Amazon / Aksys Games' unholy mess of Zero Time Dilemma watch deliveries

Oh God. Here we go.

July 2015

Preorders open for "Zero Escape 3 - Limited Edition!" (it wasn't named "Zero Time Dilemma" yet). All us excited Zero Escape fans run to our browsers and visit www.amazon.com to order a copy or two. It comes with a copy of the game, and a replica watch, modelled on the one in the game. Each Zero Escape game has used a different watch, and they are very important and symbolic to the series. So this is cool!

Although I am in the UK, and the offer is on Amazon.com, Aksys state that they don't mind who orders from where, so I go ahead and order two copies - a 3DS copy (I have an import USA 3DS), and a PS Vita version. It is my intention that I am buying one copy for me, and another copy for my brother. It was, after all, by brother who first brought Kotaro Uchikoshi's writing talent to my attention, all those years back when I first got him a copy of Ever 17 back when Hirameki were still around selling copies.

I pay for the games, I pay for the shipping, and pre-pay the customs charges, it comes to over $100. It will be worth it! Yes!

Late June 2016.

Zero Time Dilemma is out, but there has been a problem with the watches! They have been damaged in transit, and so all us Zero Escape fans get an email apologising, and they promise to send out the games as soon as possible, the watches after a while longer, and give us $10 per game store credit to appease us. Not like that goes anywhere when you're an international customer, but I appreciate the gesture.

This is such a kerfuffle that it appear in the news on Siliconera, Kotaku, Polygon... I joke that it's a zero timepiece dilemma and get 34 upvotes, which pleases me far more than it ought to.

8th September 2016. 

I receive an email, which I expect all us lovely patient Zero Escape fans who ordered the Ltd Edition game from Amazon have also received. It says that I have received promotional credit thanks to my order, includes a link to a PDF "premium booklet", and there's a link for more details. So I follow it!

...is this a puzzle? XD

It leads to a page on Amazon marked "Zero Time Dilemma: Bonus Watch by Aksys". There's a watch there and it costs $500. So I put two of them in my basket and head to the checkout to see if the credit works. It doesn't. Oh God it fails so bad.

a) It only removes the cost of one watch
b) It charges me for shipping
c) It charges me for pre-paying customs.

I try contacting Aksys Games but that does NOTHING. I guess it is the middle of the night for them, though.

So I head on over to Customer Services and chat to a nice fellow who says he'd love to give me credit for both watches but he can't, because this is something that Promotions and Marketing handle. So he's sent the details over to them and he promises they'll get in touch within 24 hours.

A few hours later I get an email from the Promotions department, telling me that promotions are limited to ONE PER CUSTOMER. It links me to terms which it says are specific to this promotion: http://www.amazon.com/promos/

No. That's the generic promos Terms and Conditions.

I take another look at the Bonus Watch page on Amazon. For some reason the cost is now up to $600 and the page is filling up with 1-star reviews from people in the same boat as me.

And why is this even going through the promotions department to begin with? All it is, is that we're waiting on watches that failed to ship with the original game! It's not an Amazon special promotion item, it's an unfulfilled partial shipment.

So I went to the message from Amazon, and clicked the "Was this representative helpful? NO" option. Filled in the subsequent form with "terrible! Your policies on this matter are bad!" etc. It did not make me feel better. Then when that was completed, it showed me options to contact another representative. So I clicked... via chat.

This time, I seem to be in contact with an American representative. This is my impression because of her name, the way she reacts to things, and the fact she says "crud" and "darn" when things go wrong, instead of just saying nothing and pretending everything is going perfectly fine.

I explain to her what's happened and she asks me to be patient and allow her time to read through my orders and work out what's been going on. So I allow her that.

And eventually, she comes back and sends me a link to the promotions T & Cs and tells me I'm only allowed one.

I tell her that it seems like she's shutting me out. She asks me to get on the phone. I tell her that that's shutting me out too. I want her to listen, pay attention, and get this sorted out now.

So I re-explain that this was never set up as an Amazon promotion to begin with, and if these were the terms, they should have been stated back in 2015 and not right now. That it was part of the Limited Edition package which was supposed to have been included, but couldn't be fulfilled at the time, and I am owed the second half of the goods I am waiting for, which are the sole reason I bought the Limited Edition and not the Standard Edition.

Something clicks! Suddenly she has an epiphany! *_*

It came with a watch, and was not an edition exclusive to an Amazon promotion, it was originally a bundle!

(Did I accidentally manage to put her in mortal danger? Did a morphogenetic field come into effect and suddenly she channelled the solution from another member of Amazon staff nearby?)

And then all she wants to do is set things right for me.

So what ended happening was an unholy kludge of a workaround but god I hope it works, because if not I end up with no watches and $129 towards nothing.

I ordered two $600 watches, had $620 taken off the price as promotional credit (the promo credit for the watch and the other $20 they gave me in apology for it being late), there was still shipping and customs charges on top of that.... oh my god I have never placed such an expensive order for watches in my entire life! Perhaps... not on anything else as an internet purchase, not in one order!

