I"m supposing that the “tools” bit is supposed to be referencing Wild ARMs, except implemented poorly because I’m pretty sure you never move around as anyone but Alex YIIKman.
But “the elevator began to shake, vibrating with motion” is the perfect example of how pointlessly prose-heavy this game gets.
: Beyond that door is… what looks like the Internet as illustrated by one of those early 90s cyberpunk games that were all just copying off Neuromancer and Snow Crash.
: To our immediate left is another switch puzzle. One thing I hadn’t really thought of up until I started writing this out is that we still have no real idea what Alex’s entire motivation is as a character.
: We have no real idea what it is that possessed him to go into an abandoned building after a cat for… a grocery list he probably could’ve gotten by, I dunno, calling his mom?
: To get some perspective, we’re now about… I’d say a good 30 minutes into the game - maybe a bit more because I’m going into this blind and without a guide. Now, let’s look back at the list briefly while I do this stupid puzzle and talk a little bit about where we’d be if we were playing some of the games on YIIK’s bibliography for about the same period of time.
: Well, by this point in Earthbound, we’d have already met Buzz Buzz (unless you spend a ton of time grinding for some reason) and figured out the whole overarching plot with Giygas. In Mother 3, I think you’d still be playing as Flint but at least you’d know what Flint’s deal is.
: This part’s a bit weird because you have to drop the panda onto it from above. Anyway: Final Fantasy 7, you’d have blown up the Mako reactor and at least known a little about what’s going on. Chrono Trigger, you’re probably done with the Millennial Fair (unless, like me, you grinded for that sword) and you’re already on your way to the past.
: The thing is, in every single one of these situations, we’d have already hit the plot hook and either discovered our character’s motivation or be well on the way to figuring it out - even if it’s something like Chrono Trigger where your character’s motivation is “Well shit I got sent to the past time to beat up some Saibamen.”
: Hell, even Ni no Kuni 2 had established Evan’s motivation by this point - we’d probably already be clear of Ding Dong Dell and heading to the old lady’s house.
: My point is, there’s a scene in The Room where Tommy Wiseau’s mother (the one whose entire character is defined by definitely having breast cancer) is talking to Lisa and asking about Denny, his adopted son. She asks Lisa something like “What does Denny do?” and Lisa responds with a story about how Tommy Wiseau’s character adopted him and how great their relationship is and how Denny really looks up to Tommy Wiseau and pretty much everything you could say about Denny without answering the goddamn question.
: I will always, always remember the Rifftrax for The Room because at that moment, someone chimes in with “And that’s what Denny does.”
: This game is a lot like that. It’s like we’ve asked the developers the question of “What’s Alex’s character motivation? What is it that drives him?” and the devs have answered “Well, Alex is home from college… and then there’s an abandoned factory with an eye-pyramid and a glowing lady who changes colors and plagiarizes Haruki Murakami and…”
: And that’s what Alex does.
: I’d post the full dialogue here, but you can probably read it yourself in one of Haruki Murakami’s books.
: Wait a goddamn second! This… this sounds like plagiarism! And not the kind of plagiarism we already know about!
: It IS plagiarism! In fact, it sounds like… they [Need] a [Citation]. Now, is it possible they covered this with the citation for Webster’s dictionary?
: No, because that term isn’t even IN Webster’s! Also, shout out to “nosegay”.
: Plagiarism Woman blasts off into space, presumably to find more Wikipedia articles to “borrow”. By the way, I also took the liberty of searching to see if anyone caught that - and apparently they didn’t. I did, however, find an interview with the developer from Kotaku, dated May 20th, 2019 that talks about the plagiarism issue.
In it, they state:
“The idea is, Alex has read After Dark, and his fondness for the novel is seeping into his reality with vocal and physical manifestations calling his attention back to the passages of the book now living in his subconscious.”
: Only one problem there, chief. After Dark was published in 2004! Not only is this plagiarism, they didn’t even have a good reason to want to use it in the first place! I wonder if they’d try to bullshit the same explanation with the Wikipedia article, given that Wikipedia didn’t exist in 1999.
: We can then use the door near her (right behind where the panda is in the last pic) to reach the top of the eye-pyramid.
: Oh look, now we’re in the End of Time from Chrono Trigger. I mean, it’s not plagiarism, but it’s not original either. In fact, I don’t think this game has a single original thought anywhere in it.
: Most of All of the NPCs in this area are pointless. There’s a couple of trash cans with our favorite number - healing items and money - in them, and also a treasure chest kinda hidden to the south-west of where we start.
: Well, we just saved ourselves $75, if nothing else. The Sergeant Salty EP is only marginally better than our current weapon, boosting our attack by one but dropping our luck by one.
: As you can see in this fight with a new enemy, the Skull, the new weapon has the exact same attack pattern as the old one. Skulls are basically Rats with twice the HP.
: There’s also a couple of chests up high, where we can’t get them. I tried to find a way to get them, but I don’t think there is one. This implies that we’re probably supposed to come back later.
: There are two windows at ground level - this one you can see in the corner, and a second one on the other side of the map. I went through both just to make absolutely sure I’d found everything, but they both lead to the same place.
: We could go back through the red window, but what happens is that you wind up in a pointless side area with nothing in it but warps that lead you back here. Yes, I tested every single one.
: There’s a chest here, but it has a combination lock. Supposedly, according to the dev, this is something you’re supposed to do either later or on a second run.
: “Oh, great. Another person.”
: Meet Sammy, whose name we somehow know despite having not talked to her yet. She’s… well, remember in the first post when I said that the game references a high-profile suicide? Yeah. Sammy is heavily based off Elisa Lam, a college student who committed suicide in 2013.
Douchenozzle, ready to get his /r/incel pickup artist moves on.
: “No! Please stay! I’ve been pretty lonely here.”
: Said no one ever to Douchenozzle or the author he’s a blatant self-insert of.
: “Where is here, anyway?”
: “I was hoping you’d know. I’ve been lost down here forever.”
: I swear, if this entire thing with the weird shit in the factory is a metaphor for depression…
: “Did you come through the elevator too?”
: Now, I’m not going to accuse them of plagiarism here, mostly because I went through an SSLP of Persona 4 while working on this update to verify that this was the case, but this entire scene seemed really similar to the scene in Persona 4 where you first meet Teddie in the TV world. The main difference is that Teddie has an actual personality.
: “–I asked, thinking it sounded nicer than ‘Who the hell doesn’t know what an elevator is?’”
: “I came from here. Is there anywhere else? Anyway, I’ve been looking for my cat, Dali. Have you seen her?”
: Completely un-necessary walls of text in this scene alone: 1
: “Is that the cat that looks like Salvador Dali?”
: “[scoff] I don’t know who that is. My cat just looks like Dali - herself - not another cat named Salvador!”
The [scoff] is not something I added in, by the way.
: This guy is like the fucking Tim Buckley of video games. We fucking get it! She has an uncanny lack of knowledge about basically everything!
: Completely un-necessary walls of text in this scene alone: 2
: “I told her I wouldn’t mind helping her find her cat. I told her we should move quickly and get out of this dank basement.”
: “I waited for a moment as she processed what I said. She was a very difficult girl to read, especially without being able to see her face.”
: “I could tell something was wrong. She really projected her opinions and feelings into the room, even without saying them.”
: IT’S CALLED BODY LANGUAGE YOU FUCKWIT! AAAAAAAAARRGGGHHHHH!
: Completely un-necessary walls of text in this scene alone: 3
: You know that scene at the end of Hotline Miami 1 where you’re fighting the ninja in the Russian mob boss’s room and you just sit there and slam her head against the floor? And then she starts crawling away from you, and you get right back on top of her and just keep slamming her head against the floor? That’s what the writer is doing right now.
