極限脱出 9時間9人9の扉 (Zero Escape: 999) 🗝 Week 9 (Visual Novel Book Club)

natarin · May 26, 2023, 2:30am

Week 9: Starting May 26th

This is being read as part of the Visual Novel Book Club.

Previous Part: Week 8
Next Part: Week 10 (starting June 2nd)

Reading

This week we’re reading four scenes starting from the last branch point on the rightmost side of the flowchart; see week 8’s main post for screenshots of the starting points.

Note: it’s not always obvious when a section ends, so try to keep an eye on the flowchart when you think you’re getting close to the end. Below is a screenshot of how your flowchart should look and where the section ends. Screenshots are under a double spoiler so you can unblur one at a time (minimizing spoilers).

Screenshots (potential spoilers)

Current flowchart:

Stop here:

The end of this week’s assignment is an ending so you’ll circle back around to the beginning of the game after some information screens and saving.

General Advice

In the remastered version, novel sections have two reading modes: novel and adventure. The mode you are currently in is displayed in the top right; click on it to swap between the two. Novel mode includes both dialogue and narrative text, while adventure mode includes only dialogue. Which you read is up to you; novel mode generally gives you more information by nature of writing out descriptions of events, while adventure mode is less reading by nature of being only dialogue.

Note: the game will occasionally force you into the other mode. When this happens, you can simply click the button in the top right to swap back; however, if it forces you into novel mode, there may be a reason it does so, so proceed with caution!

Choices

The choices are under a double spoiler so you can unblur one choice at the time (minimizing spoilers). For those of you who would like to go through the game blind as to which choices matter, I am including baseline responses for all choices. However, for those of you who would like to make your own choices where it doesn’t affect story progression, whether a choice is critical or not is marked under a second spoiler below each choice.

Note: the appearance of some choices is triggered by previous choices, so if you pick different responses on ones that aren’t required for story progression don’t be concerned if you don’t see some of the choices listed below.

Choices

No choices this week!

Guides if you want to check choices yourself (beware of spoilers!)

From what I can tell it seems like major spoilers and puzzle answers are hidden, but proceed with caution!

Japanese guide
English guide

Puzzles

In case anyone has trouble with the puzzles or that just isn’t their thing, I’m including the relevant puzzle instructions. Of course you’re welcome to ask for help in the thread as well! If you are trying to figure it out I’d recommend asking for hints here first, as the guides are somewhat hit or miss with how much they reveal and how quickly.

Puzzle guides (beware of spoilers!)

監禁室
Japanese guide
English guide

拷問室
Japanese guide
English guide

Discussion Rules

Please use spoiler tags for major events in the current chapter/part and any content in future chapters/parts.
When asking for help, do your best to provide context. Pasted text, screenshots, descriptions, etc. Unlike book clubs we can’t flip to relevant pages, so we may need a little help identifying exactly what is being discussed.
Feel totally at ease to ask questions or give your thoughts, any time! Clubs live and die by participation, and asking whatever question you have, no matter how silly it may seem, helps others who are reading it and even the answerer themselves.
Have fun, and do your best to interpret anything said with as much good faith as possible

Participants

Mark your participation status by voting in this poll.
(Please feel free to update your status whenever you like!)

I’m reading along
I have finished this part
I’m still reading but I haven’t reached this part yet
I am not reading this VN

0 voters

natarin · May 26, 2023, 4:05am

Oops almost forgot - this section took me about 2 hours, so pretty standard I think. As always let me know if you have any thoughts or questions!

Daisoujou · May 28, 2023, 9:29pm

次の瞬間ーー！ (spoilers)

No one can catch a break at all this week. I imagine this is a pretty good one for those reading for the first time, lots of new info on the backgrounds of Yashiro and Seven, plus some new, very directly connected riddles about what this place might be. Fun read in Japanese, lots of interesting, very specific new words for me here.

Even more toilet puzzles. Since I’ve solved these puzzles multiple times before, I just use the guide, and occasionally its solutions are a bit wrong (for this version? who knows). The torture room machine was particularly weird – maybe it’s because I’m rushing the puzzles, but I honestly was struggling a bit to make sense of it.

Voi · June 9, 2023, 4:49pm

More spoilers

This route is what made Yashiro my second favorite character after Santa tbh. Well, that and her tech savviness.

I HATE the torture room and always have. That brain puzzle always kills me–first I always forget to check the hint button for what needs to be matched, and then trying to match the sides on the second go kills me, not to mention I also forget you have to press “check” to finish, it doesn’t automatically progress like most of the other puzzles have so far. And yeah, the GameFAQs version doesn’t seem quite right for the first solution and is confusing for the second–I ended up googling for a different solution.

This room should have been the quickest yet, but that dang brain puzzle.

