Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors: when hardware imbues identity

NOTE: This piece contains spoilers for 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors.

In my time reading about videogames on the Internet, I’ve seen a few cases of titles that, despite not being the most popular, get almost unanimous acclaim from both the media and the groups of people I’ve got to know online. I recently finished playing one of those games: the PS4 port of 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, the first game in the Zero Escape trilogy.

I make the distinction about the system I played it on right off the bat because, as you can probably tell by the title of this piece, that is a big deal with this particular game. You see, I never had a Nintendo DS, the console where this game originally came out on in 2010 in the U.S., nor did I have a PC capable of emulating a DS (yeah, my PCs were always that bad) so there was no easy way for me to play the game until now.

The game itself is really good and I enjoyed it a lot, but I didn’t understand why everyone loved it so much. It was a very engaging sci-fi visual novel with good characters, fun yet challenging puzzles and a great atmosphere. If that is all there was, I thought, why are all these people so passionate about it? Could it be that it just didn’t click with me in the same way? It only took one tweet from a friend, however, to realize what I was missing.

The biggest reveal in the game shows the player that a younger version of Akane (a major character in the game) is experiencing what’s happening to Junpei (the playable character) through his eyes and that the way he solves the puzzles is thanks to Akane sending the solutions to Junpei via a form of telepathy, since she’s also going through the same puzzles in her time period.

However, the final puzzle of the game, which the player has to do during the reveal, has Junpei solving said puzzle in the present so that Akane can receive the solution in the past in order to save her life, essencially the complete opposite of what has been happening throught the game.

This moment is as emotional and powerful as it is hard to explain, but on the PS4 it’s missing an entire layer of context that elevates it even higher. In the DS version, the game uses the bottom screen to present only narration in third person, while the top screen has only dialogue. Also, the bottom screen is where you solve all the puzzles. During the ending, both screens start to, quite literally, have a conversation with each other and that is the moment when it’s evident that the bottom screen has always represented Akane’s perpective, while the top screen was Junpei’s point of view.

This is driven home even further during the final puzzle, where the game is suddenly upside down so the DS has to be physically flipped in order to have the touch screen on top, representing that this time, Junpei is the one solving the puzzle. This blog post by Kua Hiong Poh has pictures of what that looks like for reference.

The PS4 version, in turn, doesn’t have nearly the same impact. For one, the compromise that had to be made in order to accommodate for one screen was to have two different views of the game called “Adventure Screen” and “Novel Screen”. The Novel Screen basically combines a version of both the narration and the dialogue from the two DS screens slightly rewritten to naturally integrate the voice acting, a new element introduced in this port. The Adventure Screen is mostly the voiced dialogue and some instances of brief internal monologues but without any of the narration. One can switch between the two with one button but the idea is very poorly implemented.

To illustrate, here is a screenshot of a scene in the Aventure Screen.

And here is the same exact moment but in the Novel Screen. Note that this screen also shows part of the previous dialogue. The lines marked with quotations are voiced and they’re the only text that you get in the Adventure screen.

Except for very specific moments, you have to manually switch screens if you want to read what the Novel Screen adds to a scene. However, the presentation goes against the standards set by visual novels and it feels very intrusive. Even if most of the screen is static, it just doesn’t feel good to have a wall of text obscuring the illustrations, characters and enviroments when the Adventure Screen, which the game defaults to, presents it in a more conventional and elegant way.

If a player hasn’t been using the Novel Screen for most of the game, the reveal feels out of nowhere by the time it comes. To soften this, there are a some scenes where you only have access to the Novel Screen, but those moments are so few and mostly feel out of place when one has spent a significant amount of time in the Adventure Screen. Thanks to this, they don’t work as intended.

This changes during the ending, however, when the PS4 version starts to switch screens automatically in order to simulate the conversation between both perspectives. When the true nature of the game finally reveals itself, the screens change names: Aventure Screen becomes Junpei Vision and Novel Screen becomes Akane Vision. This is good enough to give the player an idea of what is going on, but it still feels rather odd. It is why it took other people telling me about it to realize that the twist was there the whole time.

This video by Youtube user Soren puts the DS version of the reveal and the PC version (which is the same as the PS4 version) in sync with each other, making the differences quite obvious:

After stumbling upon a Q&A with Kotaro Uchikoshi, the writer and director of the game, I found this response when asked if it would’ve been possible for the reveal to make sense on a different console:

This game was designed specifically for the DS because of its unique interface. The DS has a top screen and a bottom screen, and I thought to myself, “What can I do that utilizes this unique setup?” The result I came up with was 999’s “twist”. So, no, it wouldn’t have worked on any other platform.

When I first read this, I couldn’t help but agree. The PS4 port that I played, a version of the game that operates on a single screen, seemingly wasn’t the way it was meant to be played.

When I think about it, can I say that the version of 999 that I played is the same game that all my friends kept recommending me all these year? The game was clearly made with the unique features of the DS in mind, so when if someone strips that away, is it still the same game? What happens to 999 when the element that defines it’s most important moment is taken away?

Without the context of the dual-screens that the DS provides, the scene itself has to carry the entire weight of the climax of the game. It still does a fine job because of the writing and the voice acting, but to me it doesn’t feel anywhere near what it would’ve been if I was playing it on a DS. Like I said before, a friend had to tweet me about it in order for me to realize what was the scene actually looks like.

All these thoughts and mixed feelings lingered in my mind for quite a while after finishing the game. After a few days, the conclusion I finally arrived at is that whatever version of 999 that is not the DS version may still be the same game, but with a very different flavor that sometimes feels like it doesn’t really resemble the original game. It is a shame that I didn’t get to experience it in the way it makes the most sense.

That being said, I am really glad that 999 got a PS4 port because it allowed me to finally play it after hearing so much about it. While the experience might lack the identity of the original game that made so many people fell in love with it, it still has its strong points that make for a very compelling game. And from there, the Zero Escape trilogy just gets better. In the end, this port is a good way to get into a great series of games, even with the flaws that come from being on a different hardware.

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