Sequels have a tendency to try and pack in “more” than the predecessor. This is true for video games as much as it is true for films. You want to hit on the same formula that made the first a success, but pack in “more” of what made it a success. That is, after all, what players want, right? Traditional business practices seem to suggest as much.

Unfortunately, this can ultimately be the downfall of the sequel projects. The entirety of the Resident Evil franchise has been built around the idea of “bigger” and “better”, much to its detriment. Instead, the best games in the series are the (remake of the) first and the fourth, whose stories are much more isolated and gameplay is more focused.

I enjoyed the DS game 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors (from here on referred to simply as 999). It had its frustrating moments of near-repeating text and obtuse puzzle solutions, but on the whole it was a pretty fun game with a really interesting story. I also really enjoyed the characters and how they interacted with each other.

So it seemed to me that Virtue’s Last Reward, sequel to 999, would be better. With an improved interface and tools designed for hopping about different timelines without having to restart from the beginning, the game is all set up to be an even better experience, right?

Well, yes and no. I suppose, however, that I should start with the premise.

The Zero Escape games, both 999 and Virtue’s Last Reward, have a similar premise to the film Saw 2. Take a group of individuals and place them in a dangerous yet isolated environment filled with puzzles that must be solved in order to escape. Each character has a bracelet with a number on it, and in the two games they serve different purposes. In Virtue’s Last Reward, a player cannot escape until the number on their bracelet is “9”, and once the final door has been opened it shuts and seals itself off. So if there are any other players that are below “9” as a value, they cannot escape.

Trust played a rather large role in 999, but Virtue’s Last Reward kicks it up by introducing an additional trial: the Ambidex Game. Of the nine participants in the game, six of them will be paired off into three groups while the remaining three are solo. Each solo is matched with a pair, creating a total of three teams. After each puzzle round, the pairs have to vote against the solo they were matched with. You gain points on your bracelet based on whether you and the other member(s), the solo or pair, choose Ally or Betray.

As a result, a lot of the story revolves around issues of trust and betrayal. This was an excellent way to expand on what made 999 such an interesting story, and indeed becomes a great element in interactive narrative. Despite being a video game with preprogrammed and therefore predetermined outcomes, the feeling you get when a character you liked, a character you were certain would choose ally, instead betrays you. At the same time, the game does a good job at guilting you for choosing betray.

What is perhaps best about this system is it does not adhere to any sense of “paragon” or “renegade”, or “good” versus “evil”, binary paths of morality. While most games these days would require the “best” ending be a result of an all-good path, Virtue’s Last Reward throws this out the window by acknowledging that no one is perfect. People’s feelings change based upon the situation, and our actions in one reality may be completely different in another despite similar, but not exact, circumstances.

It’s a bit of a shame that this wasn’t the overall point of the game’s story, though. Or that the game’s focus wasn’t narrowed down a bit in general.

Virtue’s Last Reward really is more of everything there was to 999. Larger story, more branching paths, more endings, and more digressions to lengthy pseudo-scientific discussions that take current theories and stretch them into the supernatural. All in all it pads the game to be roughly thirty or more hours when it doesn’t need to be.

I know there are a lot of people out there that love such lengthy games, but the problem here is that so much of it is some form of repetition. Remember, a lot of the circumstances on these alternate timelines are similiar, even though they are not exact. While the game allows the player to skip through repeat dialog, a lot of scenes will hit brick walls where maybe a single line is different than before, grinding it to a halt. Or perhaps there’s more content that changes, but only based on which characters want to pair with who, or what characters have paired off in the past.

Similarly, a player only needed to get one or two optional endings in 999 before getting the “true” ending that was, on the whole, quite satisfying. Virtue’s Last Reward requires you achieve eight other endings before finally getting the ninth, and continues on with even more story following that. Each of these endings can take up an hour of time, and each of them requires the player to sit through the credits. There is no skip button at that point. If the player also is not quick-witted enough to write down potentially important information in the “MEMO” pad, a feature where the player can write anything and save it across timelines, then they’ll need to go back to those endings in order to make sure they have such information memorized.

While enjoyment of a story is truly subjective, I cannot help but feel that Virtue’s Last Reward could have told its story in less time with fewer words or digressions. As it is, there are moral questions that aren’t raised until the very end of the game, and these are questions that would have been much more interesting to explore than a long-winded explanation of the multiverse theory.

While Virtue’s Last Reward sees a lot of improvements, such as skipping to specific nodes on a timeline instead of having to restart, being able to switch a puzzle to “easy” difficulty where hints are more frequently dropped, and having a memo pad to store information, I still feel 999 is the better overall game simply by having a smaller, more self-contained story with fewer digressions. It still had all of those things, and all of the flaws in Virtue’s Last Reward were still present in 999. However, by expanding on its predecessor, Virtue’s Last Reward also amplified its flaws.

Despite the improvements, it still manages to become a more tiresome game as a result.