everyone go play 999 for the nintendo ds. NOT THE PORT. the ds.
9 hours 9 persons 9 doors for the nintendo ds is a masterpiece of a game, with wonderfully snappy dialogue and a quickly paced narrative that avoids many traps of visual novel writing (such as being overly obvious and repetitive) with a ludonarrative cohesion that makes SO many of its aspects initially perceived as flaws into an active strength of the experience. the endgame twist is very possibly the best in gaming history.
i think i've made it pretty clear that i consider the game a masterpiece, and recommend it to everyone.
i used to say "the ds version is better, but it's fine if you play the port for its various quality of life features" but im no longer able to have that stance, now that i know the extent of how it kinda butchers its narrative. it's not super obvious, but that subtley honestly makes it worse to me.
it's the difference between a good game that had cool concepts but kinda shaky execution, and a masterpiece.
this boils down to the "novel mode" versus "adventure mode" format that they decided to build the port on.
if you choose to play in adventure mode, it removes almost all of the narration and rewrites that aforementioned incredible dialogue to awkwardly shove in some (not all) of that information, resulting in overly obvious and clunky writing that seriously drags some scenes out. the descriptive text in general is actually incredibly important in a way i can't describe, and though it will forcibly shift to novel mode to show it to you very occasionally, it's not Nearly enough and you will miss out on some of the most memorable striking moments because of it. i cannot overstate how much the impact of the ending is affected by this.
if you choose novel mode, you do get all the narration (very important). HOWEVER. the writing is still the adjusted one done to facilitate only playing adv mode, so now the dialogue is overly obvious and clunky and slow AND repetitive (all the things i said 999 very cleverly avoided 🤔?) and then, for some ungodly reason, it is actively difficult to play the game in novel mode. the game will Constantly shift you back to adv mode so you have to spend the entire game checking to make sure to switch back (something even i found difficult to do as someone who'd played the ds version).
so neither way to play the port is good. in addition to the aforementioned changing the final puzzle to be worse. and a LOT of ludonarrative things i cannot actually get into due to spoilers.
"how much of an impact could these small changes actually have?"
well this is anecdotal, but me (and many other people i know) who originally played 999 on the ds and thought it was a masterpiece, years later went on to play the port version and thought "huh. it was still good, but it's like the magic was gone. i guess it's just not as good as i remembered, one of those things that doesn't hold up to your memories of it."
and then we replayed the ds game. and found out that the game we remembered DOES still exist! it's just as fantastic, the magic IS THERE. the port just made the game worse!!
anyways, so what were those quality of life changes i mentioned earlier?
in the original ds version of 999, every time you reach an ending you have to start from the beginning of the game again, fast forwarding through the text and replaying the puzzles. (the port changed this to having a flowchart where you can just jump to decision points)
as someone who Very recently replayed the ds version, i truly don't think this is as much of a pain as you might expect.
skipping text isn't a big deal. yeah it takes a bit, but it's easy to watch a youtube video or something while you're waiting the 5 minutes it takes. using an emulator, you can even speed up the text skipping to an even greater degree. if you can't physically hold down the button, you can probably find something to hold it down for you, and on an emulator you can rebind the key to be something easier to do that with (like the space bar)
redoing puzzles isn't a big deal either. not only do you still have to redo some puzzle rooms in the port version anyway, it can be pretty fun to figure out how to essentially speedrun rooms you've done before, and you don't redo them that many times (i would recommend a walkthrough anyway for deciding which endings to get, so making that redo time even shorter is a bonus).
if you really need the accessibility of voice acting, i would genuinely recommend watching an LP of the ds version instead. yes, i really do think some guy from 10 years ago reading out the text will give you a better experience than a genuinely good cast of voice actors reading the port's.
btw, if you're scared off at the prospect of reading a little more now without being able to choose adventure mode... if you've played danganronpa (and most of you did!) 999 is shorter, faster-paced, and has LESS READING.
i'd recommend THIS WALKTHROUGH, even if you don't want to use it for the puzzles, it'll give you good info for how to get each ending (especially recommended for true ending), and a general order to do them in. i'd recommend doing getting all the endings (except coffin, which is just the true end cut short)
if you've already played 999 (or are just curious about specifics), this video details all the changes mentioned here and more, and it gets all the way into spoiler territory (it can be nitpicky at points, particularly at the beginning, but maaaan did it open my eyes to everything i had subconsciously picked up on in playing the port)
i forgot to mention. if you emulate the game, there's a visual glitch that messes up the sprites a little, but you can fix it really easily! in DeSmuME, go to Config>3D Settings and set the renderer to OpenGL
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