Did you cheat in the game ?

[French Toast]

By cheat I mean looked at the solution of a puzzle on internet.
Obviously, spoilers ahead.


In 999 I didn't cheat, mainly because if you struggle on a puzzle the solution is forcefully spoonfed to you as you're getting stuck.
Sometimes the characters helped me despite me already knowing the solution and I found myself screaming at my screen "I KNOW !".
Sometimes I didn't know the solution and, while I knew the game was trying to help me, it felt more like "Hey dumbass as you're too stupid to figure it out here's the solution". Which is a bit raging.

But I have to admit that it helped me on serveral occasions. For instance, in the study (the place with a lot of junk on the ground which is supposedly Zero's workshop), there's a puzzle where you're supposed to put some numbered balls inside two numbered boxes so the digital root of the balls's sum match the number of the boxes. You have to do it 4 times with different numbers, and while the first 3 times are a breeze, the 4th time looked impossible to me. Fortunately, Clover pointed out that I didn't have to fill the 2 boxes, and that I was only forced to use all of the balls.

So, as it is in the game, it's probably not cheating, but sometimes it feels like you don't deserve credits for finding the solution.

And sometimes there's also the opposit problem, where the game doesn't help you while it should. The infamous magic square puzzle in the cargo room (the puzzle where you have to put numbers ranging from 1 to 9 in a 3x3 square so the sum of every line is 15) was way too difficult, and it took me half an hour to figure it out by writing a lot of (simple) equations. Of course I didn't know what a magic square was before the game, but I guess it's common knowledge for certain people.


Now for VLR. Yes, I cheated. 4 times actually.

- First time was in the GAULEM bay. I couldn't find the answer for the blue password after finding the green one. I searched for maybe 1 hour before giving up. I even solved some part of the puzzle I was supposed to solve before, specifically the thing with the radio that gives you the hint that tells you you're supposed to clean up the oil, but I already did that so it only added to the confusion.
Eventually all I had to do was to use the non-glowing eyes of the GAULEMs to decipher the code for the blue password, while you have to use the glowing eyes for the green one... I felt dumb.

- Second time was in the Director's office. Same as before, I couldn't find the blue password and I got stuck on the puzzle where you're supposed to make a parallelogram with other geometrical pieces. I spent half an hour on it before giving up. I don't really felt bad though, as I hate this kind of puzzle.

- Third time was in the Crew Quarter. Same as before, I couldn't find the blue password, spent half an hour looking for it, no dice. Turns out you just have to enter the green password code on the phone... Once again i felt a bit stupid for not finding it myself.

- Fourth and final time is actually a 2 in 1 combo, and also the first time I was stuck before getting the green password. I was in the last puzzle, Q, and out of the 3 puzzles that got out of the walls, I couldn't solve 2 of them, the "2 suns" one and the dice one. This time it took me only 10 minutes or so before running out of patience, as I already disliked them in their first apperance in the Security room and the Archives, respectively.
For the "2 suns" one, i didn't even know which pattern I was supposed to achieve, and when I found that I had to make everything red, i felt stupid (again).
For the dice one, I figured what I was supposed to make, but I had no clue on how I was supposed to achieve it. In the Archives, you only have to put the correct faces up at the correct places, and i did it by just randomly rolling the dices, but this time they also needed to be positionned specifically so certain faces faced the right directions. Needless to say, I also checked the solution online, and didn't feel bad for that one. Puzzles that involve some kind of geometry aren't really my cup of tea.


And that's it. Despite that, I can still say that I'm proud to have finished all the other puzzles in Hard mode all by myself. Sometimes I got a bit lucky, but most of the time it was just me being smart (or at least thinking that I am).
Speaking of the Easy/Hard system, I like how it adresses the problem of 999 I mentionned earlier, that is having the solution forcefully spoonfed to you. Now you can just ask the game to let you think alone, and I enjoyed that... Most of the time. There's still some problems with this system :

- Switching to Easy mode makes the game punish you by giving you a Silver file instead of a Gold file, which gives you less secrets, hence less background to read about, which is a bit annoying for a VN. Yes you can savescum, but still.

- Speaking of background, if like me you're only playing on Hard, you get less interactions with the other characters and you're missing on some text, which once again is annoying for a VN.

- Finally, the Easy mode doesn't help you at all for getting the blue passwords, given that, you're kinda forced to cheat if you're stuck.

I would also add that I was probably too proud to switch to Easy Mode when I was stuck, and I half-regret it now. I went back to the game and did the dice minigame again in Q, this time on Easy mode. If you're stuck, Phi gives you some very usefull tips, and this time I managed to do the puzzle and actually understood how to play it correctly ; so even if I was too stupid to figure it out by myself, I'm now less ignorant and I could probably do it again alone if I were to face it again.
But still, switching to Easy feels like a confession of failure, so I still have mixed feelings about it.

This post is definitely way longer than it was originally intended to be, but I'd like to read your thoughts on the subject.

[Canard_de_Bain]

I don't remember them at all telling me solutions in 999, at least the DS version.

[French Toast]

Well they don't exactly tell you the solution, but the more you struggle (by quiting/re-entering a minigame) the more hints they give you. At the end the hints tend to make the solution obvious, like the puzzle i was talking about in the Study.

[LanceL]

i probably just googled all the puzzles in VLR.

[V3]

Anyone who didn't google solutions for Q actually deserves praise.

[French Toast]

As I said, if you just switch to Easy Mode you can solve it quite easily without google.

[V3]

Originally posted by Tout à fait:

As I said, if you just switch to Easy Mode you can solve it quite easily without google.

True. I didn't go on easy mode so I wouldn't know lol.