Game #1251: Zero Time Dilemma

 One final game. 

 Well, this is it, the final game in the Zero Escape series, Zero Time Dilemma. Once again, it's a visual novel that mixes a narrative that involves quantic timelines with a few interactive puzzle segments.

 There's not much to say really, once again, 9 people are selected by a guy named Zero to take part in a deadly game. Akane and Junpei return, alongside Sigma and Phi, as well as four new guys. The game takes place before Virtue's Last Reward, but if you played that game to the end you'll understand why it also takes place after that game. Honestly, this series has a heavy focus on its narrative, so it makes no sense to play this game without playing the previous ones, heck, a ton of stuff won't make sense if you skipped even one of them.

 In this one, characters are divided into three groups of three people each, and while they do get to interact between teams every now and then, for the most part, each team will spend more time interacting with itself than with the other two. Unlike previous games, now you select between fragments, as participants get their memories wiped every hour and a half, so making sense of the timeline is up to you.

 The English voice acting is hit and miss. Some characters are really well done, while others, like Akane, leave a lot to be desired. The presentation took a bump up, as characters animate much more, even if a bit stiffly, during the narrative sections.

 Zero Time Dilemma was fine. It doesn't really feel like closure, but it's an ending. While I thought it was as good as any other game in the series, I feel like this one's plot sometimes... feels a bit more of a stretch than the others. For instance, at one time, two characters decide that there's only enough food for 9-10 months, and yet, they survive for way longer without any proper explanation as to how. Another time a character says that Koi fish die when taken from Brasil unless you put a Piranha with them, and that's just a flat-out lie. So, yeah, it doesn't feel as tight as the previous games, but hey, it wasn't a bad time at all.

 7.5