I’m currently around 32 hours of play for Virtue’s Last Reward (VLR) and its proving to be really rather excellent.  Its claimed to be a sister game to 999 (which I posted about recently) but so far from playing, its feels nore like a proper sequel.  There are some obvious upgrades both visually and audibly.  Rather than static 2D pictures of characters they have gone for full 3D models and animated them, including passable lip syncing.  Which is nice during long conversations but they arent used enough to show goings on in the story.  Audibly, the characters are now fully voiced, but only during the visual novel sections of the game.  Would have been nice to have them in the adventure sections as the voice actors and actresses do a really good job of bringing the characters more to life.  All the voice talent is really good, though I am a bit biased for a couple of characters as they have used some anime seiyuu I really like (yep – fanboy I know).  For the UK release it also retains the original Japanese audio, which I thought was a really nice touch.

The Vita has a built in screen capture function so I used it to grab some pictures to illustrate a few of the more humourous examples why I like it so much.  I should point out that while there are moments of humour, its a fairly serious game.

1.  Even the manual likes to joke

2.  Some of the puzzles can take an unexpected turn

3.  Interesting English adaption

4.  Anything referencing Monty Python is always good

5.  Characters like to be sarcastic

6.  Interesting character personalities

7.  Odd facial expressions for delivering serious dialogue.  Oddly this only happens with this character