LeMU.waterbottle

999: Nine hours, Nine Per­sons, Nine doors (極限脱出 9時間9人9の扉) has been on my per­sonal to-play list for so long since I fool­ishly passed by the chance of get­ting to the True End when it was free to play on nicon­ico douga months ago.  This game (and its sequel) has been the sole temp­ta­tion of excus­ing myself of get­ting a 3DS… and now, I get to fin­ish it.  To max­i­mize my per­sonal enter­tain­ment, I’m going to keep a log of guess-works and the­o­ries after a few end­ings, all the way till the True End.

Remem­ber that it is suf­fice to con­sider myself wants to have babies with a rabid fan of Uchikoshi Koutarou.  His pre­vi­ous works, Ever 17 and other titles of the Infin­ity fran­chise, is the finest of the visual novel medium can offer.

Edit as Novem­ber 22:
I’ve fin­ished the entire game about a week ago.  Shortly after I ordered the sequel Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward, along with a 3DS XL.  Yes, it is that good.  The fol­low­ing para­graphs of page one is my notes after end­ing 3, 5, and 6, which are the stab­bing, axe, and sub­ma­rine end­ings.  Page 2 is writ­ten right after the safe/notes end­ing (#2 end­ing).  Finally, the last page is the con­clu­sion of fin­ish­ing the first and True end­ing (Akane end); I was told by a friend that the cof­fin end­ing is basi­cally an incom­plete ver­sion of the True End and not worth a sep­a­rate walk­through, so I listened.

PS: Since my game ver­sion is dif­fer­ent from the offi­cial trans­lated Eng­lish ver­sion, the names are rather the romaji of the orig­i­nal Japan­ese names.  Here’s a con­ver­sion table for each character’s code name; cour­tesy of Wikipedia.

*The 9th guy is not really code-named.

Once again, the spoiler force of end­ing 3, 5, and 6 is strong from now on.  You have been warned!

This page con­tains spoiler for end­ing 3,5, and 6.  Do not read if haven’t fin­ished these endings!

Mys­tery 1: The Killers

My def­i­n­i­tion of a killer: “who­ever com­mit­ted at least one mur­der of the eight remain­ing ‘play­ers’ after #9’s death”.  Here’s my sus­pect list.

Ichimiya (#1 the old, big guy)

Since he goes to through door #5 with or with­out Jun­pei, he’s a likely to have retrieved the dead nerdy guy’s watch either way.  1+9+2=12, 1+2=3 which opens up door #3.  He’s a calm and smart killer.  He uses the chem­i­cal he later anes­thetize him­self to sub­due Nils, leave him to die on the other side of the door.

Two impor­tant ques­tions:  Sup­pose Ichimiya has the #9 watch, he can sim­ply approach Yashiro.  Yashiro can eas­ily be con­vinced if she’s offered safety from a strong and smart man, and fail­ing that, Ichimiya always have the ways to kill her.  Killing Nils appears to be an unnec­es­sary risk.  Another ques­tion being what truly caused the bat­ter­ies to be miss­ing?  I’ll go in a bit detail in the next sec­tion regard­ing Zero.  Any­way, on one has the oppor­tu­nity to solo the bat­ter­ies, as they arrive to the sick hall in groups.

Why Nils?  My the­ory is that in search of the bat­ter­ies, Ichimiya caught Nils doing some­thing sus­pi­cious, which may or may not cause Ichimiya to regard Nils being a threat to him (such as if he thinks Nils is Zero).

I believe he kills Yashiro in all three end­ings that I fin­ished.  The stab end­ing is the most obvi­ous.  Jun­pei finds Yashiro dead and her watch is removed, then he gets stabbed… curi­ously enough, the killer does not take Junpei’s watch before leav­ing the scene.  In the axe end­ing, Ichimiya asked Yashiro to talk in pri­vate away from Jun­pei, and nobody knows what hap­pened next before Yot­suba came in and start going berserk.  Finally, in the sub­ma­rine end­ing, Yashiro’s watch goes miss­ing again when Jun­pei finds her body.  The catch is that Ichimiya must have faked his own death, as Jun­pei only checked Yotsuba’s body, not Ichimiya and Santa.  It’s quite pos­si­ble that Yot­suba went berserk and killed Santa, and then she was killed by Ichimiya.

