What a ride. Wow. With that ending, it reminded me of the Dune series in a way, (Dune series spoilers) what with the prescience and the terrible Golden Path to save a doomed humanity that isn't restricted by said prescience. I'm not sure which one I liked more, 999 or ZTD, but I'm very, very fond of both of them. Some of my favoritest games, it looks like. (VLR I found a bit tedious for my tastes, although I still had fun, and of course it was a necessary part of the story.) I'm a sucker for psychological horror, and honestly I enjoyed the art style of ZTD and the incredibly emotional moments with some excellent musical scores.

I saw some comments on this sub that I wouldn't like ZTD much if I didn't much like VLR, but I'm very happy I had a pleasant experience. It felt a lot more like 999 for me, since I personally was much more unsure/distrustful of the characters and concerned for and invested in their lives in both of these games than VLR. I was a lot less engaged in VLR, so playing this game with emotional hit after emotional hit really got me; the stakes felt high. VLR just felt a lot less sinister to me; I had expected the AB game to be something good and necessary and not evil at all, but I didn't expect that of ZTD. Perhaps I just approached these games differently, since with ZTD I figured from the get-go Brother the overall Big Bad was involved, and wasn't sure if he was good or bad, whether his future with Radical-6 killing six billions was unavoidable and whether his intention for Free the Soul was meant for freedom in a good sense or in a bad sense

And ZTD really got me when it turned out Delta / Q was the tenth person; I thought those allusions were weird, but I never pieced it together. I had thought Eric or even more likely Junpei was Zero for a bit, the latter because he was so emotionally scarred by Akane. I thought her unlocking his morphogenetic abilities in 999 and all the horror he saw afterwards (through his detective work and through his now-expanded consciousness) led him to become Brother. I was kinda hoping for Junpei, to be honest...

And to go along with what I said in my first post when I had just started playing,

1. yes, Junpei is still sexy as heck, and I want him to do me, and
2. Gab is still adorable, and I still love him. No one is ever allowed to hurt him, ever. Such a good doggie.