I’m re-posting this here so I don’t have to look through the comments.
Our friend @Growing Beautifully mentioned that the time in dungeon was a bit confusing:
On Dramabeans we were also confazzled by the time that Jin Woo was supposed to have left before the plug was pulled on the servers. I linked this article of yours to the DB post to show how time as mentioned in the show cannot be depended upon to be accurate, at all!!! 😀 So with the game, not only do we break the 3 dimensions of reality of space but also the 4th dimension of time to exist in a before-during-after limbo!!!
I answered that this is how I interpreted it. The picture only made sense after we connected the puzzle pieces (or puzzling scenes) from Episodes 10 and 11.
JW was actually on his way out when the last group of zombies attacked him.
Going in: he had 2 hrs to accomplish mission. That was the approximate time shown when he entered the dungeon.
Reaching the end of the dungeon: he had 1 hour and 15 minutes left. He reached the “end wall” of the dungeon, going through its dark maze and fighting off the zombies in 45 minutes.
He was right when he told Park, “I didn’t fail the quest. I went to the end of the dungeon. I just couldn’t find SeJoo. I couldn’t find him, but he left something behind.”
Assuming JW needed the same amount time to get back to the entrance and fight more zombies, he had 30 minutes to spare. 🙂
Going back, he encountered swarm of zombies but he met NPC Seo, too. After Sec Seo saved him, he had 30 minutes left. Or to be exact: 29 minutes and 58 seconds.
When he was “saved” by the light, he must still have about 25 mins left in his quest.
To me then, it’s not MORE time that he needed to accomplish that mission but MORE “energy” or “health” or “defense”.
The attacks and critical hits, not to mention the emotional trauma of realizing that Sec Seo was dead, ATE UP his life points (or whatever gamers call it) and EXHAUSTED him mentally so he ran out of steam or energy to reach the end.
Having a healer 🙂at his side or a health potion would have done the trick. But this does NOT mean I want HeeJoo in the game as a user/player. Heck no!
Thanks for figuring out all the times in the dungeon @packmule3. The way the dungeon battle was shown in Ep 10 which omitted the finding of the item, (and the appearance of the item only in the later episode) made the whole sequence confusing. It was not evident at which stage Jin Woo was walking out of the dungeon. I was under the impression that he was still going inwards and had not come to the end yet. This is a great flaw in the editing.
From what I could tell in my re-watch of the battle, the 1 point where time is questionable was the time left before Jin Woo’s ally appeared (30 minutes 40 seconds) and the time remaining after his ally disappeared (29 minutes 58 seconds). This means that NPC Jeong Hun was fighting the zombies for Jin Woo for barely a minute. Granted that everything was shot in slo-mo, but still ally was taking hits as well and Jin Woo was not helping at this stage, and more than 10 zombies had to be taken down. Suspension of disbelief required.
I applaud Jin Woo’s persistence in insisting that he still has time to complete the quest (which is true) and with that gung-ho spirit. With just 29 minutes remaining, more zombies to go through and goodness knows how much more dungeon to cover while walking out, I don’t have much confidence that the quest will be completed. And this especially since in order to use the Master’s item, I believe he has to be at level 100 or more, and he’s only at level 91!!! 😖