Now, being our mas­ter killer, Ichimiya fol­lows Murasaki into the sub­ma­rine room and kills her, then waits out­side some­where.  While Jun­pei goes all teary with the dying Murasaki, Ichimiya kills Yashiro for her watch and Seven for… well, just because he can kill Seven I guess, lol.

And finally, poor Jun­pei doesn’t have a clue why he has to die (or who/what kills him).

Seven (#7 the mus­cled ex(?)-cop)

When we fin­ished room #5, he kept the door unlocked for a rea­son… the rea­son can be no other to retrieve the dead guy’s #9 watch.  If he’s lucky, nobody would notice the miss­ing watch, and by killing Nils and steals his watch, Seven can walk walk out of the #9 room all by him­self (7+2+9=18, 1+8=9).  The prob­lem here is of course, how does he kill Nils?

The short answer here is that he can’t, not with­out help from Santa or other peo­ple.  Also, given the plot of his past unlikely being com­pletely fake and red her­ring (Because I know Uchikoshi isn’t Ryuuk­ishi, and he doesn’t have a habit of trolling play­ers , it makes him an unlikely killer com­pare to Ichimiya.

Yot­suba (#4 Pink haired Loli (?))

Well, she’s a no-brainer.  Obvi­ously she couldn’t have killed Nils.  Even though she only have rea­sons to kill Santa and Seven, I doubt any­body other than (a knife-equipped) Ichimiya can stop her killing spree.  Yet she shouldn’t be the killer of Yashiro because, as said before, Yashiro’s killer is aimed at her watch, which has no use to Yot­suba.  I am not very fond of the fact that she decided to kill Jun­pei at the axe end, since it basi­cally gives her a free card to kill any­body with­out much of a reason…

Mys­tery 2: Zero, the exper­i­ment, and rules of the nonary game

Let’s agree that the dead cap­tain is not the real Zero.  Although he may look like a “player” with his watch and con­forms to Junpei’s the­ory “Zero is among us”, I think both his corpse and his watch are merely stage items.  I’m guess­ing the cap­tain guy was prob­a­bly some­one involved with the past exper­i­ment on this ship, and is killed by the real Zero for revenge or by betrayal.

On the other hand, every­one saw “Zero”, the masked fig­ure, before they were abducted.  I also don’t think that’s the “real” zero, sim­ply because one per­son can­not real­is­ti­cally go to dif­fer­ent loca­tions and abducted all these peo­ple within a rea­son­able frame of time.

The “real” Zero is the mas­ter­mind of the mad­ness game, and out of this mad­ness, I tend to agree with Junpei’s the­ory.  Zero is a player.  His num­ber is between 1 to 8.

Let’s exam­ine some pos­si­ble can­di­date for this mastermind.

Nils (#2 blind guy)

It’s very sus­pi­cious to me for that Jun­pei (and every­one else) con­cluded the exploded corpse in the shower room is Nils only by look­ing at the clothes.  I sup­pose they can­not be blamed, for under that sit­u­a­tion there isn’t any other way to exam­ine the corpse.

Con­sider what I said in Ichimiya being the killer… why he has to kill Nils?  Or rather, what is the truth behind the miss­ing bat­ter­ies in the sick hall?

This is my the­ory:  And Then There Were None.  Nils being Zero, wants to first fake his own death, and then hides some­where to see how the game plays itself out.  He pre­pared another dead guy wear­ing the same clothes in the shower room, sched­ule to be blown up.  He then hid the RED bat­ter­ies in room that only he knows.  When every­one scat­ters and looks for the bat­ter­ies, he retrieve and install the bat­ter­ies back to the RED and van­ish.  Other peo­ple will dis­cover Nils’ “death” and start to breed mis­trust among them.

Nils was a vic­tim of kid­napped chil­dren from 9 years ago.  His motive is either revenge against those who were respon­si­ble, or him­self is con­duct­ing the exper­i­ment this time.

