Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward opens with a man waking in an elevator beside a girl he has never met — except she knows his name. Before he can ask how, a rabbit appears and tells them the elevator is about to fall. That is the first ninety seconds. It is also the whole design of the game in miniature: a locked room, a stranger who knows too much, and a talking rabbit about to explain the rules of a game you will not enjoy losing.
Chunsoft developed Virtue’s Last Reward as the second entry in the Zero Escape series. It first shipped in 2012 for the Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita, and has since landed on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. Kotaro Uchikoshi directed and wrote the script. Aksys Games handled localization for North America, Rising Star Games for Europe.
The premise is a kidnapping. Nine people wake inside a warehouse-like facility and are told by Zero III — a CGI rabbit, voiced by TARAKO in Japanese and Cindy Robinson in English — that they are playing the Nonary Game. Each wears a bracelet showing a point value that starts at three. Escape requires reaching nine.
Trailer, via GameSpot Trailers.
Sigma and Phi in the Elevator
Sigma, the player character, is voiced by Kosuke Toriumi and Troy Baker. Phi, the girl from the elevator, is voiced by Chiaki Omagawa and Karen Strassman. She has what the game’s own material calls a “no-nonsense attitude,” which is a polite way of saying she will not slow down for you.
The rest of the cast fills out the standard death-game roster: Dio (Yoshimasa Hosoya/Liam O’Brien), rude and insensitive; Tenmyouji (Rokuro Naya/Dave B. Mitchell), elderly; Quark (Rie Kugimiya/Erin Fitzgerald), a young boy with energy to spare; Luna (Mamiko Noto/Laura Bailey), kind and quiet; Alice (Atsuko Tanaka/Tara Platt), commanding and focused; and K (Daisuke Ono/Travis Willingham), an amnesiac in a full-body suit of armor he cannot remove. Clover (Yukari Tamura/Wendee Lee) is an unpredictable girl who appeared in Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors.
The setting is 2028. The facility is abandoned, warehouse-like, and stuffed with puzzle rooms. Zero III controls the game. The participants call it “Zero Jr.” to distinguish it from the human Zero, whom they call “Zero Sr.” That naming convention tells you something about how much the game trusts its audience to keep up.
Ally or Betray
The Ambidex Game is the engine. Players pair off and choose to ally or betray. Both ally: each gains two points. Both betray: nothing changes. One betrays while the other allies: the betrayer gains three points.
This is a prisoner’s dilemma with a body count, and it is the best thing Virtue’s Last Reward does. The choices feed directly into the story’s branching structure, which runs to twenty-four endings. Not all of them are wins.
Gameplay splits into two modes. Novel sections are visual novel segments — reading, dialogue, and the occasional decision. Escape sections drop you into a first-person room and ask you to find a way out. You move between predetermined positions, collect items, combine objects, and solve brain teasers including Lights Out and sliding puzzles. Every escape room hides a safe with two passwords: one gives you the key out, the other opens a hidden folder with backstory.
A Flowchart That Shows Every Wrong Turn
The quality-of-life additions matter more than they sound. An auto-advance text mode lets you listen to the voice acting without clicking through every line. A memo function lets you write notes. A flowchart shows how alternate choices unfold and lets you jump back to any completed section and pick differently.
The in-game calculator has been removed. Good. It was never the point.
The flowchart is the real fix. In a game with twenty-four endings, it turns repetition from a punishment into a tool. You are not replaying; you are navigating. Hints come from the characters, and if you drop the puzzle difficulty from “hard” to “easy,” you get more direct ones. That is a concession, not a failure. The puzzles are the weakest part of the package, and the game knows it.
A Commercial Failure That Got Everything Else Right
Virtue’s Last Reward was a commercial failure in Japan. It was also released to positive reviews, and the split in critical opinion landed almost exactly where it should: praise for the story and characters, disagreement over the escape sections.
Here is where this paper lands. The escape rooms are competent and forgettable. The story is neither. Uchikoshi built a machine where every betrayal, every alliance, and every wrong guess is load-bearing, and the flowchart means you actually get to see the structure instead of imagining it. Twenty-four endings is not padding when the route to each one is the content.
The characters carry more weight than the premise deserves. Phi, Luna, and Tenmyouji are doing real work. Dio is a jerk with a function. K’s armor is a mystery the game earns. The voice cast — Baker, Strassman, Bailey, O’Brien, Lee, Platt, Willingham, Mitchell, Fitzgerald, Robinson — is deep enough that auto-advance mode is worth using on its own merits.
The escape sections are where the game stumbles. They are escape-the-room puzzles with a first-person camera and predetermined positions, and they interrupt momentum in a story that does not need interrupting. The safe-with-two-passwords structure is clever. The puzzles inside are not always.
The Release Timeline
| Platform | Release |
|---|---|
| Nintendo 3DS | 2012 |
| PlayStation Vita | 2012 |
| PlayStation 4 | Later port |
| Xbox One | Later port |
| PC (Microsoft Windows) | Later port |
The original 2012 release came on 3DS and Vita. The PS4, Xbox One, and PC versions followed as later ports. If you are coming to Virtue’s Last Reward now, the modern platforms are the ones to play, and the flowchart is the reason.
What matters here is that Virtue’s Last Reward solved a problem the visual novel genre still has not fully solved: how to make a branching story feel like a single coherent object instead of a pile of save files. The flowchart is the answer. The Ambidex Game is the proof. The escape rooms are the tax you pay for both.
Fourteen years on, the game’s reputation rests on the story, and the story holds. It is dense, it is cruel to its characters, and it asks you to make choices you will regret. That is the deal. Take it.
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