Did some apartment unfucking

Done in a very stressed hour and a half

But it is done.

I HAVE FINISHED ZERO TIME DILEMMA

tbh it’s been a long time coming… me and my friends played 999 last year over the course of a week, and then we took quite literally a year to start and finish VLR. genuinely we started it in June last year, and due to us sucking ass at scheduling we didn’t finish until this month. it wasn’t even an issue with the game, i loved VLR, just that the game is so long and we sucked at committing 😭

anyway i just sped through ZTD in three days by myself and it’s been very interesting. somehow i’ve found a lot to love about the game but also i kinda understand why it has something of a reputation among Zero Escape fans. i have a few thoughts.

first of all, since this is the first ZE game i played by myself, the escape rooms were a fucking treat. i never needed help on any of them but they still were super confusing and puzzling in the best way. i have multiple pages of notes from this game and it was such a joy to go through one of these games without the help of my friends who are way smarter than me. idk if the escape rooms are as good as VLRs but i loved the experience i had regardless.

second of all, the overarching plot was definitely not as good as the last two games, it was kinda convoluted and left a lot about VLR unanswered or unsatisfying. but there was still a lot to love, D team was on the whole fantastic (the fact that this is the only team Uchikoshi wrote himself really shows) and while C team wasn’t as good i thought Carlos was absolutely precious and Junpei and Akane have only continued to grow on me as this series has gone on. honestly, the two endings for D team were just fucking fantastic, i really liked Diana as a protagonist and the amount of lore we got for Sigma and Phi was just wonderful. definitely all my favorite moments of this game were with this team.

but then… there’s Q team. and goddammit if this game has an achilles heel it’s these bitches. these three just do not work as a unit; pretty much all their scenes range from boring to nonsensical to frustrating, and when that started spilling into scenes with the other teams it was immensely frustrating. Q/Sean was fine i guess, he was a little bland but mostly interesting as like the AI type character?? but the other two… my god. Mira was mostly a non presence but when she did do something in the story it kind of fell in the “so bad it’s good” range for me? like her serial killer shit is on the Korekiyo range of ridiculous, but at least it was kinda funny lol. Eric on the other hand i think is fucking terrible all around. pretty much all the worst and least interesting conflict surrounded him; as a villain he was boring and stupid, but then when the game wanted to make him sympathetic he just ended up being pathetic because his entire emotional core is fucking MIRA, a SERIAL KILLER. 9/10 times when i was groaning or yelling at my screen it was because of him, the story would probably still have a lot of issues without him but having him gone would’ve saved me so much headache. definitely the worst Zero Escape character imo.

honestly tho i’m just happy to finally say i’ve completed this series. it’s a shame ZTD was so low budget and didn’t come together how a lot of ppl hoped, but this is still a super awesome VN series that does a lot of interesting things with the idea of timelines and unconventional storytelling, with some super fun gameplay segments to boot. i don’t really expect a ZE4, but i guess i’ll be ok with AITSF2 in the mean time lol.