: “It’s not that. It’s okay. Forget it.”
: “Hey now, that’s lame. You can tell me anything. No judgment here.”
: … What. What the fuck?
: I wonder if this is like, some kind of natural defense mechanism in the human brain when you get approached by ol’ Fuckface here. You just kinda shut down and act like a complete dumbass and hope he goes away.
: “Hey, I’m serious. I didn’t mean anything by that.”
: “It’s not you. That wasn’t fair of me. It’s just that the world has used me so unkindly, I fear it’s made me suspicious of everyone.”
: I like how this almost completely contradicts the part about her being so naive that she has a cat named after a person she’s never heard of.
: I will spare you from the… seven remaining text boxes, including the one where Fuckface makes a joke about the n-word after Sammy calls him a ginger.
: Haha no I won’t. Did you really think I was going to suffer through that alone?
: Completely unnecessary walls of text in this scene alone: 4, though really that last one should count for like 3 by itself.
: Sammy then joins the party, which proves that the stat system in this game is a goddamn lie. Notice that her strength stat is 2, which is half of Alex’s. This will become important in just a bit.
: As soon as we talk to Sammy, we wind up… wherever this is. This room is one of those Lost Woods style trick rooms.
: Going through a door brings us to the same room, only this one has the Eye of Providence on the wall.
: Opening a door will then cause the eye to open slightly. If we were to go through the door now, we’d wind up back here with the eye totally closed again.
: Instead, we want to open the door on the other side as well, causing the eye to fully open, then investigate the eye.
: Who the fuck was that? The cat’s right there, though.
: Before we go to the cat, there’s four boxes “hidden” by the eye. You can see the corners of them when the camera pans out after looking at the eye. The two on the right have $40 each in them (bringing us well over $100) and the two on the left have a healing item and a gold bracelet, which raises maximum HP by 7. For reference, Alex has 10HP, and Sammy has 8.
: Honestly, this should read “Dali is a tool, much like you are.” I’ll show off what Dali does in a minute, but if you’ve played Paper Mario, Dali is the koopa party member.
: “Okay, so shall we get out of here?”
: “Sorry about the house, I’ve been meaning to get someone in here to fix the power, but who has time for that?”
: “I get so busy that little things like that get away from me. But that’s normal isn’t it? You get used to the flaws in your home. It’s always confusing for guests.”
: “Like my mother used to have everyone take their shoes off in the kitchen. Who does that? Oh no… I’ve become my mother.”
: The last time I got warned about Wilhelm in a game was Borderlands 2. God, Borderlands 2 was a pile of garbage. “Oh no, it’s Wilhelm! He almost killed off the most annoying character in the game!” and then he dies in like three hits.
: Dali works by hitting switches and opening chests that are too far away to grab. Unfortunately, using Dali SUCKS. The aiming for Dali snaps to the cardinal directions, meaning you have to finagle Fuckface into just the right position to get it to work.
: The game then puts us into a dumb switch puzzle where we have to use Dali to hit switches remotely. Hitting that switch on the northern island SUCKS because you can’t stand right across from it. Nintendo figured this shit out in 2000, but clearly the dipshits who made this game couldn’t.
: The left island switch raises and lowers the left and middle platforms, while the northern island switch sends the middle one…
: Into this position to make a bridge.
: A fight with two skulls! Let’s show off Sammy’s attack. She has two spells, both of which are heals and will not be useful.
: Sammy uses a worse-looking version of the hammer action command from Paper Mario. On the PC, “pulling back” means holding S or the down arrow. Holding too long causes an automatic miss.
: I took a detour to the north to get the chest, which you can actually do with Dali without fighting the monster. It has equipment meant for Sammy in it, but… it’d be better not to give it to her. I mean, it’d be kinda creepy giving someone you just met a T-shirt that’s an advertisement for your crappy pseudo-Gameboy game with a plagiarized soundtrack.
: Now, this is how I figured out the stats are a lie. This is that first battle with the two skulls. The one on the right I had Alex hit with a 9-hit combo. It did about 75% of the skull’s HP in damage.
: This is the fight in front of the chest.
: Sammy attacks by throwing Dali at the enemy…
: And kills a full-health skull in a single hit, despite having lower stats than Alex does.
: Two switches later (one to get the platform over and a second, at that lever on the bottom of the screen, to move it the rest of the way) we’re… back in the factory?
: Oh, there’s the elevator. Surely, nothing bad could possibly happen to the female character who is based on an actual person who was last seen in an elevator shortly before committing suicide. This, by the way, is EXACTLY why I didn’t put the gold bracelet on Sammy, despite the devs pretty clearly intending you to do that.
: On either side of the elevator are couches that contain 50 cents each. Alf Warbucks strikes it rich again! This game is (definitely not) better than Vegas.
: “Well, at least we found Dali. Imagine how much worse it would have been without her?”
: “Right. So where do you live? I’ll walk you back home, or maybe I can borrow my mom’s car and drive you if it’s outside of Frankton.”
: “What do you mean? This is my home. This is where I live.”
: Yep, nothing bad could possibly happen. This is absolutely nothing like the last minutes of Elisa Lam’s life. Not at all.
: “What? You live in this shithole?”
: “That’s not very nice.”
: I think what they were trying to go for here is that moment in Silent Hill 3 where the guy goes “They look like monsters to you?”
: I mean, technically his house is the set of Full House, and that had Bob Saget on it… god dammit, I said Bob Saget and now I’m going to hear Gilbert Gottfried in my head all night.
: “Sorry. It’s just not every day I meet a girl who lives in an old factory.”
: “I don’t see it that way. I almost feel as if the factory lives with me. As if the factory, just like Dali, is a part of me.”
: Metal Gear?!
: “Of course the factory isn’t part of me. That’s just weird!”
: “But do you actually live here?”
: “Yeah. Just me and Dali. But usually, Dali is better about keeping me company, ya know? He isn’t always just running off to God-knows-where.”
: There is an 11-box monologue here, not counting this one.
: “A mysterious girl, who lived with her cat in an old steel mill. It was obvious to me that her words didn’t contain the entire truth.”
: “Something about her compelled me. Pieces of her story started to fit together in my mind.”
: “Well, at least that’s what I had thought at the time. I can admit now that some pieces were pure fabrication on my part.”
: Okay, so now I think I understand. This IS a Final Fantasy 10-style “how we got here” story, only instead of “we”, it’s a single dumbfuck. They could’ve made this more clear like, I dunno, the first three times he monologues like this?
: “In my head, her story went like this: Sammy was homeless. A runaway woman who was trying to escape hard times - someone who had found refuge in her cat, maybe the only thing left from her previous life.”
: “Somehow, this felt right inside my head, but I could still tell I was missing something.”
: “Is what my hobby?”
: “Staring off into space and screwing your face up as if to say ‘What’s going on inside my head is REALLY important so just let me think.’”
: Now I’m just confused. Is the monologue from the future, or not?! Make up your fucking mind!
: In case you’re wondering what’s going on here, Sammy questioned Alex’s entire character and now she has to die for it. I’m actually playing this game completely blind minus a couple of things I know in advance - one being that Sammy dies here. My theory, however, is that anyone smarter than Alex will die.
: I’m not sure if the cutscene director forgot that she was bleeding profusely from her eyes or not, but whatever.
: What I love about this scene is that Alex doesn’t even TRY to help her. He sits there staring like an idiot until after she’s already outside the elevator, then just kind of weakly puts his arm out. If this was a better game, I would almost think this was an attempt at realism - showing that the protagonist doesn’t have action hero reflexes. Here though, it almost looks like he’s just trying to make himself not look like an asshole.
: “Sammy was gone for good, swept away as if she’d never been there at all.”
