Virtue's Last Reward is part of the Zero Escape serie, as a sequel to 999 (which is a damn good game btw, you should check it out.) It's a visual novel/escape room kinda game, which puts extra emphasize on fucking with video game mechanics.
Now, VLR is a game that is kind of hard to talk about, because... well, bluntly put, it's an unfinished game. The story teases many things, but a good chunk of them aren't actually resolved, only hinted to be in the sequel- which I have yet to play, so I'm just sitting here like damn girlie would love to have some sort of complete story here. But my griefs with VLR are not the topic of this post. I want to talk about the themes VLR as a standalone do bring to the table, being: sometimes your trauma fucks you up so bad you end up stuck in it for the rest of your life, and if you cannot get away from it you WILL take other people down with you.
Akane. Tenmyouji. Sigma. Clover. Alice. They're all people who have had something awful happen to them, something they so dearly wish they could take back. It's a ghost that has been clinging to them their entire life, influencing their most important decisions. Quark. K. Dio. People who never asked jack shit, but are suffering from the actions of others around them (yes, I'm counting Dio here, he's a bitch but "a cult created me at the image of some guy's dead brother to further his agenda" isn't exactly something he chose for himself.)
So, the question: when your trauma is clinging onto you like dirty oil, what happens? How do you live like that?
Alice and Clover deal with it more or less gracefully. They have a life they value as much as their goal, after all. They have each other, and Clover also has her brother. By the end of the Phi end, they want, and can, go back to who they used to be.
Tenmyouji is harder. He's obsessed with his goal, with finding this one girl he's been chasing for so long. He (almost) gets Quark killed in his obsession. But by the end of the Phi route, he lets go; lets go of that girl, lets go of his trauma, and in fact rejects the very idea that you should try to fix this shit. Yeah, trauma sucks, yeah, we all have things we wish we'd done differently. But there is meaning in being alive, even in a fucked up world, even carrying guilt as heavy as the world. It matters. It matters that you find happiness in a world that won't let you.
And Sigma and Akane? They're stuck. They're stuck in a loop of their own making, desperately trying to change this horrible horrible thing that had happened. Take me back. Take me back where it began. I'll fix it, I'll change it, I'll do better, just let me try again, just once more, just once more. But they won't change it. Even if you can change the past, you cannot, in fact, change the past. It's too late. But neither of them can let go, and so they're stuck there. Sigma can be a college student in his car, he can be a doctor on Rhizome 9, fact is he never truly left this small Mars experiment that altered his entire life. He's still there. He's always there. He has a son and a family and countless people and he hurt them all threw them all to the wolves because he can't see them. He isn't there. He's still in Dcom. He never left Dcom. He never will.