Visual Novel / Virtue's Last Reward

So, what's it going to be? Will you choose to Ally? Or to Betray? ^note From left to right: Zero Jr., Luna, K, Quark, Tenmyouji, Phi, Sigma, Clover, Alice, Dio

"Tu fui, ego eris." ^Translation"What you are, I was; what I am, you will be."

Virtue's Last Reward ^note (Kyokugen Dasshutsu ADV: Zennin Shibou Desu; lit. "Extreme Escape Adventure: Good People Die / I Want To Be A Good Person") is a Visual Novel for the Nintendo 3DS and Play Station Vita, the sequel to the DS's Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and the second game in the Zero Escape series. It was released in February 2012 in Japan, October 23rd in America, and November 2012 in Europe, courtesy of Rising Star Games.

An average college student called Sigma awakens inside an elevator, finding himself trapped with a strange girl named Phi who somehow knows him. Working together to escape the room, Sigma and Phi discover that along with seven other victims, they have been kidnapped, trapped inside a large warehouse and forced to play the "Nonary Game: Ambidex Edition" by an A.I. program calling itself "Zero III".

As with 999, each player has a numbered bracelet attached to their wrist and will be killed if they break the rules. However, the "Ambidex Edition" has a twist: to escape the warehouse, the nine players must accumulate points by splitting into teams of three (further divided into two sub-teams, a duo and a single) and completing deadly challenges. Nine points will grant a player their freedom, but losing all their points will reward a player with death. Reminiscent of the Prisoner's Dilemma, a sub-team can choose to betray their partnered sub-team in order to steal points from them, but if both sub-teams choose "Betray" then neither gain anything. Furthermore, the exit door will only open once, regardless of how many players have enough points to leave.

Check out the trailer here. There is also a promo anime for the game, available here with English subtitles and here dubbed into English. While the American edition has both Japanese and English voice tracks available, the European edition has only the Japanese voice track.

On February 2014, it was announced that due to low sales, VLR's sequel was being put on hiatus. Fans started a Facebook campaign to show support for the series. After a viral marketing campaign involving a website made by English localization company Aksys Games, Zero Time Dilemma was officially announced at Anime Expo 2015 for a Summer 2016 release.

On October 31, 2016, a bundle with 999 was confirmed for PS4, Vita, and Steam for release on March 24, 2017.

See also no-one has to die., a free browser game which is a love letter of sorts to VLR, using similar concepts with a unique spin.

Be warned that like 999, this game is a minefield of spoilers, so do not read ahead if you're spoiler-averse.

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Seek a way out!