: “A door into nothing, into a different reality, showed up and swallowed Sammy whole.”
: He is trying WAY too hard to be Max Payne right now.
: “All I could do was replay the scene of her being pulled into obscurity by nothing. There one second and gone the next.”
: And there’s another one of those “vibrating with motion” moments we know and hate. Also, I like how he manages to repeat himself three times in that one monologue just using slightly different words.
: We’re now back on the first floor of the actual factory. There are vending machines here for reasons unknown - all they sell are basic healing items and there’s a save point just outside.
: Amazing! Plagiarism Woman managed to go four whole lines (I cut two out) without plagiarizing! A new record!
: As soon as we leave the factory, guess what? ANOTHER MONOLOGUE!
: Now, at this point you’re probably asking “Hey Timrod, why would you not use the icons you made to lower the general size of this update?” The answer is because I want you to know how it feels to sit there for a good minute (and yes, this takes a full minute and then some) and just listen to fuckface here very slowly read out his fucking inane bullshit. You can’t skip any of this in-game, there’s no way to fast-forward it.
: Before we leave, there’s a chest here with $40 in it I missed on the way in.
Next update, we’ll attempt to go buy drugs in the park, get a couple of chests we couldn’t get before, and hope to god Alex shuts the fuck up (he won’t).
Oh that’s right, now I remember why so many people I saw sharing the terrible shit of this game stopped. Many of them had hard locks of the game in the factory that prevented all progress. I remember some even replayed a few times and it happened every time.
This is the type of smile I wear while enjoying this LP
You actually won’t be returning to this part of the factory ever again, and the only way to get those chests is to use Panda to physics a ladder on the upper platform where the windows are to get to them. There’s supposed to be a puzzle that you can do to reach it normally, but it’s completely broken and has been broken since version 1.01. (They’re suppose to fix it so people can unlock the super secret third ending that’s totally in game for realz.) Anyways, here’s how you can get to the chests.
I was going to do a quick mailbag update, but then… god dammit.
I think the best part about it is, they don’t even seem angry that they plagiarized or that they plagiarized for reasons that make about as much sense as Quiet’s outfit in MGS5, but they only seemed mad that they got caught doing it.
God dammit! You know, the first time I read this I thought “How hard is it just to ask what your name is” and then I saw what we’re going to see at the end of the mailbag update and you know what, I’m surprised the developer of this game is even able to breathe on their own.
I have never played Wild Arms, but I probably should given that I have a PSP Go sitting not even four feet from me right now.
Why am I not surprised? I think it might be related to some kind of memory leak, because I know after getting to that part past the flying carpet/switch puzzle, I kept having a shot of that room flash every time I went into a new room. It was the kind of thing that’s too fast to get in a screenshot.
Excuse me for a minute. Here’s my immediate response to that.
Thank you for letting me know. You know, I thought I was done with bullshit puzzles when I finished Gabriel Knight 3. Clearly, I was wrong. Even though there’s been a video posted, let’s just turn this into a mini-update because I’m going to go experience this bullshit myself. Seriously, why would you break the puzzle and then not just… I dunno, remove it entirely until you could update it?
There’s one thing I want to know though. The combination lock chest. If you don’t come back to the factory, how the hell do you get that open? The dev said on the Steam forum there’s a trading sequence involved, but I swear I looked all over the town and didn’t find anything.
: So let’s talk about this obvious glitch we’re using to fuck with this puzzle. The video that Combat_Lobster posted makes this look easy. It is not.
: Now, if you’re wondering how you get to this area (and I had figured this part out before I posted the last update), if you go through the red window before talking to Sammy…
: You get shunted into this area, with a bunch of teleport windows. I actually tried all of these - most of them just warp you back to Sammy’s room, while one at the end warps you to where we entered the area from.
: I think two of the windows lead to the same place, but I know this one works so let’s use it.
: In theory, what you do is mash L to summon and unsummon the panda while also mashing the arrow keys to cause the physics to kick in and move the ladder. The problem is that when it gets near the window back there (which I’m assuming was the intended way to get up there) it becomes very hard to hit. That’s fine though, a few more hits and…
: God dammit! Fuck! Shit!
: Okay, what the fuck, where’d the ladder go?
: FUUUUUUUUUCCCKKKKKK! By the way, if this happens to you, there’s no way to reset the ladder, so you have to start from scratch.
: My second attempt was a little more successful, until…
: The ladder got stuck against the wall. Thankfully, it only took me another… two and a half minutes out of the probably 10 I spent fucking with this stupid ladder to finish the puzzle.
: The Propeller Beanie is the only worthwhile item in any of these chests - boosting Alex’s defense a full 3 points beyond what the paper bag gives us. The garbage can has money in it, and the other chests have an Ambrosia…
: And an item that is a straight downgrade to our Camo Jacket. Why it gives us two of them, I have no idea.
Anyway, finishing the mailbag…
RJWaters2 said:
This is the type of smile I wear while enjoying this LP
So here’s what I want you to do for me, RJ. Go make a Tabletop Simulator game based on this stupid ladder puzzle. I want people to suffer.
Allegedly, it’s something you can open in NG+, but… like everything else in this game, it’s broken. Now it’s being re-purposed(?) for the super secret third ending that’s totally in the game for realz ™.
I’m starting to think this might be a bad game that’s only worth is found in irony and communal suffering. I’m just spit-balling but what if?
Bless you for your bravery in wading through this bullshit. God knows I couldn’t handle it.
Yeah, of course he’s mad he got caught. It’s not like you copy another author’s work that perfectly by accident.
He absolutely just said to himself “none of the fucking plebs who are actually going to play this game have even heard of Haruki Murakami, so they’re never going to notice that I’m not actually this intelligent or deep.”
Side note: I’ve never read Haruki Murakami but maybe I should. Probably be more thought-provoking than this game.
I hope you’re all ready for like thirty straight minutes of monologue interspersed with jump scares I couldn’t capture, because I sure wasn’t!
: The first thing I did was go check the park for the drug guy. He uh… he sells nothing good.
: The game wants us to bring Fuckhead right back home, but there’s something else we can do first. Because we have Dali, we can get these chests now.
: The items inside are pretty useless. One of them is the “running shoes” accessory which is more or less a straight downgrade from the gold bracelet, and the other is a “smelling salts”, this game’s revive item. They weren’t even selling those in 1999, you dipshit!
: You know it’s going to be good when we bring Fuckface home and the first thing we get is a “REFLECT” prompt. Monologue incoming!
: We already know that! I just played as you going to the goddamn couch!
: “My mother, a forty-nine year old, short, red-headed woman was an Information Systems Programmer Analyst for Pacific Chime, the West Coast’s leading telecommunications provider.”
: “Her job, ironically located on the East Coast, worked her harder in one year than most jobs work people in a decade. This job paid well.”
: “Without it, my sister and I never would’ve gotten through college. I left school debt-free thanks to the back-breaking mental labor of my mother.”
: That has the be the most awkward goddamn sentence I’ve ever heard. By the way, I looked up to find out where the developer is from, because usually if something sucks this bad, my home state of Connecticut is involved.
: I couldn’t find out where they’re from, but I did find out that the dev studio consists of three people, all of whom are related.
: Immediately after Fuckface’s monologue, his computer plays a copyright-friendly version of the old AOL “You’ve got mail!” sound. This despite the fact that he clearly uses dialup, meaning either he’s racking up those charges or his computer is possessed.
: Once we get near the computer, the screen goes dark purple like this for a second and you can see a shadowy figure in the alcove. I’m assuming that’s the ghost of John Stamos’s career. It’s supposed to be a jump scare, and there’s actually a second one coming up that I couldn’t capture. Why they needed jump scares, I have no goddamn idea.
