I’m casting my vote for Ending A because, I dunno, I feel like Alex would shrug all these discrepancies off.
I mean, probably no one else would, but I refuse to accept a canon where Alex has learned anything.
I mean I kinda feel like both endings represent Alex not learning anything. In Ending A he’s completely incurious and just accepts what he sees without question, not learning anything in sort of a passive way. In Ending B he keeps chasing the thing that should have (but, unaccountably, has not) utterly ruined his life and alienated everyone he supposedly cares about, making the active choice to not learn a Goddamned thing.
The only proper response is to vote for both, so you do both. But I’d say go for B so that we can at least see everyone die, hopefully.
The thing that gets me about Ending #3 is, they didn’t have to do it that way. They could have just thrown up the video on their own blog saying “hey, there was supposed to be a third ending but we couldn’t finish it, here’s what it would have looked like though”. That’s a thing that’s fine to do! But noooo, they had to go and do some kind of dumb ARG social media bullshit to try and gin up some fake buzz for it. Ugh.
Or maybe buzz isn’t right, maybe it’s not about buzz. Maybe it’s about not being able to admit that they lied. If they made that post, they’d have to walk back the earlier stuff about how Ending C is totally cool and totally in the game, and they can’t do that.
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Oh, I should’ve made it more clear. I fully intend to do both. I have MOST of Ending A recorded from when I did the last update. The vote was for which one I was doing first.
Honestly, I don’t think they did it to get attention. YIIK is sort of in this category where everyone knows it sucks, and it’s not one of those situations like No Man’s Sky where the possibility exists that the developers could fix it. I’m pretty sure they don’t have the money to do that, and no one is going to donate to them after what happened with the plagiarism accusations.
I think what probably happened is that it’s a combination of bad taste (they probably think the whole ARG thing is cool) and not wanting to show their faces in public anymore. As far as I know, they’ve done all of one interview since the plagiarism story broke. If they came out with a video on their own blog, I think what would happen is that they’d be flooded with comments about it and I don’t think either of the devs could take it.
The reason I think they didn’t just release it as a patch, by the way, is because of the console releases. I doubt they have the resources to also patch the Switch and PS4 versions, and they probably don’t want to answer people who might be angry that their platform of choice didn’t get the patch while PC did. Speaking of the console releases, I’d like an answer from Reginald Fils-Aime about how YIIK was considered good enough to get a devkit for the Switch, but Disaster Day of Crisis wasn’t good enough to be released in the US. At least Day of Crisis is a fun trainwreck.
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: After that, uh… riveting conversation with what may or may not have been Alex’s dad, we get put into a blatant ripoff of Moonside from Earthbound. It looks like Ending A won, so we’ll do Ending A first.
: I don’t know why they put a healing item here, because as far as I know, there is no more actual combat for the rest of the game. I didn’t actually FINISH Ending A on this recording run, however, so there might be combat that I don’t know about yet as of the time I’m starting this update.
: You might ask what triggers Ending B, and it’s that tree over there. We COULD trigger that this run and still get Ending A, but I won’t.
: I wish I knew what the reason was for choosing this artstyle to show reality breaking down. Moonside looked the way it did because it sort of symbolized things that the characters didn’t understand: it had an enemy called Abstract Art.
: Following the path shows us New York (gotta love how you can see what are apparently the Twin Towers in the front) with a giant Alex-faced meteor about to crash into it.
: “We’ve been waiting here forever!”
: “What’s going on?”
: “You okay, dude? You look terrible.”
: “Yeah, maybe you should sit in the back seat, far away from me in case you barf.”
: “Seriously, are you okay?”
: “Yeah, let’s get going.”
: Some of you have been asking why the developers chose the name YIIK when the game has seemingly nothing to do with the Y2K bug other than passing mentions. I’m pretty sure they did it solely so they could make a Prince reference.
: “I can’t remember the last time I did something fun for the new year!!”
: “We should leave now if we want to get shopping in before the new year!”
: I haven’t gone back through Ending A yet, but when I recorded this I was getting massive amounts of audio desync and I’m not entirely sure it was intentional. The voiceacting would be three or four lines behind where the text was.
: “How can you even think about shopping? Wasn’t it just Christmas?”
: “Exactly. All the best stuff is on sale now.”
: Typo! That’s what, 15? I bet if they’d hired a professional writer instead of blowing all their money on voiceacting, this wouldn’t be an issue.
: “Why did I feel like this? Why was it that when I looked at Vella I felt as if I was looking at someone else altogether?”
: “When I looked at Proto-Michael, I felt like I was looking at a beautiful image that was stained. His features were too rounded.”
: Come to think of it, why doesn’t Michael’s sprite thing reflect the whole shirtless dipshit thing he had going on?
: “Claudio, Chondra. How were they even talking? I looked at their mouths moving up and down and felt a strange detachment to them. As if they were speaking a foreign language without making a sound at all.”
: “I turned to the Essentia. Her face felt blurry and out of focus.”
: “No. What’s happening?”
: “This reality has already started to break.”
: “But this didn’t start today, did it?”
: “I see, so you have noticed.”
: “Only just today. I’ve been pretty oblivious to things I don’t want to see, if you haven’t noticed.”
: “So would you like me to clear some things up?”
: “Of course. Give it to me straight.”
: “Our souls are in constant transit if we do not enter the Soul Space and take control. So this Michael here is not the Michael from your childhood. Proto-Michael is, as he is a combination of all Michaels.”
: You have to love how the camera never moves from this spot for a good… probably two minutes?
: “So did the old Michael leave this reality?”
: “No. This reality is shattered. Lost souls in the Soul Space are slipping in and out of it.”
: “So Claudio and Chondra?”
: “That is one I’ll let you figure out yourself. It will be good for you.”
: “So does Sammy. When Sammy left, Vella took her place.”
: A lot of people have also pointed out in the thread that the entire mechanic of how souls work in this game makes no sense and is wildly inconsistent. For the record, Vella has stated before that she’d been in Alex’s reality for a year - meaning that this shouldn’t be possible.
: “I took advantage of Sammy leaving this reality and forced my spirit into this physical space. Understand so far?”
: This also makes no sense, because they’ve established that it’s a one to one thing: one soul leaves, another can enter. So no, I don’t understand what the fuck the point is.
