999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors
Encyclopedia
is an adventure game
Adventure game
An adventure game is a video game in which the player assumes the role of protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and puzzle-solving instead of physical challenge. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media such as literature and film,...

 developed by Chunsoft
Chunsoft
is a Japanese video game developer specializing in console RPGs and visual novels. It was founded by Koichi Nakamura, a video game designer from Enix...

 and published in Japan by Spike
Spike (company)
is a Japanese video game developer and publisher. Most of the staff were part of Human Entertainment. Human's Fire Pro Wrestling series is owned by Spike.-Games developed:*Crimson Tears*Dangan Ronpa: Kibou no Gakuen to Zetsubou no Koukousei...

 on December 10, 2009, and in North America by Aksys Games
Aksys Games
Aksys Games Localization, Inc. is a video game publisher that specializes in translating and localizing Japanese video games for English-speaking markets. It was founded by Akibo Shieh in 2006. Some of its clients include Namco Bandai Games, Xseed Games, and Atlus USA. Aksys Games is best known for...

 on November 16, 2010. The game's design team was led by Kotaro Uchikoshi, who is also the writer of the acclaimed visual novel
Visual novel
A is an interactive fiction game featuring mostly static graphics, usually with anime-style art, or occasionally live-action stills or video footage...

 Ever 17: The Out of Infinity. A novel based on the game has also been released, with a slightly-different plot.

Nine people have been abducted by a mysterious kidnapper who uses the alias "Zero." They find themselves on a ship— possibly a replica of the Titaniac and are told that they have nine hours to escape before the ship sinks beneath the waves. Zero is running the "Nonary
Nonary
Nonary is a base- numeral system, typically using the digits 0-8, but not the digit 9.The first few numbers in nonary and decimal are:Nonary 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 81011121314Decimal 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 910111213The...

 Game" - a game "where you will put your life on the line." The group is forced to split up into various subgroups and explore "numbered doors," behind which lie Zero's puzzles. Zero promises that escape lies behind a door numbered [9]. The characters must work together despite suspicions of each other to advance, as well as to discover Zero's motive and identity.

The game is very text-heavy for an adventure game; more emphasis is placed on the characters, their motives, and the mystery of the situation than the puzzles.

A second game in the series, Kyokugen Dasshutsu Adv: Zennin Shibō Desu
Kyokugen Dasshutsu Adv: Zennin Shibō Desu
is an upcoming visual novel developed by Chunsoft. It is a successor the Nintendo DS title 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and is being created by the same staff. The game contains full voice acting, and is rendered in 3D models, rather than 2D sprites like its predecessor...

, was announced in August 2011. Among the cast are Clover and Alice, both of whom were featured in 999. The antagonist also shares the same codename, but with a "3" attached.

Gameplay

Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors has two types of gameplay. Puzzles are placed behind the doors the characters enter, and the player must solve them to advance. This involves investigating each room, picking up tools, and using any notable items in the room. For example, a set of music scores is scattered about in inconvenient locations; when combined and played on a piano, they unlock a door. In the rest of the game, the player interacts with the other characters and make decisions that affect the story of the game. Different dialogue options can reveal different useful nuggets of information, and Junpei's choices of which doors to enter personally changes the information the player learns. Junpei or the other characters may die depending on what doors and dialogue choices the player makes. There are 6 endings in total, and the player's decisions change which ending occurs. Only one ending is the true ending, and one specific 'bad' ending must be achieved first in order to unlock the true ending.

Characters

The game features nine characters that are introduced at the start of the game. As they have all found themselves aboard a ship against their will, and are marked with different numbered bracelets, they opt to use code names based on their assigned number to identify each other.
  1. Ace - an older gentleman
  2. Snake - a blind young man dressed like a prince; he is Clover's brother
  3. Santa - an aloof and sometimes foul-mouthed white-haired young man
  4. Clover - a young girl with pink hair, she is Snake's sister
  5. Junpei - a college student and the game's protagonist. Junpei's name is revealed to everyone before they opt to use code names
  6. June - a young woman, she is Junpei's childhood friend, Akane
  7. Seven - a heavy-set man who, unlike the others, has no memory of the events that led him to the ship
  8. Lotus - a woman dressed as an exotic dancer
  9. The 9th Man - a nervous man with a tie and messy hair; he does not offer a pseudonym

Story

Junpei, the player protagonist, wakes up inside a small locked room; his last memory was that of him being drugged to sleep by an unknown person in a gas mask. He finds that he has a bracelet with the number "5" on it and that he can not leave the room. He appears to be on a boat, and is forced to solve a puzzle to escape the room before it floods from a leaking window.

