According to Ben Bateman, who was involved with the English localization, he has said that he found Luna a fascinating character because she treats the Three Laws of Robotics as more of a belief system.
Zero Jr scolding Sigma for betraying Luna. Given that they're both creations of Dr. Klim and that this is the only time after the first round when he appears, it's possible that he saw Luna as his sister. And considering that Sigma is the one who created them, and earlier he refers to Zero Sr. as his "parent", his scolding may come across as Calling the Old Man Out. Or alternatively, given Luna's reveal that she hacked Zero Jr in her ending, it could very well be Luna speaking as Zero Jr., indirectly calling out Sigma and Phi for betraying her trust.
The alternate timelines theory that is often explored in the game seems to explain why certain characters that are not espers like Sigma, Phi, and Akane tend to be inconsistent in their behavior and motivations. One example is during a vote in the AB Game where Alice is your opponent. If the alternate timeline theory is in effect, it's very likely that the Alice who votes Betray against Sigma and Phi if you choose to Ally with her, is not actually the same 'Alice' who votes Ally if you choose to Betray her.
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Not in the game itself but in one of the Golden Files. While Sigma's cat pun habit is just innocent quirk, the story behind this quirk is ridiculous even by Zero Escape standards and never referenced outside this file.
Broken Base: Sigma's pervertedness. It's either extremely funny, or really creepy with how insistent he is (plus, Junpei from Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors was far more subtle). Doesn't help that Sigma is actually 67 years old with the mind of a 22-year-old throughout the story.
Captain Obvious Reveal: You'll probably figure out that Tenmyouji is actually Junpeiway before the game reveals it. Him having Akane's photo in his wallet is a dead giveaway, but there's also Quark mentioning how Tenmyouji was "looking for a very important lady" after establishing that Akane went missing after the events of 999, and his strange behavior around Clover and Alice, the only two characters returning from 999.
In almost all endings, someone manages to escape and then promises to contact the police to come and save everyone else left behind. The problem is, as you play through all the routes you gradually learn that not only has the world gone through the apocalypse as a result of the Radical-6 pandemic, but the main characters are actually stuck ON THE MOON and they are infected with the deadly virus. It's highly likely that everyone died in all endings except the true one.
Betraying Luna, as Sigma is unknowingly her creator and Luna herself has quite a bit of angst relating to the fact that she's not human.
The True Ending has Clover and Alice lamenting that they will never be able to reclaim their former lives, as they are stuck in the future, and their friends and relatives are either dead or 40 years older than them. There is a brief Hope Spot when Clover mentions that Akane promised to send their bodies back in time, but the sequel reveals that it was a misunderstanding and such an action is actually impossible. Akane intends to use an alien device to send clones of Alice and Clover to the point in time before they were abducted, but the original ones are truly incapable of leaving the current timeline.
K's ending, in light of Word of God and revelations that occur during Zero Time Dilemma. K effectively forced Sigma to choose which of his children he would save from imminent death.
Inferred Holocaust: Every single ending except the Golden Ending almost certainly results in everyone involved dying not too long afterward, even if they get out of the Nonary Game, as they are all infected with Radical-6. Only Alice in her bad ending has much of a chance, as she has nine points and has already been cured of the infection, although it's easy to imagine the other players not allowing her to leave after seeing her kill Sigma by accident. Quark, in his ending, has also been cured of the infection, although he's likely to end up alone in the facility after everyone else kills themselves with no way to escape.
Magnificent Bastard: The brilliant Dr. Sigma Klim is Zero, mastermind of this game's Nonary Game and the protagonist's future self. A revolutionist in the fields of science and leading doctor in curing the Radical-6 pandemic, Klim intended to prevent the spread of Radical-6 and nuclear apocalypse from happening by training his past self and Phi into mastering their psychic abilities to jump into different timelines and travel back to where the infection first started and stop it. Setting up the Nonary Game as the training ground for the two, Klim place the two and the others kidnapped players, including his loved ones, in a Deadly Game of trust and betrayal with death lurking in every corner, even letting a terrorist and the virus itself run rampant to force Phi and Sigma in danger to grow their psychic abilities. A man with plans to save the worlds, Dr. Sigma Klim would even create a death game to achieve it.
K's "shocked" animation pose has him clapping his hands to face not entirely unlike the iconic Home Alone cover. His pupils turn vertical too. It looks more silly and adorable than shocked.
Tenmyouji reaching for Akane's hologram might've been more dramatic if it didn't look like he's trying to grab her boob.
Sigma discovering Alice's dead body after she runs off and kills herself is suitably dramatic until he screams "Yeeeeaaaaaaaarrrrggggghh!". The strange onomatopoeia used to describe the scream is rather funny and over the top, not helped by the accompanying screen shaking and motion lines.
The game definitely makes you feel like a jerk any time you choose "betray", but it's especially bad if the opponent is Luna or a comatose Quark.
Learning that the dead old woman is Akane.
Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Alice was quite hated at first due to her jerkass attitude and for her stealth-betrayal of Sigma, which kills him in one route. However, she comes to regret betraying you and causing Sigma's death, admitting that she made the decision out of fear of losing the Nonary Games and succumbing to Radical-6. Sigma forgives her and she tells him about her past, which in turn helps him discover the #2 bomb code after physically restraining Dio.
Retroactive Recognition: Jamieson Price's Sojiro voice comes through quite distinctively in this game, as random speaking roles like the Detective example of the Prisoner's Dilemma given by Phi and, more importantly, Zero Senior.
The Scrappy: Many people were put-off by how different Clover was personality-wise in this game from the first installment. A pretty ironic turnaround when you consider that Clover returned in this game because she was a fan favorite in the first game.
Sequel Difficulty Spike: Many of the puzzles in this game are radically more difficult than the puzzles in the previous installment, particularly those past the third set of Chromatic Doors. On top of that, the previous game allowed the player to skip a few obsolete puzzles and still get the best ending after only two playthroughs. This game requires the player to do every puzzle in the gamenote Some puzzles can be skipped through Sequence Breaking, but doing so will mess up the story by revealing plot points the game expects the player to already know. in order to get the true ending, and were it not for the FLOW mechanic allowing players to jump to already completed events, the number of playthroughs needed to get the true ending would be in the double digits: 12 at the bare minimum,note The nine character endings, plus Phi's game over, the Fission Mailed on Sigma's route, and an extra run of Quark's route to clear a lock on Alice's route before Quark's route can be finished. and most people would need significantly more due to the plot locks and dead ends.
Special Effect Failure: It's clear that the budget didn't allow for very amazing 3D models of the characters. For the most part, it isn't a huge deal, especially since the game was originally for portable devices. Whenever characters stop talking, they default to a rather neutral face. But for whatever reason, Quark and especially Clover default to a smile for their neutral face, which clashes horribly when their dialogue makes it clear they aren't happy.
The Director's Office contains an optional puzzle where the player has to rearrange shapes in a screen to create a parallelogram. While this doesn't seem difficult on paper, the detection for whether the shape is correct or not is ridiculously sensitive so that even if the player thinks or should have it right, the game can still treat it as the wrong answer.
The Q Room contains revamped versions of some of the hardest puzzles across the game, but what stands out is its dice puzzle. Like before, it provides the player with clues to where the dice need to go, and the player has to roll the dice to the indicated locations. However, instead of matching one face and the die's position, the entire die's orientation must match the clue.
Dio is so repugnant that finding out he's the antagonist of the scenario is...really surprising because it's so unsurprising. You keep expecting him to have some sort of hidden redeeming value. Nope. He doesn't. He really is as bad as he appears to be, and then some. Particularly surprising in the sequel of a game where the biggest jerkasses turn out to be supposedly caring and selfless people.
Quark is such an innocent and well-behaved child and Luna such a nice and caring woman that anyone who played the first game will become immediately suspicious and may even for a while believe Dio's story that Quark is the one who picks "Betray" against Tenmyouji. While Luna does have a secret that she is keeping from the rest and is working with the people responsible for the game, she is also as genuinely kind as she appears to be and is only involved because she doesn't really have a say in the matter as a robot. And Quark is just a kind hearted kid, what you see is exactly what you get.
The True End. If you know Prisoner's Dilemma, then you know from the start of the game that there's only one way for everyone to survive: cooperate. Unlike 999 and the "q/9" twist, VLR has no way to disguise this.
While only Dio was intended to be hated, most of the cast, including Sigma himself, can come out as Jerkasses when they promise to vote "ally" and then betray your trust (and insult you for it). Luna and Quark are the only characters not to invoke this trope.
Phi is something of a secondary protagonist, but she urges you to betray in the first round, even against Luna, even after mentioning that the best way to win the Prisoner's Dilemma for the whole group is to ally. And if you take her advice and betray, she blames the vote on you. If you ally and you're right to do so, she still chews you out.
What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The game falls into the category of being a game that would likely be passed off by parents as being a cartoon and for their kids. Just a few moments of playing said game and seeing the heavy cussing, violent situations and heavy use of sex jokes, should show anyone that that it's not for kids. Heck, just looking at the rating the game got, M for Mature [16+ in the UK], would tell parents it's not for kids.
The game's Japanese title was generally translated as Good People Die, but it also could be read as I Want To Be a Good Person. To preserve this double meaning, the English title was changed to Virtue's Last Reward to play off the phrases "Virtue is its own reward" and "The last reward" (death). The scenario writer liked it so much he had the game's main theme on the soundtrack renamed to "Virtue's Last Reward".
Myrmidons were originally called Clay Dolls, another way of saying golems (or a phonetic romaji of "Cradles"). It is implying that Dio and the other Left clones are similar in nature to the gaulems. Myrmidons, on the other hand, are a reference to "ant people" from Greek mythology which also suggests that while autonomous, they are a hivemind like the gaulems. It also has a double meaning as "fanatical warrior".
