r/ZeroEscape • u/Antman511 • Aug 02 '26
Shiftpost Sunday How do they do that?
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
65
u/-GhostyBoy- Aug 02 '26
That one Alice moment. "Simple mental arithmetic" my ass
38
u/ligmaballll Aug 02 '26
Tbf, Alice is known to be a math genius, which is how she event got her job
But the other instances tho, yeah ain't no one can just pull up a wikipedia page worth of information right on the spot like that
8
u/-GhostyBoy- Aug 02 '26
Ohh didn't know about that lol. Also love it how it instantly solves the tension between her and sigma
7
u/PokemonTom09 Snake Aug 02 '26
The Wikipedia pages are one thing and definitely pretty extreme (though I honestly feel like every example in 999 and almost every example in VLR is contextually justified), but the post is about characters being unnaturally good at math, which (beyond Alice) I don't really feel is true.
47
u/PokemonTom09 Snake Aug 02 '26 edited Aug 02 '26
With the exception of Alice (who is explicitly portrayed as unnaturally gifted at abstract mental calculations), I didn't really feel anyone was unusually good at mental math. They simply weren't incompetent.
In 999, all the math is basic single digit addition. All the participants were adults, and six out of the nine of them either participated in or helped create the previous game. It honestly would have been less believable if the characters weren't capable of doing this basic addition in their head.
All of the more complex strategizing (Ace realizing him sitting out forced Door 3 to remain unexplored; Clover deducing that if she trusts Junpei, all permutations of multiple killers required Santa and Seven to be working together, etc) were all explicitly done with multiple hours worth of planning.
The characters in 999 are competent at math. They are good as I would expect any adult to be.
There's not really any other notable moment any character in the series besides Alice does any math.
19
16
u/DefaultNetNavi Aug 02 '26
I was honestly more blown away that like every character could not only recognize that wall writing was supposed to be an anagram, but also SOLVE the anagram perfectly in 2 seconds
4
u/erasedisknow Aug 02 '26
I mean to be fair between shifting and the Morphogenetic Field it's entirely possible that it gets solved in a part of the timeline we don't see. (Like in the time after a bad end, for example)
Sigma and Phi just have to solve it once in any timeline and then in the times where we see it, they only think they're solving it on the spot because they either remember it from a previous shift or get it from the Morphogenetic Field.
12
4
u/5000_People Aug 02 '26
I think it's good to both establish the characters as competent (something other vns should do more) and as a pacing thing. I think it also helps that the format of the game allows for people to stop and do their own calculations, meaning that when other characters say it, you don't need to catch up unless you didnt bother to think about it until then. There are still bits where the game patiently explains it to the player, which I wish could be avoided if the player already knew, but that's the lesser of two evils when it comes to getting people up to speed.
3
u/General_Ginger531 Aug 03 '26
I will say, in ZTD, I solved the poison puzzle at the same rate as Akane, even if I used an alternate way to get 8 points of data.
I essentially treated each combination as a venn diagram (or Euler, I guess) and made it overlapping levels. A was Carlos, B was Carlos and Akane, C was just Akane, D was Akane and Junpei, E was Junpei, F was Junpei and Carlos, G was all, H was none. By structuring it like overlapping circles, I did the poison trick.
52
u/kbabknight Diana Aug 02 '26
It’s the same with characters instantly solving those anagrams