Tropes # to C

• 12 Coins Puzzle: There are four coins to weigh and a scale that gives you five weighings before resetting itself. As the weights of the coins are constant, and there are only four of them, the resetting is just a nuisance.
• 20 Minutes into the Future: The game opens in 2028 and involves issues of nuclear and biological warfare that feature heavily in 21st-century fiction.
• Abandoned Warehouse: Where the game takes place this time around.
• Absurdly Short Level: The last escape room sequence. It's just the very first escape room again, which means you can just input the safe combination you learned your first time through and exit immediately. In fact, you have to do this. If you try to legitimately solve the puzzles again, Phi just yells at you for wasting time
• A-Cup Angst: Phi insists she is a C cup. Sigma's response is "If you're a C cup, then I'm packing twelve inches!".
• Addressing the Player: In the "Another Time" epilogue, several characters talk with an unknown consciousness that Word of God confirmed in a roundabout way is the player.
• Aerith and Bob: The cast includes characters with unusual names like Sigma, Phi, Quark, Tenmyouji, and K whose real name is Kyle, which isn't so cool... but also Alice, Luna, and Dio. And unlike the last game, most of the players are not using fake/code names.
• After the End: The game takes place several decades after the Radical-6 plague outbreak and a subsequent world-ending explosions on Earth, which is implied to now be a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
• All for Nothing: Most of the participants who receive 9 BP and are able to leave the facility, thereby trapping the participants for eternity, usually do so to get justice for the Nonary Game victims, or to just be selfish. It turns out that, not only are they all on the moon where there is no help, but Zero Sr. is actually Sigma, who's been in the room with them the whole time.
• All Love Is Unrequited: Akane and Junpei never wind up together even after being reunited after decades. Their love is canon, though, as stated from K and also from the Q&A.
• All the Worlds Are a Stage: The final puzzle room, Q, also consists of a series of puzzles the player has seen previously. Additionally, the last puzzle of the level concerns the Ambidex Game, a central theme of the game.
• Already Done for You:
  • While the player is controlling Sigma, there are usually at least two other teams off solving puzzles and investigating rooms.
  • In the path to the Golden Ending, Sigma also goes back in time to input the password to the elevator safe so his past self can escape earlier than usual. Phi will actually berate you if you try to do the puzzle again.
• Alternate Universe: Some of the characters suggest time travel works on a "many-worlds" system, meaning the routes in which characters died or went crazy still exist, and even if Dr. Klim stops the Radical-6 incident, the players of this game will still be stuck in their current Bad Future. This is confirmed in the next game, Zero Time Dilemma.
• Always Close: For some reason, Sigma almost always feels he needs to wait until the last second to input his AB Game choice. Sigma eventually exploits this to realize that his opponent's choice sometimes inexplicably changes based on what he chose, despite them putting in their choices before him.
• And I'm the Queen of Sheba: Sigma responds to Phi claiming she's a C cup by saying "If you're a C cup, I'm packing twelve inches!"
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Since the game has multiple endings based on past choices, you're going to want to revisit those previously played portions of the game to see them all. The "Flow" chart allows you to instantly jump to any previously played pivotal point in the game, such as when choosing "Ally" or "Betray" in an AB Game. This feature was absent in the prequel, and is very essential here.
  • Revisiting old story branches means having to wade through already familiar dialogue, but the "Skip" setting lets you blaze through what you've already seen, only stopping itself when you hit a decision point or encounter new dialogue.
  • Certain story branches have "locks", which require information from other routes to proceed. When the player has the relevant info, the icon for that "lock" changes immediately to show that progress can be made, rather than have the player blindly poke around previous dead ends to progress through trial and error.
  • In the Hard difficulty of the game, the Gold files contain content from the Silver Files, therefore there's no need for the player to worry about revisiting every room of the game on easy.
• Antimatter: Antimatter rockets figure in the Mars mission backstory, and the world was devastated after 18 antimatter generator plants were detonated in 2029. The bombs Dio plants also use antimatter charges.
• Arc Number: Like in the first game, the numbers 3 and 9 are all over the place.
  • There are various 9s in the game's rules.
  • There are nine images of a lion eating the sun.
  • An incredibly subtle one: after each AB Game, when the characters check how much time is left until the next set of doors open, the time (in minutes) always has a digital root of nine. Doubles as a Call-Back to the first game.
  • Then there's The Reveal that the game actually takes place 45 years later than the characters had previously thought. The digital root of 45 is 9.
• Arc Welding: The in-game secret files reveal that Gentarou Hongou, aka Ace, was a member of Free the Soul, and that Cradle Pharmaceutical and his experiments with the morphogenetic field were funded by the cult. The symbol on the robes Snake was forced to wear in 999 is also used as Free the Soul's coat of arms.
• Arc Words:
  • "Memento mori, If the nineth (sic) lion ate the sun." It's instructions for Sigma to use the ID and password he gained from K and Luna's deaths in previous timelines when he sees the ninth image of "a lion eating the sun" in order to gain access to the Director's office; alternatively, the ninth image could be the computer in the Q room, where you had to use the ID and password from a card off Akane's body, meaning the death to remember is hers.
  • The phrase itself is also an anagram of the true arc phrase - "The man on the moon rules the infinite time."
  • "Tu fui, ego eris." ("I was you, you will be me.") A message from Zero Sr. to Sigma, hinting at his true identity.
• Artificial Human:
  • The real K is a clone of Sigma.
  • Dio is a fourth generation clone of Left, the dead sibling of the enigmatic leader of Free the Soul.
  • Luna is a GAULEM, essentially an android.
• Art Shift: The first part of the "END or BEGINNING" epilogue uses the same art style from 999. It's also used during Tenmyouji's despair over Akane's transmission ending, foreshadowing who he truly is.
• Author Appeal: The secret files in the Crew Quarters imply that Sigma's obsession with swimsuits is derived from the story's author. There are also a few promotional images for the game of Phi◊, Clover◊, and Luna◊ in swimsuits.
• Auto-Doc: The Treatment Center has special stasis pods which can be used to diagnosis and treat conditions. It cannot be used to cure Radical-6, however. They also function as cryo-freeze chambers.
• Bad Future: A massive portion of the human race died and Earth was plunged into nuclear winter following the outbreak of Radical-6 and the destruction of the world's eighteen anti-matter power generators on April 13, 2029.
• Bad Moon Rising: A magazine found in the lounge describes a total lunar eclipse that'll happen on December 28, 2028, which leads the group to assume that it's only been a few days since they were kidnapped. In Dio's ending, Phi, Sigma, and Dio all see it for themselves. It's actually post-apocalyptic Earth in 2074 and the group has been on the moon all along.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: A very excited Sigma exclaims loudly how he wishes to have a fourth antimatter bomb to deactivate just to fuel his adrenaline. A deadpan Phi tells him that he will get his wish.
• Behind the Black: Occurs in the PEC room puzzle. There's a binder beneath one of the machines that's necessary for escaping the vacuum chamber, that is perfectly visible to anyone willing to bend down and look. Unfortunately, the camera doesn't allow this, so the only way to acquire is to first get trapped in the vacuum chamber, at which point your perspective is far enough away to see it even with the limited camera angle.
• Berserk Button: Every other character will turn on you if you Betray anyone to obtain 9 points outside of one specific ending or appear to be a sleeper agent for Zero.
• Bewildering Punishment: Phi betrays Sigma as a reaction to him betraying her in another timeline. If you didn't choose to do this before, Sigma will have no idea why Phi is mad at him.
• Big Bad: Plays with it again. This time, the game is being controlled by Zero III/Zero Jr./Lagomorph, a little bunny AI that controls the warehouse, but he makes it clear his creator, Zero Sr., is the real mastermind. Said person is Sigma himself, and K, Sigma’s future self/clone, but neither know it at the time; and Akane, the one who actually planned the game, is absent for most of it, and she is once again usurped by the true Big Bad. And both of them want to save the world, albeit through questionable methods. Instead the true/other Big Bad is Dio/Left, the foul-mouthed Jerkass who is a high-ranking terrorist leader sent to stop the project and ensure the world’s destruction, and the one who killed Akane and planted bombs around the warehouse to ensure his mission’s completion. Stopping him from killing Akane turns out to be the goal of the game.
• Big Bad Friend: One of the 9 players is the mastermind behind the AB game, the true Zero III. It turns out that while it is technically Sigma, it's a future version of him, whose body the consciousness of the present day Sigma was inhabiting.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Dio is easily caught off guard and tricked in many of the routes, despite being a terrorist member of Free the Soul there to kill you all.
• Big Eater: Phi stuffs herself when exploring the Pantry with K, likely because she and the others didn't notice how much time had gone by because their Radical-6 infections slowed their perception of time: Phi hadn't eaten for about a day by then.
• Blamed for Being Railroaded: Getting to the Golden Ending requires the player to vote against Phi at a crucial moment, in order to hear her declaration of vengeance (which the protagonist uses to talk her down in another pathway where she instead votes against him and tries to escape the facility with her newly-won Bracelet Points). Despite that, your character still gets chewed out by everyone for a dozen paragraphs and mentally berates himself for it afterwards for doing something so stupid and out-of-character: he's legitimately perplexed at his own actions and wonders what possessed him to go through with it (a not-so-subtle jab at the player, basically).
• Body Horror:
  • Sigma has issues with his suddenly, and unexpectedly, prosthetic arms, artificial skin or otherwise, and becomes very worried at he might be a robot without knowing about it. Then when he uses his knowledge of his artificial arms to save himself in another route... by crushing one to a pulp with a massive door. Then with the fact that he's suddenly a 67 year old man with only one eye. And then being back in his 22 year old body... immediately after getting new artificial arms. They have no skin. Considering you can't see Sigma except during specific circumstances... this body horror is reflected upon the player, as well. Sigma's life is full of this.
  • It also has foreshadowing for more body horror: in the ending of the next game that leads to this timeline, Sigma will lose his arms and his eye. We don't see it, fortunately — we just see him immediately afterwards.
• Bolivian Army Ending: Most of the Multiple Endings close on Cliffhangers or Downer Endings where everyone seems doomed.
• Book Ends:
  • The game's final escape sequence is exactly the same as its first, although you don't have to solve any puzzles since you already know the safe password.
  • Much like the end of the first game, one of the player character's last objectives is to save Akane Kurashiki.
  • At the end of the game when you ask Phi who she is, she gives you the exact same joke/non-answer she gave when she first met Sigma.
  • In a meta sense, if you go through the yellow door in the first AB game, your lineup for the first and last puzzle rooms consists of Sigma, Phi, and Tenmyouji.
• Brain Bleach: Sigma and Alice wish they could forget the sight of a grown man in armour (K) riding a big cute bunny like a little kid.
• Break the Cutie: Clover when Alice dies. She even threatens to kill everybody. Doesn't this seem familiar? There's also Luna, when Sigma betrays her.
• Brick Joke: Checking the safe in the elevator at the beginning will cause Phi to suggest a cracker's inside. When Sigma opens the safe later on in the story, Phi frantically yells "Grab the cracker!" If you missed it, this is a joke on "safecracker".
• But Thou Must!:
  • You have to go back and create a timeline where you Betray Phi after being told you did earlier in her route. Even Sigma is utterly baffled by being forced to select "Betray".
  • In the Golden Path, Phi berates the player repeatedly for hitting the start button in the AB room, and locking them both in there for 40 minutes. The player has no option in doing otherwise.
• Bystander Syndrome: When Sigma struggles with Quark in the Infirmary to stop the latter from killing himself, the other players stand around and watch until Sigma suggests one of them take the scalpel away from Quark.
• Call-Back:
  • The final puzzle door that you go through has a "Q" on it, just like the last door in the first game. Q is a homonym for 9 (Kyu) in Japanese. Given this is Junpei, he's still bitter about it even 45 years later.
    Tenmyouji: Well, now someone's just being a smartass.
  • Clover mentions the rumor from the first game that Alice's body water is made of Ice-9, which Alice dismisses as completely absurd.
  • Upon finding a monitor, Alice concludes that the CPU must be in the monitor. Which is exactly what Lotus of the previous game said an ignorant person would do.
  • Upon completion of a late room escape, a white-haired man stares at a photograph of a girl whom he deeply loved and lost a long time ago. The girl is Akane Kurashiki.
  • Sigma tricks Dio into spilling the beans about being the leader of the Myrmidons by pretending to be from Free the Soul, in a manner similar to Junpei tricking Ace in the first game.
  • Junpei Tenmyouji pulls the exact same "I already stole it" trick he used on Ace in the first game, this time with Dio's detonator.
  • Being separated from Clover by a glass partition and telling her to do things so you can be reunited. This likely isn't lost on Tenmyouji, as he was there the last time this happened.
  • The protagonist watching Clover crawl under things (a computer in the previous game, a desk in this one).
  • The depowered computer in the GAULEM Bay and the disconnected computer in the Laboratory in the previous game. In fact, these two locations share more than a few similarities, including but not limited to Lotus's lecture on our perception of brain functions getting expanded upon by G-OLM's Chinese Room explanation.
  • The first time veteran Zero Escape players will see a "TO BE CONTINUED", nostalgia (and possibly frustration) will ensue.
  • Zero's gas mask. Unsurprising, considering Akane is actively contributing to Dr. Klim's Project AB.
• Canon Discontinuity: The secret final ending of the game, titled "Another Time END", has been confirmed by Word of God to be non-canon (sort of - see Gainax Ending below) and wasn't followed up on in Zero Time Dilemma. Originally, the final ending of the game was "END or BEGINNING", but a major earthquake in Japan caused Uchikoshi to write one more, not wanting to end the game in a similar position.
• Chekhov's Gag: When K recalls his history, it's accompanied by some illustrations of him as a child and young adult in the same armor he's stuck in, which seems to be a humourous depiction since we don't know who he looks like at this point. The Reveal shows that was exactly how his life was since growing up on a Moon base with lower gravity would cause development problems, so Sigma made him special armor to support his body.
• Chekhov's Gun: Several escape rooms contain implements that ultimately do not get used in escaping the room. This doesn't mean that they remain unused for the rest of the playthrough... or in other timelines.
• Children Are Innocent: Quark is pretty much the only one not scheming in some way, even though he's a kid raised in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
• Cliffhanger:
  • Most storyline paths will cut to "TO BE CONTINUED" at a particularly tense moment partway through until you collect critical information from other routes.
  • The game ends just as Sigma and Phi are about to begin their mission to infiltrate the Nevada air force base — yet another Nonary Game, which will end up costing Sigma both arms and his eye.
• Clue of Few Words: Played With in one of the bad endings. A dying woman writes 'dio' in blood on her leg. This is a perfectly good dying message and would easily have revealed the killer, Dio...except for the fact, after her death, a reversal of that message was imprinted on her other leg, and that message just so happened to be the one everyone else saw and assumed to be what she wrote. So it instead looks like '016', and the cast- having recently discovered a room full of Ridiculously Human Robots- start searching for a robot with that serial number. Hilarity does not ensue, especially because there actually is a robot with that serial number Hiding in Plain Sight amongst the cast, but she's completely innocent of any crime..
• Covers Always Lie: Inverted: the cover shows Sigma with a glowing green eye and wild gray hair, which is his actual appearance in-game. The cover is spoiling the game without you even knowing it!
• Crapsack World: A virus has annihilated most of humanity, forcing the rest into underground shelters during the short time between the prologue and the beginning of the game.
• Cruelty Is the Only Option: In order to get the gold ending, you have to enter timelines where you betray Luna, Tenmyouji, Alice, K, Clover, and Phi in the AB game. Alice, in fact, has to be betrayed twice in total. However, the Luna, Tenmyouji, and Alice betrayals all occur in round one of the AB game, when the players have had no opportunity to discuss strategy and intentions, and in most cases had only minutes to think before voting, so the betrayal can be forgiven pretty easily. The second Alice betrayal ends up saving Sigma's life, as Alice sneaks in to vote betray, which would have killed an ally-voting Sigma, and most players likely only vote betray after learning this. The K betrayal, similarly, ends up being moot when K votes betray as well in an attempt to escape. The Clover betrayal is justified in that Dio and Phi were going to escape no matter what you picked, and betraying Clover allows you to escape alongside them. The Phi betrayal, for many players, happens only after they see Phi betray them when Sigma votes ally, and ends soon after with Sigma being knocked out by K and likely kept where he won't be able to escape the game anyway. Voting betray in any other AB game ends with the other players knocking Sigma out so he can't open the 9 door, preventing him from going through the 9 door, or being stuck watching someone else go through the 9 door and leaving him stuck there forever.
• Cultural Translation: The original script contained Japanese cultural terminology, humor and even vocal quirks, leading translators to completely change a great deal of references, idioms and puns in the English version. For instance, The Japanese title of the game has a Double Meaning that literally translates as "Good People Die" / "I Want To Be A Good Person". The translated title changes this to an English only idiom with a slightly different Double Meaning, "Virtue's Last Reward".
• Cyanide Pill: Dio uses a suicide pill to kill himself in the Alice Ending so no one can stop the bombs he planted. He attempts it in the Sigma and Phi routes, but gets stopped by Sigma before he manages to use it, who then dumps it in a nearby sink.
• Cycle of Revenge: A small but important one happens on Phi's path. During one of the AB games that is you against Phi, it is extremely likely that you will choose Ally since you haven't had much reason to distrust her by this point. However, Phi chooses to Betray you, leaving Sigma shocked (and a TO BE CONTINUED screen). So you retry the choice and choose betray this time. However, Phi chooses Ally this time as she thought you were trustworthy. Sigma is baffled because he remembers that "last time" Phi chose betray. It turns out that the Phi who betrayed Sigma remembered the Sigma who betrayed Phi because that Sigma remembers the Phi who betrayed him, creating a loop.

