Information


Paradoxical has a minion!

the Common Garden Snail




Paradoxical
Legacy Name: Paradoxical


The Reborn Feli
Owner: silas

Age: 6 years, 8 months, 4 weeks

Born: June 29th, 2017

Adopted: 11 months, 1 week ago

Adopted: April 21st, 2023

This pet has been nominated for the Pet Spotlight!

Statistics


  • Level: 30
     
  • Strength: 72
     
  • Defense: 10
     
  • Speed: 10
     
  • Health: 10
     
  • HP: 10/10
     
  • Intelligence: 16
     
  • Books Read: 15
  • Food Eaten: 0
  • Job: Junior Lifeguard


SEEK A WAY OUT!

mind mild spoilers for each of the 3 games!!

On December 10, 2009, one of my favorite video games of all time was released: 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, the first game in the Zero Escape series. It is an adventure/puzzle/visual novel game for the Nintendo DS, and was originally intended to be a stand-alone game; while it failed commercially in Japan, it sold better than expected in America, and its success there was what eventually spurred its first sequel. But I'll get to that.

I first played 999 because a friend and mutual on tumblr was liveblogging it, and I had to see what the fuss was about, as said mutual had impeccable taste in media. So, on October 6, 2013, I started playing a Legally Acquired copy of it and liveblogging it on my own tumblr, finishing it over the course of several months around January 2014. And holy WOW was I blown away!

The characters, the intricate story, the puzzles (that final puzzle in particular, DAMN!), the branching storylines all coalescing into one -- I was in love with everything about it. The story follows Junpei, a Japanese college student who has been abducted, and, along with 8 other participants (for a total of 9, you see), forced to play a Nonary Game aboard a sinking cruise liner in order to escape before said cruise liner sinks and kills them all. What the hell is a Nonary Game? Simple: Find the door marked with a '9' on the ship, and enter it within 9 hours. Not as simple, actually, because in order to enter a door, you have to make a team of 3-5 people whose numbers match the digital root of the number of the door you're trying to go into. Oh yeah, each person has a bracelet numbered 1-9 on their wrist when they awoke on the ship; Junpei is number 5, and his childhood friend Akane, known as "June" on the ship (they use codenames due to the stakes of the game), is number 6. But not everything is as it seems, and things quickly go off the rails, with various scientific and pseudoscientific theories abounding, as well as plenty of, uh, murder! Fun! And it IS fun, it's one of my favorite games of all time for a reason, y'know!



IF THE NINETH LION ATE THE SUN

So of course, as soon as I finished 999, I knew I had to Legally Acquire the sequel, Virtue's Last Reward, for the Nintendo 3DS and Playstation Vita. It released on February 16, 2012, to... about the same reaction, actually: commercial failure in Japan, but did decently in the States. This time, however, failure would have a price: the sequel to VLR was canceled in the wake of the positive reviews but poor sales. I didn't know that at the time, or maybe it wouldn't come until after I played it, but Man. Man!!! Capitalism Strikes Again.

This one struck an even bigger chord with me, and due to being an idiot teenager, I put almost 40 hours into the game to its completion. The gimmick this time around is a "prisoner's dilemma" type situation, the Ambidex Game, wherein two or more people are pitted against each other and have to pick "Ally" or "Betray". If you reach 9 points, you can escape!; if you reach 0 points... you die. Junpei isn't here this time, but Sigma is, a frat bro, whose sidekick this go-round is Phi, a snarky girl whom Sigma has a somewhat antagonistic relationship with. There's antimatter bombs, robots, pandemics, secret societies, cults, space, and more puzzles than you can shake a stick at! And, a noncanon ending to the whole shebang that was added post-2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Which... I didn't realize was noncanon for the longest time. Pensive. There's ALSO lots of violence in this one, as one would come to expect from this series, honestly.

And, if capitalism had had its way, Kotaro Uchikoshi's magnum opus would have ended here, at a cliffhanger ending with the promise of a better future (?). BUT, as you can tell by the third header, that's thankfully not what happened!



LET THE DECISION GAME BEGIN...

In the years post-VLR, the Zero Escape fandom launched Operation Bluebird in a bid to raise awareness of the series, and get the third game greenlit. And wouldn't you know, it paid off: in 2015, at Anime Expo, it was announced that the development on the third game was going to continue! And on June 28, 2016, Zero Time Dilemma launched, and brother you know I had that special edition with the irl wristwatch (a staple of the series) on lock! ... which would have been fine but the shipments were delayed due to them getting damaged in transit, so while I bought the 3DS version, I ended up buying it on Steam as well in order to play it sooner.

And thank god I did, because once again, Uchikoshi knocked it out of the park! While I did have some complaints with this game (and others did too, primarily with the 3D models...), I THOROUGHLY enjoyed it, and honestly, it's a miracle it got made at all. This time, several previous characters are back, including Junpei, Akane, Sigma, and Phi, as well as multiple new characters! Including my favorite character in the entire series (also possibly most hated character in the entire series...), Eric!

The story of ZTD takes place BETWEEN 999 and VLR, and this installment is EASILY the bloodiest and goriest of the three: you literally start the game by killing off one of three teams in order to progress the story. In this game, much like the previous one, you can hop around timeline AND gameplay wise, getting information in one timeline to use in another. The gimmick in this one is the "Decision Game", where after completing a puzzle, the characters have to complete some moral quandary, which often involves either the chance of one of them dying, or the inevitability. The game does a pretty decent job of wrapping up the series, as Uchikoshi had stated that he intended ZTD to be the final Zero Escape game. And so it's been, with Uchikoshi having moved on to other games and projects, such as World's End Club.



Zero Escape is SUCH an important series to me, and I hope that I've been able to convey at least a little of what I love so much about the series. It's about having hope for the future, and also dope-ass puzzles. The TC below has many items that are related to ZE either directly or indirectly, as a little treat for fellow fans of the series, and a taste of what to expect for those uninitiated!

credits:

zero escape by the man, the myth, the legend, kotaro uchikoshi
profile template by piers
background via microsoft
gifs by figtreegif @ tumblr
fonts via google fonts
writing by silas

Pet Treasure


Nine Sticker

Nine Sticker

Nine Sticker

Red-Lens Gas Mask

Zero Sticker

Expired Novocaine Vial

Red GPS Watch

Ship Porthole

Battleship Piece Plushie

A Tall Melting Ice Cube

Ovaries Explosion Sticker

Keiths Amy Lee Poster

Flower Print Bookmark

Set of Safe Keys

Rusty Submarine Model

Bloody Hatchet

Chained Coffin

Useless Rusty Knife

Hand of Flame

Sea-Farin Activities: Subeku

V Sticker

L Sticker

R Sticker

Paranoid Bunny Plushie

Perihelion

Gold Sun Relic

Box of Wondrous Surprises

Small Cage Necklace

Vesnali Blue Bird

Right Arm Mutagen

Left Arm Mutagen

Root Beer Float

Quantum Physics, Rabbits, and Robots: A Simplified Theory

Invader Skin

White Pot of Enamel Hobby Paint

Clone Rag Doll

Harvested Moon

Infected Subeta

Z Sticker

T Sticker

D Sticker

Black and Silver Plague Mask

Red Special Coin

Blue Special Coin

Oddly Ornate Revolver

Blue Atebus Locker

Futuristic Watcher Robot Head

Survivors Pump Action Shotgun

Double-Layered Puzzle

Spacetime Ship Key

Scritch

Wheelchair with Dignified Blanket

Shifter 632

Snail Shell

Happy Subeta

Pet Friends