1 Name: TheWeirdOne : 2013-04-23 06:38 ID:vwxxQuqB (Image: 586x330 jpg, 40 kb) [Del]
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 six 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.
Story:
Junpei, the player character, 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" within nine hours; fail and 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 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 Alice, 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 the 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, 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. 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 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.
At this point, the player learns that the gameplay they have witnessed has been 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 that their bracelets did not contain detonators. Outside, they find an SUV with Ace tied up in the trunk, 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.
[For: Nintendo DS]
