Nonary Stars
, also stylized as nonarystars, is a choose your own adventure style interactive fanwork published and played through Twitter, featuring characters from the Japanese mobile game Ensemble Stars!!. Gameplay itself is based off of the Zero Escape series, but prior knowledge to it is unnecessary to play and enjoy Nonary Stars.
Awakening within a mysterious facility, 18 teenagers from Ensemble Stars!! find themselves trapped within a dangerous game by an unknown figure known as Zero. The rules aren’t the most simple, but the goal is clear. Out of their 18, only 9 people may be allowed to live and escape. A game of 9 and none.
Upon release of Season 2, rules have been adjusted and goals have been slightly changed. Now it’s entirely possible to allow every single player a chance at escaping alive, but with this comes a series of trial and error, timeloops, and a mystery bigger than that of Season 1.
From Nonary Stars a series of apprentice projects have spawned, such as a0 Escape, Banonary, EnQ, i7 Stories, Argononary, and Soraverse.
The creator of the series went on to make a Discord-based roleplaying game based on the Nonary Stars formula, titled nonaryourstars, currently ongoing as of this edit.
Contains examples of:
- And Now for Someone Completely Different: The POV character for each chapter is based on the audience’s decision. In season 2, this is key to solving the main mystery. Or, a player switch can be forced if your previous POV dies in the puzzle.
- Anyone Can Die: The format of the game, having the audience select a new POV character every chapter, means that the characters with more prominent roles in the story are especially likely to die.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: The consequences of failing or making a mistake in a puzzle room.
- Dysfunction Junction: Well, obviously a death game is going to mess with a bunch of formerly frozen in season’s 2 case teenagers’ sanity. This leads to lots of bloodshed.
- Let's Split Up, Gang!: Since the game’s mechanics in both seasons make it impossible for everyone to go through the same door.
- You Wake Up in a Room: Naturally, as Nonary Stars follows Zero Escape’s Room Escape Game format.
- Apocalyptic Log: In Chapter 11.50, Eichi finds one written by Jin, detailing his time at the facility and the development of Saxitoxin and the bracelets that would later be used for the Nonary Game. It starts out as a perfectly normal development log, but suddenly turns darker in tone near the end as he realizes what the bracelets are actually for.
- After the End: The game takes place in a timeline where the world was infected with the deadly virus OPH, killing an unknown amount of loved ones of the cast and Eichi Tenshouin. Keito hosts the game in order to find the cure and rewind time to save everyone.
- All for Nothing: Subverted. Despite the timeline resets, the audience’s choices matter no matter what.
- Played straight when it comes to the King’s game, where Tsumugi tries to get Yuuta to kill himself to protect Sora, but Sora breaks the rules of the game himself to save the two. Tsumugi offs himself in regret soon after.
- Everybody Lives: After gradually uncovering the game’s secrets thoughout mutliple timelines all ending in death, the players are finally able to escape without a single casualty.
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: Wataru in the second timeline ends up trapped in one after dying as a result of being betrayed by Tomoya and Hokuto in the AB game, not seeing any other option and simply accepting that fate.
- Random Number God: Many puzzles from Round 3 onwards depend on RNG, either as a game mechanic or because the puzzle isn’t being played by the POV character (the only deathly non-POV puzzles in which the results aren’t determined by RNG are those that are being played by a character who already knows the answer). And when things are up to RNG, they usually turn out as bad as they possibly could.
- The Swampman’s Experiment puzzle is played off-screen three times. The ‘test subject’ doesn't survive a single one.
- Whether or not there's OPH in the Riddles puzzle is up to RNG. Not counting the first timeline as the room hadn't been discovered yet, there's only one round in which no one comes out infected.
- Chapter 12 has the green door team play the Poison and Lies puzzle off-screen. It goes terribly, to the point that all of them would have died if it hadn't been for the unusually lucky outcome of the Riddles puzzle allowing them to cure themselves of Radical-6 by exposing themselves to the gas in the library.
- Every Round 5 puzzle involves RNG due to the fact that they're made to be impossible to solve without casualties (and those who survive end up dying after the puzzle, anyways). A particularly unfortunate example is the third timeline's King's Game puzzle, in which Yuta has to shoot Rei to progress and, since he's not the POV character, his aim is up to RNG. He misses Rei twice and shoots Ritsu to death.
- Reset Button: The players jump timelines (or SHIFT) multiple times throughout the story. The majority of the cast leaves the game blissfully unaware of the horrifying experiences they had gone through in previous timelines, although those who developed their SHIFTing abilities throughout the game aren’t as lucky.
- Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: The purpose of the game is to train the players’ ability to jump between timelines, and therefore the characters who do so retain the memories of the previous timelines they lived through. Those who develop this ability are left to deal with the trauma of everything they’ve gone through while everyone else forgets about it.
- The Lost Lenore: Eichi serves this position as the motive for this season’s first zero, Hasumi Keito, and to a lesser extent the second zero, Himemiya Tori..
