great effect—In Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, the fact that you couldn’t trust anything or anyone was played up constantly; the characters used fake names and were constantly pointing fingers at one another. You, the player, could do the same, and suss out who the bad guy is, and be rewarded by the twists, if you chose correctly.

ZTD’s execution of this is shit, and I’ll get into it in a minute.

I also think the game’s final twist, the true ending, had potential to be really cool.

So at the start of the game, Zero II has them all in cages and then has them flip a coin. Call it right, and he lets you go.

You’ll always get this right the first time, and Zero II makes good on his promise and frees the cast, and they all wake up outside the facility and the game ends. Now obviously, this is wildly premature, and you go back and choose the other option, and when you get it wrong, the game gets started for real.

Fast forward about twenty hours, and after all the questionable narrative decisions, the characters have gotten comfortable with SHIFTing (having their consciousnesses jump between worlds where different decisions were made), the only choice where they survive is to jump back to start to the world where they called the coin flip correctly.

I find this really interesting. It’s subjective, but that first premature ending is intentionally confusing at first blush, and this is a satisfying way to wrap the story up in a bow, and when Zero II taunts them—they can’t make him face consequences, he didn’t do anything to them here in this history—I really do think it’s a cool concept.

What I Don't Like

A Less Than Stellar Story

Okay, I’ve alluded to it a couple times, but the narrative direction for this final game in the trilogy is incomprehensibly weird.

It’s revealed that Phi is Sigma’s kid—concieved and born here in this facility and then sent back in time to the 1900s, and then sent forward to the 2000s, the second time travelling stint explaining the wild age difference between her twin brother, Delta, who’s revealed to be Zero II.

See, Zero II engineered the events of ZTD to achieve a couple goals. To engineer the circumstances of his birth, the circumstances that led to Virtue’s Last Reward, in one ending, Sigma, Diana and Phi escaping, Sigma losing his arms and an eye, and Phi being infected with Radical-6, being revealed to be the one to have caused the outbreak in the first place, and Delta going on to take the place of Brother of the radical cult Free the Soul. Akane goes on to become the architect of the VLR game, and Junpei’s lack of knowledge during that game is explained by Akane hitting him with the memory wipe drug that makes the fragment gameplay work.

But apparently, his main goal is to create a history where all of this was avoided, hence the true ending of the game.

It’s all very forced, and while when it’s written all out like this, I can almost see what Kotaro Uchikoshi (the writer) was trying to do, it’s still very goddamn forced and the twists do not feel good when they’re revealed.

Okay, I’m going to wrap up the ‘Bad Writing’ segment of this. It might not seem like it, but I’m being really charitable with the story choices here. Sure, I don’t like them, but a story’s a story, and that’s the story he wanted to tell.

An Insulting Reveal

The nine protagonists of this game are split into teams. C team is led by newcomer Carlos, who’s joined by Zero Escape veterans, Junpei and Akane. D team is led by Diana and she’s joined by VLR’s primary and secondary protagonists, Sigma and Phi, and Q team is all newcomers; the obligatory scantily clad woman Mira and her boyfriend, the wet noodle Eric, and strange masked child Q.

Q team sucks for various reasons.

There is a through line between various characters, a story Zero II tells in pieces.

A woman was jogging through a park and reached a fork in the road. Usually she went right, but this time, she went left, as there was a snail down the right road. This woman was Eric’s mother, and she was murdered that day, as she came across a serial killer. Eric’s father became abusive in his grief.

About a month later, a man was incorrectly arrested, tried and executed for the crime, leaving his family behind. His wife took her own life later, leaving two siblings behind, Akane and Aoi (Santa from 999), to fend for themselves. They were later kidnapped and took part in the First Nonary Game, before and leading to the events of 999.

Right before the man was falsely arrested, he’d ordered a taxi, and when his planned occupant was taken into custody, the taxi picked up a surgeon instead. The taxi later crashed, and the surgeon never got to his destination, and never got to perform the operation that would’ve saved a little boy’s life, the boy Q is based on.

I do think this story is one of the high points of the game as well, actually. It is legitimately satisfying to piece this story together. See, Zero II tells parts of this story, and punctuates it with the phrase, “Life is just unfair,” implying that all this death was caused by the whims of a snail.

He does… know that Mira was that serial killer, but never really seems to blame her for some reason. I mean, there is a history in which he just kills her, but in the game’s true ending, she’s just… here. Why does she get away with this?

Whatever, at least there’s a reason she’s here. She doesn’t have the ability to SHIFT, but is revealed to be Zero II’s accomplice. He kills her in that history because she turns on him, I think. I’m not sure, I don’t really care enough to check.

Eric, it seems, is only here to abuse the child. He cries and whines often, and is just all around useless. He can’t SHIFT either, and I honestly don’t know why he’s here.

The kid is an integral part of a twist that really pisses me off, on a deep level.

I haven’t directly mentioned it quite yet, but the kid is a robot, personality based on the kid that couldn’t get the life-saving surgery. Apparently, the game never directly calls him Q, but his name, Sean, is only revealed when the robot twist is.

And then when you’re asked to reveal Zero II’s identity, and the only name you have is of Phi’s twin brother Delta and you enter that in, and the child points at the camera, Eric goes, ‘What the hell are you talking about, Sean?’ which means they knew his name all along, but never said it.

And then the camera pans around to reveal that there’s just been an old-ass man in a wheelchair who’s deaf and mute and blind with Q team the entire time. The bad guy was following Q team around the entire time, just not saying anything because he’s supposedly deaf and mute and blind and in a wheelchair. Sean is apparently just his assistant, and that guy was the real Q all along.

Eric would rather point a shotgun at a child and then shoot said child, rather than question if the disabled guy is really disabled, apparently.

I was playing with a friend, and when Delta was revealed, she explained to me that Q team never actually refers to Sean as Q. It’s implied heavily, but they never do it directly.

Excuse my French, but this is fucking stupid.

There are many ways the game forshadows this, but it’s so fucking stupid.

Life Is Just Unfair

I talked about how in 999, you could pick out the bad guy from the cast; there was a mystery the game presented that you could solve, but ZTD doesn’t even let you try. It really is insulting to the player for the reveal to have him be ever so slightly offscreen during Q team’s segments, it really is.

I can wrap my head around bad writing choices, but this is such bad storytelling that it’s hard to comprehend. This means that there are ten players running around, because that bumps Q team up to four members.

And when you really think about it, why even do this? Why have the robot participate in the game at all? Why not just have a deaf and mute and wheelchair-bound player and, at the very least, acknowledge his existence?

Hm? What’s that? Having a character like that is incredibly suspicious?

It wouldn’t be satisfying if that was revealed to be the bad guy?

And… hiding him is your solution?

It feels bad because with the other games, you could put yourself in the characters shoes, experience things as they did. With this, if you put yourself in the characters shoes, you get blindsided. It’s immersion breaking. It’s such a tall order to ask players to be okay with this.

All this takes away from the final choice I mentioned earlier. I do think that it’s interesting, but it’s snuffed out by players reeling from baffling story decisions and sloppy storytelling.

There could’ve been something here, and not all of it is excusable by the game’s rough development cycle. It’s a shame really. The series started out so well, and ended so poorly, so much so that it almost taints the high notes.

Life is just unfair like that, I guess.