How many hours does it take to get to the true ending of both games (using a guide)?

[Mike]

Topic. I'd like to know not so I can rush them or anything, but so I know what games in my library to play first since I want to play shorter ones sooner.

[French Toast]

Using a guide ? Depends of what do you use it for.
In VLR you could easily cheat to get the passwords you're supposed to get by taking different routes, so maybe not even 10 hours.
I'm not sure for 999 though. It also depends if you intend to use the guide for cheating the puzzles or not.

In any case I'd recommand you DON'T use a guide (except if you're really stuck), as it would spoil the fun of the games.

As a reference point, I have 100% both games. My playthrough of 999 lasted 30 hours and my playthrough of VLR 50 hours, for a total of 80 hours.
But I might have been a bit slow, reading all the text and not being very good at the puzzles.

As an other reference point, 26 users on gamefaqs have voted a lenght of 56.5 hours on average (to finish both games).
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/200839-zero-escape-the-nonary-games

[Mike]

Oh, I see! They're not quite as long as I was thinking they might be. I usually use How Long To Beat to look up a game's length, but it's hard to tell when using that when the playtimes they list are for true ending or 100%-ing the game.

Thank you for the info! I probably won't use a guide but I suck at puzzles, so I can't make any guarantees on that front at least.

[French Toast]

Well that might be a bit of a spoiler but you're kinda forced to almost 100% the games anyway (minus the gold files in VLR) to get the true ending.

If we take a look at this page :
https://howlongtobeat.com/game.php?id=41323

"Main Story" probably means "True Ending" and "Completionists" means "100%".
However times displayed here looks quite low, wether you look at average or median, and I suspect some people are entering data for a single game (rather than for both of them) or are not on their first playthrough (as you can see on some comments when you look at the "Completions").
Or I'm just that slow ^^
I tried to look for more precise data on steamspy but you have to pay to get access to most datas, so nope.

For the guide, I just recommend not using it for the story or trying to find the "true ending", but as for the puzzles, feel free to use it. I did it myself (as I tell in my topic "Did you cheat in the game ?") and for the major part it was for the better ; even though the game often helps you when you struggle anyway.

[Mike]

Yeah, I was confused by the lower times. I assumed VNs would be longer.

And gotcha, story best enjoyed no guide, puzzles do whatever necessary. Thanks!