Tropes D to G

• Darker and Edgier: Despite the creators being told to make this game Lighter and Softer, the first game 999 features a game where at worst, 9 people can be made to kill each other with some or no survivors, and are isolated from an intact world similar to Real Life, though with advanced technology and psychic powers. This game features multiple paths where various characters die like the first game and some endings where everyone dies like some 999 endings. Sound about the same? It would be if not for the fact that you also have to deal with a spy for a religious terrorist cult, a kid who will become suicidal in almost all routes, a virus that almost everyone in the game is infected with that makes them suicidal at points, a post-apocalyptic world, Junpei and Akane's relationship turning out to have failed, Akane almost always dying (as well as that she's the only one who can cure the virus that will drive the other characters to suicide) and many more twists like those. Yeah, this game is pretty bleak at points. That's without even mentioning said terrorist cult releasing a virus that wipes out a third of the human race, causing the rest of society to collapse from the sudden loss of life affecting all aspects of daily life, and finally culminating in 18 annihilation (antimatter) reactors around the world being sabotaged, creating an explosion so powerful that it plunges the earth into a nuclear winter, and the clouds resulting from the explosion blot out the sun for seven years. Mankind begins to recover, but even 45 years later, the earth still appears red from space due to green and blue light being unable to pass through the pollution in the atmosphere. While the whole point of the game is to prevent this, the game follows many-worlds theory, meaning that the characters we meet and know (excluding Phi and Sigma) will never see that future. Darker and Edgier is an understatement.
• Deadline News: In the (first) epilogue, we see a newscaster reporting the horrible extent to which the Radical-6 virus has spread before succumbing to it and killing herself on the air.
• Dead Man's Switch: A Free the Soul terrorist uses a switch that sets off a number of bombs he planted on 30-minute delay if the device is ever more than a meter away from him. The terrorist, Dio, uses it as insurance if he fails to kill everyone in the AB game himself.
• Death of a Child: Downplayed: Quark dies in multiple routes, implicitly or otherwise, but is the only character who you will never explicitly see dead.
• Denser and Wackier: Denser and Weirder, anyway. Characters include Androids, clones in Powered Armor, a 22 year old man in a 67 year old man's body, a secret agent dressed like an Egyptian princess, and so on.
• Depopulation Bomb: Thanks to Radical-6 and the subsequent nuclear winter, the Earth's population has fallen by six billion.
• Derailed for Details: G-OLM, while explaining the Chinese Room experiment, frequently adds racy details.
• Developer's Foresight: When you solve puzzles by just inputting the passwords without making most of the room, such as in the Lounge when you're supposed to see the Red Moon, which prompts Phi to elaborate on how this happens, if you solve the room without making use of the globe, she'll suddenly just blurt out information about Lunar Eclipses just before exiting the room, making Sigma and Luna quite confused.
• Diabolus ex Machina: The first bad ending on Luna's Route. Most of the time, the bad end is triggered by someone else going for the #9 door while you get knocked out because no one trusts you, but at least there's someone with a reason to open it. In this one, the only one who reaches 9 points is Quark, who's still unconscious, but Tenmyouji decides that he'd be willing to die by passing through the door as well and has Quark open it to escape.
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage: In the promo OAV, Sigma is listening to the game's theme song on the radio when he's kidnapped.
• Died in Your Arms Tonight:
  • Luna happily dies in Sigma's arms in the ending of her route, since she broke several rules and will have her data from the central core deleted as punishment.
  • If you fail to disarm bombs 1-3 in Phi's route, Phi dives into Sigma's arms as he promises Phi that they will meet again.
    Sigma: We'll meet again. Somewhere, somewhen. I guarantee it. We can jump through parallel worlds! We can change history! You see?! This won't end here! I won't let it! This is just the beginning!
• Dirty Old Man:
  • Tenmyouji openly discusses "Grandpa Videos" and "Erotic Units" with Quark.
  • Sigma is a 22 year old college kid's mind in a 67 year old man's body, which explains a lot about how other characters react to his perversions: As a college kid, it would be unsurprising. As an old man with wild hair and a prosthetic eye? It's downright creepy.
• Distract and Disarm: In Sigma's ending, Dio threatens to explode the facility where the cast is being held captive, when Tenmyouji steps forward and tells the villain that the detonator is actually a fake. This causes Dio to absent-mindedly look at the device, at which point the old man tackles him and successfully wrestles the detonator out of his hand.
• Diving Kick: Phi jumps off an AB room's roof and kicks the one who's about to kill the old woman while falling onto them.
• Door-Closes Ending: In certain endings/game overs where one or more player gets nine BP then you get to see the number nine door close slowly with a groan.
• Double-Meaning Title: The Japanese title can be read as either "Good People Die" or "I Want To Be A Good Person". The English title can be interpreted either as a reference to the saying "virtue is its own reward" or as a Deadly Euphemism.
• Downer Ending: Almost every ending other than Phi's is this for everyone but Phi and Sigma. This is usually due to some combination of bombs, Radical-6, Nonary Game penalties, and murder.
  • Alice and Sigma's endings result in an "Everybody Dies" Ending due to Dio's bombs destroying the facility. Ditto for many premature endings on Phi's path, which have the added bonus of detonating the annihilation reactor in the Control Room.
  • Clover's ending is another "Everybody Dies" Ending, this time due to Radical-6. Alice, Tenmyouji, Sigma, Phi, Clover, and Dio succumb to Radical-6. Luna has been shut down next to their bodies, likely by Zero Jr. Neither Quark nor K is shown deceased, though both would likely die from the penalty after not entering a Chromatic Door.
  • K's ending comes close, with bleak implications. Alice succumbs to Radical-6. Luna is shut down by Zero Jr. Tenmyouji and Clover go missing, likely handcuffed to the infirmary sink. Dio is suffocated by K, destroying his bracelet. As a result, Phi and K are unable to successfully enter a Chromatic Door. Every living player but Quark is penalized, but Sigma injects Phi with neostigmine, saving her life. Phi and Quark survive, but will likely succumb to Radical-6.
  • Luna's ending. Clover, Tenmyouji, Alice, Dio, and K all die prior to the final AB round. Though Phi and Quark escape Rhizome-9, they have no way to get off the moon or cure their Radical-6. Luna is permanently shut down by Zero Jr., and Sigma is left alone to succumb to Radical-6.
  • Dio's ending. Alice succumbs to Radical-6, and Luna is shut down by Zero Jr. Clover, Tenmyouji, K, and Quark are left behind, likely succumbing to Radical-6. Dio, Phi, and Sigma head towards another of the Rhizome facilities. However, given the three are all infected with Radical-6, it's unclear if they will make it there.
  • Tenmyouji's ending. Tenmyouji escapes with Quark and Clover... but only Quark has been treated for his Radical-6 infection. Alice has already succumbed to Radical-6, and the other human players (Sigma, Phi, K, and Dio) will likely succumb as well. The people who escape also have no way of returning to Earth or contacting anyone, even ignoring the fact that two-thirds of them have active Radical-6 infections.
  • Quark's ending. Dio and K escape, and Sigma loses his arm, but not everything seems bad at first. Then Alice succumbs to Radical-6. Besides Quark and Luna, the remaining survivors will all die due to a lack of additional Axelavir.
• Dramatic Irony: Clover's reason to Betray Tenmyouji early on is that she doesn't trust someone she's just met. He's actually Junpei.
• Dramatic Unmask: K's mask is removed in K's ending. It's removed again in Phi's ending, but it's still surprising because there's a different person behind it this time around.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • A virus, Radical-6, is present that causes those infected with it to become suicidaly insane. Quark, a boy ten or so years old, tries to kill himself in practically every timeline thanks to the mind-altering disease Radical-6.
• Dub-Induced Plot Hole: A slight example, but the I Never Said It Was Poison moment makes less sense in the translated version. In the Japanese version, Sigma says that he knows about Clay Dolls and Dio reveals himself by saying that he doesn't know who the Clay Dolls are, which makes sense since people would normally assume clay dolls are objects, not people, if they didn't know about them. In the translated version, however, Clay Dolls are called "Myrmidons", a name which originally referred to a group of people from Greek mythology and sometimes used in pop-culture and always referring to people, so even if Dio didn't know anything about them, assuming that Sigma is talking about some group of people isn't much of a stretch and doesn't look particularly suspicious.
• Dwindling Party:
  • Most routes have more and more people turning up dead until there's practically no one left.
  • In Clover's Ending, all the characters die due to Radical-6.
• Earth All Along: The "moon" first found in Dio's ending upon stepping outside the main facility is at first assumed to be a red moon during a solar eclipse as everyone thinks they're on Earth. The "moon" they see actually is Earth after the Radical-6 virus consumed its whole population.
• Easter Egg:
  • Several hidden messages can be accessed on the phone in the Crew Quarters by using the numbers 6969, 5309, 6724, 3141, and 8008.
  • The passwords used to deactivate the bombs are actually coded messages. Replace each letter with the one that comes immediately after it in the alphabet to decipher them.
• Easy-Mode Mockery: When you switch to Easy mode, your partners will offer you hints for the puzzles. If you do really poorly, they tend to get rather hilariously annoyed at you. On hard mode this extra dialogue is replaced with harder puzzles that reward the player with gold files containing extra lore. This would sound like a fair balance, except for the fact that the passcode for the safe (which the player has immediate access to) is the same on both difficulties. Meaning one can just play trough the level on easy mode, learn the code, and quickly claim the hard mode benefits, inverting the trope by having hard mode be the obsolete difficulty.
• Elaborate Underground Base: The setting for this Nonary Game, complete with a lounge, rec room and infirmary. It's also on the moon. Justified in that Sigma and Akane had to live in it for decades while it and the Nonary Game were being built.
• Enhance Button: While looking at security footage at one point, you're able to inexplicably zoom in and clearly see the numbers on a character's bracelet. Probably justified by being built, at the earliest, in the year 2028, where screen resolution should be pretty immense, especially for a highly sophisticated security system.
• "Eureka!" Moment: After the discovery of a mysterious old woman who was found murdered, there is a conspicuous blank area on her wrist that's clean compared to the bloodstain surrounding it, suggesting she was wearing something on her wrist. Everyone present is stumped and suggests various things until a bracelet (the fashion accessory) is brought up, which Sigma realises that the blank space is an exact match for a large bulky Nonary Game bracelet, meaning that she was originally a player in the Nonary Game.
• Everybody's Dead, Dave: In Luna's and Clover's route everybody dies but Sigma, Quark (who is missing), in Clover's route, K (assuming he didn't find a way to kill himself off-screen) and in Luna's route, Phi. It also turns out the Radical-6 pandemic has killed off most of Earth's population.
• Everyone Has Standards: While both K and Alice have no qualms with betraying so that they could escape quicker, if they're partnered with the comatose Quark, they refuse to betray him. As an extension, if Sigma gets put in their shoes and betrays Quark himself to get 9 BP, they become outraged and pin Sigma down to refuse him escape.
• "Everybody Dies" Ending: Everyone dies in a number of the game over scenarios in Phi's route, Clover, Alice and Sigma's routes end with everyone dead as well.