: “Michael, like Rory, Chondra, Claudio, and myself, are important to you in every reality. When this reality broke, they entered. So a version of Michael, Rory, Chondra, and Claudio all come to this reality.”
: Okay, so did this happen years ago, or just now, or what even the fuck? This feels like I’m reading a bad fanfic where the author can’t keep anything straight.
: “For what?”
: “To find you. To find me. We’re going to help them.”
: “How? This reality is broken. And from what I can tell, it’s been broken for a long time.”
: “I do not know. We must first see what form you take to destroy this reality.”
: Here’s another thing I don’t get. From what the robot is saying, their reality was already collapsing in on itself before Alex even got here, and was probably going to wind up dying anyway. The way they present it, this weird drawing shit would’ve happened even if Alex WASN’T going to destroy reality.
: “Why does it have to be me?”
: “If it wasn’t you, it would be me, or Rory, or Claudio. We are all capable of destruction. We can create or destroy. The choice is ultimately yours.”
: “Then I choose not to destroy this reality!”
: “Excellent. Now if only your parallel selves agreed.”
: “I was playing the events of the past year over and over again in my head. I thought back to when I first arrived in Frankton. Everything felt so different.”
: “Seeing Michael again. It seemed so normal for him to live next to me. Then we met Vella and that felt the most real out of all the things that had happened so far.”
: If I had to guess, the answer is from you and because she hates you.
: “Probably for the best. This reality has gone to literal shit. Did she, perhaps, sense that the end was coming? Was her reality torn apart along with mine?”
: “I thought about the Mind Dungeon. I had never heard of a Mind Dungeon before, and yet I accepted it.”
: “There you can go and toughen up and learn to do magic. Magic? Why hadn’t I found this strange? It was all so obvious from the start. This wasn’t my reality.”
: “Mind Dungeons, cats with moustaches, beautiful women who come in and out of my life, mysterious pan-dimensional androids.”
: “This wasn’t my life. Of course something had to be wrong. I had sensed it all along, but I was so intrigued by the fun and mystery of it all. Who wouldn’t be?”
: New York is pretty much just a cutscene you walk through, which is pretty accurate from what I remember the one time I visited there.
: You’ll notice that once we get into New York, all of the characters are back on-model.
: Ahh yes, New York’s famous Food District. Who could ever visit New York and not see the Food District, right next to the Business District and the Ey I’m Walkin’ Here District.
: At this point I’m starting to question whether this was an actual design choice or they just ran out of money.
: “Would we survive the night? Would this reality continue to exist? What would happen to our souls? I wished I could jump inside their brains and make them remember, but were these even the same friends I was with the past year?”
: If you’re wondering, the blue rings on the map are all shops. We don’t need any of them because there are no more real fights left.
: Ahh, this must be the famous Times Square, located straight in the heart of the Anime District.
: “I don’t know how, but I can feel it in my bones. This is how it ends.”
: You ever just steal something right out of Majora’s Mask, but it’s never quite the same?
: Meet the Proto Meteor. It’s the laziest boss design ever.
: “THIS IS ALL SO FAMILIAR!”
: "Prepare to fight! This is it. This is the end!’
: “Okay guys, we trained for this!”
: “WHAT DO YOU MEAN WE TRAINED FOR THIS!? Isn’t that Alex’s face!? HOLY SHIT!!!”
: “Michael!!! You’re back!”
: “I never left.”
: “Holy shit. I remember everything now. What’s happening!?”
: “I hope that means you all remember what’s going on here!”
: We’ve got this. Alex has over 110 strength and is at an 89% chance to critical.
: Yeah, I’m thinking that’ll do it… only it doesn’t. The Proto Comet is an entirely scripted boss fight that is a BLATANT ripoff of Persona 4’s final boss. It can be reduced to 1HP, but cannot die.
: As soon as it can start taking turns, the Proto Comet starts banishing your party members, one by one.
: Eventually, you’re left with just Essentia and Alex.
: This is basically a colossal ripoff of Persona 4’s final boss, which unlike the Proto Comet had an actual boss fight before it got into the scripted stuff. However, the way that Atlus did it was far better: all of your party members have an ability by default where they will step in automatically to take an otherwise-lethal hit for the main character. The final boss in Persona 4 exploits this by targeting the main character with an instakill attack, and one of your party members will take the hit and die instead.
: “I am all that’s left. How did this happen? How can I have everything one moment and be so completely alone the next?”
: “My world is destroyed. I am destroyed.”
: So what you’re saying is… you know you let us down? You’ve been a fool to yourself? You thought that you could live for no one else? You’ll never love again, your world is ending?
: “We could live alone on this island forever. You and me, what do you say pal?”
: “Yeah, you’re right. That’s a terrible idea.”
: This actually would’ve been a pretty good ending by itself. Alex is so self-absorbed that he ultimately winds up in his house with only himself for company until the end of time.
: “Where you do think the Essentia 2000 is?”
: “I don’t know, but I really wish she was here. And Vella. And everyone else.”
: “Video games, music, TV, expensive record players, all of these material things have value, but they can’t be valued above the people in your life.”
: “Vella lost the man who hurt her. Sammy lost her mind. Rory lost his sister. What had I ever lost?”
: “It’s a funny thing, to grow up with everything in life. When I was four I vacationed to Italy one summer. I did every year for the next two years and you know how much I appreciated that travel?”
: I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use the phrase “every year for the next two years”.
: “You guessed it, I didn’t appreciate it all.”
: Typos! Typos fucking everywhere!
: “I met a kid in college who had never left the state. He said his parents didn’t take vacations. I didn’t realize people didn’t travel.”
: So you… met Charlie from Always Sunny in Philadelphia? Alex would fit right in on that show, in that he’d absolutely be a side character who gets destroyed every time he shows up.
: This is among the longest monologues in the game, at a whopping 35 text boxes. Nothing to look at, just a black screen with text on it.
: “But now that there is nothing there, I realize – I realize what a little shit I was. I thought about my soul and whatever the hell that meant. Did I even believe in souls?”
: “Well, I did to a certain extent. I think the problem is people of a hundred different ideologies say different words. Soul means one thing to one person and something entirely different to another.”
: “I thought about my mom, my sister, about Vella, Rory, Michael, Chondra, and Claudio. I thought about all my friends from college, my past girlfriends, teachers, random people on buses.”
