I was extremely disappointed with "Zero Time Dilemma", last year's conclusion to the "Zero Escape" trilogy of games/visual novels. Ever since playing it I have considered its creator, Kotaro Uchikoshi, a hack. However, there is one aspect of the series which I never see discussed and which I'm actually very impressed with, and that is how symbiotic the gameplay is with the story and its themes.
Needless to say I'm going to spoil important parts of the entire trilogy.
Before I get any further, I have to talk about a concept that made me think about this in the first place. 5 years ago, one Cody Johnston wrote an article predicting events that he thought would occur in Dark Knight Rises, based on a theory that Christopher Nolan was creating that trilogy around the structure of "Pledge, Turn and Prestige". This is a concept derived from Christopher Priest's 1995 book "The Prestige", which Nolan adapted into a movie in 2006, and it describes a structure of a magic trick. First you have The Pledge, in which you introduce something ordinary. Then you have The Turn, during which you do something unexpected. And finally, The Prestige, in which you do something seemingly impossible. Cody's idea was that Nolan used this structure not only to form "The Prestige" film's script around, but also based the entire "Dark Knight" trilogy around it.
Now, there's a somewhat similar narrative structure known in the East - kishotenketsu. In the West it's probably most known because Shigeru Miyamoto and Koichi Hayashida were cited using it when creating levels in Mario games, although it originated from Chinese poetry and is also used in creating short comics in Japan. It's a four-step structure - introduce the idea, develop it, make a twist, and then wrap everything up. Even more than "Pledge, Turn, Prestige", it puts focus on an idea rather than action or characters.
Both of these are much better in explaining the framework of "Zero Escape" than, say, drama-originated three act structure. The first installment was "999", a game that starts as a thriller with supernatural undertones, but dives into straight sci-fi during its final stretch. It introduces the concept of people being able to connect telepathically through morphogenic fields, circuiting not only space, but also time. The second game, "Virtue's Last Reward", builds up on that concept by introducing another way to use morphogenic fields - moving your consciousness between timelines. Finally, "Zero Time Dilemma" turns it all up with the characters actively using that ability in creating and solving scenarios.
Each consecutive game develops the possibilities created by morphogenic fields. "9 person, 9 hours, 9 doors" has a standard visual novel structure - the game has choices which lead us down one of 6 possible paths, and once we reach the end of it, the game ends and we have to start all over if we want to see another possible way the events could've developed. The only time the game introduces the elements of supernatural to the gameplay is during the final puzzle, during which we telepathically connect with another person in another time. Since the game was first released on the Nintendo DS, it utilized the console's dual-screen nature by displaying one timeline on first screen, and the other on the second one. Additionally, the game pulls a trick on the player by hiding the True Ending behind a fake one - they are both at the end of a particular path, but to get the True one we must previously unlock one particular other, otherwise the events will play out slightly differently and we'll reach one of Bad Ends. True and Bad endings are staple of visual novels with branching paths, but this particular way to unlock the True one is either very rare or unprecedented.
"Virtue's Last Reward" introduces a timeline mechanic - a menu that displays all of the possible ways the story could develop in a flowchart, allowing us to jump to any previously unlocked scene. At first it may seem as something done for sake of convenience, allowing the player to skip tedious puzzles and introductions which he had to repeat over and over in 999 if he wanted to reach all the endings. However, at some point we start reaching endings during which we learn information that seems completely redundant, or scenes after which we get "To be continued" message rather than standard "Game over". Additionally, characters start revealing information they technically shouldn't know and can't explain how they've learned. Finally, we start receiving flashbacks from events we either haven't seen, or saw in other timelines, allowing us to find solutions to problems with information we learned in different timelines. As the frequency of such jumps increases, the characters start to realise what's going on and acknowledge that all the paths in the game are in fact part of the same story, causing them to deliberately go to one timeline in order to gather information needed in another.
There's one brilliant detail related to this. VLR introduced a menu option that allows us to scribble notes, which comes in handy when solving puzzles, but will most likely be used to write down codes and passwords which we receive before learning their purpose. As such they may sit in that menu untouched for hours before we get to use them. And every time we jump from timeline to timeline, all the scribles (which are drawn by hand, using touchscreen or a cursor) will slightly deteriorate, like ink from old prints. It'll likely go unnoticed for a while, and personally when I first noticed this effect, I thought "Is it really decaying or am I going crazy?". This falls in line with the way game explains how moving consciousness works, revealing that memories fade away in the process. And just like characters, we experience that before we're aware that this is what's actually happening - a clue hidden in plain sight. A great example of using storytelling tools exclusive to video games.
So, 999 serves as a Pledge, or Ki. We are introduced to the idea of morphogenic fields and time loops, as well as using one story path to advance in the other. VLR further explores that by having the player actively jump between timelines and consciously use knowledge from one to advance in another - The Turn (and both Sho and Ten).
And so, we finally arrive at Zero Time Dilemma. I think this game fails at almost everything - it's a contrived and unbelievable story on its own, it gives unsatisfying explanations to all the mysteries and loose ends left by previous two entries, the puzzles feel lazy compared to 999/VLR escape rooms, and of course the visual presentation is abhorrent. However, let's try to forget about all that for a moment (I wish I could) and focus on one thing which the title delivers on, and that is the conclusion to the idea of morphogenic fields.
Now that the player is aware of the characters' ability to jump between timelines while retaining memories, ZTD is deliberately built around that. While we still have a flowchart with all events, we can't just straight progress from point A to point B. Instead the game is cut into series of scenes that we can play in whatever order we want. They all start with our characters waking up, and end with them going to sleep and getting injected with a memory-erasing drug. So at first we have no idea what the continuity is and which timeline we are in, until we reach a point when the characters finally find some ground to figure out what's going on and perhaps even retain their memories. Furthermore, several obstacles in the game are based on pure chance - coinflips, dice rolls, russian roulette. This ensures that at this point, the timeline will split into exactly two branches (and as the player, we might have to repeat those actions several times, since they are dependent on pure luck). Now, in 999 and VLR, the goal with each ending was to solve more puzzles and get further in the story, until we reach the final point when we discover The Grand Mystery Behind Everything. The endgame of ZTD is finding ourselves in a timeline where none of the events of the game happened, but the memories of them are present in the characters' minds. The Prestige. Ketsu.
"Zero Escape" breaks the fourth wall for a non-comedic purpose, instead aiming to enrich the narration and increase immersion. As we start to learn characters' secrets, they start to realise what is apparent to us, creating a sense of bridging the gap. The story evolves from something that seems like a standard thriller to a sci-fi story involving time travel, and then to metafiction exploring the possibilities of its inherent set of rules. And jointly the game mechanics evolve from a fairly standard visual novel to an unconventional one, and finally to something that plays with the boundaries of the genre and tries to go beyond.
It is, after all, "entertainment for the thinking man".
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