• Everybody Lives: As in 999, in the Golden Ending, every single named character survives the ordeal, even if most of humanity doesn't.
• Evolving Credits: Characters like the detective who sets up the prisoners' dilemma in one route and the Old Woman only appear in the credits of routes where they have a speaking role.
• Exact Time to Failure: The watch timers start at the exact same time as the clock on Dio's bombs by pure coincidence.
• Expressive Mask: The eyes on K's armor change to reflect his mood.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Spoken word by word by Akane: "Anima is another word for the soul or the consciousness. Body is, well, exactly what it says on the tin".
• Exact Words: Once someone gets 9 BP and exits through the Number 9 door, the announcer states that the Nonary Game is over and that all doors except the Number 9 door are now unlocked. This includes the identical door on Floor B, which is a stop on the cargo elevator behind Door 9, but it can only be opened from the outside.
• Fair-Play Whodunnit: The file "Knox's Ten Commandments" lists author Ronald Knox's ten rules for writing detective fiction, only for the game to gleefully break every single one of those rules. However, it still upholds the spirit of the rules. The intent behind Knox's list is so that writers don't perform an Ass Pull by coming up with impossible crap that wasn't foreshadowed or alluded to, just to get themselves out of corners they wrote themselves into. In VLR, Magic A Is Magic A. Even the weirdest stuff is fully explained and properly foreshadowed.
• Fake Difficulty: Well, more like pointless difficulty. You are supposed to play through the rooms on hard with the extra password to get the golden files and also unlock the Golden Ending, but nothing is stopping you from beating the level on easy, then just going back and using the same password at the beginning of the level.
• Final-Exam Boss: The "q" room on the True Phi Path contains all of the most difficult puzzles you've completed in the game as the final test.
• Fission Mailed: On the path to Sigma's ending, there is a point where Sigma finds Alice dead in the Crew Quarters, triggering a Game Over. This is completely mandatory to continue, as Sigma then uses this knowledge to go back in time and stop Alice from commiting suicide. Amusingly, this results in a lock on the flow chart which is unlocked as soon as you get it, regardless of what routes have been taken previously.
• Flashback with the Other Darrin: A rather strange version in The Nonary Games remaster. The scene with 23-year old Akane has Ali Hillis' voice clips replaced with Rena Strober's.
• Flock of Wolves: Of all the players, four actively worked to create the game and four others know who Zero is (or can at least make an educated guess). The only people who are ignorant as they claim are K and Quark, given that Alice probably knows everything Clover does. And even K only counts because he's amnesiac for most of the timelines.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Sigma's Verbal Tic. If the subject becomes about cats, he can't refrain from making cat-related puns like "You gotta be kitten me." Zero III, being a rabbit, is always making similar rabbit-related puns.
  • Involving Sigma's true appearance:
    • The cover art has one of Sigma's eyes glowing and his hair looking oddly gray.
    • One of Phi's first lines in the game is "Just back off, grandpa!"
    • When Sigma tells Phi he's 22 years old, Phi shoots back "You must have done a lot of drugs to look like that at 22."
    • In the Lock 3 route, when Dio escapes through the number 9 door he tells Sigma "Just hurry up and die! You senile old fuck!".
    • Sigma tells the others that he's a student shooting for a Ph.D. Alice responds, "I guess you've been working on that for quite a while, huh?"
    • When Sigma goes silent for a moment while musing on his vote changing making Alice's vote change too through quantum physics, Alice shouts "Hey! Did you have a stroke or something?!"
    • When you get to control Sigma during the Escape segments the screen looks a lot more low res, like it's on a old television screen, hinting at Sigma's artificial eye.
    • When Sigma shows concern about Tenmyouji pushing himself too hard given his age, Tenmyouji shows offense that Sigma thinks he's in any position to talk since they're physically about the same age.
    • If you go with Luna through the magenta door and then betray her in the first vote, going to the lounge where K and Dio are will have the latter insist on checking over the room again, citing that he doesn't trust Sigma's eyes. Sigma being an elderly man with an artificial eye, Dio might have a point there.
  • Tenmyouji being Junpei:
    • Clover and Tenmyouji repeat the "pipe" joke.
      Clover: Give me a "P"!
      Tenmyouji: Give me an "I"!
      Sigma: What is wrong with you!?
    • Tenmyouji's odd way of counting:
      Sigma: 3, 2, 1...
      Tenmyouji: 2, 3, 4...
    • Tenmyouji asks Alice if her body water is Ice-9.
    • When Clover tells Tenmyouji she doesn't want to go through the Chromatic door with him because he's old, he indignantly shouts "I'll have you know I'm as spry as I was when I was twenty!"
    • During the first round, when you pair with Alice, he'll say he could never betray Clover.
  • The file on Soporil ß mentions that "high usage can lead to side effects including memory loss".
  • G-OLM talks about the Chinese Room, where the player is treated with a picture of a girl trying to decipher letters written in Chinese sent to her through the door. G-OLM then proceeds to compare the Chinese Room story with the GAULEM and how they cannot be told apart from a human being, even if one is right in front of them. The G-OLM utters: "See? Right in the middle of—" before being deactivated as if to prevent it from revealing who was a GAULEM. Now, look at the girl from the Chinese Room story. Doesn't she look a bit like Luna?.
  • There is a subtle hint towards Luna's relationship with Sigma. Whenever a decision must be made in game (especially when there's a time limit), who does Luna always turn to? Also, in the GAULEM Bay escape room, upon solving one of the puzzles Luna cheerfully exclaims that she's "fallen for you all over again".
  • A Schrödinger's Cat book is found early on in the game.
  • Zero III refers to Clover as "Cleaver" a nickname only Akane could still know, hinting at her involvement in the newest Nonary Game.
  • The graffiti found in the warehousees.
    • "Memento mori, If the nineth (sic) lion ate the sun" anagram: "The man on the moon rules the infinite time."
    • "Two milkmen, go comedy" anagram: "welcome to my kingdom.", "Two Klim men."
  • When Dio asks about the second way to remove the bracelets, Zero replies "I think you already know" in a sinister voice. He, in fact, does know, since his mission was to kill Akane, retrieve her bracelet, and use it to win the game.
  • One of the security room's messages is "She knows everything." This foreshadows Phi's knowledge of her and Sigma's mission. It also foreshadows Akane's involvement.
  • The "memo" feature is called "Brain Memory." It allows you to store data, hand written onto the screen. One easily-overlooked "feature" of Brain Memory is that every time you jump, the information in there gets more and more distorted, and if you save information on the screen across enough jumps, it may become unreadable. This is because, although Sigma has photographic memory, he loses information when he jumps.
  • There are multiple hints from Quark and Tenmyouji about how the world outside is After the End due to being the only characters from it:
    • Quark and Tenmyouji have the least shocked reactions toward the article found in the Infirmary. They're already living in the aftermath of the Radical-6 pandemic.
    • In one of the scenes in the Lounge, Tenmyouji mentions that he'd struck jackpot by finding an abandoned factory full of rare earth metals. The very fact that abandoned factories full of valuable resources are around, and people can just stumble upon them, implies that something apocalyptic has happened to the world.
    • Quark talks about the time he got something none of the other kids had ever had: a root beer float, hinting at the fact that such things barely exist anymore after the apocalypse. He's surprised when Tenmyouji offers to buy him a root beer float after the Nonary Game, and also mentions being surprised to learn that one kid he knew had a mom.
    • Tenmyouji briefly finds it laughable that Quark could be an elementary student, which Sigma finds odd. There isn't an infrastructure for an education system in their time.
  • The cocktail puzzle in the Lounge has RED PLANET as one of the required drinks for one of the safe password solutions. As it turns out, there is a red planet out there...
  • In one scene in the Pantry, Phi mentions that the expiry date on the food is about "a hundred years from now". The game takes place decades in the future, so the expiry date isn't that long.
  • When Sigma is trying to figure out why he may have been captured, one of the possibilities he brings up is starting a fight with a frightening and mysterious new religion... which is exactly what his older self has done and is, indeed, why he is being forced to participate in the game (to hone his time travel powers in hopes to thwart Free The Soul, the Religion of Evil in question, and Set Right What Once Went Wrong).
• Four Is Death:
  • Clover, the fourth player, threatens to kill everyone in a moment of weakness during Luna and Tenmyouji's path. Everyone also dies in her character ending.
  • Dio actually planted four anti-matter bombs, not three.
  • The antimatter generators explode in April, the fourth month. Not only that, but it happens on the 13th of that month...which is a Friday.
• Fun with Acronyms: GAULEM stands for "General-purpose AUtonomous Labor Electronic Machine." G-OLM opines that the full name is silly and the creators probably just wanted an acronym that sounded like "Golem."
• Gaia's Lament: The lunar eclipse seen in the sky in a few endings? It's actually Earth circa 2074. Following the fires and destruction caused by the Radical-6 oubreak and the antimatter plant explosions, the skies were blotted out by smoke and ash, causing a nuclear winter that lasted for seven years. Millions of plants and animals and billions of people died, and while things have recovered somewhat in the decades since, Earth remains a wasteland. The atmosphere is still contaminated with dust, causing the Earth to look deep red.
• Gainax Ending: The secret ending already had shades of this, what with suddenly introducing concepts such as the player being a character in the game and warping reality through belief, but it becomes even more of one retroactively when the sequel failed to address it at all. The creator's official explanation didn't help much, either, claiming that it's non-canon except for higher levels of reality, and implying that character Kyle Klim will appear in our world in 2028. ...what?
• Game-Breaking Bug: In both the 3DS & Vita versions, some of the puzzle rooms like the Pressure Exchange Chamber can freeze up the system, forcing a hard reset. If you save your game in a room when it glitches, your whole save file can become corrupted too. Luckily, the second part can be avoided by only saving during the novel portions of the game.
• Get A Hold Of Yourself Man: Parodied in the GAULEM Bay. Examining the shelves of useless objects enough times results in Alice having to slap Sigma... To stop him from eating said useless objects.
• Gratuitous Latin: Several Latin phrases make appearances in the game:
  • Phi's brooch says Elapsam semel occasionem non ipse potest Iuppiter reprehendere (Not even Jupiter can reclaim a lost opportunity.)
  • Also spoken by Phi: "Acta est fabula, plaudite!" (The play has ended, applaud!)
  • On the tombstone in the garden: Tu fui, ego eris. (I was you, you will be me.) The English translation plays a part on the Security Room escape, although the second "you" is skiped for the puzzle's benefit.
  • Memento mori (Remember death) is part of the message on the wall of the Floor B warehouse.
  • The journal found in the Laboratory is entirely written in Latin. Most of the characters can't read it, but Phi is able to translate one important passage.
• Grumpy Old Man: Tenmyouji wants nothing to do with the Nonary Game and thinks very little of the real Zero III's somewhat altruistic goals.
• Giving Someone the Pointer Finger: Sigma in some routes.
• Golden Ending: Phi's True End, which is reached by clearing almost every other path in the game. In it, Akane is saved, the bombs are successfully defused, Dio is captured, and everyone escapes.