Then the lovely Amazon representative jumped onto the order, and somehow reduced it to $129, which I will be charged on my credit card, and then she'll refund that amount after it ships. I have not had a shipping confirmation yet! But I have this in writing, that I will get a refund! Oh, oh, oh, I hope this all works! I want my watches but this is a serious amount of money on the line!

I did mention to her that the Bonus Watch page is filling up with 1-star reviews that are people in the same situation as me, but I don't know how their orders will be dealt with.

UPDATE: 10th September, item was shipped. 12th September, 3pm: no refund in sight!

Banshee's Last Cry / Kamaitachi no Yoru

An app came out on iOS a few weeks ago called "Banshee's Last Cry", it's published by Aksys and is described as "a thrilling visual novel that takes readers on a deadly thrill ride of murder and deception". It's a free download where you pay £2.49 as an in-app purchase to unlock the full game.

It's actually a localisation of an old game by Chunsoft for the Super Famicom, called "Kamaitachi no yoru", or "Night of the Sickle Weasel". I guess they primarily called it "Banshee's Last Cry" to make it look a little bit related to "Virtue's Last Reward" - well, enough to lure fans into spending their £2.49.

They've changed the location of the original story from a ski lodge in Japan to a ski lodge in Canada, made some technological changes to bring it into 2014, re-recorded the soundtrack (some music is the same, some different - some so it doesn't sound so traditionally Japanese, I suppose), gone to an actual Canadian ski lodge to take pictures to replace all the original background images, changed all the names of the characters, and changed the folk mythology from Japanese to Irish.

I've been reading it, and here's what I have to say:

The story is perhaps more "Choose Your Own Adventure" than you might expect from something described as a visual novel. It's what they used to call a "sound novel" - basically a light novel with atmospheric background images, music and sound effects. No character portraits or voices.

The main story really feels like a murder mystery from the 1990s. The murders and descriptions are really quite gruesome sometimes. The plot actually seems really familiar to me, perhaps similar methods were used in some Kindaichi manga I read, or some Detective Conan anime I watched. As such, it was fairly easy for me to pinpoint the correct suspect and details about the initial murder (though I certainly didn't get it on my first play-through). The main difficulty for me was finding the choices in the story where I could express my thoughts in order to trigger the ending.

Another comment on the 1990s feeling of the game - the attitude of the male protagonist and other characters is pretty much that females in the story only exist to be protected. They're rounded up together, and the way they don't seem to be suspects seems dismissive. Any attempt by them to be useful on their own ends up disastrous. I don't think they really even notice.

After my first play-through, certain new options appeared in the game, which is an interesting way of doing things. Your reasoning in previous play-throughs brings you closer to being able to solve the mystery. However, the player does not know - if I use this option it appears to be a short cut of a few pages, but is that relevant to any in-game path change?

Having said that reasoning brings you closer to the correct mystery ending... it's also the case that some endings completely diverge; one ending you can trigger very early in the story has you leaving before any murders take place - and so in that timeline the murder doesn't take place that night (why is that?). In the very worst ending (which is also the first one I saw), I still don't fully understand who committed all the murders at the end.

After I solved the main murder mystery and the credits rolled, a lot more options open up in the game. They lead to far more light-hearted stories, joke endings, and a lot of puns on the word "banshee". It is clear why they are not present when the game is first started. Two of the new endings also had end credits rolling, so they must be the "Occult" and "Spy" endings mentioned in the Wikipedia article on Kamaitachi no Yoru. One is just funny, the other a secret code message which I managed to decode straight away (but it was still fun to read the story). There's also a path with a reference to Chunsoft's "Mystery Dungeon" line of games. Oh it would have been nice if there really was a roguelike built into the app, hahaha.

Issues I have with the localisation - very few. One comment near the beginning about how silly it is to say "cheese" for photos because people end pulling an "ooh" face only really works if you consider the Japanese pronunciation of "cheese" ("chi-zu-"). There are some errors; in the "Snow Maze" path, there's a mistake where they give the incorrect name for one of the characters, accidentally marrying her to the wrong character ("Colleen Buchanan"). In the end of the path with the secret code, the font size messes up and you're left scrolling the page left and right to read.

It would have been nice to have something telling me which endings I've seen so I know if there's anything left to aim for. It would have been nice if like the original Super Famicon version, we could see silhouettes of each character in order to feed the imagination. It would have been nice to unlock some sort of diagram of branching paths for the after-story so I can see the last few things to do. It would be nice if there was a "clear data" option in the menu so I could compare the options available at the start to the ones available after many play-throughs.

Best of all, it would have been nice if it was on Android so I didn't have to borrow an iPad to read it! (I think that's "coming soon").

But overall, it's been a fun read, it was a good price, and it's been a pleasure to experience this little piece of sound novel history so long after the game originally came out. I hope they decide to bring more visual / sound novels out in English on mobile / tablet devices, because it's a very convenient platform for reading interactive fiction.