Lettuce Play Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Lettuce Play Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward

Wolpertinger: Feb 16, 2011

I'll toss a vote for Luna.

# ¿ May 29, 2013 09:22

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 19:16

Wolpertinger: Feb 16, 2011

Jeek posted:

Hey guys, I found a major spoiler to both VLR and DR2 thanks to this little image I stumbled upon while messing with GIMP today:

Guess it is time for me to stop speculating on both LPs now.

_{_{_{Sorry for the :effort:}}}

How did a silly crossover photoshop end up spoiling you? Did you google it or something and see a bunch of spoilery related images?

# ¿ May 30, 2013 05:52

Wolpertinger: Feb 16, 2011

ApplesandOranges posted:

I'd probably actually pair Ten and Quark and group them with Luna - if Ten and Quark are separate and Quark is indeed a backstabber he could just Betray again and doom Tenmyouji. With Ten and Quark together, even if Quark betrays it's just helping Ten, and Luna can afford the point hit. The problem of course is that Quark just wins if that happens.

For them to 'win' they have to physically reach the door and pull the lever - since Quark is a kid, it probably wouldn't be too hard to restrain him.

# ¿ Jun 5, 2013 16:04

Wolpertinger: Feb 16, 2011

Kgummy posted:

I'd assume it was part of his plan, considering K said/theorized as much. At the very least Zero III doesn't doesn't care one way or the other. I guess it might be 'didn't have a bracelet, wasn't part of the game'.

Though Zero III did seem to imply that he already knew the death caused the bracelet to come off, much in the same manner as calling out Phi about knowing the death rule of the AB game. So either the murder victim had a bracelet and Dio took it; Something similar to the captain situation in 999. Or Dio knows more about the Nonary Game than he's letting on.

Don't really have enough to go off at the moment.

The body was found in K's and Clover's booth, not Dio and Quark's, why would you think Dio did it? And how would he have done it? :confused:

# ¿ Jun 6, 2013 00:02

Wolpertinger: Feb 16, 2011

Kgummy posted:

I said Dio might have done it. Or that he knows more about the Nonary game that he's letting on.

I didn't say for sure that he did it. It's much more likely that he has outside knowledge of the Nonary game.

Though rereading the update it seems possible that Zero III was just being kind of a jerk, and meant it as a "Can't you figure it out?" kind of thing. Though Dio being especially loud in asking questions in the AB room might have been him asking things he couldn't outright ask with the others around.

Well, Quark was with him.

# ¿ Jun 6, 2013 00:37

Wolpertinger: Feb 16, 2011

KasaiAisu posted:

I don't know why they'd think any of them are murderers though.

The whole dead body thing in a room they were just in, the 'one of you is zero' shtick from Zero III, the fact that they were all just kidnapped... Seems like good reason to be suspicious

# ¿ Jun 6, 2013 14:11

Wolpertinger: Feb 16, 2011

Nidoking posted:

The Chinese Room argument (reversed) would ask how you know that Watson itself is producing the answers, and not some remotely-located human who can understand the questions and is somehow providing the responses. The point is, as PlaceholderPigeon says, sort of a deconstruction of the Turing Test, which asks a human to converse with one other human and one non-human intelligence, then decide which is the human. The Turing Test suggests that if the non-human intelligence is sufficiently capable of acting as a human does to fool some number of humans, then it can be considered a humanlike intelligence. The Chinese Room argument compares an intelligence (human or not) to a non-intelligence, and posits that the two are capable of providing exactly the same set of responses to a given set of stimuli. If the responses can't be distinguished in any way, then how can the observer distinguish between an intelligence and a non-intelligence?

I recall a story I read ages ago as an example of absurdism that featured a man who, among other things, had memorized the answer to every mathematical problem in existence. He couldn't actually do any math and frankly didn't understand how numbers worked, but given any problem, he could supply the correct answer. Anyone who tested him without asking how he came up with the answers would think he was a brilliant mathematician. Same principle, in the end.

I think a large problem with the whole 'Chinese Room' metaphor is learning capability - it's explicitly a fixed, pre-made library. It breaks the moment someone asks tells it something and then asks them to recall what they said later. Even if you handwave it as a magic library that has stored all possible conversations, what if that person tried to teach the Chinese Room to speak English? Suddenly the whole thing falls apart.