: As much as I hate to do this twice in an update… what you’re saying is that you heard telephones, opera house, favorite melodies? Saw boys, toys, electric irons and TVs? Your brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare? You had to cram so many things to store everything in there. And all the fat skinny people? And all the tall short people? And all the somebody people? And all the nobody people? Never thought you’d meet so many people?
: “And they were all gone. Simply gone. Where? When you die you don’t enter the Soul Space. Soul Space isn’t heaven or anything stupid like that. It’s the place between places. No, that’s not entirely right though, is it? It’s the place-between the place between places.”
: “If I stayed here, I’d die. I’d starve. I’d go insane from the loneliness. The only place to go was to that place between places, the Soul Space. But how? How do I do this? How do I separate my brain from my body?”
: “How can the physical and metaphysical be separated? What happens to a mind lost to the Soul Space? What becomes of it? There were so many questions I should have asked The Essentia 2000.”
: “You’re now face to face with God. You can ask him any question, and all you can ask is what’s for dinner. This is me in a nutshell. I lacked appreciation for those around me. I should have – no, don’t think like that Alex.”
: “There is no use beating myself up. Is there? I don’t even know any more. ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself.’ This is what my mother said to me whenever I made a mistake. But was this the mantra I really should have adopted?”
: That’s the entire point! You’re a fucking failure!
: This is apparently the Soul Space. In front of us, we have a cosmic horror too awful to look at. The blue arrow tells us which direction we need to go.
: Hey guys, remember Planet of the Apes? Huh? Do ya? Do ya?
: “I’m terrified. I miss my friends, my family.”
: “I’m sorry.”
: “What do you mean you don’t have answers!? You always have something to say!”
: I haven’t seen it in years, and I’m too lazy to look it up, but I’m pretty sure those last two lines are stolen straight out of Cast Away.
: Moving around in the Soul Space is incredibly slow, and it took me a good few minutes to find our next destination even with the arrow.
: Now we’re on the Planet of the Dipshits. I’m pretty sure all of these Alexes here are earlier concepts for the main character.
: “Yes. Can you tell me where here is?”
: “It’s your room, of course.”
: “Look, I just got to the Soul Space. I’m lost. I’m so confused. I don’t even know what we do here in the Soul Space.”
: “Ah, I understand. Well, we’ve got a bunch of the latest games from each reality, some dope beats. So, just kick back and enjoy.”
: “I was with my friends, and then something happened. I was myself, but I was also a meteorite. They’re all dead, I think.”
: “Shit are you serious?”
: “Of course I’m serious! What kind of question is that!?”
: “Usually we leave our body when she comes to get us.”
: “Wait, who is she?”
: “Well the Essentia 2000. She appears to us, warns us, shows us what we’re going to do, and we get the hell out of reality before anyone gets hurt.”
: Wait, what? How does that… how does that make sense?
: “I didn’t do that. I thought I could fight it!!”
: “Phffttt. Wow, you’re a brave one. But ahh— it’s impossible. How could the decent few of us actually stand a chance? There are just too many of them.”
: “Too many of who?”
: “Look, I think it would be best if you just relaxed a bit. You’re going to give yourself a panic attack. Whatever you do, just don’t go to the other side of the rock. We’re not allowed to go there.”
: The other Alexes don’t have much interesting to say, but…
: Apparently, Chondra’s missing brother is an Alex? I don’t quite get how that works.
: Behind the rock is a group of Alex in a hood.
: I’m pretty sure that agreeing to join just gives you a game over… even though the dialog that follows afterward seems like you join them anyway.
: “I was losing a part of myself. I was a burst pipe and I was the plumber desperately trying to hold it altogether.”
: I think the Allansons need to be put into a new language classification where they technically speak English, but they’re so bad at it that they actually do not know a language.
: “I was a metaphor for a metaphor for a sad, sad man.”
: I don’t have much else to talk about, so let’s talk about how I bought a copy of After Dark and read about 2/3 of the way through it.
: “Each time, it was as if I lost all my friends again.”
: After Dark is not a great book. It reads like a stageplay, and the whole thing kinda feels like Haruki Murakami is trying to give you an elevator pitch for a movie he wants to make, only the movie is about nothing.
: “My mom, my sister, my dad. Everyone I couldn’t remember. Why couldn’t I recall everyone?”
: As someone pointed out, all of those cutscenes with Essentia in them were basically ripped straight from the book. Every other chapter is basically “We are looking in on a Japanese woman sleeping on her bed, only there’s a man in a suit with a mask on the TV” to the point where I was reading a few pages in and then just skipping the entire chapter because nothing fucking happens.
: “I was the sole survivor of my reality. It would be a fitting fate. I tried with earnest desperation to hold on to what made me, me.”
: “A star in the distance. You’re gone again. Your soul’s destroyed. I don’t know how many times I’ve witnessed the loss of a reality at the hands of myself.”
: “What could I do? I wasn’t strong enough on my own to defeat so many. I was cold. I didn’t have a body, and yet somehow I was cold. Desperately I longed for – what was her name? She was a woman, made of plastic.”
: It’s called a realdoll, dipshit.
: “She was essential to my survival. How had she saved me? Why didn’t I do…? What was her name? What was my name?”
: Your name is shut the fuck up and get on with this goddamn game already.
: “I needed to keep my mind. I needed to stay me as long as possible. But for what? What was I going to figure out? What was I going to accomplish? Why am I here?”
: I’m just going to go ahead and skip the rest of this monologue, because it’s a recap of the entire game up to this point.
: This isn’t really a dungeon, in that there’s no enemies. The basic idea is that we need to get to where Michael is, but the stupid panda is in the way. There’s two ways you could do this “puzzle” - there’s chests you can pick up that have small amounts of cash in them.
: Opening any of the chests will cause this guy to spawn. He sells keys.
: You can pretty much guess where this is going to go. Alex has lost all of his money and all the items we picked up throughout the game - but he still has his equipment. Given that Alex is strong enough to kill anything with a single LP Toss at this point, you can also sell his equipment off and just buy all three keys in one go.
: You’ll notice that Rory is standing on a little platform near where the new path opened going up to the stage. I don’t know if there’s a separate thing to rescue Rory or not if you didn’t let him die, but I suspect there isn’t.
