Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward Fixes

An unofficial patch for the Steam release of Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward.

Features

• Lip Animation Fix: Fixes a bug where characters will maintain their default (neutral) mouth pose after talking. Also known as the infamous Clover smiling bug.

• Skippable Transitions: Skip map transitions, room titles, or the opening splash screen with the A button.

• Disable Background Pausing: While in windowed or borderless mode, prevents the game from pausing while the window is not in focus.

• Custom Game Files: Loads uncompressed game files from a local directory instead of ze2_data_en_us.bin.

Installation

• Download the latest .ZIP file from the Releases tab.
• Locate the installation folder for Zero Escape: The Nonary Games.
  • Right-click the game in your Steam library > Properties > Installed Files > Browse...
• Extract the .ZIP file and place these files in the same folder as ze2.exe:
  • version.dll
  • VLR.Fixes.asi
  • VLR.Fixes.ini
• Launch the game.

Using Custom Game Files

The CustomGameFiles patch allows you to replace game files at runtime without having to repack the .BIN archive.

When the game requests a resource, the patch will first check if the path to the resource exists in a folder called VLR.Fixes\ in the same directory as the game executable. Otherwise, the patch will fall back to the archive to load the file.

One way to discover these paths is to enable DebugPrintGameFilePaths in VLR.Fixes.ini. Each time the game tries to access a resource, the patch will debug print the location where it would expect to find a replacement in VLR.Fixes\.

You can use a tool such as DebugView to inspect these messages. Example output:

Note: .AVI files are currently unsupported.

Note: This feature may cause some slow-down due to slightly more disk accesses. Installing the game on an SSD can help mitigate this issue. To disable the feature, set CustomGameFiles = 0 in VLR.Fixes.ini.

Credits

This patch is made possible by:

• Ultimate ASI Loader by ThirteenAG (included in the .ZIP)
• Hooking.Patterns by ThirteenAG