One of the most surprising titles for the original DS was 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, a Japanese visual novel that incorporated "escape the room" puzzles in order to deliver perhaps the most intense videogame story in the past decade. In 2012, a sequel entitled Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward was released on both 3DS and PS Vita; it too was met with critical acclaim. Unfortunately, it sounded like a third installment was not going to happen.
Both 999 and VLR sold quite well in the West, but their performance in Japan was less than satisfactory. As a result, development of Zero Escape 3 was put on ice. The series' director / writer, Kotaro Uchikoshi, apologized to fans earlier this year over Twitter, expressing his desire to explore other avenues in order to gather the necessary funds.
But in a recent end-of-year Japanese developer survey conducted by 4Gamer (and interpreted by Gematsu), Uchikoshi made a rather cryptic yet hopeful remark:
It's looking like 2015 will be the year where everything I've built up over the years will come together and be let out into the world in one fell swoop.
Now, he may not necessarily be talking about Zero Escape 3, but considering how most of his time during the past few years has been devoted to this series, it's not too much of a stretch to believe he may have come to a satisfactory solution to his money problem. If true, a lot of folks are going to be very happy.
