Zero Time Dilemma is the final part of the trilogy after
Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and
Virtue's Last Reward. You will definitely have needed to play the previous two games to fully appreciate the story as the main characters from both games make appearances. The game assumes you are already familiar with the concepts and terminology. At the very least, play Virtue's Last Reward before starting on Zero Time Dilemma. The presentation now is much improved from the clunky and archaic design of the previous two games. The menu is slicker, the animation smooth and the general quality seems higher. It's not without its problems though since selecting items requires multiple button presses, the same goes for investigating a certain section.
One thing to note coming into this is that Zero Time Dilemma is mostly storytelling, with some escape the room puzzles. The story is told via cutscenes and you will be watching one after another with no break. The cutscenes are fully voiced, in Japanese or English, and unlike the previous games where you press a button to advance the dialogue, it plays like a movie taking away what limited interactivity it had before. This makes it kind of boring and hard to pay attention to in the beginning where the story is slow. All character models are in 3D, with black outlines so it looks like cel-shading. Whereas the previous two games avoided explicit gore, Zero Time Dilemma embraces it with violent and gory executions, to the point of being hugely exaggerated.
The story has a familiar premise, with nine people stuck in a bomb shelter and they are forced to play the Decision Game, hosted by Zero. Four characters are already known to the player, being Junpei and Akane from Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (999) and Sigma and Phi from Virtue's Last Reward (VLR). The game takes place in the timeline between the two games. Every 90 minutes, the characters are put to sleep with their memories of the previous 90 minutes being erased. They are split into three teams and told that for each person who is killed, one password will be revealed. They will be freed when six passwords are revealed and used. The premise isn't as brutal and personal as previous games only because the characters lose their memories and your decisions aren't choosing who to kill.
To split the game into bite-sized pieces, you pick a team, then a Fragment to experience that part of the story. Playing them out of chronological order is intended as the characters also don't remember anything and how the events that are happening now take place in relation to previous events. This makes the story confusing for the player and takes a while until you can eventually piece it together. However, to make it easier to handle, there is a Flow Chart that plots the timeline and the splits int he timeline. You're able to jump immediately to sections where the game forced you to make a decision that split the story into multiple paths. It makes it much easier to replay and see where you need to go next in order to unlock the next piece of the story that you haven't seen.
There are various points in the story where the outcome of your decision will be based on a randomized event (such as dice rolling certain numbers). This is an interesting take as every attempt/playthrough could result in a different outcome from the last time you tried it and makes it unpredictable. However, this also makes it annoying and a waste of time to keep repeating the same section to get to the other branch of the storyline. Eventually, the teams will find themselves trapped into various locked rooms and this is where the escape the room puzzles come into play. They are presented in first-person and feel out of place within the game. While you can use the button control scheme, it is much quicker and more convenient to use the touchscreen.
You can freely control the camera during escape the room sections which is a nice touch. During these sections, you will find clues in the form of items around the room in order to find the password to get out of the room. These puzzles can be hard and counter-intuitive, taking a while to get through without a guide. With the items you pick up, you can combine them to form new ones. An anti-frustration feature is that the items disappear from your inventory once you use it and it has no further uses. This helps you in determining whether you need to find more items or not. A frustrating feature though are when you need to click on specific areas to use an item and even when things are obvious, it does not work the way you want since the game registered that you pressed just a tad bit to the left and not in the exact drawer it wanted you to. This feels a lot worse than 999 or VLR.
Playing through the game, you need to get through at least 70% of the way into the game before it becomes interesting and things start becoming clear. There are multiple endings, including a heap of bad endings. Some of the characters' personalities feels inconsistent from their previous games, the most obvious being Junpei who is more of a bastard now. It's completely different from his appearance in 999 and makes him unlikable. The same goes for a few of the newer characters, whose personalities have little redeeming qualities. Characters also tend to state the obvious multiple times which pads things out.
The final revelation, while still intriguing, does not have the same impact as the previous two games and feels like it made portions of the game pointless. It hastily finished off some major plot points from the previous games, while adding too many other subplots causing a huge mess in the storytelling. For the final game in the trilogy, it does not feel like it properly concluded. If you play the game going via the optimal path using a walkthrough, this will take you a minimum 12 to 14 hours to complete. Play it blind and your playtime will be pushed to 20 to 40 hours depending on how good your puzzle skills are. Overall, Zero Time Dilemma promises a lot of things but the poor pacing of the story, switch to cutscenes and oftentimes counter-intuitive puzzles hamper the game. It's still highly recommended to fans of the series, just not for newcomers.
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