: The annoying part is that you have to open this chest, go back to the store, sell the Panda Key and buy the Dali Key before you can progress.
: Here, we have to open that chest you can see in the background, and then go back and sell the Dali Key to afford the Entity Key.
: What I don’t quite get is why he doesn’t understand that his friends are dead. I mean, he saw it happen right in front of him.
: “How is the meteorite not already here? Something is happening. Somewhere in the isolated recesses of my mind, like a warm light in the distance, an idea is forming.”
: “A completely human, genius, and kind-intentioned idea. Something that no other version of me would do.”
: You’re going to kill yourself so that the meteor can’t keep killing people? That’d be nice.
: “And now my body is filled with that overwhelming feeling that I am about to do the right thing. I always made a choice, a lazy choice. Not today. Today, I choose differently.”
: “Could I intervene? Was there another me in this reality?”
: “I’m afraid that this reality will soon end. And once again, you’ll be destroyed, along with Vella, Chondra, Michael, and Claudio.”
: In the console versions of the game, this scene changes slightly based on what console you’re using. What would’ve been cool is if for PC they detected your monitor’s resolution and changed how the display Alex is on looks based on that: curved if it’s an ultrawide, flat if it’s a standard 1080p or 4k.
: In the end though, this is just a shittier version of Omikron The Nomad Soul’s opening, and that’s a fucking David Cage game.
: Let’s take a look at what this scene looks like on the Switch. For one, it’s zoomed out more, but I think that’s because I was clicking through the dialog relatively fast.
: What the fuck? What the everloving fuck? If I found out I was an Alex clone, I’d probably commit soul suicide right then and there. I mean, it’s not like…
: Oh, fuck. I KNEW there was a reason that creepy old lady told me I shouldn’t LP this game. I fucking knew it!
: Naturally, I hit no.
: God dammit you had to make a fucking Batman reference. Fuck it, I’m going full on Chaos. Let the galaxy burn! Blood for the blood god!
: The game then makes you load your last save, which in my case… was back when I was skipping days at the end of the last update. Whoops. Anyway, now I’ll start recording again and find out if I actually get to LP Toss a final boss to death.
: Anyway, I re-recorded. This re-recording was… ill-fated. On the PC version by the way, you get a PS4 and a Vita.
: “There are many things I have to tell you. But to tell you everything would probably take a very long time. Hours, maybe.”
: “I wish I could say how sorry I am for everything that has happened to you in your parallel lives because of my mistakes. Unfortunately, I lacked the courage to act in the past, but I plan to make up for it today.”
: “In many lives, you were different things to me. But names and relationships don’t matter. What matters now is how much you’ve always been there for me. I want you all to join me once again and do something absolutely crazy.”
: Fuck you, only Dante gets to say that.
: I plan on confronting Proto-me, and destroying it. I don’t know what will happen when I get there, but I’ve faced this thing before and I think I know what I need to do to defeat it – me – well, us.’
: This is where all those names we used at the start come in. Unfortunately, we won’t be seeing Sephiroth… because that’s Rory. Sorry to whoever suggested that.
: “No problem! So, what’s going on?”
: I feel like this game could’ve been five minutes long, and this would have been the entire story.
: Unfortunately, we don’t get to use Essentia anymore, because fighting with a 1970s-style tape drive would be too unique.
: Here’s the final dungeon. You can probably guess what we need to do. The chest on the left contains all of the items we had before the world got destroyed. The one on the right has four Ambrosias. Now, what I didn’t know going into this is that this segment is EXTREMELY FUCKING GLITCHY, ESPECIALLY IF YOU USE LP TOSS.
: By the way, here’s our new party. We have the worst girl from Fire Emblem, the worst Danganronpa, and depression. There’s always depression. Plagiarism is basically Alex but with worse stats. Hilariously, the female player character uses Alex’s voice during combat and has extremely broken animations because they use a sword and not a record.
: Our first mini-boss is Alex, but masturbating.
: “What the hell are you consuming realities for?! Why do you have to do this!!”
: This is Plagiarism, by the way. TV Head Alex poisons on hit, but that won’t matter because…
: This fight was “interesting”, and by interesting I mean the boss dodged my first LP Toss so Plagiarism had to use hers.
: Even with her strength being a bit over half what Alex’s is, she still does 5200 damage.
: Chris Niosi, everybody.
: Like all the other clones, Fat Alex can dodge LP Toss.
: What he can’t dodge is having the book thrown at him. In this case, the book is After Dark by Haruki Murakami.
: There’s a scene after this with Sammy’s ghost that I am going to skip. Let’s just pretend that he tries to kiss her and she slaps him. That’s the canon version of events.
: So if you’re wondering what the fuck is going on, this is the Essentia 995. If you paid attention (I sure as hell didn’t), this is the robot Yuzu was working on before we killed him.
: “…Essentia…? What is this? How are you here?”
: “I’m really surprised to see you here. I’m glad you made it this far.”
: That would mean this fuckstick is the version of Alex that ultimately ruined Yuzu’s life.
: “What did she say to get you here? Look, I don’t want any trouble. Just let me drink my tea.”
: “Come on Alex, attack. Take him out. You’ve come this far.”
: It’s a doggy dog world. Chumps like this guy are a diamond dozen. It’s ‘We’re one AND the same’ you fucking… you know what? I have a reaction image for this.
: “If he still wants to kill me after, then I’ll take my chances with a tussle.”
: “What the fuck are you talking about?”
: “Look man, I don’t want to burst your bubble. But she lies ALL the time. Whatever she thinks you want to hear comes out of her mouth. She envies my power.”
: “We may all be one in the same, but I drew the proverbial long straw. She needs all the help she can get. Even if it’s from a skinny MC…”
: “I’m you, you’re me, she’s us as well. The division of our soul isn’t exactly natural… and she wants out. She wants to be the last one here. She can’t accept our little arrangement. I get it. But we’ve been this way for a LONG time, man.”
: “So, tell me. What lies did she tell you to get you here?”
: “…Essentia… is this true? Sammy? Vella? Was all that a lie?”
: “It is often necessary to lie to yourself to get a tough job done. You’ve done it. We’ve all done it. I said what I needed to say to get you here.”
: So wait, is this just Bravely Default now?