Escaping the lower decks, he encounters eight other people, each with their own bracelets with different digits on them. Junpei recognizes one of them, his old childhood friend Akane. As they find that the ship is no longer taking on water, they are greeted by their unseen host over a loudspeaker. The host, "Zero", informs them they are playing the "Nonary Game", which they can only escape by finding a door marked with a "9" before nine hours are up or else the ship will resume sinking. They learn of electronic devices called REDs and DEADs near each marked door that assure that only three to five people whose bracelet numbers' total digital root
Digital root
The digital root of a number is the value obtained by an iterative process of summing digits, on each iteration using the result from the previous iteration to compute a digit sum...

 equals the number on the door can pass through each door; otherwise, a small bomb planted in each person's stomach will be detonated, killing them.

As the group assign themselves code names and plan their escape, the 9th Man holds Clover hostage and forces the group to help him through door 5. When he ventures alone through it, he is killed when the bomb in his stomach detonates. Knowing that the game is real, the group proceeds to explore the ship, splitting into groups as necessary. The player has the option to select which group to travel with and other decisions that ultimately affect the fate of the game. Depending on the choices made, Junpei learns of several strange stories that involve forms of morphic resonance communication between people and entities from those groups he travels with, as well as stories of a woman named Allice, an Egyptian priestess apparently frozen in ice-9 for centuries. Certain decisions may lead to a bad ending in which Junpei and others are killed before they can escape; the game allows the player to start again from the beginning with knowledge of these events to avoid them. This is required to access the True Ending of the game.

In reaching the game's True Ending, Junpei is told of the events leading up to this point. Nine years before, Cradle Pharmaceutical, led by CEO Gentarou Hongou, kidnapped nine sets of siblings for an experiment involving morphic fields. The children included Snake and Clover, and Santa and Akane, as well as Lotus' children, twins Nona and Ennea. One of each set of siblings was to be placed aboard the Gigantic
HMHS Britannic
HMHS Britannic was the third and largest of the White Star Line. She was the sister ship of and , and was intended to enter service as a transatlantic passenger liner. She was launched just before the start of the First World War and was laid up at her builders in Belfast for many months before...

, the sister ship of the RMS Titanic, the others in a secret facility in the Nevada desert-Building Q. Both sets of children were to play the Nonary Game with those in the building solving the puzzles and sending the solutions to those aboard the ship. Hongou's desire was to understand morphic fields to try to cure his prosopagnosia
Prosopagnosia
Prosopagnosia is a disorder of face perception where the ability to recognize faces is impaired, while the ability to recognize other objects may be relatively intact...

. People are more easily able to access morphic fields under conditions of "epiphany" and "danger" - thus, trying to solve problems in a life-and-death situation, exactly what the Nonary Game sets up. However, the experiment went awry: first, Akane was misplaced, put alongside her brother Santa on the ship rather than sent to Nevada; second, Seven, a detective at the time, had discovered Cradle to be behind the kidnappings, and was able to rescue the children on the ship. As they fled, Hongou recaptured Akane and forced her back into the incinerator room to continue the experiment alone. She was unable to solve the sudoku
Sudoku
is a logic-based, combinatorial number-placement puzzle. The objective is to fill a 9×9 grid with digits so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3×3 sub-grids that compose the grid contains all of the digits from 1 to 9...

 puzzle to escape the incinerator, and apparently died. However, Akane (June) has been playing the Nonary Game with Junpei and the rest of the group the whole time, implying a mysterious paradox
Paradox
Similar to Circular reasoning, A paradox is a seemingly true statement or group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation which seems to defy logic or intuition...

