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"Two Milkmen Go Comedy"
"Welcome to my Kingdom"

As the sequel to my favorite DS game 999: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors, I had high expectations for Virtue's Last Reward and Kotaro Uchikoshi's epic story writing and it's no surprise that he did not let me down.

One year after the events of 999, Sigma, a 22 year old college student is kidnapped and placed in an elevator with a mysterious girl named Phi. The two along with 7 other people have been brought to a facility called Rhizome-9 to play the Nonary Game: Ambidex Edition. In this game, players go into rooms, solve puzzles, then after each round, vote to ally or betray their partners to change their BP. Depending on how the two groups votes, players can increase their BP or decrease them. 9 BP allows them to escape while going below 0 kills them. How can you play a game when you don't trust anyone? Will you Ally or Betray? The choice is yours.

You will spend much time in Novel mode, going through the brilliant storyline. However you will stop for a while to enter a puzzle room you must escape. Upon escaping you will be sent to an Ambidex Room where you must vote to ally or betray the person(s) you were partnered with. If both voters ally, both gain points. If one betrays while the other allies, the betrayed will lose points and the traitor will gain more points than if they both ally. If both betray, neither will gain points. Your choices will affect the routes you take which is illustrated in a flowchart that you can access at any point and see how you are playing and also jump to specific points at anytime.

Uchikoshi's brilliant story reemerges in this story as 999 with all new philosophical terms like Schrodinger's Cat and the Prisoner's Dilemma and even Latin Phrases. Boasting 24 different endings, you'll find yourself once again at the edge of your seat wondering what comes next. The choices you make affect the outcomes of the future...and the past. Like 999, playing through multiple times is mandatory and you will have to go through different timelines in order to access other timelines and ultimately finish the game. And don't forget many references to 999 will be made including having Clover as one of the main cast once again.

The puzzle rooms have difficulty settings, allowing you to play each one on Hard or Easy. In Easy, partners will slowly give you hints how to solve the puzzles until they tell you the answer. In Hard, partners will give no hints at all. If you complete the rooms on hard, you'll gain more secret files about the game.

Many of 999's music tracks return and a new ones are also added. This game boasts full voice-acting and both English and Japanese voices for those of us outside of Japan. Having real voices really brings out the character's personalities and makes the game much more engaging over the last one.

I will warn that the only downside to this game is that there is a bug in the PEC Room that will delete your data if you try to save in that room. This is present in the 3DS version only, but it has caused headaches for us who spent more than 14 hours on the game only for it to be deleted in this. Once the room is cleared, the problem does not arise again. However other than this huge problem, there is nothing else wrong with the game.

Nonny's rating: 9.5/10. Superb storyline, excellent voice acting, spectacular plot twists, and awesome characters all amounts to a sequel that clearly takes everything that made its predecessor good and make it great. I await the next installment to the series with high anticipation.

Nonny's Tips: In total, you will have to completely go through 8 of the character endings and one specific Game Over ending in order to completely finish the 9th and true character ending.