# ¿ Jun 20, 2013 03:09

Wolpertinger: Feb 16, 2011

tiistai posted:

Besides, secretly taking the bracelet with you is practically suicide the next time you go through a colored door with two other people. 4 scanned bracelets means everyone gets punished.

That would be a clever murder technique - as a group runs into their door, throw a bracelet in after them just before the door shuts. Take out three birds with one stone!

# ¿ Jul 3, 2013 15:25

Wolpertinger: Feb 16, 2011

Terper posted:

Also, the one actually throwing the bracelet might not make it into his/her door. Meaning potentially everyone could die.

This is actually a surprisingly efficient way to break the game entirely in an instant - even if you and your match-ups survived, you could do a single AB game, tops - after that, you'd have randomized bracelets and your pairs would be most likely all trapped forever between the primary and the secondary doors forever, so everyone left would die when you needed to enter a chromatic door again.

# ¿ Jul 4, 2013 00:44

Wolpertinger: Feb 16, 2011

whitehelm posted:

There already is. When the following AB round finishes anyone stuck in between doors dies because none of that group voted.

I think he more means the failsafe being needed with them being stuck between doors, dead, and no one is able to get their bracelets, as the chromatic doors only become unlocked after the completion of the puzzle that they never reached - so the bracelets are trapped between the two doors, and this prevents any future people paired with those bracelets from going through any future chromatic doors, leading to every single remaining person dying.

As far as I can tell, if ANY person or group gets stuck in the chromatic doors for not enough or too many bracelets, even just a single person, it could easily cause a chain reaction that would kill off all the other people too - from that point on every single person part of a pair or a matching solo with anyone who's trapped in the chromatic doors will die. They can't get the three bracelets needed to enter another door, dooming them.

# ¿ Jul 4, 2013 06:54

Wolpertinger: Feb 16, 2011

theshim posted:

But that's not how it's described. She's effectively piggybacking on Junpei, experiencing his experiences, only she has the completely separate and unique ability to do it without it actually happening. She has the ability to sit and watch the future unfold in front of her, seemingly as far as she wants, and then to jump back to herself. Basically, though the whole game implies the communication is in real time (and if Junpei doesn't make it to the incinerator to send her the solution at that moment she dies), Akane basically savestated at the beginning of the game and went back to that every time things didn't work.

(There's also the fact that child Akane, who goes back for the doll, who's panicking and in tears and is a child in a horrible situation, is somehow supposed to have gone down at least one alternate timeline far enough to get the critical information and then sent it to Junpei at the right time. Effectively her abilities have to function outside the normal progression of time as well - otherwise there'd be no reason to panic at the end if she'd already sent Junpei the coffin information as she knows he's on the right path and will be there to solve it with her. Or perhaps the fact that she panics until Junpei establishes contact points to it being more linear? The relations between the past and present, as well as the mechanics of accessing the morphogenetic field for alternate timeline information, are incredibly vague.)

Akane's unique ability just has to have so many bells and whistles attached to actually make the story work. It has to have so many exceptions and qualifications on top of the established fact that morphogenetic fields exist. This annoys me...and there's really no reason that it should - there's no reason that I should be willing to accept morphogenetic fields and communication but the moment Akane comes into play I start going "whoooaaaa not cool", so we should pretty much drop this as it's all me being nitpicky about time travel and stuff.

And that's why I said I'm hoping VLR gives a satisfactory answer as to how this all works. I'm looking forward to the game's explanation.

Here's one possible way of looking at it. Akane escapes from the incinerator. Period - there is one, single, akane, looking at a million possible futures, and when she finds a future that has the solution to the puzzle, she now, independently of Junpei, knows the answer and can escape. This apparently turns her into some sort of quantum possibility that only half exists. She then goes to actually set up the game to ensure the true future happens - if something goes wrong and the answer isn't transmitted, she ceases to exist in that future - but the things she has done before vanishing sticks. That is still a 'possible future'. That's just the way time travel works in 999.

Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Aug 29, 2013

# ¿ Aug 29, 2013 22:33

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 19:16

Wolpertinger: Feb 16, 2011

Flea Wars posted:

Hot drat, that's even less of an ending than the Coffin in 999.

Not every possible path in a game with so many branches and endings can lead to a meaningful ending, - there's actually two types of endings in this game - 'game over' which means essentially 'bad end', you got nothing out of it, and an 'Ending' which reveals a piece of the larger puzzle.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2013 18:32

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