: “…Alex… won’t you… help me… destroy him? Come on, take him out. You’ve come so far. End this division. End this strife. Without him, there will be no conflict.”
: So, this is where the game’s lazy programming kicks in.
: We get to fight a Joy Mutant straight out of LISA, plus two horse statues. Now, this is SUPPOSED to be a scripted boss fight - but I had no fucking idea going in.
: I figured it might dodge Alex’s LP Toss, so I had Plagiarism use hers even though she went before him.
: So yeah, this breaks the script. The game basically softlocks here - you can either wait an eternity for the boss to kill everyone, or you can reset. Unfortunately, I didn’t save during this route because I didn’t expect a fucking softlock. That’s what, four of them now? No wait, five. FIVE FUCKING SOFTLOCKS.
: Let’s talk about how this fight is supposed to go. Notice that there’s two glass pillars. We have exactly two turns to destroy both of these pillars, or the game becomes unwinnable. They go down in one hit from anything.
: The Joy Mutant spends its first turn charging, and its second turn to do this.
: The game then gives us a standard game over screen, which I don’t think I had ever seen before. It’ll ask you to continue, and you want to hit yes.
: Welcome to what I’m pretty sure is the inside of Two Brothers. Let’s meet a blatant author self-insert.
: “Not a lot of people do. But, I’m going to offer you some advice. I’ve lost everything. Trust me, I really have.”
: I don’t know much about Two Brothers, only that it had a Kickstarter. From what I’ve heard, the game had some massive issues - including that it was an unstable piece of shit. I wouldn’t be surprised if somehow they also screwed over their KS backers somehow.
: Enough with the goddamn self-pity! I don’t pity you one fucking bit! Your game sucks - both of them suck!
: This time, you’ll notice that there’s something different about this room. See those levers? Those were blocked off by horse statues before.
: “That’s the only thing keeping this division permanent!”
: “DO NOT UNPLUG US. WE WILL BE WHOLE AGAIN. DON’T DO IT! DON’T UNPLUG!!”
: Really? FUCK YOU, AND FUCK YOUR SHITTY GAME!
: “WITHOUT THIS EVERYTHING GOES BACK TO THE WAY IT WAS!!”
: “I don’t know what’s going to happen if we do this… but this is what my heart’s telling me to do.”
: “IF YOU DO THIS ONLY ONE OF US WILL BE HERE!”
: “I’m with you, and it’s all up to you now. Sorry again for dragging you into this. I shouldn’t have been so stupid.”
: “Everything she said really got to me. I was so worried about hurting my friends. I didn’t realize the difference between being flawed and being evil… anyway, it doesn’t matter now.”
: What the shit? This game got released in Japan? Moreover, someone edited this script? Did he quit halfway through or something? Maybe did all his editing while drunk from being forced to edit YIIK… actually, that makes sense.
: You’d think that Brian Allanson would have figured out he can’t code for shit after the first time he fucked a game up. That final boss was such a bad design choice: your first instinct is going to be to use an AOE attack due to there being three enemies, only the main AOE you have is glitched and will softlock the fight. This ending took me two full re-records to finally get.
: This game also apparently had two different testers. I don’t think a thousand testers could fix Brian’s spaghetti code.
: And I’m done. Goodbye, everyone. I’ll see you after several months of intense therapy to remove all memories of this from my brain and - what the fuck do you mean there’s still another ending? Fuck! Next time, we’ll do Ending B.
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Happy 100th Post!
Ohhh BOY have I found out things about Two Brothers. It’s a Game Boy-inspired game but the graphics are way too detailed for a Game Boy game, making it rather clashing, plus there’s actual color in the heaven sequence, though not as much as actually shown. When Roy talks about people preventing him from his journey, that is literally the Allansons crying about any critique for that game, including the fucking Shadow of the Colossus music plagiarism (hey same theme!)
I want to just stress this point especially: a game that’s about the main character coming to terms with his flaws, is coming from a team where the two leads didn’t learn a single fucking thing when it came to actually improving a game and instead whined about it. It’s so fitting, but goddamn they wanted to charge, what $20+ to show they didn’t learn a single thing?
I don’t know what’s behind ending number 2, I did see into 3 and ugh, it’s lazy but at least not worth the effort of looking at.
Whew. Just reading that felt like such a goddamn mess. My eyes may have glazed over trying to read all that dialogue.
Also, something about the way the people in New York look jumped out at me. I don’t know that it was the first game to do it, but Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE did the whole “colored silhouettes for random people” thing too:
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That was, rather a lot, and I shouldn’t really be surprised that the ending is basically “every Alex explodes and then credits roll” but I’m still like “that’s it? This is not worth the setup, ugh”
Also it only hit me this update that the Mind Dungeon’s phone number is 333, and I’m annoyed. I’m betting that’s a reference to Choronzon, from English mysticism and Crowley, and they didn’t even get it right.
And then there’s the final dungeon being a blatant visual riff on the Cave of the Past from Earthbound. This game just feels like a pile of, well… quotes and works from others thrown together haphazardly. Pretty much what we expected, but still disappointing.
Well now that you’ve reach the end, now is a good a time as any to tell you that this ending, and by ending I mean a huge chunk of the final sections of the game, were rewritten after the Allanson brothers’ mom passed away. So the original ending, or at least a part of it, is still in the game’s data. (Along with other bits of cut content that is surprisingly way better than what’s in the final game.) One nice person on the YiiK discord, yes really, compiled a series of saves that you can load to view said content, and I took the time to record it.
So I’m just gonna leave this here for your curiosity:
I’m having a hard time coming up with words for what I’m feeling about all this and why. Certainly one thing that bugs me a lot is how little actually mattered in the game. The fact that “learning from your mistakes and becoming a better person” was the central theme of the game kind of came out of nowhere at me (see: previous remarks about clarity of plot). They had all these scenes where Alex realizes he’s a giant piece of shit only to change nothing. They wasted so much time on lore which was not internally consistent, did not enrich the narrative world, and did not help the narrative make more sense. It literally just doesn’t matter at all if a central character lives or dies.
What is this game. This game is nothing.
