Sno

Virtue's Last Reward

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Well, PSN+ has cloud saving for Vita, but only if you upload it manually I think? I'm still new to it so I don't know if it has that option, but thanks for the tip.

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You can automate it, but it's a bit unintuitive. You go in through the Content Manager app - > Online Storage then on the game list click the wee "i" on the right and tick the "Upload Automatically" box.

You need to leave it in sleep mode and (I think) be on the home screen for it to upload your saves but that mode uses very little power from my experience. Mine uploads overnight but I'm not sure if this is a standard thing or if it's borrowing the setting from my PS3 where I have it set to upload at 4am every day, I can't see an option on the Vita to specify an actual time.

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One final question, it's better to have a "blind" first playthrough for both games before trying to get all the endings, right?

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For 999 I would personally say go in blind for a couple of playthroughs then refer to a spoiler-free chart showing you the decisions you need to make to engineer the other endings. That's the way I did it. It's easy to see where your decisions branch off for the first couple of endings (there are six in total) but some of the others require you to make some decisions that may not be obvious.

 

In VLR they've actually included a tree in the in-game menu that shows what you chose in the past and where it got you so this isn't a problem. Which is nice as according to the box there are twenty-four endings.

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Tanu, really now. Just play the damn game already instead of min-maxing your every experience. Life isn't a JRPG!

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Both games do a good job of tracking the choices you've made, and in VLR, it actually just completely surfaces the story trees.

Go in blind and have fun with it, it won't make getting alternate endings and eventually the true endings any more of a pain.

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Life isn't a JRPG!

Damn, I've been doin' it wrong.

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Whoa... Alice and Clover are here? I'm pretty sure the memory loss guy is "Snake" although I could be wrong.

I can't wait till they call her "granny" like Lo-tits.... she actually is a few millenia old so it would accurate for once.

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OK, I got the real ending and....

 

I'm kinda pissed off....

 

It feels like the game is giving the middle finger to fans of the first game...

-Hey, I bet you wanted to see Jumpy and Kanny live happily forever after, right? Well #@$% you, because Junpei only gets to meet her when they are both old and the Akane she loved is gone!

-Remember Alice? You know the Egyptian ice princess, who you totally saw dressed in ancient Egyptian garb in the ending? Well, she was a secret agent! Yep.... that's how she dresses when on a mission! HA HA, @#$% you for believing that!

-Remember Clover being a genius? She's an idiot now! @#$% YOU!

-Since we had to escalate things from the first game... let's up the ante! You saved one girl from dying so how about.... a virus that kills that world? NAH, @#$% that, let's have a virus AND a nuclear winter! HA HA!

-Remember how June was Zero in 999, well... this time it's YOU! HA HA, WE'RE GENIUSES!

-Best of all.... You don't even get a real ending? Yep, we gave you a thousand dead ends and bad ends, only to not even let you know if you managed to save the world.... but our next game to find out.... HA HA!

 

Also, I can't get over how perverted Sigma is.... He's constantly being perverted to every female in the game and it's so stupid that he couldn't figure out he was old! Yeah, the whole gravity and virus wouldn't make him notice he's weaker, but still.... HE LOST AN EYE. HOW DO YOU NOT NOTICE THAT! GAAAAH! How do you not notice having implants? How did he not see his face reflected on ANYTHING in the whole game?

 

The humor was..... horrid... I love bad puns, but the humor in the game is just bad puns and pervy jokes, the explanation behind he cat puns is what's really annoying....

 

The game simply didn't blow my mind like 999 did, I could already tell from the beginning I was supposed to stop the infection, but the way they escalate everything seems stupid, I actually got more angry than surprised when I found out I was I old and Zero Sr, the fact that I have to buy the next game, if they even make it to find out is just... disappointing.

 

If there is a 3rd game, they did mention people from the first experiment work for SEIE, so I assume Snake will be there, because I can't think of who else could be in the third game, maybe Santa? And obviously there will be a big breasted woman with almost no clothes on... :|

 

Things are still clicking in my head, I just notice how Phi called Sigma an old man, but still... I'm so disappointed!

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Well, yep, I do agree it's overall a less awesome experience as 999, but VLR still has amazing things in it. I don't think I've seen anyone as angry at it as you are. The overall experience might not have touched me as much as the first, and you are emphatically right about the weird sexism in the game, but overall I did enjoy the bonkers stuff near the end, where it's just grasping for ways to make it even more unseemly bizarre and convoluted. At this point, that's more or less the charm. I don't know if that escalation is quite good... You know, much will depend on the 3rd game. If that manages to wrap up the story in a satisfying way, VLR could be totally redeemed. If not, it'll be the Matrix Reloaded to its Matrix Revolutions.

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I'll stand by feeling like VLR is a superior game in many ways, particularly since i'm still not convinced that the big mind fuck conclusion of 999 makes any sense.

Third game is confirmed though, it is happening.

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Well, since this is the internet I probably "read" like I'm AVGN angry... the eye thing does make me pretty angry though. How could they have missed something like that? I guess I wouldn't have minded how convoluted the game got if the game didn't just sequel bait.

 

I'm probably more angry because they are messing with the 999 story and canon, before it was just your memory that flowed through time, now they claim YOU do the time jump

 

How on Earth does "June was dead all the time, but she was here because you saved her" make less sense and is less of mindfuck than "Oh, I didn't notice I'm old and lost a few limbs and that I was the bad guy all along"?

 

I will admit that technically VLR is superior, but storywise 999 makes much more sense. VLR doesn't even really explain the time travel that well, it's just 30 hours of "ECLIPSE", "VIRUS", "SCHRODINGER CAT" and you don't even get to know anything about anybody until you reach their ending... Heck, I still don't know who Phi really is.

