Visual and Sound Novel Ports on Mobile
While searching for more visual novels in Apple’s app store, I came across a port of 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors.
This version is different from the DS version in that you don’t need to solve any puzzles and you also have access to a flow chart so you can go back and pick different paths. The game also flat-out tells you which paths to take to get the good ending if you die enough times (which I did).
I love this game – I even preordered the DS version and got a replica watch of the Nonary Bracelet as a bonus. But I died a lot. So much that I couldn’t handle running through the game again to figure out the right path for the good ending. So I’m thankful for this mobile version that tells me what to do if I die too much, but I do miss the fun puzzles.
This 999 port was published by Aksys Games, and they have one other game in the app store – Banshee’s Last Cry. You might have heard of a game called Kamaitachi no Yoru, or Night of the Sickle Weasel before. It’s the first “sound novel” that got really popular and shaped the sound/visual novel genre as we know it today. And Banshee’s Last Cry is the first official English localization of that historic game! Definitely give it a play.
Visual novels are perfect for mobile and I hope more quality games like these two published by Aksys will be released in the future. With Spike Chunsoft opening a US branch soon, perhaps we won’t have to wait long!
999 didn’t have the flowchart? The only game in the series I’ve played was Virtue’s Last Reward on the 3DS, and that definitely did.
I’m in an odd place with that game. I really enjoyed the room escape puzzle sections, but the visual novel parts I found irritating; as you say, there are tons of path branches and only one “good” ending, and the choices you have to make to get there are blindingly arbitrary. I get frustrated when I know there’s a “correct” choice, but I can only make it through sheer random luck.
I don’t recall it having a flowchart. I remember having to restart the game and holding down a button to skip through all the text I’ve already read.
But yeah, good point on picking branches just by guessing. I remember I had a notebook full of clues I’d discovered from each branch, trying to keep it all in order so hopefully I could figure out the correct path. But I’d received one too many a bloody death so I gave up, heh.
When I played 999 I did everything right on my first try. When you do that, you can’t get the true ending. It just ends when they find the coffin and it’s like “Now play it again”
That put me off pretty heavily.