Tropes H to K

• Hair-Raising Hare: Zero III, a creepy digital rabbit avatar who facilitates the events of the life and death Nonary Game this time around.
• Happy Ending Override: The previous game had Junpei and his friends escape the second Nonary Game and were free to leave. Not only does Clover get kidnapped for a third Nonary Game, she's been sent to the future against her will where her brother Light is most likely deceased after the world went through a tragic apocalypse and Junpei's 45 year-long quest to find Akane ends with him bitterly letting her go after being disgusted by what she's become.
• Heroic RRoD: Radical-6 - If you had to experience your life as though it was on constant fast forward, you'd probably become pretty desperate to kill yourself too.
• Human Popsicle: Cryogenic freezing exists, and can be used to preserve victims of disease until they can be properly treated. It's also used to get Clover, Alice and Phi into the Nonary Game without worrying about them dying from Radical-6 or old age.
• I Just Knew: Justified due to the whole plot being based on a Timey-Wimey Ball. The phrase crops up a lot when one of the espers of the story just happen to know something from another timeline and have to explain it without revealing their role as an esper to those who aren't in the loop. Notably, Phi does this when starting a new game as she just happens to know Sigma's name somehow, trying to get Sigma to listen to her that she legitimately doesn't know how she knows his name.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: In Luna's route, Dio gets impaled through the chest by K when K finds out Dio killed Akane.
• I Never Said It Was Poison: In Sigma and Phi's routes, Dio angrily insists that he doesn't know anything about who the Myrmidons are, nor some old fart named Brother, despite Sigma not saying anything about the Myrmidons being people or Brother's age.
• I Never Told You My Name: Phi somehow knows Sigma's name at the beginning of the game without Sigma saying it.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • The player can call up the flowchart of events at any time and see which decisions lead to new scenes. However, the Golden Ending and the paths with the white chromatic doors don't appear on the flowchart until the player unlocks them.
  • Getting the Gold Files early will reveal concepts before they are explained in the game. In particular, the "Axelavir" file in the Laboratory mentions the year 2038, spoiling that the game takes place in Sigma's future.
• In Vino Veritas: While there are alcoholic beverages in the Lounge, nobody ever drinks any of it. There is a Vita trophy for getting Tenmyouji's ending titled "In Root Beer Veritas" though.
• Ironic Echo:
  • Dio, at one point, defends himself after saying Quark is likely dead by stating "What? I'm just saying it's a possibility. Don't get so worked up about it". Later on, when Phi accuses Dio of killing Alice and Luna, she retorts to his objections with "What? I'm just saying it's a possibility. Don't get so worked up about it" too.
  • Whenever Sigma opens a door with Phi in the group, she says, "You don't have to ask me when you're opening the door". Sigma returns the favour when Phi opens the 9 door on Luna's route.
• Irony: You'd think that as the main protagonist Sigma's ending would be one of the most important ones, yet it's always the 4th to 6th ending encountered out of 9 good endings. In fact, his route can be entirely skipped if the player knows the right passwords ahead of time!
• Knockout Gas: As in 999, Zero used traps and grenades containing an aerosol version of the liquid drug in each player's bracelets, Soporil, to incapacitate and capture each victim.
• Killer Rabbit: Though Zero III appears as a cute little bunny avatar, he still has the power to kill you if you don't follow the Nonary Game's rules.

