The twist at the end involving 'hardware' and the story reveals surrounding it blew my fucking mind. I actually made a loud vocal sound like "OOOOOUUUUHHH" when it was revealed. That aside I went into this with some spoilers as I'd already played VLR but even with that I loved it, something about the lack of flowchart jumping (at least in the ORIGINAL version of the game, goddammit Spunsoft) and therefore having to play the whole game repeatedly and have it end in tragedy over and over and over before finally unlocking the true ending and EARNING your happy ending through constant heartache was so powerful. VLR was no less powerful despite its flowchart, but with how 999 was structured this way really worked to its benefit and it felt deliberate. A shame the Nonary Games version took that away. If any of y'all ever play the Nonary Games version of 999 please resist the urge to use the flowchart to jump chapters in it if you can. Go nuts with it in VLR though. In fact don't even make Nonary Games your first experience, just play 999 on DS, take my word for it. Game's just really really really good. Amazing story, fantastic characters, really cool puzzles, amazing soundtrack. Shinji Hosoe is such an underrated composer.