Much like its predecessor, Virtue's Last Reward is a very dark story where people are trapped in a Deadly Game. Frightening scenes are to be expected.
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- Much like the previous game, Clover's ending is full of it. You get the first hint that something is terribly wrong when you bump into Phi while chasing after Clover — Phi is not her usual brusque and no-nonsense self, and she genuinely looks ill and devoid of all life. Then everyone in the warehouse is suddenly gone. When you find most of them, it's as a heap of dead bodies. Then Sigma's own Radical-6 kicks in and he slits his own throat with a used scalpel. Have fun sleeping.
- Luna appearing out of nowhere outside of the AB rooms during her ending, especially when considering that you've only just found out that she is a GAULEM and was thought to have been killed by Clover. Slightly mitigated later on as despite Luna being a robot, she still has no intentions of hurting anyone and never chooses betray at all over the course of the game.
- At the end of Luna's route, Zero Jr. slowly starts to shut her down, and she dies in Sigma's arms. Meanwhile, the drug she was injected with is breaking down her artificial muscles, which results in her skin cracking and her eyelids falling away from her metal face, all whilst crying and hugging Sigma.
- Alice's expressions when you're trying to stop her from killing herself can be this. She looks almost possessed at times, especially when she first comes down with her symptoms. The fact that the camera zooms in on her bloody corpse a lot can also make you a bit squeamish.
- While it happens in virtually every route, Quark attempting to kill himself after catching Radical-6 can be VERY hard to watch.
- Tenmyouji's exposition dump at the very end of the true ending; Radical-6 spread all over the world, just like the in-game newspaper and journals stated. Hundreds of thousands died BEFORE someone decided to send the planet into nuclear winter. And Junpei lived through all of this.
- The sight of Sigma's mechanical arms in the End or Beginning ending is enough to send a chill down anyone's spine. This ending also shows a newscaster commit suicide on live television.
- When you open a treatment pod and see Dio dead inside. Just imagine being trapped in a confined space and notice someone outside your treatment pod shutting off your oxygen supply. There's literally nothing you can do but to wait until you die from asphyxiation.
- In most of the bad endings and some of the "good" endings, the number 9 door is opened and one or two characters escape, leaving Sigma and the others trapped permanently inside the facility. Everyone is infected with Radical-6 and will eventually succumb to it without Akane's treatment. And given that Akane dies in all endings where the bombs don't go off...
- Quark's ending. Sigma remembers that his arms are fake, and thus uses this to almost kill Dio using the 9 door. Everyone tells him to stop, with him complying. Cue Sigma's arm getting crushed along with explicit sounds.Sigma: No... I'm gonna live...
- The researcher's journal found in the Laboratory. It gives a detailed account of the Radical-6 virus, and seems clinical, if a bit disturbing due to its subject matter. But the last page is horrific, detailing what the world looks like, now that the virus has spread. It borders on being an Apocalyptic Log.The bodies of those dead from suicide are piled up along the roads leading into and out of town. The entire area reeks with the stench of decay, and the sky is filled with the constant buzzing of flies. At times, their swarms are so thick that when one passes it feels as if a cloud has gone over the sun. Every day I see more crows, and rats are everywhere, feeding on the dead. Ironically, the only healthy-looking creatures are the stray cats, who have grown fat on a plentiful rodent diet. The few humans who survived the outbreak have been locked away by the government in underground shelters. I don't know how many were saved, but I fear only a handful. Oh Lord, please... let their future be a bright one.
- Dio activating multiple bombs in several ending routes is plenty terrifying, especially since there's no way to prevent it when he reveals the detonator and even one bomb can kill everyone, but it's topped off with his insane screaming about how they all are going to die as they deserve, while the group restrains him. Small wonder Phi has him sedated immediately after.
- With a certain reveal in Zero Time Dilemma a retroactive nightmare appears. In K's ending, Sigma is forced into a situation where he must give the neostigmine to either K or Phi, since he only has enough for one. With the reveal that Phi is actually the daughter of an alternate Sigma, the situation turns from "which of my friends do I save before I die?" to "which of my children do I sacrifice so the other can live?". It doesn't alleviate the situation even with the knowledge that neither Sigma, Kyle, or even Dr. Klim knew of this fact.
- The proposal that Akane gives to Alice and Clover for getting them back to their proper time with "Schrodinger's Cat" that ZTD reveals. The transporter is capable of sending atomic data from whatever it scans through the morphogenetic field directly to itself into whatever time period it exists in and is active. Akane's plan to get the VLR Alice & Clover back to the "present" of 2029, is for them to be scanned and have the transporter of 2029 reconstruct them... but the original scanned versions of Alice and Clover will still be stuck in the 2074 bad future. The ones exported will still have the VLR memories, but there will still be two people trapped in the future with no way to get home and only a cold assurance that their lives in the past were fulfilled. And no amount of SHIFT-induced swapping can fix this.
- While not discussed in as much detail as in ZTD, when you realize that people who can shift between timelines can swap conscience, it makes the fate of having that ability terrifying, because it means that at any point, a shift-er's conscience can be taken over by one from another timeline and effectively be killed or just cease to exist.
- Alice voting to betray against Sigma in the second round of the AB game on her route. Just when you think you can safely vote 'Ally' when your opponent is unconscious in the Infirmary room during a simple game round, you step out of the AB room to see the results...only to discover that your BP result had suddenly dropped from 1 to -1, which results in your death. Then it hits you, right before your bracelet activates the needles due to the penalty. Your opponent was not unconscious the whole time and had managed to slip inside an AB room at the very last second to vote 'Betray' when you have least expected it. With this knowledge in mind, it makes voting 'Ally' with just 1 BP left very difficult to do in the future.
- Seeing the skulls on the results screen for the third AB Game in Luna's route (signifying that those participants were penalized for nobody in their group voting) really drives home the fact that almost everyone in the place is dead.
- Sigma's bad ending. Sigma betrays Clover to reach 9 BP, but as he opens the number nine door, Tenmyouji notices the white fluid dripping from his hand. The others all then think Sigma is a robot and knock him out to prevent him from escaping. When he wakes up, he finds that they also cut off his arm and stole his bracelet so that they could play the AB Game and escape without him, leaving Sigma all by himself with no hope of escape.