I honestly kinda forgot that Two Brothers existed, but it doesn’t at all surprise me that they had trouble making it even look like an actual Gameboy game. I backed a reproduction GB game on Kickstarter a few months ago. With that game in particular, the developers were going from having a game that worked on original GB hardware to making it work with the Super Gameboy and GBC and there are all kinds of quirks associated with that (namely the SGB’s 4-color limit and the differences between the GBC and GBA/GBA SP/Early-model GBA SP’s screens).
I think what angered me the most about this game though is pretty much exactly what you said - that if the Allansons had listened to the people critiquing their game at any point, YIIK might’ve been a halfway decent game after a couple of patches. I don’t think anyone went in wanting them to fail. I even remember seeing threads on 4chan’s /v/ board about it, and apart from the usual “hipster lumberjack protagonist” comments it didn’t seem like there was any real animosity.
The thing is, it’s clear that the Allansons knew people who could’ve helped them make this game not suck. I don’t think you get Toby Fox to make a track for your game without knowing him enough that you could ask him to take a look at what you’ve got. I think that’s what really gets me: they had every opportunity to succeed, and they didn’t take it.
Yeah, imagine how that is for me. I had to work in it for short periods at a time, because any more than that and I’d just start falling asleep.
I didn’t upload it, but I did actually stream my first re-recording of Ending A. When I hit that part, I remember just laughing really hard and being like “Of course it’s just fucking Giygas. Of course it fucking is.” That was the run where I softlocked the game by LP Tossing the Joy mutant, which is why I didn’t bother uploading it.
I wish I hadn’t used that goddamn DBZ video, because I’d have used it right here. That original ending isn’t great, but at least it’s a goddamn ending! I like that they cut it because they felt it was too depressing, but then they left in like half the fucking game being people committing suicide in some form, because that’s perfectly okay.
I also now realize that most of the stuff from that third ending video that wasn’t in the main game actually was, but it was all cut. A lot of the stuff they cut is also just… why did they cut it? They had an interior to the gas station they removed because… I mean, it would’ve just been another shop but who cares?
I think what really gets me though is the cut version of Frankton. I get that having huge maps is a problem, but they could’ve easily solved that by just having a fast travel thing. It feels like someone told the Allansons that it was too big and they responded by throwing a fucking fit and reducing it to what it is in the final game. All they would’ve had to do is put in a fast travel thing and maybe a map. That’s it.
Honestly, it feels like a lot of what they wanted to do was hampered by both the fact that Brian Allanson is not great at coding as evidenced by his dev log where it seems like this was the first time he had ever worked in Unity and by the fact that neither he nor his brother were terribly good at writing.
It seems to me like they probably would have had Rory’s death mean something, but couldn’t figure out how to make that work code-wise. It probably would’ve driven up the cost of the game as well, because they most likely would have needed more voiceacting done. I still don’t really understand why they even bothered to voiceact the game in the first place. They’re trying to mimic a PS1 game, but most PS1 games didn’t have voiceacting.
If anything, I’d almost like to see a post-mortem on this game that is just a giant list of what not to do.
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I believe the audio desync is because Rory’s lines in some scenes don’t play if he’s not there, but either the subtitles or the audio still plays as if his lines were still there. I think I saw a video of that some time ago.
I wish I could say something intelligent about the ending, but having seen it at least twice, I still don’t really understand what’s going on or what motivates anyone here. It’s not the first ending I’ve ever seen where I feel like the author was trying to be really clever and the mortal minds of their audience are failing to make some leap of logic that would reveal the cleverness, but with this one, I don’t even care enough to go back and try to puzzle it out.
Projecting much, writer?
MOther fucking excuse me. She “lost” a pedophile version OF YOU, who SEVERELY hurt her. Fuck offff.
Who knows how many hours into this trash fest and we finally get something resembling a cool idea. Good job. I suppose.
I can’t say this is the worst thing I’ve ever experienced, because I didn’t really experience it you did, and because I’m an avid manga and anime fan and have had the displeasure of seeing some awful shit. That being said though… this is probably one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. I can’t really think of anything else to say other than that. There are aspects of the ending that make quasi sense, and there’s clearly… SOMETHING in this that wants to be refined into something good, but it’s not even worth considering at this point, clearly. And truthfully, some of the misunderstanding of what their writing actually means just means that it’s poisoned from the beginning.
So yeah. I’m excited to see the failure ending, if this is the good one.
: It’s time for Ending B, and the final update to this LP. I’d like to thank everyone who read through all this garbage and posted in the thread for making this the most active and successful LP I’ve done.
: Ending B is basically a hunt for stuff we have no reason to suspect is there. There is ONE clue to this, and that’s if you check ONISM 1999 before you head out.
: BPA is Brian Allanson, by the way. Also, this sounds a lot like a post on one of those Men’s Rights forums.
: I think this is about as far up your own ass as you can go. He’s right about one thing though - no one should have allowed him to ship this ending because it is a buggy pile of SHIT. It makes Ending A look good by comparison.
: By “look for the flesh”, he means “check behind the tree in Alex’s yard.”
: What is she, a fucking korok?
: “You wasted so much time looking for me, but I’ve been here all along… in your front yard, hiding behind this tree!”
: I find that unlikely, given that in YIIK’s universe you’re apparently a fabrication of an evil robot that exists solely to be this game’s equivalent to Maria in Silent Hill 2. Also, they kind of found your dead body.
: I swear to god, if this ending has Alex kiss her at any point, I am replacing it with Mike Dawson missing the ring toss.
: Finding Sammy allows us to leave out the back door of Alex’s house, which is blocked off if you haven’t found her.
: If you’ve seen the video for the third ending, this will look familiar. The world map gets replaced by inverted colors and is just generally godawful to look at.
: Our destination is the one place we never had a reason to visit - the KNN building.
: The actual building is off to the right of where you enter the area. I’m not entirely sure why that is. Before we go in, there’s an item outside we need to pick up.
: I got stuck in this room and assumed I had softlocked the game. The “Exit” door has an interact prompt, but doesn’t do anything if you try to use it. The computer doesn’t do anything, and the only other thing we can even interact with in the room…
: I get what they were going for, but there’s no way the Allansons are so dense that they don’t know about the whole “redpilled” thing being used extensively by white supremacy groups and the alt-right.
: No, what you have to do is use Dali and launch him through the other door.
: This marks the start of the first point at which the game can softlock.
