See the project screenshots here!
It all started on November 26th, 2012. I was returning home from a long trip to Lapland, and once we got back home it was already 1AM. Before going to bed, however, I checked for new demo versions for games on my 3DS - and found Virtue's Last Reward. It seemed interesting, so I downloaded it overnight. After trying it out the next morning, the puzzles felt very interesting. At the time I wasn't really paying attention to the story, but it seemed okay nevertheless.
After a bit of thinking, I finally decided to purchase the full game. And after playing for a little while, the story cranked its way into my brain. It was at that moment when I started to play not just because of the puzzles, but to understand the story and seek for the answers hidden inside. It took me a little while, probably a week or so, until I had all the endings and gold files. At first, I was really happy for having played through such an incredible story (and very intriguing puzzles!), but then came sadness - what if I could never experience that feeling again? I started to search for a similiar masterpiece, discovering 999 and Ever17 in the process. Since Ever17 seemed to be very difficult to obtain due to a ridiculously low amount of English copies, I decided to order 999 from the US. It seemed odd that it had never been released in Europe, but I ultimately let that slide.
A copy of 999 appeared in the mail a couple weeks later, and that fact alone made me extremely happy. Unlike VLR, 999 took me two weeks to finish because I didn't want to use guides for the endings. And, once again, the true ending blew my mind. "So this is the reason for those references in VLR!", I thought, and my mind filled with the same feeling of joy and happiness as before. But that was ultimately forced to come to and end as well, because I found myself addicted to visual novels like these two. I couldn't get enough. And, to tell you the truth, I still can't.
I started to do some research regarding the games, especially the series' main writer, Kotaro Uchikoshi. This is how I discovered the Infinity series (and Pepsiman, to this day I've wanted to play it just for the sake of it!). While the games in that series, Never7, Ever17 and Remember11, were very difficult to obtain at the time, I resolved myself. I would read through them, no matter what. I'm against pirating games, so even with this resolve I wasn't willing to do that, but I ultimately watched non-narrated let's plays on YouTube of the Infinity series. While it does feel kind of bad, I couldn't stop myself. It was either that or buying copies on Ebay from scalpers for terribly high prices. Their endings didn't give me the same feelings as Zero Escape did, but Ever17 and Remember11 were especially great nevertheless!
When Spike Chunsoft and mr. Uchikoshi announced that the third ZE game, now titled "Zero Time Dilemma", was at risk of never being made, my heart shattered. The fact that people weren't buying the games because they thought they weren't interesting probably made something snap in my head, and I began an attempt to bring these works to people through essays, "book reviews", by recommending them to friends and family as well as by starting a rather ambitious new project - recreating Virtue's Last Reward in Minecraft! To this day, that map has been under near-constant development, and I believe it to finally be ready for the world.
Titled "Minecraft's Last Reward", the map is basically a multiplayer version of VLR with puzzles of my own creation. The map is made to resemble the look of VLR in as much detail as I possibly could add, and I even went as far as to make custom textures for it. The map is still not perfect, but it is complete enough for me to showcase it here. While the released versions didn't seem to get much attention, one day I got a message from a person who was working on a similiar project. At the time I didn't know they were sort of "neighbors" to me (the person being Swedish), but we became friends. He and his brother found my map to be a perfect template for their project, which became known as "Minecraft's Last Reward 2".
One day, I saw a tweet about 4infinity.co. At first, I just thought it was a rather strange website, but the numbers on the page reminded me of the ones in 999's suitcases. So, I decided to keep an eye on the site. As time passed, I made numerous theories of the words that appeared and I became increasingly confident that this was a message of hope: Zero Escape 3 was coming. Unfortunately I could not attend the Aksys panel held in LA back then due to the sheer distance between our countries and the cost of plane tickets for a mere high school student, but I waited for the promised live stream. The tweets that appeared on my Twitter page shortly after confirmed and steeled my hope - ZE3 is a thing, and it's really coming!
As soon as I heard about this fan project, "Thank You Zero Escape", I couldn't refuse to participate. Originally my plan was to remake the Grand staircase from 999 in Unreal Engine 4, but that project failed at its final stage - my 3D models wouldn't import properly, making them look like a real mess. My nect idea was to make a new video regarding the Minecraft VLR map I made, but ultimately I ran out of time to make the video look good enough. As a last resort, I decided to execute plan C. That would be this article, and some screenshots of both the Minecraft map I created and a few regarding the models I made for the original project - including a model of Junpei! While this isn't as grand as what I hoped for, I would say I did my part nevertheless.
If I hadn't played that demo of VLR back in 2012, I would not have all these friends I got thanks to Zero Escape, not to mention know what a visual novel is. From the bottom of my heart, I want to thank Kotaro Uchikoshi for making my life what it is today. I want to thank him for my newfound interest towards writing stories. I also want to thank him for inspiring me to start making video games. Let his future be one with hope!
Sincerely, Lari Liuhamo, also known as "Diapolo10"
28.5.2016
P.S. You and Nakazawa should start working together again at some point. I love you guys!
Contribution and message by @diapolo10
For the Thank you Zero Escape project