.

At this point, the player learns that the gameplay is shown through the viewpoint of young Akane during the first Nonary Game. She was able to connect to the Junpei in the second Nonary Game nine years in the future through morphic fields and watch his actions. Akane had been able to see multiple futures for Junpei depending on his choices (i.e. the multiple Endings), and is able to provide him with guidance as to which choices will succeed. During the timelines in which Junpei is on track to fail, Akane falls ill from a mysterious fever—the fact that she will have been unable to survive the incinerator in her own Nonary Game if Junpei fails his. Junpei learns that Ace is really Hongou, and the 9th Man was another Cradle executive. During the second Nonary Game, Ace had lured the 9th Man to act as he did to test the seriousness of the game and to avoid his identity being revealed, as well as obtain the "9" bracelet he possessed. Ace also kills two other Cradle executives that Akane had planted for revenge for the first Nonary Game. Junpei and the group also learn that Zero is really Akane assisted by Santa, having created the second Nonary Game to guide Junpei to the same puzzle in the incinerator that Akane faced nine years earlier. Junpei, under duress and linked by the same situation, is able to communicate back to young Akane, and demonstrates the solution to the puzzle to her. Young Akane reunites with Seven, Santa, Snake, and the other children, and escapes the ship before it sinks.

In the present, Junpei and his friends escape, discovering they were at the Nevada facility all along and their bracelets did not contain detonators. Outside, they find an SUV with Ace tied up in the back, and they drive off, hoping to catch up to Santa and Akane. As the story closes, they encounter a hitchhiker, who Junpei recognizes to be Alice, and Clover stops the car to let her on.

Development and marketing

In 999, Uchikoshi and producer, Jiro Ishii, initially intended to have boys and girls locked together via explosive handcuffs, but later decided against it. In the United States, a replica of the watches seen on the wrists of the game's characters was offered as a pre-order bonus at GameStop
GameStop
GameStop Corporation is an American video game and entertainment software retailer. The company, whose headquarters is in Grapevine, Texas, United States, operates 6,500 retail stores throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, New...

; due to low pre-orders, Aksys later made these available on their website's shop, both in a bundle with the game and individually.

Reception

999 received critical acclaim, with several near perfect scores emphasizing its well written story, remarkable presentation, and addictive gameplay. Some of the notable review scores are 10/10 from Destructoid
Destructoid
Destructoid is an independent video game-focused blog based in San Francisco, California that was founded in March 2006. It has since grown into one of the most widely read video game sites on the Internet, reaching more than 3 million unique visitors per month...

, 9/10 from Nintendo Power
Nintendo Power
Nintendo Power magazine is a monthly news and strategy magazine formerly published in-house by Nintendo of America, but now run independently. As of issue #222 , Nintendo contracted publishing duties to Future US, the U.S. subsidiary of British publisher Future.The first issue published was...

, IGN
IGN
IGN is an entertainment website that focuses on video games, films, music and other media. IGN's main website comprises several specialty sites or "channels", each occupying a subdomain and covering a specific area of entertainment...

 and GamesRadar
GamesRadar
GamesRadar is a multi-format video game website featuring regular news, previews, reviews, videos, and guides. It is owned and operated simultaneously in the UK and US by worldwide publisher Future Publishing...

, and 4.5/5 from Cheat Code Central
Cheat Code Central
Cheat Code Central is a video game website primarily known for its extensive list of cheat codes. Cheat Code Central, also known as CCC and CheatCC, offers previews, reviews, news, and various articles on the gaming industry...

. The game received a score of 82 on Metacritic
Metacritic
Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...

, based on 26 critics.

Following the game's release, it sold out from many US retailers both traditional and online, including Amazon.com
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...

 and GameStop
GameStop
GameStop Corporation is an American video game and entertainment software retailer. The company, whose headquarters is in Grapevine, Texas, United States, operates 6,500 retail stores throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, New...

, resulting in high prices on the secondary market. Aksys has since announced a second printing.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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