Tropes L to R

• Lampshaded Double Entendre
  Sigma: Clover, try pulling that lever.
  Clover: Why do I have to do it?
  Sigma: It might be dangerous. I was hoping you could just wrap your hands around it and give it a good jerk. It is kinda big, but I'm sure you can handle it. Just...be gentle.
  Clover: Uh... This doesn't seem like appropriate workplace behaviour. You're kinda grossing me out.
  Sigma: I know you probably still think of yourself as just a girl, but you've become a woman some-
  Clover: You're not making it any better! Why don't you do it?!
  Sigma: If you can't take it, then maybe Luna can. Have you done this before? You just start at the base and work your way up, then give it a good tug once you get to the top.
  Luna: ...Wh-What?
  Clover: What is wrong with you?! If you're so desperate to give that lever a good time, why don't you do it yourself! Just leave me and Luna out of your sick fantasies, you creep!
  Sigma: Hmph. Fine. But I won't like it.
  Clover: Oh...
  Luna: One of the doors opened. Hmm, we might as well go through it.
  Sigma: Maybe we should try flipping it one more time, though... I think you could actually manage with just one hand, Clover. Just do it real fast, it'll only take one second. Just up and down once...
  Clover: Ugh. You are disgusting.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: Somebody who is currently playing 999 and sees the promotional art for VLR can probably assume that Clover survives the first game, and isn't the original Zero. Inversely, anyone who plays through VLR before 999 will also learn Akane was one of two people involved in the Second Nonary Game, ruining the reveal in the True Ending of 999. Ace's identity is also given away in the Gold Files.
• Left Hanging: Akane can't and Phi won't tell you what happened in the Mars Simulation incident that caused the outbreak of Radical-6, making it a Sequel Hook for the third game in the series, Zero Time Dilemma, which released four years after VLR.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In the "Another Time END" epilogue, you play as an unknown consciousness in Kyle's body that Akane and Phi seem to imply actually is the player of 999 and VLR.
  • It can double as a Take That, Audience!: on Luna's route, after you pick ally in the first AB game, Phi chides you for it as she told you that if their BP hit zero, they die. When Sigma retorts that it was only a second before the deadline so he couldn't have processed what she said in time, Phi says that the brain's processing speed increases during a crisis and that that second would've felt like an eternity. This is indeed the case for the player, who had all the time in the world to process what Phi said and then pick what to vote accordingly.
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: Alice's reaction to the sight of K riding the coin-operated kiddie ride in the Rec Room.
• Lighter and Softer: The sequel is less gory than its predecessor, with the bracelets injecting a poison instead of making people blow up, and overall there is far less endings which end up in a total slaughter. Word of God revealed that the higher ups gave him the order to make the sequel more light (question n°71 of the Q&A), since they believed that the scary and gory nature of 999 led to the poor sales of the title. Word of God also reveals that he was not happy about being forced to tone down these aspects of the game. The bleakness of the setting may be a part of that.
• Look Behind You: Phi tells Dio something is behind him and then runs for the elevator by herself to keep him out of the AB room. Dio actually falls for it.
• Magical Defibrillator: Sort of. While it's not used, examining the AED in the infirmary has the characters comment it's used to restart a stopped heart. Which is probably why Sigma elects to have his arm cut off by the number nine door instead of running for it to stop his heart early and thus get his about-to-kill-him bracelet off in Quark's ending. It likely wouldn't work anyway, since restarting a heart means nothing if the tubocurarine disables your lungs.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": Everyone barring Dio in the latter case shits themselves in Alice's game over and Quark's ending when Sigma's BP goes negative.
• Meaningful Name:
  • In mathematics, the Greek letter sigma is used to denote "summation", hinting at Sigma's ability to accumulate memories from alternate timelines.
  • "K" is a standard "placeholder" variable used in summation functions hinting at the real K's identity as Sigma's clone "son".
  • Phi is another Greek letter; of its many uses in math, the most notable is standing for the empty set.^note Okay, okay, the symbol Ø isn't REALLY a phi (it's derived from the Scandinavian slashed O), but they're very similar. Older math books sometimes used phi for ease of typesetting. Phi remains a total mystery even in the true ending. The author rubs it in on the Answers page: when asked "Could you give us hints about Phi?", he simply answers "Φ".
  • Tenmyouji, according to Uchikoshi himself, is named for the fact that the game takes place during a lunar eclipse. The characters represent, in order, space, the sun and moon, and (in a more roundabout way) the earth.
• Mental Time Travel: Phi and Sigma can both transfer their consciousnesses into the past and future. Training them to use this ability is the entire point behind the new Nonary Game.
• Memory Gambit: An interesting blend with Mental Time Travel. The true Zero III/Zero Sr., the mastermind of this Nonary Game who created the A.I., had his entire consciousness transferred decades back in time so the participants of the game wouldn't discover that he was Sigma, the player, all along. When another consciousness of his arrived from the past at the start of the game, he didn't remember anything of The Plan because, well, he hadn't planned it yet. Sigma's realization that he was Zero Sr. without his memories comes as The Reveal.
• Mind Screwdriver: This game does give a far less crazy explanation for apparent ancient Egyptian princess Alice catching a ride with you at the end of 999. She's actually just a Department of Defense anti-terrorism agent with odd taste in clothing; with that odd taste being an over the top disguise to keep people from believing she works for a secret organization.
• Mind Virus: Radical-6. First, it slows down the perception of time and then drives the victim to suicide.
• Moonwalk Dance: Sigma, at one point, gets asked by Phi to demonstrate her point by taking some random action, in which the player can choose to clap, wave, or dance (among other choices). If the player chooses "moonwalk", she tells him he's doing it wrong.
• Morton's Fork: At several voting points, Phi will explain to Sigma at length how voting "Betray" is the logical choice. If you do vote that, she will right afterwards decry you as a heartless selfish monster and use Exact Words to weasel out of her own responsibility, claiming that even though she said it is the logical thing to do doesn't mean she was advocating it as the correct option. But if you vote "Ally" at that same point instead, Phi will then chastise you for taking a foolish risk and putting your trust into people you barely know. Even if your opponent also votes "Ally", she will dismiss that as your stupid decision just happening to provide a positive outcome by pure chance.
• Multiple Endings: There are 22 different endings:
  • END: 9 "True Ends" for each character route, with Phi's serving as the Omega Ending.
  • GAME OVER: 11 Nonstandard Game Over "Bad Ends" divided up among each of the 9 routes, one of which is mandatory in order to get the Omega Ending.
  • END or BEGINNING: An epilogue unlocked after the Omega Ending where Sigma talks with Young!Akane on the day the world ended 45 years ago.
  • Another Time END: A Sequel Hook non-canon epilogue unlocked after clearing every puzzle room on Hard where an unknown consciousness in Kyle Klim's body talks with Old!Akane about the Mars testing facility incident.
• Musical Nod: Multiple occasions.
  • The themes of this ("Virtue's Last Reward" and "Virtue's Last Reward ~ Piano") and the previous ("Morphogenetic Sorrow" and "9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors") games use the same core melody.
  • The first room you have to escape in both games is virtually the same track ("Unary Game" vs "Ambidexterity").
• Music Box Intervals: Blue Bird Lamentation both starts and ends with just a music box playing.
• Mystical White Hair: Phi. It turns out she shares Sigma's ability to jump across worlds.
• Mysterious Waif: Phi. Even following her path and the epilogue reveal very little about her or her life outside the game, and there's been no supplementary info about her, either. In fact, following her path is the only way to get the true ending, and requires all the other endings first.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Dio never triggers the bombs on his own accord, and Tenmyouji even bluffs him out of doing it in multiple ending paths. They only go off on an automatic timer once the party takes the detonator 1 meter away from him.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: The bombs would go off in every timeline if Dio didn't insist on giving away one of the passcodes to taunt you.
• Nobody Poops: Nobody seems to get hungry or need to use the bathroom during the course of the game, even though the final ending reveals that they've actually spent 36 straight hours playing under the effects of Radical-6. Which is good, because there don't seem to even be any bathrooms in the building, or at least any the participants can access.
• No Biological Sex: The GAULEMs don't have sexual characteristics, if their metal frames stored in the bay are any indication. However, they do appear to have personality genders. Luna seems to identify as female, probably due to her initial programming.
• Noodle Incident: Pretty much everything that happens at the Mars Mission Test Site in Nevada. Zero Time Dilemma explains what actually happened there.
  • Sigma in the Laboratory gives us "I've got a dead frog, but I don't know what to do with it. Just like Easter 2020..."
  • Apparently, Sigma has once gotten wasted and had a one night stand with the mistress of a prominent politician. "But it was just the one time. And she was the one who went after me."
  • Then there's the really strange incident he had that granted him his cat Verbal Tic.
• Non-Standard Game Over: The 11 "Bad End" outcomes. Failing to solve certain puzzles in Alice, Phi, and Sigma's routes also results in smaller non-standard game over scenes.
• Number Two: Dio, the leader of the Myrmidons and "Left" hand man of Brother.
• Obviously Evil: Dio is a scumbag, votes "Betray" at (nearly) every opportunity, and it becomes clear he's done something heinous the longer the game goes on. As it turns out, he's a terrorist member of Free the Soul, and he either killed Akane or he planted bombs all over the facility to kill everyone.
• Obvious Rule Patch: the loose nature of this Nonary Game's rules demands a lot of specific counterrules:
  • Zero III himself states that the fact that the Secondary Chromatic Doors can't be unlocked until after the Primary ones close serves solely to prevent easy cheating.
  • Anyone can go through Chromatic Doors back and forth, but first they must escape from the puzzle room that's beyond the CDs. This prevents the nine players from returning to the warehouse empty-handed: the AB games would be pointless if no one had the keycard to enter the rooms.
  • Zero III forces all nine players to play the AB game in the first round, but later on, you find out that you can in fact not participate, which will make your vote default to ally. Sure, it puts you at a disadvantage, but it frees you from voting. Except it turns out that at least 1 out of 3 people who go through the CDs has to vote, or else the 3 of them die. This serves the obvious purpose of preventing everyone from not voting, which would grant them 9 BP after three rounds.
  • Anyone who has 9 BP or more can open the number nine door. So if you haven't enough BP, you just have to sneak out when someone else opens it, right? Wrong. If you cross the door and you have less than 9 BP, you die. So only people who have 9 BP or more can actually escape safely. This scenario is specifically talked about in-game.
• Odd Name Out: Any mythological references in the game are always Roman... except for the Greek names of Hephaestus Industries ^note A company mentioned in the Golden Files; the GAULEMS' original creators and the Myrmidons.
• Omega Ending: In order to get the Final True Ending, you need: the codes from the Dio, Tenmyouji, Sigma, and Alice paths to defuse all four bombs; the ID card from Quark's path to solve the one-headed lion mystery of room Q. Plus you need to have seen Phi's bad ending once to break Lock 08, Alice's ending to break Lock 09, and Luna's ending to break Lock 10. To get Luna's ending, you also need to have gotten key #1 from Sigma's path and key #2 from K's path to solve a two-headed lion mystery. To get Sigma's ending, you need to have gotten the Alice ending, which in turn requires the Dio ending, and to get K's ending you need to have gotten Clover's. Tenmyouji and Alice's endings also require you to have reached the second AB Game in Quark's route.
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: The true Zero III/Zero Sr., who is a researcher of genetics, robotics, cloning, AI systems and more.
• Once an Episode: In nearly every path:
  • Quark gets sick with Radical-6 and needs to be sedated, or goes missing.
  • Alice allies in the first round and gets betrayed. She then succumbs to Radical-6 and either attempts suicide or kills herself immediately before or shortly after the second round of the AB game.
  • After going through a Chromatic Door on floor B, Dio opens an AB gate as soon as his team returns to Warehouse A (always just before Sigma's team does), potentially killing anyone else who can't get back in time, due to the rule that at least one member of a trio is required to vote. In those timelines in which someone found out about that rule, he plausibly claims not to have known, since they weren't told about it initially, and only a few rooms have a copy of it.
  • Akane gets killed. Preventing this re-occuring event eventually becomes a major plot point.
  • In the timelines that Alice dies, you can expect Luna to die either at the same time, or shortly afterwards.
• Ontological Mystery: As before, nine strangers are dumped in a series of puzzle rooms for no apparent purpose, in a game that could very well kill them all. Even 999 players will be stumped as to the purpose of this Nonary Game (even Clover, in-universe), because the ones who set up the last Nonary Game already achieved all their goals. Nobody's even sure what it's like outside the building, where the building is, or what day or time it is.
• Percussive Maintenance: Discussed. At one point, when Sigma finds a device is unresponsive, K suggests that "a little damage might make it more flexible", justifying it with, "If being locked means it's working correctly, then if it's not working correctly it won't be locked."
• The Plague: Radical-6, which makes those infected with it become suicidally insane.
• Plot Twist: The main twist reveals that the player's ability to explore story branches is actually an ability Sigma has.
  • Sigma being an old man for the bulk of the game is a big one aimed at Japanese gamers. The creator lamented quite a bit in interviews that he couldn't use more mature characters as player characters because Japanese gamers have, in his opinion, a rather narrow-minded look at what makes a good player character. He even mentioned at least once that he had intended the characters to be older in 999. Is it really surprising that he pulled this kind of twist?
• Posthumous Character: The Old Woman you find dead early on in the game ends up featuring heavily in the story as she turns out to be K's mother figure, one of the main facilitators of newest game, and Akane / June / Zero from 999. Sigma also ends up preventing her death in the path to the Golden Ending.
• Power of Trust: If everybody just committed to trusting each other and always chose Ally, everybody would be able to leave after playing 3 rounds of the AB game. This actually happens in the last 3 rounds of the AB game in Phi's ending, which allows everybody but Dio to escape.
• Pre-Rendered Graphics: Any scene where a major revelation plays out — dubbed "Event" scenes — is typically depicted with a series of pre-rendered shots, though a handful of them are fully-animated.
• Previous Player-Character Cameo: Returning characters from 999 include Clover, Alice, Junpei Tenmyouji and the Old Woman (Akane).
• Prisoner's Dilemma: This is the basis behind the Nonary Game: Ambidex Edition, and Phi spends about 3 minutes explaining the concept to Sigma. The object is to escape the facility with 9 Bracelet Points, and the only way to get BP is to vote at the end of each round either for or against the people whom you cleared the round with. If both sides vote "ally", they both gain 2 BP; if one side votes "betray" while the other votes "ally," then the betraying side gains 3 BP and the betrayed loses 2. If both decide to betray, then neither will gain any BP for that round (which becomes a problem since the door to escape can only open once, meaning someone who played smarter could reach 9 BP before you do). Failing to vote causes the system to automatically vote "ally" on your behalf, which would seem to be an easy solution — but both sides failing to vote results in death by lethal injection via the point-counting bracelets worn by the players (which also happens to be the punishment for dropping to 0 BP). Funnily enough, after finishing her explanation, Sigma concludes that they should vote to ally, and Phi instead insists on betraying Luna.
• Psychic Powers: They exist, and their users are called Espers. Their powers work by interfacing with the Morphogenetic field, a form of 4th dimension.
  • Clover has Telepathy through a mental link, Tenmyouji has the same ability as Clover, Phi and Sigma can jump between parallel timelines, and Akane has foresight.
• Pungeon Master:
  • Sigma and Phi take turns doing this to one another, mostly just to annoy each other.
  • The Zero III A.I. goes out of his way to work in a rabbit or vegetable-related pun in every sentence.
  • Sigma has a compulsion to make cat puns when talking about felines.
  • Clover makes several bad puns in an attempt to annoy Dio during the Laboratory escape puzzle.
  • And Sigma and Alice make several underwear-related puns at Clover's expense in the Pantry, when she misreads the sign as "Panty".
• Recycled Soundtrack: A few of the background tracks from 999 are reused in this game.
• Red Herring: A number of potential solutions for Plot-Lock 3 are shown in other timelines, including using the cryogenic pods and tinfoil to remove the bracelets, using a defibrillator in the facility, or finding the injection gun that can counteract the poison in the bracelets. The actual solution comes from learning that Sigma has robotic arms.
  • Even with the interruption, GOL-M's words imply there's a GAULEM (human-like android) among the players, it's pretty easy to suspect Sigma after seeing his white blood, Phi with her amazing jumping skills and K who never shows his face. However, all of those suspicions are wrong, with the android actually being Luna.
• Red Sky, Take Warning: Even by 2074, Earth's atmosphere is still contaminated with dust and debris following the antimatter disaster and resulting nuclear winter, causing it to appear blood red from space. Somewhat subverted by Tenmyouji, who implies things are finally starting to get better.
• Religion of Evil: Free The Soul is a religious cult that is responsible for the outbreak of Radical-6, a virus that effectively wiped out most of the human race and sent the world into an apocalyptic future, and sent Dio to kill everyone involved with the AB Project.
  • At first.
• Ret-Gone: The entire reason behind this Nonary Game is to create a situation in which it never happens.
• Retroactive Precognition: As in the first game, this is the only way the protagonists can succeed, although we learn more about it this time.
• Rewatch Bonus: If you examine K's armor closely at one point while he lies on a couch during his route, his bracelet doesn't show through the armor. This is because he isn't inside it.
• Ridiculously Human Robots: Luna is a GAULEM who looks and has emotions just like a normal human.
• Robotic Reveal: Luna, just after the lock on her path. Also subverted in the Sigma ending - he turns out to be a human with cybernetic arms.
• The Runaway: In a flashback, Quark and Tenmyouji once got into a fight causing the former to run away. Tenmyouji went to search for him and nearly got himself killed due to a fever; had he died, Quark would become an orphan again.
• Running Gag: Zero III being referred to as a rodent, either to his face (whereupon he'll say "I'm a rabbit") or not (whereupon Sigma will correct them.) Indeed, rabbits are lagomorphs, not rodents. "Lagomorph" is Zero III's real name and, of course, was probably given to him by Zero Sr.