: “I’m going to need you to do me a favor, okay? First order of business is make me a cup of coffee. Think you can do that? If you can’t make coffee, you’ll never make it in the competitive world of local news.”
: Talking to the boss causes some new NPCs to spawn.
: This almost sounds like the premise for a KC Green comic. It’s a good thing we have a dead friend… well, “friend”, I guess. We won’t go in the supply closet just yet though, because we need to set another plot flag to continue.
: Okay, NOW let’s go into the supply closet. Surely it’ll be fine and…
: Well, fuck. That’s awkward.
: I should mention that if Rory isn’t dead, he won’t be in this room but that’s the only thing that’s different. The NPCs will still say only people with dead friends are allowed to go in.
: “I know it’s weird seeing me here, and I get that. But, I’m in a better place.”
: “Life was hard, and it finally caught up to me. Do me a favor, okay? Don’t blame yourself for what happened to me.”
: “But nothing you did really pushed me over the edge. It was going to happen one way or the other I think. So, just know that I forgive you. Forgive yourself. Just… just maybe be a little more careful next time a friend is in need.”
: I actually did this take before I had talked to the lady downstairs about the sugar, so the sugar hasn’t spawned in this room yet.
: This is where the game can and will softlock. What happens is that the trigger to take a cup doesn’t expire after you take one. If you take more than one (for instance, by failing the quest as I’m about to) the game won’t let you finish it properly. Thankfully, this is only maybe a 3 or 4 minute time loss as opposed to the 10+ minutes it took me to re-record Ending A.
: The sugar spawns right here once you’ve talked to the lady downstairs.
: Finally, there’s this exchange, which is more than a little creepy.
: This feels like the start of a fetish porno… or Hellmoo. Hellmoo had a command to milk people. I would actually LP that game if it wasn’t as creepy as it is - and also if I was good enough at exploiting it to get to the ending.
: “Uhhgnn! You little shit!!! Do it again. GET IT RIGHT!!!”
: At this point, I thought I had to go back and get all the ingredients again. I got a second cup, and then the game softlocked because I did.
: What you’re supposed to do is go to this coffee maker once you have the ingredients. The boss will tell you he likes his coffee weak. If you have more than one cup, the game will just not let you interact with the coffee maker at all.
: I had to re-record, and on the re-recording I forgot to pick up the red disk outside, hence why this scene is a bit different.
: “Wow! This is not bad. I’m pleased. Okay, now I need you to find me a Red Disk. Go to a computer, copy the MASTER FILE onto it, put it on the other computer, and bring me the disk.”
: “Also, uh… the disk is somewhere outside. I buried it last night.”
: These directions don’t make a lot of sense, but what we need to do is simple: go get the red disk (like we did earlier) and bring it back.
: Talking to the boss again causes two computers to light up. Unfortunately…
: The password is on this specific bulletin board, which you can’t even interact with before this particular plot flag has been set.
: “I need you to go to to the toy store and get my son a gift for his birthday. Buy the most expensive and fancy toy they have. Something that really shows my love.”
: I have no idea if it actually takes $1000 out of your inventory, but if you don’t have it you’re probably screwed. You can’t go back to any of the towns as far as I know.
: “I know it was expensive, so I’ll be sure to get money out from my desk to pay you back by the time you arrive. Mr. Jacobs wants to see you. He’s down on the second floor.”
: By the time we arrive from what?
: “Ha! Got you, you’re not fired. Boss Journalist is. Go upstairs and give it to him, let him know to pack up his desk and don’t make any big purchases, as he won’t be able to afford them any time soon.”
: “HOW CAN THEY DO THIS TO ME!? AND ON MY SON’S BIRTHDAY OF ALL DAYS!!! … snif …”
: I bet Andrew Allanson said this at some point during this game’s development.
: “I’m sorry you had to see me show my emotions. Listen, I won’t be able to pay you back after all. I don’t have a job anymore. Thank you for your service.”
: It may not be obvious at all why we just did that, or what any of this shit has to do with anything. The answer is to turn off a security camera, and also it has nothing to do with anything, this entire ending is somehow even more pointless than Ending A was.
: The plot trigger here is real weird. What we have to do is go through all of those doors up top - there’s five of them - and then the door to the actual ending appears.
: This part actually kinda infuriates me because it’s Brian Allanson being all “Oh woe is me I WANTED to write a good ending but forces beyond my control just STOPPED me”
: I have no idea who Mr. Kwek is - if he’s someone that words for Ysbyrd or whatever or just something they made up.
: Once we’ve talked to all of those things, another door opens.
: You might recognize this place, but if you don’t, it’s from the factory at the start of the game.
: The door won’t open, so we have to go through the window.
: Nothing here. Not even a phone call from a dead wife.
: I should mention that none of this is voiceacted, meaning that this was probably done after the game was “finished”.
: “It’s me, Sammy. I hope you can hear me clearly, it’s always so hard to get a good signal from here.”
: “To top it all off, I can’t help but feel that it was me that got you into this mess.”
: Again, not a lot to talk about here. I rushed through the rest of After Dark tonight, and honestly it’s a pretty garbage book. This game basically got all of its ideas from a handful of pages where one character’s sister (who has been in a coma for two months but it’s not a coma because she gets up to eat?) winds up teleporting into an alternate reality for a chapter. Nothing ever really comes of it, and I think it’s supposed to be a metaphor for depression or something.
: “Had I never met you, the world wouldn’t be ending right now.”
: The entire reason I think this game is pretty much nothing in terms of plot is because that’s just kind of how After Dark is - it’s a novel where absolutely nothing happens.
: “I’m not saying reality wouldn’t have broken, that had nothing to do with either of us… that happened a long time ago.”
: “But, you kept looking for me, and just because you wanted to make sure I was alright, you were dragged into this mess.”
: Is she… is she apologizing for committing suicide? What the fuck is this shit?
: That you’re dead and have been the entire time?
: I know that Chip and Ironicus are doing an LP of Metal Gear Solid V, so I’ll spoiler the rest of this, but: Sammy here seems a hell of a lot like Paz in MGS V. This also kind of leads to a weird question: is this like Police Quest where things aren’t consistent depending on your actions? Where like, getting Ending A means Sammy was a hallucination or projection or something of Essentia 995, but getting Ending B means that she wasn’t?
