They lost me at "... ... ... ... ... ..."
My brother played VLR and loved it, talked its story up, and then bought it for me for Christmas so we could talk about it. I cleared out a weekend to get through the first play through. It started out alright enough, locked in an elevator with spunky/sassy anime female and a crazy bunny AI/Puppet from a Saw movie. By Sunday night, I was irritatingly cussing at the screen while blindly clicking through every bit of the first ending I got for this story. I then immediately was thrust back into the beginning of the game and I timed how long it took to redo the first puzzle and get to the first choice. 17 minutes. Those were the last 17 minutes of this game I could stomach.
Now I am no stranger to Japanese story telling. I watched Robotech in the mornings before I went to Japanese language class in the mid-late 90's. I played JRPG's of all levels of quality in story and Japanese-ness. These characters are simply not interesting and their interactions with each other are nonsense. Now if the puzzles were at all difficult or fun then I could probably have seen the game through to complete all of them. Sadly, they were not. So, with the puzzles being equivalent to a "Hello World" program and the fate of the characters being as meaningless as the end of "Lost", there is just nothing here for me.
If your answer to the question, "What if a crazy bunny SAW puppet kidnapped an Anime guy, Spunky girl, Anime smart girl, two anime stripper girls, a dude stuck in his cyclone veritech armor, an old guy, a young kid, and a dude in a top hat from sailor moon, to force them to play non-lethal games with a vague threat of non-painful death looming somewhere in the back burner?" is "Who the fuck cares?" then you might side with me on this game, Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward.