The computer is a cutscene for right now, but later we can try and use it and it’s… bad. You can hear dialup modem noises when he logs in.
: I’m not entirely sure what the hell kind of email this is supposed to be. I didn’t have an email address for another… probably two years or so when I got a hotmail address in middle school, but I’m fairly certain browser-based email never looked like this.
: You know what I love in a game? When the main character goes on back-to-back monologues with no gameplay in between, and the dialog doesn’t auto-scroll so I can’t just leave the game running and come back in an hour.
: “Last thing he sent me that was allegedly scary turned out to be a picture of two elephants locked in the throes of passion.”
: “I sighed and clicked the link. The file was 2.9 megabytes.”
: “In the dark room the monitor was hurting my eyes. I rubbed them and waited for the file to load.”
: I can think of about four different ways to write that last sentence so it doesn’t sound as awkward as Alex looks. “The brightness from the monitor against the darkness of the room stung my eyes.”
: Alex’s VA corpses here and giggles at “cartoon porn”. I don’t know why. The line isn’t funny. Nothing about this game is funny.
: “Maybe a girl from my high school was now into adult videos and was doing some particularly unladylike things.”
: Again, awkward fucking sentence. The “joke” has nothing to do with the plot and is basically “HAHA WOMEN ARE PORN STARS”. I want to punch this dipshit.
: “While the video loaded, I thought of all the girls I had gone to school with who might be involved in such activities. All of the girls that came to mind neither (sic) had the looks, nor the motivation to seek out an adult filmmaker.”
: Alex is like a fucking alien or something. Who talks like that? Can anyone prove that David Cage didn’t work on this game?
: “I gave up. I’d just have to wait for it to finish downloading.”
: Now, here’s something the developers could’ve done, and it would’ve been historically accurate to boot. Pacific Bell got bought out by Southwestern Bell Corp (SBC) in 1997, and dropped the Pacific Bell name entirely that year. SBC owned a number of phone companies on the East coast at that time.
: At the same time, SBC had started offering DSL packages in… guess when… 1999! Just imagine if this had been reduced to maybe two lines. “I’m glad my mom got this new DSL thing through work. I hated that stupid dialup noise.” and then the image just fucking loads in like 30 seconds.
: I also love how the developers were afraid to namedrop Pacific Bell, but weren’t afraid to namedrop QuickTime, which is still under active development by Apple.
: “Finally, it was loaded.”
: So wait… you needed to load a 2.9MB video… but this is a BBS post.
: One thing you’ll notice is that Alex isn’t in any of these photos. That’s… curious. Also, these “photos” are basically taken straight from actual photos of Elisa Lam right before she died.
: I feel like they just kinda stole this entire thing from Persona 4.
: I looked it up, and they didn’t even get that right. The New York Times (article might be paywalled) did an article in October of 1999 that stated the average college cost for a private college (with room and board) was $21,339 a year. Hundreds of thousands would be appropriate today, but in 1999 you’d probably have to be going to an Ivy League with zero scholarships. Not that I doubt that’s what Alex did because he’s a complete moron.
: “It’s already 2:00 PM. Don’t you think you should be getting out of bed?”
: “Just… can you keep it down, please? I had a rough night. I can’t get that video out of my head.”
: I like how he’s totally forgotten that he saw someone die in front of him.
: “Alex, can I ask you a serious question?”
: “Do you have to? It’s too early for serious questions.”
: Also, I kind of wish the writers had set rules in place for what’s actually happening and what’s either Alex doing an unreliable narrator thing or just being generally fucking insane. No one else in town, for instance, comments on the presence of monsters or any of the weird RPG shit. This feels like the fucking Quiet Man where he wasn’t even deaf or something? Fucked if I know.
: “I don’t let you get away with letting things slide.”
: Like, what I’m trying to understand is this: is the panda actually “alive”, or is it just Alex fucking hallucinating? It kind of doesn’t make sense for the panda to have woken him up if it’s not actually alive, but Sammy referred to it explicitly as a stuffed panda.
: “Okay, fine. What is it then?”
: The thing is, the panda has a voice, but it’s run through a filter that makes it difficult for me to tell if it’s Alex’s VA or not. This whole thing is so fucking dumb! Like, for Earthbound it would make sense because the characters in Earthbound are kids. Alex is over 20 and talking to a stuffed animal like it’s fucking Ted, except taking itself seriously.
: “I-if you had seen her being pulled out of the elevator, you’d have known she was gone for good too. And besides, it’s-”
: “You’re forgetting that I was there. I saw it too. And I get it. You were scared, right? So you ran home. I understand.”
: “Yeah, maybe.”
: “Now get yourself out of bed, take a shower. You smell TERRIBLE!”
: Shout-outs to the fact that they didn’t bother to remove the model from the bed, so there’s two Alexes.
: “Why had I run away? Why did I just stand there and let her get pulled into – into what?”
: I also realized just now that Alex is absolutely going for the Travis Touchdown look, so of course they wouldn’t bother having him change clothes. That actually would’ve been a nice touch. I also just remembered that Travis Touchdown has a YIIK shirt in Travis Strikes Again.
: “What exactly HAD she been pulled into? Just the thought of going back to the factory made my stomach tighten.”
: “But if I didn’t go back, I knew I’d never be able to live with myself. I think there was a part of me that didn’t believe what my eyes had seen, that I was missing something - some vital piece of information that slipped my mind and the whole thing could be explained logically.”
: Oh, THERE’S David Cage! He’s the one in the blue hood.
: This is a very long, very awkward cutscene, and as much as I WANT to skip it, I need to show this entire thing off. I also ran each and every one of these lines to check for plagiarism - they were awkward enough that I thought they might be plagiarized, but they’re not.
: And I get the feeling this is a bad mockery of the English language.
: There’s a jump scare right about here where you see Sammy covered in blood, but I couldn’t cap it. Don’t worry though, I re-created it 1:1 using advanced Photoshop techniques that I learned from watching the Retsupurae playthrough of Arise.
(Photo Credit: Google. No really, it’s the thumbnail that comes up when you search “John McCain”. I have no idea where the hell they got it from, but my guess would be the U.S. Government)
: Yeah, well I gradually come to sense that this fucking script is broken in more ways than one! Fuck this cutscene!
: Thank god that’s over. It’s not like there’s going to be another set of pointless dialogue…
: “Now, with a new sense of bravery, you’re running off to the last location you saw her to try and track her down.”
: FUUUUUUUUCKKKKK
: “Exactly!”
: “I think you have the wrong number.”
: Okay, so NOW we can go to actual gameplay… right?
: Nope! No gameplay for you! Just cutscene!
: Meet Michael, or as I like to call him, White Urkel.
: Really? Do we REALLY need a goddamn monologue for this?
: “He was a good kid, a bit younger than me, and usually worth a laugh or two. My hand covered my eyes to block the sunlight so I could see him better.”
: “I thought back to the last time I had seen him. For some reason, I couldn’t place any memories of him since before high school. But, I knew I must have seen him since then.”
: “It makes you into something.”
: Now, I’m PRETTY sure that the people voiceacting Alex and White Urkel here are the brothers that make up Ackk Games. I’m too lazy to look it up.
: “What’ve you been up to?”
: “Just took the SATs. That’s about it.”
: Michael is also a walking fucking time paradox, as we’re about to find out. Alex says that he’s “a bit” younger than he is. Now, I don’t know that it was this way in 1999, but most high school students take the SAT in junior year, which puts Michael at 15-16 years old. Alex has just finished college, but he admits he didn’t do it in four years.
Let’s assume that Alex, like me, entered college at 18. He does four years, putting him at 22, maybe even 23 depending on how many extra semesters he took (I’d assume he’s 23). This would mean that Michael is either 6 or 7 years younger than Alex is. I dunno if I’d call that “a bit younger”, given that they never would’ve been in the same school together.