Tropes S to V

• Sadistic Choice:
  • In Alice's route, you have to choose whether to give Quark or Alice your one dose of Radical-6 cure, Axelavir, before they kill themselves. Unless you've found the replicator in the Laboratory, in which case Sigma can Take a Third Option and save them both.
  • The choice of who to give the Neostigmine injection to in K's ending - K, or Phi? Although this one is pretty quickly subverted since Sigma realizes that he won't be able to inject K through his armor anyway, so there's no point picking him. It's only after he injects Phi that he notices K had unlocked his armor and could remove it, meaning he could have been saved after all.
• Samus Is a Girl: In Sigma, Alice, and Phi's routes, Akane is the one in K's masculine-looking armor.
• Save Scumming: A form of this forms a key gameplay mechanic and plot point.
• School Swimsuit: In the Japanese version, Sigma's swimsuit obsession is actually a school swimsuit obsession. Presumably, this is due to Author Appeal.
• Schrödinger's Gun:
  • Used and discussed. A few characters inexplicably change their cooperate/betray decisions depending on what the player chooses at the same time. After a while, Sigma starts to notice this as you replay sections. This is eventually used to open a scenario lock, as seeing the Game Over where you betray Phi and she cooperates is what's needed to stop her from leaving in the alternate choice where you cooperate and she betrays you.
  • Sigma himself is subjected to the Schrodinger's Cat effect: he is forced to remove his memory of his past in order to make dramatic changes to his future.
• Schrödinger's Question: Applies to the game of rock paper scissors you have with Phi before the first AB game against Tenmyouji.
• Sdrawkcab Name: Luna's login password for the Director's Office is MIL KEV OLI. It's "I LOVE KLIM" backwards; it turns out Sigma's last name is Klim, and Luna has unrequited romantic feelings for his future self.
• Second Chapter Cliffhanger: It ends with the protagonist Sigma, having mastered his time travel powers, going back in time to meet Akane in the past so they can stop Free The Soul from unleashing the Radical-6 plague that has just killed off 6 billion people.
• Seers: Sigma, and Phi to a lesser degree, thanks to their Mental Time Travel abilities.
• Sequel Escalation:Virtue's Last Reward is 3 to 4 times the length as 999, has nearly 5 times as many endings, more unique story branches, a deadlier Nonary game, much bigger stakes behind it, and character voice-acting.
• Sequence Breaking: Due to the nature of every escape room boiling down to finding the green password to a safe that's usually out in the open, it's possible to bypass the entire room by entering in the password if you know what it is. On the path to the Golden Ending, Sigma and Phi use this to break out of the AB Room at the beginning earlier than planned in order to save Akane from Dio.
• Sequel Hook: The game ends with Akane asking you to help Sigma and Phi finally prevent the incident at the "trap-filled" Nevada Mars Test Site that caused the Radical-6 virus outbreak. Indeed, this is the gist of the Interquel, Zero Time Dilemma.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The ultimate goal of the AB Project Nonary Game is to fully awaken Sigma and Phi's Mental Time Travel abilities so that they can stop the outbreak of Radical-6 in the past.
• Schmuck Bait: Think you can safely vote after your opponent is put to sleep with Soporil due to their Radical-6 going haywire? Especially if you have 1 BP left? Surely you can just choose "ally", right? Nope.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Nine People wake up in an unfamiliar location deep underground, they are greeted by an Artificial Intelligence projection of a talking white rabbit who is holding them prisoner against their will, and he tells them that they need to play a game to get 9 BP to get out of there and get back home. One of the characters is even named Alice. Sounds a bit like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
  • Calling the number 5309 on the Crew Quarter's phone connects you to a girl named Jenny, in a reference to the 1981 Tommy Tutone song 867-5309 / Jenny.
  • Planet Liquor?
  Phi: *Drool*. But with our powers combined.
  • Two of the factors in determining if you are a gentleman in the "Gentlepoints" secret file are "number of top hats owned" and "number of puzzles solved". Similarly, the way Sigma points out who planted the antimatter bombs is highly reminiscent of the way the Professor makes an accusation in his games, complete with "it was you!" and Giving Someone the Pointer Finger.
  • If you call Phi a second time in the Crew Quarters, she answers "Welcome to Good Burger, home of the Good Burger."
  • If you examine the billiard poster, Alice will ask about a children's show where the main characters gather magic balls and make a wish.
  • Examining several beakers in the laboratory will eventually make Sigma go, "meep meep meep."
  • In the Laboratory, Dio will refer to a dead frog as an "ex-frog", much like how John Cleese referred to a certain "parrot".
  • According to the game's editor, Ben Bateman, he purposely renamed the model numbers of the Gaulems with references to My Little Pony^note Said names include "K-1ND", "P-RTY", "A-PL3", "G-3M5", "L-15T", "D-AGN", and "R-20C" .
  • Luna, the most optimistic of the cast, has a bluebird necklace.
  • When interrogating Dio about the bomb's deactivation codes in Sigma's path, Sigma will thrust his arm out like a certain spiky-haired lawyer, and then retort how it "isn't a court" when his target refuses to comply.
  • After Akane orders Zero Jr. to remove her bracelet, he replies, "Compliance!" similar to Max from Flight of the Navigator.
  • When Sigma goes down to Warehouse B and Phi sneaks up behind him, Sigma asks her if she's Batman.
  • After Phi says all the different "men" she isn't, she concludes with "I am no man" and then calls Sigma "witch king". Eowyn makes the same statement right before killing the Witch-King in ''The Return of the King'' and The Odyssey, which is the alias which Odysseus/Ulysses makes when tricking the cyclops Polyphemus.
  • Two of the Vita trophies are called "Who set up us the bomb", part 1 and A.
  • The achievement for Luna's ending is "Tears in the rain". Moreover, when Sigma and Phi discover that Luna is a GAULEM, Phi wonder if the Nonary Game is some kind of Voight-Kampff test.
  • The achievement for the Golden Ending is "Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb!"
  • Clover's outfit is a "sexy costume" version of the outfit worn by the teenage Pebbles Flintstone, complete with hair bone.
  • When talking with Luna in the Crew Quarters after going through the Lounge, she suggests the Nonary Game was created for entertainment, so rich, powerful people can watch, just like in the Secret Game: Killer Queen visual novels, and Dio greatly resembles the character Tezuka from that novel.
  • Exploring the Director's Office with Tenmyouji and Quark yields this Shout-Out to Tenacious D, when they ask how you plan on using the slingshot without any ammo.
    Sigma: With... mind-bullets...
    Tenmyouji: It's called "telekinesis," Sigma.
• Smart People Know Latin: Phi modestly claims to know only a little of the language before flawlessly translating an entire passage from a scientific journal.
• Solve the Soup Cans: Justified Trope. The purpose of the Nonary Game is to strengthen your mental powers, nothing better for that than some life and death mental exercises!
• Somebody Set Up Us the Bomb: Several appear throughout the base at various points. Antimatter bombs at that. The achievements for clearing the locks to expose who planted them are "Who Set Up Us The Bomb", Part 1 and Part A.
• Space Base: The final ending reveals that the base the Nonary Game takes place in is on the moon. The red "moon" in the sky is actually the post-calamity Earth.
• Spanner in the Works: Dio aspires to be this to the AB game. Too bad for him that not only is he expected, but his presence is actually required.
• Stable Time Loop:
  • Phi comments that she knows exactly how Radical-6 will happen at the Nevada test site, but she withholds saying anything about it because it will thoroughly dash their hopes in preventing the incident from happening in the first place.
  • Zero Sr.'s recorded message tells Sigma the code to deactivate the #1 Bomb. The only reason he even knew it in the first place is because 45 years ago he was on the other side of that same message. At no point can you get the code out of Dio like the other three.
  • In one round of the AB game, Phi betrays you if you ally with her, which you most likely will on a first playthrough since the game gives you no reason not to. This, of course, makes you want to go back and betray her to get revenge... except she allies this time. Turns out the only reason she betrayed you in the other timeline was to get revenge on you for betraying her in this one. Which, of course, you are only doing to get revenge on her for betraying you in the other one. Of course, if you decide to betray her before allying with her for some reason, then no loop happens, but again, you most likely won't do that.
• Stripperiffic: Clover's outfit shows off her entire midriff, while Alice is just straight-up goes topless and only manages to be covered up because of how huge her necklace is (she also wears a jacket, but it's completely open and so small she'd hardly be able to close it even if she wanted to). The former's outfit is apparently largely like that because of Alice, as Clover aspires to be like her.
• Stupid Evil: The decision to betray Luna in the second vote after allying with her in the first one is both a dick move and impractical. Both of you have 5 BP so an additional 1 BP is useless, since you need to go through the third round either way, and you lose everyone's trust which would make getting the remaining BP next round much harder. Unsuprisingly, it gets you a bad ending.
• Suddenly Voiced: In Another Timeline, the Player Character suddenly has full voice acting, your first sign that you're no longer playing as Sigma. It only happens in the English dub, though: the Japanese voice acting completely inverts the trope, having all characters lose their voice in that timeline.^note This segment was added very late in development, after the Japanese voice acting had already been completed, and was added in part because of an earthquake during recording.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Luna, the orange-haired woman, shares a lot of mannerisms with June, while Phi looks a lot like a gender-bent Santa. Alice is also a mysterious Stripperiffic woman like Lotus, K is an amnesiac like Seven, and Dio wears a princely getup like Snake.
• Take a Third Option: You can do this on Alice's route, but only if you've previously escaped from the Laboratory at least once in Quark's route. Specifically, both Alice and Quark catch Radical-6, a disease that eventually makes its victims commit suicide. A bottle of Axelavir is discovered that can cure it, but there's only enough for either Alice or Quark, but not both. For a moment, it looks like you have to choose who will live and who will die... Until Sigma suddenly "remembers" that the Laboratory has an IG Replicator that can replicate Immunoglobin, which in turn can be used to manufacture a second dose of Axelavir so you can save both Alice and Quark.
• Taking You with Me: A large part of society's decline due to Radical-6 was because of this. Suicidal drivers and pilots can bring down their vehicles, killing their passengers with them even if they weren't infected; infected drivers furthermore put food supply chains for a halt, condemning people to starve. Tenmyouji also speculates that the detonations of the antimatter plants was also this on a large scale.
• Talking Is a Free Action: Mostly averted. Sometimes, it's stretched a little bit. For example, the Number Nine door is only supposed to be open for nine seconds but sometimes the character leaving gets a bit longer than that to monologue. However, in any other given time-sensitive situation, the characters will often be racing against the clock and a few times, it turns out that having a conversation during a countdown is a bad idea. One ending, where Sigma gets a medical examination from Luna right in the middle of searching for a bomb... Only gives him enough time to confirm his medical status before everyone explodes.
• Temporal Paradox: Subverted, according to Word of God. It seems that technically, the deactivation code for Bomb #01 doesn't really originate from anywhere because Dio never tells it to anyone, but Zero Sr. does, and Zero Sr. is Sigma, meaning he would learn from "himself". What actually happened is that Akane hacked Bomb #01 and changed its password, which is how Zero Sr. knew of it. Incidentally, the password for that bomb is one letter away from the name of Akane's organization Crash Keys.
• Thanatos Gambit: Akane is acutely aware of the fact that some of the game's timelines will result in the death of herself and several others.
• The Many Deaths of You: In the various Bad Endings, Sigma is poisoned, blown up, kills himself...
• Theme Song Reveal: If you haven't figured out the identity of the old woman by the time you finish Luna's route, the sound of "Morphogenetic Sorrow" playing over Luna explaining her orders and the old woman's death will tune you in.
• The Time Traveller's Dilemma: Although the goal of the AB project is to prevent the release of the Radical-6 virus, the timelines in which Sigma and Phi failed to do so still exist. Phi talks to you about it briefly as part of the Multi-World Interpretation, and Tenmyoji and Quark talk about it during the Golden Ending, and some ethical implications thereof.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: Akane's explanation of Sigma's necessary time-jumps is more of a Timey-Wimey Diagram; and the end of it splits in two.
• To Be Continued: The player gets this message when the plot cannot advance in a particular timeline because they haven't obtained the necessary information from another one yet.
• Tomato in the Mirror: Double Subverted. At one point, Sigma is implied to be a robot after his hand is cut and he begins to bleed white. This is helped by an earlier implication that one of the players is an android. Eventually, this is revealed to be false, he just has cybernetic arms. Later, it is revealed that Sigma is Zero, although due to his consciousness travelling through time, he remains unaware until near the end. Within the game, Sigma's face is never actually shown outside of the game's introduction, leading the player to believe that he's a college age student, and not the 67 year old he's shown to be.
• Tomato Surprise: Numerous facts about the setting are kept from the player, despite many of the characters being aware of them:
  • The plot actually occurs not in December 2028, but 45 years later. Everyone other than Sigma, Clover, Alice, and maybe Phi are aware of this.
  • The events of the game actually occur on the Moon. About an half of the cast is aware of this.
  • Sigma is in the body of a 67 year old man. Everyone other than the player and Sigma are aware of this, although only Luna and K know the significance of this.
• Trailers Always Spoil: Averted. Unlike the actual game, the promo OAV is an entirely non-canon retelling of events by Sigma, who believes himself to be a 22-year-old college student rather than the 67-year-old man he actually is in the game.
• Translation Convention: Even though Tenmyouji isn't a Westerner, he doesn't seem to have trouble communicating with everyone else. Justified in that Tenmyouji was already fluent in English given his background.
• Trickster Game: The game is a "screw you" to the Japanese players' narrow-minded thoughts on player characters. The game creator wanted to make an adult hero, not a slightly older teenage hero. Japanese gamers don't like the idea of playing as old men because they can't be awesome (basically). So the game has you play as an old man but tricks you into thinking he's college age.
• Unreliable Narrator: Whoever wrote the secret files often comes across this way, repeatedly joking with the reader and contradicting themselves in a single entry.
• Verbal Tic: Sigma has one of these. Whenever he sees or starts talking about cats, he starts putting practically every cat-based pun he can into his speech.
• Viewers Are Morons: The fact that the game has to explain primary and complementary colors, anagrams, and Schrödinger's cat, three phenomenons that the target demographic should be well-aware of by the time they play.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • In the Tenmyouji path, Tenmyouji betrays Sigma and makes it clear the only thing he cares about is getting Quark out of the game, threatens to kill Sigma through the AB game when he starts annoying him with questions about the outside world, then betrays Sigma again in round three, escaping with Quark and even mocking Sigma's trust on the way out. The first time through, it looks like Tenmyouji is just being particularly mean, since the player doesn't know that Tenmyouji learned that Sigma is Zero. So betraying him in a later path (despite his innocence in the new timeline), which infuriates him, can be cathartic to some.
  • Alice's path involves Alice betraying Sigma, then calling him stupid for voting ally. After coming down with a bad case of G-6, Sigma manages to cure her by finding the rare medicine and even duplicating it so there's enough to go around. Sigma's reward for that...is for Alice to sprint to the second AB round to vote betray, which kills Sigma and gives Alice the chance to leave if he votes ally. Alice will even defend herself and insist she was only doing the logical thing, even if she later apologizes. So you may enjoy betraying her in the Phi path.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment:
  • Although you can get a Game Over by picking Ally in certain rounds, the majority of premature bad ends occur if you hit the "betray" lever. Basically, Sigma can only get away with voting betray if it's the first round of the AB game or if his opponent votes betray as well. Otherwise, Sigma is knocked out or held back from escaping by the other players, cuing a bad end where nothing of value is gained. Only one of these bad ends contains required information.
  • Betraying Luna, the nicest person in the cast, deserves a special mention. You get three chances to do so, and all of them result in a bad outcome. Betray her in the first AB game and you are locked to Dio's ending, where the Big Bad succeeds in his goals and becomes a Karma Houdini. Betray her after going through the Green Door and a Game Over will be triggered. Finally, betraying her is mandatory in order to get K's ending, where Sigma dies due to the penalty and Phi is trapped alone in the facility.
• Viewers Are Geniuses: This game will expect you to make 2+2 = kumquat a few times with the plot. Even with the secret files, you'll be fitting pieces together to get a full sense of what's going on.