New readers! Who do you think did it? I’m super curious what peoples theories are now that we’ve reached a new ending

Edit: Oh and this ending is probably my favorite achievement title for 999

liveunderwater · June 13, 2023, 2:07am

Finished this weeks section!
As a video game player I decided I had to restart from the beginning for completion sake after we reached our first ending. Even advancing automatically was much too time consuming. Really put into perspective how much reading we had done so far though. And in the end, not really even worth the bit of dialogue differences.
The visual novel vibe started tingling when I reached seven and yashiros sections on this route. Like, the way that, as you branch out, the bigger the picture gets. Still, I guess I misunderstood the route differences. Thinking it would be more akin to Clue (the board game).

So, either someone was playing dead or we haven’t seen the murderer(s) yet, right? Now I’m wondering how much the paths diverge. The killer is essentially the same no matter which path you choose right?

omk3 · June 13, 2023, 2:15pm

Finally finished this part (a couple of weeks late, but better late than never). It got interesting towards the end, that’s for sure.

So one of the abducted kids, Yashiro’s daughter no less, is called ノナ. Any relation to ノナリー by any chance? (and we were never told the second daughter’s name, hmmm) Those kids took part in mind control experiments, so maybe they’re being controlled now too? They were Junpei’s age when they were abducted. My favourite (not!) Murasaki is his age, and she’s getting those weird fever attacks, and I suspect her of killing a bunny at the very least, so who knows, she may well have been one of those kids. Santa is roughly the same age too, isn’t he? Yotsuba probably younger? It seems everyone has a direct or indirect relation to those experiments. I’m sure we’ll learn more about the others soon.

The puzzles were annoying. 脱出 is “emergence”? Are they sure? And 14 stands for E because E is 14 in the hexadecimal system? And we should know that because? Not to mention that in the electrical chair (or whatever it was) puzzle, I never realized I could turn the head both ways before I looked at a guide. The huge arrows were right there, but I just thought I had two ways to get to the same profile. Oh well.

omk3 · June 13, 2023, 8:43pm

So my experience with visual novels is literally zero, so take what I’ll say with a grain of salt, but my understanding is that it works a little like time travel. The underlying logic and external factors are the same throughout the game, but your decisions affect the development of the story directly or indirectly, in a kind of butterfly effect way. After reaching one end, you get to replay making different decisions, leading to different outcomes, but always within the given framework of the story (ie everyone still has the same background and same motivations, the environment works the same way, etc). That said, the killer may not necessarily be the same every time, if there are specific circumstances that may or may not push certain persons to murder.

liveunderwater · June 13, 2023, 10:04pm

Hmm, ok yeah!, thinking further into it brought several other outcomes to mind. Yep. I’m formulating new theories now. Any of the characters murdered along this route could also have been murderers themselves, before they got murdered. Maybe double crossed. Certainly spaced on that notion.
Excited to have several hours ahead of me tonight for reading the next section(s).

rikaiwisdom · July 6, 2023, 5:01pm

This week's content spoilers

I started reading this again this week and I’m back to reading daily so it won’t take too long to catch up, but unfortunately it’ll be over pretty much around the same time, oh well . In any case, I finished week 9 yesterday.

This route was pretty cool and learning about both Yashiro and Seven was interesting. From around the beginning of the game I mentioned liking the fact that they didn’t make Seven the stereotypical strong and dumb character with 2 brain cells, I really liked his moments of insight and now I know why he was quite smart. That is, supposing what he says is true at all, or if they’ve tampered with his memories or something to distort reality when he was captured. There is also definitely something going on with ノナ and ノナリー as omk3 mentioned. My bet is either she’s Zero (with a voice changer? Why would she kidnap her mother though, might have been controlled?) or she’s with the kids seeking revenge or I don’t know. I guess everyone there is involved in the abductions incident one way or another, but there are still so many characters that we (I at this point) know nothing about or in which way they’re related, like well, pretty much everyone else. Murasaki’s fevers don’t seem so mysterious any more though.

For a minute I thought it was Murasaki but obviously it would’ve been way too evident (and there are still other routes left), the game clearly wants you to think that but then it also clears that up when it shows her dying. Then pretty much everyone was seemingly dead and I thought that the killer was not among them. The silhouette that was shown looked masculine leaning to me but I don’t trust that much, as it can just be a mere symbol, a mannequin. Then I read liveunderwater’s thoughts about someone faking death and welp, I’m pretty lost again because yeah, that’s plausible . They did mention Yashiro’s bracelet missing if I remember right so yeah, one or more of them might be collecting them for the 9th door. Then what about 9 guy’s bracelet, did they pick it up? What about Niels’? I can’t quite recall if that was highlighted. Still too many questions! I can’t guess much yet to be honest xD. Some could’ve faked their death, and other bracelets could’ve been picked off-screen after Junpei’s death.

It’s getting quite fun with the info bombs each time.

I’m feeling everyone’s evil grins filled with forbidden knowledge from the future… !