: “Sounds intense. How do you think you did?”
: “I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. But then I realized how uncomfortable it was to sit at the edge of my seat, so I sat normally.”
: “Just a little joke. Anyway, you look good. Well, maybe a few pounds heavier. Guessing you didn’t major in Exercise Science.”
: “Great! What do you do with that?”
: [groaning noises]
: “Have any fun plans for the summer?”
: “Not really. Just got back yesterday. I already spent the day chasing a cat and exploring that old factory by the water tower…”
: “Oh wow, that sounds awesome. Hey, have you ever heard of Urban Exploration? There is this great website called www. onism1999. com. I think you’d get a kick out of it.”
: The voiceactor, who again, I presume is one of the developers, actually fucking spells the URL out, including the “www” part. It hurts. A lot. I also purposely broke the link to that site because it’s a promo site for the game and fuck giving the developers attention.
: “It’s like a conspiracy theory support group. People from all over the world post about political conspiracies, local myths, stuff like that.”
: They wanted a stand-in for either 4chan or Reddit, despite the fact that 4chan would not exist for another four years and Reddit for another two after that.
: “You don’t look so good, dude. Everything okay?”
: “It’s something with that page. It’s been screwing with my brain.”
: “What exactly did you see on there that has you so freaked out?”
: “It- I don’t know if you saw it or not. It was the one with the girl in the elevator. The one who gets lifted off the ground.”
: “That – that was supposed to be filmed locally.”
: The writer is overusing dashes and I hate them for it.
: “After that went up, everyone on the forum started acting strange, like a sort of darkness had come over the website.”
: What the shit kind of line is that? Who fucking talks like that?
: “It was the first time something like that has been posted and people weren’t immediately calling it a fake.”
: I’m not going to repost it because it’s already in this update, but if you scroll up to where Alex used his computer, you can see that there WERE people calling it fake.
: “Something about the look of horror in her face. There is a sick part of people that WANT it to be real, ya know?”
: So, just a refresher, and I’d know because I did parts of this update twice. From the time Sammy got kidnapped to now, roughly 35 minutes have passed. Probably a good… 33 of those are cutscenes and monologues.
: “But I couldn’t bring myself to say it. There was something that felt personal, almost intimate, about my meeting with Sammy.”
: “Like in that moment of her disappearance, we were linked, that it was for my eyes only. Her memory was for my thoughts only.”
: Yeah, nothing at all creepy about what you just said. Nothing at all. Carry on.
: “But I needed someone to talk to about the situation, so I proceeded with caution.”
: “I know that sounds weird, but I really think that video was filmed there.”
: “What?! Really? Y–You want to go?”
: “I was getting my camera repaired, if we go in I’m going to want to take pictures. Photos would be like GOLD on ONISM.”
: “Yeah sure, let’s just go quick.”
: “That building isn’t going anywhere, anyway. Besides, the whole thing is probably a hoax. I checked the paper this morning and there wasn’t a mention of a missing Frankton girl.”
: Michael is similar stats-wise to Sammy, only his strength is… somehow higher than hers was.
: I tossed one of the Slightly Used Jersies and a Paper Bag on him for now. We could buy another Propeller Beanie for him, but those are like $20 a piece. Surely, we can get to gameplay NOW, right?
: Nevermind the fact that we passed this arcade at least three times so far.
: “That’s AWESOME. WOW! How long has this been here?”
: “They opened it about three weeks ago. I still haven’t gone in. I’ve been waiting until they fixed my camera so I could get some great photos of the place.”
: I don’t really understand why he’d want to take photos in an arcade. Most people aren’t there to have their pictures taken. I also don’t understand why someone would open a standalone arcade in a small town in 1999. The only arcade I remember from that time period was attached to a mini-golf place next to the gym I go to. The mini-golf place closed down like ten years ago, and has been abandoned with zero bids on the land since. The owners have rented it out to a car dealership to park their cars in, and there’s a group of trashy old people who do a “classic car show” every Friday during the warmer months.
: “I hear they have a bunch of import games.”
: “Import games? From where?”
: Gee, I dunno, France? SNK’s totally from France, right? Same with Sega?
: “I dunno. Japan, mostly.”
: “Aren’t like, all games made in Japan?”
: “Well, at least the good ones are. Although, there are some good RTS’s on PC I’ve been playing lately, and I’m pretty sure those are made in the US.”
: I love how they omitted an “an” in this sentence. It makes me think Alex is a caveman. Now, let’s see the worst part of this goddamn conversation. I want to post images for these so I can tear them the fuck apart.
: Okay, so let’s tear this apart. We know that Michael is around 16 years old. Let’s look at release dates for each of these games:
Chrono Trigger: 08/22/1995
Lufia 2: Even Gamefaqs doesn’t know this one, they cite it as August 1996.
Secret of Mana: Gamefaqs doesn’t have an exact date, October 1993.
August 1996 was LESS THAN THREE YEARS AGO. Keep in mind it’s April 4, 1999. Yet, the way Michael talks about it, it’s like it’s 2010. Also, from personal experience, none of the kids I knew who had a SNES owned any of those games. In fact, I can tell you that the one kid I knew who did own an RPG (and it was Super Mario RPG) found it boring as hell. My first RPG was Final Fantasy 7, and even then only because a friend’s older brother had it.
Further, I did some digging and found a copy of a game magazine dated September 1996. It’s a “top 100 games of all time” issue. You will not find a single mention of Chrono Trigger or Secret of Mana in it. Nor will you find a single mention of Lufia 2, despite that being a new game at the time. Their top game, by the way? Mario 64, which had come out that year.
Next, I found out that Gamefaqs actually kept lists of which games were most popular on their site each year going back to 1998. Let’s take a look, shall we? The one I linked is for 1999. You’ll notice that Chrono Trigger is on the list… in 51st place. Lufia 2 and Secret of Mana are nowhere to be found. Why is this? Because of emulation, which was still in its infancy at that time. That’s why Seiken Densetsu 3/Trials of Mana is on the list, despite the fact that it had not seen a US release and wouldn’t for another 20 years. In fact, you don’t see Chrono Trigger get on any top games lists until like, the early 2000s when everyone had played it on an emulator.
The fact is, this would work if the game took place in 2004 onward. It doesn’t work in 1999, when I guarantee you almost no one in the US, let alone a kid who was 13 years old and probably didn’t have the money to be buying his own games, had heard of Chrono Trigger.
Anyway, that’s enough of that shit.
: Nope! Fuck you, you don’t get any free advertising in my goddamn LP! Eat shit! No one ever will who didn’t back it on Kickstarter, because you’re a plagiarizing motherfucker who stole a track from Shadow of the fucking Colossus and had to take it off Steam!
: “I just want to step in and smell that combination of bacon grease and BO.”
: I’m… reasonably certain I’m going to start screaming when they enter the arcade, so let’s go to the camera shop first.
: I looked it up, and digital cameras have existed for a long time, going well past 1999. However, no serious photographer would probably have used them because they were notoriously crap (from what I remember at least) up until the mid-2000s.
: Mercifully, the arcade is not a giant cutscene or another monologue. Oh no, that’ll wait until… the start of next update.
: The only reason the game has us come here is to meet this person, who we don’t actually meet yet. I think I only realized it just now, but this game kind of totally rips off Stranger Things, and this lady here is YIIK’s equivalent to… I think her name is Eleven? The bald psychic girl. I only watched half a season of that show.
: I’m going to skip almost all of this. It’s short anyway and basically consists of Michael going “HEY LOOK AT THAT GIRL OVER THERE”. We can pick that dollar on the floor up though.