Pos­si­bly related

We know Yashiro is the mother of the kid­napped vic­tims, and Seven was a police offi­cer fol­low­ing the case.  Nils is directly involved, of course.  And so is Yot­suba for she and Nils declared them­selves being sib­lings, and Yotsuba’s dis­clo­sure of some dark secrets to Jun­pei.  Jun­pei, Murasaki, and Santa, how­ever should be related to the inci­dent as well.

Santa is … strange.  He must have some dark his­tory that caused him to hate humanly emo­tions.  Although his per­son­al­ity makes a good Zero con­sider how the game is set up, but some­how I just feel that it wouldn’t be very inter­est­ing if he turns out to be Zero.

Murasaki, on the other hand, is either a giant red her­ring or a cruel rev­e­la­tion in wait­ing.  Murasaki never talks about her past with Jun­pei.  It is unnat­ural that a sur­prise encounter with a child­hood friend does not pro­duce fol­low up ques­tions, like which school did Murasaki went to after elementary?

And Jun­pei.  It will not make sense for the game’s PoV to be either a killer, or the mas­ter­mind.  But I think he has some secrets; some secrets that share with Murasaki, thus land­ing them­selves a place in this nonary game.  Could it be that Jun­pei or Murasaki has been kid­napped in that inci­dent?  I highly doubt Jun­pei was, since I’ll have to call the writer a troll if that’s the case :p  Murasaki on the other hand… not sure.  They haven’t seen each other after ele­men­tary school, and if I’m not mis­taken, the kid­nap­ping inci­dent occurred dur­ing Junpei’s first year in mid­dle school.  But the children’s names are pub­lished on news­pa­per.  It be unlikely for Jun­pei not to know about it if Murasaki has been involved in that incident.

The Exper­i­ment and Mind Control

To my under­stand­ing.  The phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pany (whose name isn’t Leib­lich, yet I incon­ve­niently for­got) used chil­dren as lab rats to research on telepa­thy and mind con­trol.  It doesn’t look like the for­mer is suc­cess­ful between Nils and Yot­suba.  And nei­ther of them have invis­i­ble arms that choke peo­ple or make sharp objects float in thin air and then stab into oth­ers (wait wouldn’t this be telekinesis?)

Now, about mind con­trol.  I sin­cerely hope it isn’t used as a plot device, because it would be stu­pid and cheap.  Yet I can’t ignore the pos­si­bil­ity of Seven being a vic­tim of mind con­trol, you know, his lost mem­o­ries and stuff…

Some misc note on rules of the game

Sick hall bat­ter­ies mys­tery is hypothesized.

Using objects to pre­vent doors from clos­ing and lock­ing.  As stated, this is how Ichimiya (or who­ever) obtained the #9 watch.  I won­der if this trick can be used else where for peo­ple to go back to where they not sup­posed to.  The pis­tol in the stor­age room may be retrieved… and that knife from the kitchen etc.

Yot­suba seems to have dis­ap­peared in the stab­bing end­ing?  From the descrip­tion it sounds like she locked her­self in a room and then Yashiro and some­one else claimed that they couldn’t find here.  Pos­si­bil­ity of foul play, or did they not check the very notice­able big cof­fin in mid­dle of the room?  Isn’t that where the knocks come from?  I for­got which room they were in, but it may be pos­si­ble that Yot­suba knows some secret paths inside the ship, since she’s been here before.

The sub­ma­rine end­ing.  A sup­pos­edly locked door is opened with­out Jun­pei has the chance use its key.  There was never any men­tion of dupli­cate keys, so either it’s Zero who prob­a­bly has a mas­ter key, or some­thing else is going on??

Mys­tery 3: the Nar­ra­tion Trick

This feels impos­si­ble to pre­dict at this moment.  I think I saw the phrase some­where say­ing that this game is impos­si­ble to present out of a DS.  Either that is meant to say the touch­screen inves­ti­ga­tion is inte­gral to the game­play, or maybe hint­ing a trick some­where regard­ing to the split PoV in nar­ra­tion?  Cur­rently the upper screen is all dia­log, hence first-person nar­ra­tion.  The touch­screen, how­ever, employs third-person lim­ited nar­ra­tive style.  This may be noth­ing, or pos­si­bly a Every 17 OMG moment.

The fol­low­ing page is bad, bad spoil­ers for the Safe/Notes end­ing (end­ing #4).