: “She’s a liar. She wants something that only you can give her, and she’ll destroy the entire world just to get it. But, I have a solution. It’s so good that you found this phone and I was able to reach you.”
: When I recorded this part, I was hoping it would be like Spec Ops, where Alex is so fucking crazy that he’s hallucinating everything - reality isn’t actually falling apart and he’s on an unplugged phone somewhere thinking he’s talking to a woman who has been dead for over half a year at this point.
: “Before you come in, I feel like I need to be honest with you. I want to see you, and I want to explore the great beyond with you…”
: Okay, this is just… what.
: “But it’s the best choice. If you stay, the world will end. If you stay, she wins. If you stay, you’ll never see me again.”
: “So, if you want to end this without destroying everything, go into the elevator… but, if you want to see it through to the end, now is your chance to leave.”
: I didn’t actually try to leave, because I figured that I didn’t want to re-record this. Even assuming hitting “no” here doesn’t softlock the game, we’ve already seen Ending A.
: “There is no right or wrong choice here. Just, be sure you’re willing to accept that you won’t be able to come back to this reality. It’ll be all over for you here, but… but everyone will go on.”
: So, okay. Does this mean that if Alex soul suicides, the world doesn’t end? Because I’m pretty sure you just said not all that long ago that it’s going to end regardless.
: “I’m happy you made that choice. Did you bring Dali? I’m so glad you kept him safe. Take my hand, and let me show you where I’ve been.”
: This is absolutely the canon image for what happens in this ending. Anyone claiming they hug at the end is a fucking liar.
: “We’ll be together in your waking reality one day, I’m sure of it. For all I know, we may already be.”
And that’s it. That’s YIIK, everybody. Ending B was mercifully short while also retaining the complete lack of substance Ending A had. Fuck this game.
By the way, I’d like to debunk the statement that one of the Allansons made that this game is around 25 hours long. I finished this game with both endings in 14 hours of in-game time. My total time on Steam shows 25 hours, but that’s due to re-records and leaving the game open while I worked on the LP.
Again, I’d like to thank everyone for reading and posting in the thread. It amazes me how this LP got more views in… not even two months… than I did on pretty much any of my other LPs, and way more posts as well. I can’t say for sure what I’ll be going for next.
I hope that if any of you reading this LP ever get the chance to make a game yourself, you learn something from my pain.
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@moderators This can be put in completed.
One other thing I realized that I don’t feel like editing into the last post - they never actually did anything with the “what’s your favorite tech” thing.
I think there are different models for the Essentia stand-in for specific answers to the tech question.
I could try and figure out what this game was trying to, but it’s so lifeless and without merit that I have no real desire to.
Thank you for playing this. I’m sorry you have to purchase this with money.
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This hub post is for YIIK 1.25 and any new content added in the patch. For the original 2019 LP, please click here.
I thought the nightmare was over.
I was wrong.
In January 2020, a few months after this LP concluded, the Allansons announced that they were working on a plot patch for YIIK that was meant to fix everything - overhaul the combat, fix the plot, and generally turn the game from a nigh-unplayable pile of crap (as seen in this very LP) into something playable.
I wasn’t even aware they were planning on patching the game until October, when I woke up one morning to half a dozen messages on Steam letting me know I’d been featured in tehsnakerer’s YIIK video and that the LP had exploded in popularity virtually overnight.
Since then, I did a complete playthrough of the Allanson brothers’ other game, Two Brothers, which provided a lot of context to YIIK that I hadn’t understood the first time I played through it.
Without actually posting the patch notes, which are available on Steam, let me talk a little bit about what’s going to be in this update and why I’m going to be “re-opening” the LP specifically for this.
The biggest changes are that they supposedly removed all the bugs (read: they patched the LP Toss bug), rebalanced the entire combat system and got rid of the minigames, and added in a “reduced monologues” mode, which the Allansons claim removes the “non-story-critical” Allanson Monologues that plagued the original game.
Oh, and they changed the entire Wind Town plot arc to add a thing about the Golden Alpaca, which is now voiced by DC Douglas. I have no idea where exactly they got the money to hire him, especially given that this is a free update, but whatever.
They also got an entire team of random indie music artists to put out a second OST for the game, and now I’m wondering if any of them know or were told about the plagiarism issues with Two Brothers. With that, let’s get right into it.
This post will serve as a second hub specifically for LP updates related to the 1.25 patch and any new content therein. Any subsequent content updates will be given their own hub post.
Why re-use the old thread?
I have two reasons for this.
The first is that I don’t believe the patch will have enough content in it to warrant an entirely new LP. The Allansons have also teased a “1.50” patch that would add more story content.
The second is that I want readers to be able to seamlessly go from the original 2019 LP to this one without having to change threads.
How much of the game are you planning on re-playing?
My plan is to play through only up to wherever this new Golden Alpaca segment is. I will be playing it in a new file on the new “easy” difficulty, as there is no indication that there is any kind of bonus content for doing a New Game Plus run.
If it is discovered that there are major changes to the game outside the patch notes (ie; bonus content for NG+ or changes to the story beyond the Wind Town segment such as the inclusion of an additional ending) then I will absolutely be covering those.
Where should discussion about the new updates go?
You can keep talking about the game in this thread. I don’t think it’s locked, and posts will show up in the main LP forum… which I kind of wasn’t expecting to happen.
Are you going to be using Reduced Monologues mode?
Yes. I will be doing this both in order to make comparisons to the original LP and to see if the Allansons finally learned something after eight years and two games. The Allansons have also teased a “Silent Protagonist” mode (separate from Reduced Monologues) that will be added in 1.50.
Originally, I had intended to do my own “Silent Protagonist” mode where I enclosed all of Alex’s dialogue in a box, and I may still do that, but I don’t know if they’re planning to re-write parts of the script in order for that to make sense. I may hold off on that until 1.50 and activate it for any new content in that patch.
Will you be making any changes to the original LP?
No. I have no plans to touch any of that - the original 2019 LP represented my thoughts on a blind playthrough of YIIK in its pre-patch state and can never be replicated. The only change being made to the original LP will be a link to this hub post (and any subsequent ones for later patches).
What’s the spoiler policy?
Since these updates take place after the end of the main LP, spoilers are open.
Just when you thought you were out they dragged you back.