: Onward! So we can maybe see some actual gameplay after 40 minutes of almost solid cutscenes out of 90 minutes of game time!
: Unlike the last time we were here, the window on the second floor is boarded up. The front door, however, is open.
: I intentionally got into a random battle here just to show off Michael’s attack.
: It’s basically Parrakarry’s attack from Paper Mario 64 - you push the right button at the right time to increment the combo counter.
: Meet the “Soul Survivor”, which is absolutely not a Starman from Earthbound. Totally different.
: “The entire galaxy - no, the universe maybe - compressed into the silhouette of one entity.”
: “It hadn’t noticed us at first. We were as insignificant to him as the trillions of stars at its core.”
: “But, when provoked, it came after us like the most sought-after thing in the universe.”
: “I’ve been scared before. Everyone has. But those past memories of fright were nothing compared to what we had just experienced.”
: “As if a black hole incarnate had come to exist, and it wanted us gone. As if consuming us was its only purpose.”
: “I couldn’t say why I felt that way at the time, but I had known it was true. And with all this in mind, Sammy’s vanishing was starting to feel like the least supernatural thing I would experience.”
: Time for our first bossfight! Oh boy! Gameplay!
: It’s really hard to get screenshots of the battle text in this game, because it goes by so quickly. I think what happened is that when reviewers complained that battles were too slow, the developers reacted by speeding up the text rather than, I dunno, getting rid of some of the minigames.
: Our attacks do NOTHING against the boss - he just automatically blocks them. Now, because of a bug that was apparently introduced when they fucked with the battle text, there’s a hint that’s SUPPOSED to show up that doesn’t. What’s supposed to happen is that Michael calls out and says there’s no way to beat it and you should run.
: Instead, I kept going, assuming the boss would eventually become vulnerable, or I’d just die and it was one of those fights you weren’t meant to win. Eventually, I missed a dodge and Michael died in one hit.
: One turn later, Alex took a hit for 15 damage, which is just below his max HP thanks to the gold bracelet I equipped on him.
: I let Alex die, thinking “Okay, it’s been… five or six turns. There’s no way you’re supposed to win this.”
: By the way, this boss has a theme with lyrics. Unfortunately, I can’t find it on Youtube and I refuse to give the developers money for it. I’ll uh… I’ll just make a video myself. The soundtrack is maybe the one thing about this game that doesn’t suck. Toby Fox actually made a track for it. This track, however, is the most emo garbage I’ve heard since I was in high school.
Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYG2szV0b18 - Here’s a video of the fight I made, where I also show off both Alex and Michael’s regular attacks and special attacks in action.
: The trick is to run, which requires… another minigame. In this minigame, L is the jump button and you’re attempting to run away from the boss without hitting obstacles.
: We immediately book it to the elevator, with the boss in pursuit.
Next time, we’ll see more pointless monologues, more pointless dialogues, and maybe some gameplay if we’re lucky.
God, this game is just nothing. We’ve spent most of our time in cutscenes and I have no idea why Alex is doing anything, even just in the immediate sense of reacting to the world around him. I don’t understand what I’m looking at, I have no desire to engage with it, I don’t even really want to talk about it. Sometimes the game says something that reminds me of something I want to talk about (I have a weird story about Chrono Trigger if anyone cares to hear it) but nothing I’m looking at right now gives me anything to sink my teeth into.
Alex’s voice is Chris “Kirbopher” Niosi, who’s done a lot of voices for games, TV, and anime. There are also some troubling accusations against him including sexual abuse, so… consummate YIIK, really.
Honestly, when I did that last update, I was going to take out some of the pointless text. If you think about it, most of the monologues/dialogues in that segment of the game are just repeating the same shit we already know. I think the best analysis of the plot I’ve seen so far was a person on 4chan who said something along the lines of “It feels like the writer was trying to write the Great American Novel and forgot they were writing a game.”
But yeah, go ahead with your Chrono Trigger story because chances are it’s going to be more interesting than the game.
I’ve never heard of him, but I am not surprised even in the slightest.
I have known for years people who have associated with Kirbopher. I’m not sure that posting the callout here would be good but uh, seems like a very abusive dude. Works on Mob Psycho 100’s English Dub, OK KO on Cartoon Network, A Hat in Time, Skullgirls, and more anime and Cartoon Network shows. There’s, kind of a worrying trend of this with voice actors for games, cartoons, and such.
Once, when I still had the time and energy to try to find work as an animator, a friend working on a particular production looked at my reel and said, “They hired Chris Niosi, he animates like whales tap dance, you’re a shoo-in.” I didn’t get the job. That stung, and moreso now that what kind of person he is has come out. Many of his victims are friends-of-friends so my twitter feed has no shortage of evidence that you shouldn’t touch him with a 39 1/2 foot pole.
Anyway, Chrono Trigger. I remember as a kid seeing the TV commercial for Chrono Trigger and thinking it looked absolutely boss. No clue what it was about but that shot of the giant frog stomping on the battlefield looked kickass. So I asked my parents for it, because when Chrono Trigger was new enough to be running TV ads I was like eight years old.
Now, I presume what came next came because my parents let on to the clerk that they were buying the game for an attention-deficit eight-year-old whose taste was so bad he liked the Ace Ventura sequel. I presume that he told them “This is a long, complicated RPG. Your hyperactive little plebian is going to spend like ten minutes with this, get bored, and never touch it again. Make an excuse and set him down in front of Mario World.” Because my parents told me that the reason they elected not to buy me Chrono Trigger…was that it was an extremely rare collector’s item valued at a whopping seventy United States dollars. I think my main takeaway from this excuse was that the game was simply not actually available, I understood the concept of scarcity well enough even if my grasp on the value of a dollar was “things cost money, and that’s perfectly reasonable, although I’m not entirely clear why,” so to young me the whole thing passed muster.
The part where they were running TV ads for a supposed collector’s item as though you could just buy it in any store, though, that’s on me. I have no excuse for letting that part slide.
: I feel like he’s reacting a day late and several dollars short here. Why didn’t he do this when they first saw the weird star monstrosity?!
: “It – what the hell is going on!?!”
: And now they’re just slathering it on to the point where it’s laughable.
: “I – what!!! Just – can you even believe what just happened!?!”
: “Oh man, dude! We need to get your photos developed!!!”
: There’s actually FOUR exclamation marks in that last sentence but the site truncates them after three. This game is like a graveyard for punctuation.
: “Developed? This thing is digital, baby!!”
: … so uh, why can’t you, you know, just look at the image on the camera’s preview screen? I’m pretty sure even cameras in 1999 had those.
: “So what now? Do we just leave…?”
: “I’m gonna go with: YES!”
: “I still didn’t know where Sammy was… and all we had found was more mystery.”
: “My mom’s on the phone, so if we want to go online we’ll have to go back to your house. Sorry about all the back and forth here…”
: He lives… right next door. Seriously, you can see the elevated area behind his house where we dropped down from Alex’s house to get a chest in the first update. I also don’t get why everyone has log walls around their houses.
: “I was talking to my cousin about this recently - the lifelong implications of seeing something actually, undeniably supernatural. Specifically, your reflection doing something that you were not doing.”
: I remember once, back when I was in English class in my senior year of high school, when we were reading something and the teacher tells us “You have to remember that when people are writing, every single word they put down has a reason for being there. The author thought about where to put it.” I think this game singlehandedly proves her wrong.
: I want you to think back to the last time you heard someone use the word “precocious” in casual conversation. The answer is probably never. Also, I like how Michael goes from “WHOA DUDE WHAT!?!?!?!?” to just paragraphs of pseudo-intellectual horseshit.
: "When I thought about that, I knew it would destroy any respect you had for the rules of life, or the boundaries of what could happen. I asked him what he said and he just shrugged his shoulders and said ‘Eh, kids say weird shit.’ "
: “He told me that his wife said his daughter was just confused. That she probably felt sad, but was smiling from having fun playing.”
