(I finished 999 back in 2021, so my memory of my opinions of it may be hazy. Finishing VLR was much more recent.)
My first experience with any sort of escape room concept was back in my first playthrough of Danganronpa 2 with that Final Dead Room section, but even then, I just paid the Monocoins and ended up not actually DOING the escape room. Eventually, I played the first Zero Escape game, and learned of the beauty (and occasional frustration) of escape rooms for myself. Having the flowchart was nice for backtracking purposes, especially when I learned the DS original didn't have one at all. I did like seeing how things weaved together into their final conclusion, and very much liked the part where a certain someone outs themselves thanks to some clever trickery from our protagonist. It even has a satisfying ending. Why am I bringing that up specifically? Well, because of one reason.
Virtue's Last Reward...is a video game of all time. It is much longer than 999 was. My final playtime, with every ending, both good and bad, was 41 hours. Part of that is because some paths through routes are locked behind others, making you jump around between paths in hopes of getting the information you need to bust through story locks to progress. While this is significantly relevant to the main narrative, as a player, I will admit, there were times I wasn't the biggest fan of being in the middle of one set of events only to be cut off and told "alright, go somewhere else now until you get the right info." There were a couple of times I even through story locks without even knowing there were story locks, just because of how I played through the game.
As for paths I took, I went All Magenta paths -> All Yellow paths -> All Cyan paths, with the appropriate jumping around as things were locked or game overs reached. One path that should've been a story lock, but for some unusual reason isn't, was a certain part of Luna's ending, and to me, it felt like the game was implying you should already have the answer...even though at the time, I obviously didn't, as I had not finished any character endings at the time I reached that point. Since I assumed I was already supposed to have the answer, I ended up looking up the answer (not knowing I needed to do K and Sigma's endings to acquire this information) and ended up, through fault of my own, getting spoiled on several important story details far earlier than I should've.
I do think that, likely due to the nature of the AB Game being a game of betrayal, I wasn't nearly as attached to most of the cast compared to the characters from 999. I will also admit I wasn't the greatest fan of the character model changes from 999 to VLR.
Then comes the elephant in the room, the ending. While 999 had a satisfying ending, VLR basically ends on a cliffhanger. I will admit, a good chunk of the giant yap session at the end of the game did go over my head a bit, but the ending just didn't satisfy me very much. Most of the cast was only there to be used and discarded, a couple basically had their lives stolen from them, all for an uncertain possibility that everything will work out. What happens if it doesn't? Screw all of them?
Knowing what I know about the game's sequel, Zero Time Dilemma, it gives me an even worse impression of this game's ending. I get that the value of VLR shouldn't be affected by the...:quality" of it's sequel, but this game's ending is literally made for the purpose of setting up the sequel in the first place, so you can't even unshackle them because that one little plot thread conjoins them together, whether I like it or not.
Now, ignoring that, if you turn your brain off partly and just focus primarily on the gameplay, I'd still say VLR is a fun game. Yes, I did end up looking up puzzle solutions a bit more often than I did in 999 (and even then, it was only a couple of times after I spent a lot of time trying to solve it myself), so yeah, they did raise the level of difficulty with some of the puzzles, especially since there are now files that give supplementary information if you can get a second safe password.
Even so, despite my...less than stellar feelings about VLR, it's still 2 games for 30 bucks, less if there's a sale. Both are still fun games that you should be able to get some mileage out of, and if you REALLY want that final conclusion, despite it's "quality," Zero Time Dilemma is a game that exists, I guess.