Tropes W to Z

• Weaksauce Weakness: In Luna's route, she reveals that if you just stick some tinfoil in between your arm and your bracelet, it won't be able to detect your heartbeat anymore, assumes you must have died, and pop right off without a fuss. Insultingly, there's a giant roll of tinfoil in the Crew Quarters which is accessible from the first set of Chromatic Doors.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: K (aka Kyle Klim) views his relationship with Sigma this way. Not only is he wrong, he's instrumental to helping his father save the world.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Akane could easily be seen as one. Even Uchikoshi sometimes talks about her in this manner. She is the explicit mastermind behind every event featured thus far in the playable series, cares very little about casually ruining lives, as well as taking them, when it suits her purposes. She even flat out admits that the people and methods involved in her games matter very little to her and could be achieved in different matters, implying if she cared enough.
• Wham Line:
  • A minor one early in the game:
    Luna: Quark has an... infection. A viral infection. He's been infected with a virus called Radical-6.
  • Sigma himself delivers one that reveals there's far more to both him and the game's multiple routes than meets the eye.
    Sigma: You chose "betray" last time!^note For context, this is after you choose to ally with Alice in round 1, then go back to that decision and choose betray. There are also variants for the other way around, and for Tenmyouji, who does the same thing.
  • In the Golden Ending, after the characters escape the facility and see the surroundings:
    Tenmyouji: (after they see a circular shadow moving on the surface of the red moon) I meant what I said before: That up there is the Moon's shadow.
    Sigma: What the hell are you saying?
    Tenmyouji: Think about it. If that's the Moon's shadow, then what's it falling on?
    Phi: That's... Earth?
    
    Tenmyouji: This isn't New Year's Eve in 2028. Today is January 27th.
    Sigma: In '29?
    Tenmyouji: No.
    Clover: Don't tell me... '30?
    Tenmyouji: Still no.
    Alice: Then just what year is this?
    Tenmyouji: ... It's '74. 2074.
  • When you find a guy that looks just like Sigma in the pod.
    Quark: So... who is he?
    Akane: You've never seen him before?
    Quark: No.
• Wham Shot:
  • For those who played 999, the person on Tenmyouji's photo. It's Akane. Which also reveals that Tenmyouji is Junpei, even though he's much older than Junpei has any right to be one year after the previous game.
  • After Sigma accidentally gets his hand cut while fighting a suicidal Alice, Luna points out there's still some sort of bleeding from his hand, which he realises is white blood.
  • The first time a person votes differently than the last time is quite a surprise, as it puts Schrödinger's Cat into effect.
  • Alice chosing "betray" even though she should be unconscious.
  • The reveal that K looks exactly like Sigma.
  • In Quark's ending, everyone decides to search the mysterious old lady found murdered earlier for clues. They find her ID card which reveals her last name is "KURASHIKI", which is hammered in by a password she wrote on the back: "JUMPYDOLL", which confirms that this is Akane Kurashiki.
  • In Phi's ending, Kyle being in a treatment pod instead of Akane.
  • Sigma looking at his reflection in the pond and seeing Zero's face.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: You can visit the Gaulem Bay during a route where you went to another puzzle room instead and see that G-OLM isn't there. There was no explanation for this in game. Uchikoshi states in the Q&A that he was inside the operation table, and most likely put there by Zero Jr/III.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • The other characters really let you have it if you vote Betray against certain characters, especially the ones that are incapacitated or otherwise unable to vote. Phi gets so angry at you for Betraying her in one timeline that she decides to screw you over in another... Even if you haven't actually done so yet, and even if you only end up betraying her because she betrayed you first, and you're trying to figure out how you can keep her from leaving.
  • Though the real kicker is when Alice, who you thought was incapacitated, somehow manages to betray you. If you picked betray, she chastises you for thinking you could get "an easy 2 points" (which is incorrect; picking betray only gets you 1 point more than picking ally if you know your opponent will ally) by betraying her. When Sigma tries to give her one of these back, noting that if he had picked ally, she would've killed him (as you only have 1 point at this point in time), she refuses to admit any wrongdoing because she "knew you'd betray". And yes, that is one of the few occasions where the usual bad ending/good ending dynamic for the second AB game is reversed—she still votes betray if you vote ally, and you get a bad ending.
• What the Hell, Player?: A few Bad Ends obtained through Betrayal will have Sigma sincerely confused by his own choice, since there was no logical or emotional reason to do so. During his introspection, he mentions being overwhelmed by the desire to see what happened, purely for its own sake. He promptly berates himself for making such a needlessly stupid and selfish decision.
• White Void Room: The final puzzle room you unlock resembles this, at first.
• World Half Full: As bad as Earth is, Tenmyouji does imply that things are slowly getting better. There is a cure for Radical-6, and the nuclear winter has long since dissipated.
• Year Outside, Hour Inside: Radical-6 does this within the body. Moreover, It is revealed that the entire game took roughly 36 hours instead of the expected 14 or so, and that all the timers were slowed accordingly.
• You Bastard!: If you're on Clover's route, and you choose "Betray" in Round 2, you'll get a game over, and it plays out like this trope. Specifically, it causes both you and Clover to get 9 BP so you can escape... But in order for that to happen, you took advantage of a sedated and thus unable-to-vote Quark, who thus defaulted to "Ally". This basically means you took advantage of a sick little kid to save yourself. Once it's explained to everyone that you pressed the button and not Clover, everyone gets royally pissed off at you, and just to punish you for your cowardice, everyone else charges at you at once, and K in particular actually manages to catch up and pin you to the ground just so you can't leave, and Alice shoves Clover out the door so only Clover will escape and get help for everyone.
  • Any instance where you betray Luna tends to have this tone as well. She always chooses "ally", and will be utterly heartbroken if you betray her, especially the second time (where she explicitly says she trusts you beforehand) and the third time (where it's a test to see if you still trust her despite her being a robot). The latter instance will lead to her taking the only other survivor and abandoning you in the facility while Zero III berates you for not trusting her.
• You Killed My Father:
  • K kills Dio when he realizes Dio killed his mother figure Akane to get into the Nonary Game.
  • Alice's father was kidnapped and eventually killed by the Myrmidons & Free The Soul. She does not take the knowledge that Dio is Left very well.
• You Lose at Zero Trust: In multiple bad endings where you choose Betray, everybody else turns on you because they decide that you are no longer worthy of their trust.
• You Shouldn't Know This Already: Averted; there's nothing stopping you from logging into Luna's account in the Director's Office and finishing the route before you actually get the passwords. This led to some Sequence Breaking issues from players who weren't familiar with the plot lock mechanics, assumed they were supposed to know the passwords already, and looked them up.
• You Wake Up in a Room: Sigma and Phi wake up in what appears to be an elevator, which Zero III warns them it will drop if they don't get out in time. However, they find out after escaping that they're not elevators.

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