: What the fuck is this point of this bullshit!? What the fuck is the point! Get to the point, White Urkel! Get to the fucking point!
: So the point is your cousin has a six year old daughter who might have depression. WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH ANYTHING YOU JUST EXPERIENCED?!
: “Like, as if her vocabulary wasn’t enough to express depression. But, I don’t know. She is a smart kid and somehow it felt wrong.”
: “Her reflection smiled at her? That’s really creepy.”
: You remember the part from Stranger Things where the kid goes missing and then the rest of the kids spend the entire episode talking about irrelevant bullshit? Of course you don’t, because that shit never would’ve made it to air!
: “Not really. I’ve always had a bit of an interest in it. I always thought that these sort of things follow certain people around.”
: “Like there is something that picks a particular person and forces them to see all the weirdness that others miss out on.”
: Like how you’re picking out your player and forcing them to see all this goddamn bullshit dialogue!
: “You say that with a lot of affection.”
: “I don’t know. It’s just kinda been my thing for a while. Conspiracies, ghosts, missing people, things like that.”
: The worst part of this to me is, they totally could’ve handled this in a way that didn’t involve a cutscene. What if, for instance, they had us go into Michael’s house to search for his camera cable? You go into his room and there’s a really obvious spot where it is, but also things like a bookshelf full of weird conspiracy shit that you could examine to find out as much (or as little) as you care to know. Something like, say, the opening scene of Policenauts where you look around Jonathan’s office.
Nah, that’d be good game design. YIIK’s got no room for that shit.
: "When did you first get into this sort of thing?
: “I can’t remember ONE thing that really pulled me in.”
: Would you care to guess how many more images I have for just this cutscene alone? I take one screenshot per dialog box so I can transcribe them in text format for the LP. From this point, we have… 50 left.
: By the way, this sentence is also outright wrong. Dial-up didn’t work that way: it’s not like DSL or Cable where a company has to put up new wire infrastructure and wire up your house. With dial-up, all you needed was a phone line and a modem - your ISP was a phone number that you set your modem to dial out to. In fact, you had to be careful who you picked as your ISP because what would happen is that your phone company would charge you for the phone calls your modem was making. If you happened to pick one that was long-distance, shit could get out of control real quick.
Some ISPs would also charge you a fee on top of that, most notably AOL.
: “And before long, I realized that information was too scattered. I spent a few weekends learning HTML and before I knew it ONISM 1999 had over 15,000 hits each week.”
: “Wait, you were involved with making ONISM 1999?”
: In fact, the fact that long-distance (and other phone-related charges) could be applied to internet service spawned an entire class of computer viruses called diallers, which were sort of the 90s version of those viruses that use your computer to mine cryptocurrency. Diallers would set your modem’s number to a 900 number - which usually charged a fee up front and then a per-minute fee after that.
: One last thing about dial-up: around this time, my dad had the family computer hooked up to an ISP called “Bluelight”, which was free and offered through KMart, of all places. The service sucked. Anyway, I’m going to be merciful and skip the next… ten images or so. Why?
: Because it’s Alex recapping events that happened not even an hour ago. If I had to transcribe this shit the rest of my commentary for this update would just be incoherent rage.
: “Maybe we can check online for a missing persons report. You could call the police and tell them you know where the video was taken!”
: “I don’t know. There’s still a part of me that thinks that, like–”
: “-- what, you dreamed it? Dude, I don’t know. That’d be a pretty specific dream.”
: “So you think that you went into the factory, came home, and then had a REALLY realistic dream where you met a missing girl you hadn’t seen before?”
: “But – sigh”
: “You see, she didn’t look EXACTLY like the girl in the video. There was something skeletal about her appearance. Something otherworldly.”
: “Other…worldly?”
: “Dude, just forget I said it. Did the pictures upload?”
: You’d… you’d almost think it’s a horror movie cliche!
: “Holy shit!”
: “Okay, well. Yeah, this is pretty otherworldly.”
: “All my fears were confirmed. What I was experiencing was real. There was no doubt about it.”
: “We uploaded the photos to ONISM 1999 and waited for an explanation. We had our doubters, but more people wanted to believe than not. And with each reply, Sammy got pushed further away from the forefront of discussion.”
: “I explained how the building was the same one from the ‘Elevator Girl Photo’, but everyone was more concerned by the creepy figures in the photo.”
: “Each time my little mailbox turned red, I slowly realized that everyone on this forum wanted the content to be true. They needed it to be.”
: I like how he has no trouble accepting that there’s a monster made of stars, but a ghost? Nah, that’s impossible.
: “I considered myself something of a philosopher in college. I thought I had answers, but now that I’ve come face to face with the otherworldly…”
: His philosophy is “no one likes me, clearly something is wrong with their brains.”
: “I know now that every person who tells you about spirituality, dead people, and all that have no idea what they’re talking about.”
: When this game first got announced, I remember people laughing at it because Alex looked like a lumberjack. I really, really wish he was actually a lumberjack, because maybe then he’d be less of an unlikable dipshit. I seriously thought that Nippon Ichi had perfected the “protagonist who is such an asshole that people actively hate the game” with Disgaea 3, but clearly I was wrong.
: “With the exception of my post, most of the things on that forum seemed like lies.”
: …what. This is like, the worst possible way to introduce this sort of thing. “Oh yeah, there’s just a girl in town who can casually warp reality but, meh. Been there done that.”
: I like how one, they didn’t even bother to change anything to make it seem like time had passed. They’re still wearing the same clothes, sitting in the same position they were before the time skip, and now they’re talking about shit we already just heard about in the goddamn monologue.
: “No, really? Where? She – wait!”
: “Knew you’d get there eventually. It’s that old lady from the arcade!”
: I think the other thing I hate about this cutscene is that neither of them at any point considers the implications of having an unkillable star creature living maybe five minutes down the road. No “hey, maybe we should stop being idiots and swinging household objects at things to attack and get like, a gun or something”. You know what was a memorable scene? The scene in Persona 4 where Yosuke tries to smuggle a katana into Junes. That would’ve really brought something to this otherwise barren wasteland of cutscenes.
: “Geeze, enough with that old crap. She’s probably our age.”
: “Just wait til you’re done with college. You’ll be --”
: “–boring and fat like the rest of your graduating class? I’m looking forward to it.”
: “In the meantime, I will continue to be my interesting, slim, nubile self.”
: Come to think of it, you know what else Persona 4 did well? Having a reason for the characters to be together. Alex doesn’t even seem like he’s friends with Michael so much as it is that he tolerates him. It’d be hard for me to see Michael taking a Summons to Yomi for him.
: “Nubile?”
: “I stand by my statement. Anyway, let’s take another look at these photos.”
: “Wow. It’s just so unbelievable. What is the likelihood that this is a thing?”
: “It’s incredibly unlikely. But since we’ve got nothing better to do, what do you say we visit ye olde Arcade for some air hockey and an interview with a dimensional traveller?”
: There is no air hockey table in the arcade. Or at least, there wasn’t the first time we went there. Now, let’s hope we can get some gameplay in. But first, I’d like to show you just how much of a dick this game can be.
: Not that, though… yiikes. No, what I want to show you is that the shops have new inventory - and buying any of it is a goddamn mistake.
: I sold some of our useless healing items at the pawn shop, and bought a propeller beanie for Michael.
: Now, notice that the Golf Cap (as well as the Fitted Ball Cap, which has even worse defense) is almost twice the price… for a bit more luck and one less defense. The Flannel Shirt is slightly better defense-wise than the Slightly Used Jersey we have two of, but as it turns out the Jersey adds 1 to strength. Not that I think any of these stats matter in the slightest.