 

Oh, I forgot to mention how know Ace is now all of the sudden part of a cult.... Remember when you felt sorry for him because he had prosopagnosia and just wanted to see people's faces? Nah, he did it for a cult!

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Okay, I'm probably about a third through this, and:

  • Really like the graphics and way of exploring the environment
  • The puzzles are better
  • The whole tits thing is just weird and awkward
  • The voices are cool. I love it when they mix English with Japanese
  • I like that they show the big story tree right from the start, and then still change it as you go
  • In the PEC, my DS just froze and I had to restart from the last save, which was a ways back. Thank God for that auto mode.

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I had one freeze in the game, I believe also in the PEC, but didn't encounter the save-corrupting bug thing.

 

I also really liked the voice acting. Very convincing. Kuwaaaarko!

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I recently found out that the US version has English voices, but I do like the Japanese ones better.

 

999 had at least some sections that felt like an adventure game instead of a visual novel with puzzles breaks, like the ice puzzle. In VLR you just put memory cards in tablets and assemble key part.... I kinda like combining items logically. 

 

I already said how stupid it was you never notice you are missing an eye during the whole game, right? Well, I just noticed how much Radical 9 ruins everything.

 

Not only does it only make you commit suicide only when the plot demands it, but the game clearly says everybody was infected, which ruins everything...

 

Let's forget whether they somehow managed to infect Dio while he snuck in, but the game clearly says you were infected from the start so that you would not notice you were on the Moon, since the gravity difference would make you move at a different speed, but... since you perception of time is distorted from the start, if would also affect sound! Those sections where people talk very fast? That should be the WHOLE game!

 

It's amazing how Alice is the "Lo-tits" of the game in such a similar way...

Lotus is only useful ONCE when she hacked something... that was only there because they needed something for her to do.. Alice is only there to do some math... In a place filled with computers and I'm pretty sure Luna could have done the math too. At least the don't call her a grandma?

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I guess it can still crash regardless, but your save game only corrupts if you save during the affected puzzle rooms.

 

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... or if you're just playing and saving outside a puzzle room, then the game crashes and you can't resume. I guess that's 15 hours down the drain OH FUCK YOU WHOEVER DIDN'T PATCH THIS GAME.

 

More like Virtue's Ass Reward.

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Fuckfuckfuck.

 

So what's the best way of discovering the rest of the story online? Does anyone know of a particularly good FAQ or something? Fuck shit god damn it.

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Okay, okay. I found a wikia thing that sort of repeats the whole story, but in a very unstructured and messy way. For those of you who have completed the game, could you, like, summarise the plot in a few lines? My progress at the time of the crash was something like:

  • I had completed a little less than half of the plot tree, starting from the left.
  • I had learned the following:
    • Lots of talk about Radical-6. Quark got it, and we put him in the pod
    • I apparently had it at one point, everything going by super-fast
    • We found the antidote, but Dio stole it and broke the bottle
    • Three people had been thawed from the pod earlier, maybe?
    • Clover and Alice were up to something, reporting to some organisation
    • We listened to the audio log (from Mars?)
    • At one point I escaped into a desert (on Mars?) and something with a bomb and timelines
    • I had a couple of «How did I know that?» moments, so the parallel timeline stuff is obviously a thing.
    • I got a couple of «to be continued» endings, like the one where I'm poinsoned and have 5 minutes

 

Apparently someone is maybe working on a patch, but probably not. And even if a patch comes out, my save is probably fucked, so my hopes for actually playing this through are zero. If someone could awesomely reveal the important twists and revelations to me, I'd be super-grateful.

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It's kinda a big job to explain everything, because the whole game consists of a dripfeed of non-linear hints and information, and then it ends with approx. three hours of wall-to-wall exposition.

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Yeah, there is way too much to summarize in a simple forum thread, the story is kinda structured in a messy way with all the timelines, which only makes things harder, but I can reply to your questions, read if you must:

-The whole radical 6 is supposed to have a double effect, the threat of death heightens your "time skipping" powers and the time warping it does allegedly doesn't let you know you are on the Moon since the gravity is different and you move slower... except it should affect how you hear things. *shrugs*

-Everybody is infected since the beginning, which makes that part make no sense.

-Thank to the time jumping you can get the antidote from another timeline and even make a duplicate.

-This is a big one... ready? You are 45 years in the future! Phi, Clover and Alice where frozen for 45 years! That old man was the main character from 999! That old lady that died was June! And you are old and someone didn't notice you lost an eye and both are and.... YOU ARE ZERO! TAA-DAAA!

Alice and Clover work for an organization that fights the cult they shoehorned into the storyline... Remember Ace? He was totally a part of that cult! Apparently they killed Alice's father.... Dio is the cult leader or right hand or something like that... he snuck in to sabotage the game with the bombs.

-Aparently Junpei was working on a project that simulated a Mars landing when someone the virus was released... It seems that the third game will take place here and you'll have to stop it from ever happening.

-The guy in the robot suit is a clone of you and Luna is a robot.

 

I think that's about it, the game basically ends where it seems you'll travel back to the present to prevent all this from happening... I guess whoever the villain is in the next game will set up a nonary game where you must win to stop the virus from spreading... Oh and the virus also causes a nuclear winter since it makes people commit suicide and some did it by blowing up a power plant.

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Thanks, Tanu! I was never going to replay the game from the start, and that listing of crazy revelations was exactly what I was looking for. I was about as crazy as I could hope for, which is good.

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