: No, the dick move is in the record store, where we can buy the “Strolling Bonez LP” for a whopping $125. It does less damage than the weapon Alex already has equipped (but good luck figuring that out since this game lacks any kind of “compare” option when fucking Final Fantasy had figured this shit out by the SNES era). I bought it anyway, just in case the attack areas were bigger. They’ll be bigger, right? Also, notice the “u87 Keytar”. I wonder who that could be for?
: “Are you kidding me? That’s totally your job.”
: “Just man up and say something to her.”
: “I know how to talk to girls, but she is a senior citizen, man.”
: “I told you to cut it out with that age crap! She’s probably no older than 24.”
: “And besides, aren’t you the nubile one? You’re much more desirable.”
: “Hmm. Yes that’s true, I am.”
: “If you’d like to ogle some women, I’m sure your mothers would love if it you were home in time for supper.”
: “You’ve been taking photos of me!?!”
: What offends me about Vella is not only that she’s as badly written as Alex is, it’s also that she had a cameo in VA-11 Hall-A, which was actually a good game. Hilariously enough, the portrait art for Vella in that is WAY less shitty than YIIK’s is.
: VA-11 Hall-A and YIIK share a publisher, and I’m guessing money from VA-11 was used to fund this pile of trash. There’s no way in hell they got enough money purely off Two Brothers to develop a game for four years. Also, “Personality” followed by a blank space is pretty much how I’d describe every character in this game.
: Now we have a boss fight against the “Mysterious Vella”. Because the devs sped the battle text up so much, it’s hard to see but every turn she’ll call out that she’s “not a mysterious Vella”.
: Unlike… every other enemy we’ve fought, Vella’s attacks cannot be dodged.
: Michael dies in one hit. The reason he has 10 HP is because I bought him an accessory from the Pawn Shop that gives him an extra 2.
: By the way, this is that $125 record. Note how the active spots are no different than they were for the last two records. Vella then kills Alex in a single hit.
: After this, I reloaded the save. Didn’t buy anything this time.
: “Then why were you taking photographs of me?”
: “Hey, we didn’t take the photos! Someone on the internet did!!!”
: “Someone on the internet? What’re you talking about?”
: “If you’d stop slamming our heads together for one minute, we’d love to explain.”
: “Okay, explain.”
: “Exploding things with my mind? I haven’t done that in a while, so I’m sure it’s an old photo.”
: “So you’re not denying that you can do that!?”
: “Of course I can’t. Not with my mind, at least.”
: “Yeah, sure. I live like, five minutes from here.”
: On the run back to Alex’s house, I started just singing Hotel California to myself. YIIK: you can try to escape the cutscenes any time you like, but you can never leave.
: “How exactly do you explain all the blowing stuff up with your mind things? Can you really do that?”
: “It’s not exactly with my mind. I use sound. Remember when I kicked your ass earlier? I used the sound of my Keytar to do physical damage.”
: Oh, so you’re Lucio. Got it.
: “Where did you learn to do something like that?”
: “Oh, years of private practice and studying really.”
: “So tell me more about this website. What is ONISM 1999?”
: “Basically, it’s a place on the internet for people to talk about conspiracies, the occult, and anything supernatural.”
: So, you might ask why I’ve been so quiet for the past bit, and the reason is that it’s around here that we pass the two-hour mark in game time. TWO HOURS OF THIS BULLSHIT! It feels like fucking twenty!
: “That’s behind the old grocery store. Obviously you’ve been there before.”
: “Hmm. Interesting.”
: “What’s your name, by the way?”
: “I’m guessing you’re Camera Man and this is your sidekick, Ginger Boy?”
: “Usually I go by Alex. Only my mom is allowed to call me Ginger Boy.”
: Oh boy, it’s monologue time again!
: “As we told our story, Vella just looked into my eyes and never reacted. As I went on I could tell she was doing her best to understand my story.”
: “Something felt familiar about her, but not in the ‘I’ve met her’ sort of way. Something deeper.”
: “I dated a girl in college who was a Women and Gender Studies major. She told me that she believed men and women were all the same at our core.”
: Bull fucking shit!
: “That we were all made of the same elements, not just on a physical level, but on a metaphysical level. She was a strong believer in spirituality, although she’d be the first to tell you she wasn’t religious.”
: …excuse me, what the fuck did you just say? Did you fucking say “soul mates”? Did you just reference Ni no Kuni? If this fucking game goes there…
: “That unexpected feeling of familiarity you feel when you meet someone for the first time means you were meant to meet.”
: “I personally didn’t believe it. I still don’t think she has all her facts straight… but every time I feel what I felt when Vella looked in my eyes I thought of this explanation.”
: Entities? Oh boy, this game’s going to become Clock Tower 3!
: “Yes, those are the ones.”
: “No, we were too busy running for our lives.”
: “Did you try and take photographs of them, Michael?”
: “Yeah, let me pull them up.”
: “The way she spoke seemed two-sided. As if for a few moments, a side of her that she was trying to keep hidden was visible, and as soon as we noticed she made to cover herself up.”
: “She made jokes more often than she was serious, but when the serious aspect of her personality appeared, I was convinced that’s who she really was. This was almost more fascinating than the information she was giving us.”
: Shout-outs to the typo. I’d ask if anyone actually proofed this script, but we all know no one did.
: “Self-consumed with humanity. Self-consumed with other people. You know, that’s just how they are.”
: This is some serious “tell, don’t show” going on here.
: “A short time ago, I entered into a dark place, both physically and metaphysically. While I was there, I encountered the Entities for the first time.”
: Waiter, this word salad is awful! Send it back!
: “I can’t say what about their presence was so striking to me, but the moment I saw them, I felt something - something that was weighted. Like, their bodies took up the entirety of the room - as if they were the room.”
: As if this game is the videogame equivalent of The Room, only without even the humor value.
: “Something I said upset it, and it tried to grab me. It was almost like a mother trying to smother its child. The pain was beyond description. It scared me to death.”
: “I reflected on her story. I wanted to reply, but something inside me told me to let the words hang in the air. It was as if the longer the pause between her words and mine, the more truth they carried. Finally I spoke.”
: “That’s horrifying! But can you explain what you mean by ‘entered a dark place?’ Or more importantly, ‘physically’ and ‘metaphysically’.”
: “Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that includes the first principles, includes ontology and cosmology, and is intimately connected with epistemology.”
: “Epistemology, is of course, a branch of philosphy that investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge.”
: Did I check to see if any of this was plagiarized? You fucking bet I did! None of it is.
: “I’m afraid that’s all I feel comfortable telling you. I don’t know you at all and to reveal something so personal seems like I’d be opening myself up to vulnerability.”
: “Opening myself up to vulnerabilty” - there’s another one of those elevator shaking things again.
: “Do you mean to imply that you’ve found a way to exist inside of a metaphysical space? That you–”
: “Enough. I don’t need to talk about this with you. It makes me uncomfortable. Don’t you get that?!”
: “Okay, okay! Sorry. I didn’t mean to piss you off.”
: “Look, I need to get back to the arcade. I was technically in the middle of a shift.”
: She also gives us the number for something else, which I’m going to skip to so we can see some actual gameplay in this update. It’s only another… six textboxes or so.
: You might’ve noticed that although we’ve done a few battles, I haven’t mentioned levelling up at all. That’s because up until this point, we can’t.
: “Also, if we want to call her we’re gonna need to search ONISM 1999 for some interesting posts.”
: The only reason I’m not skipping this cutscene entirely is for this particular line. They… somehow are aware they’re in an RPG, but it’s not like Disgaea where you have Etna pointing out the title on her status screen. What the shit is this game trying to pull? By the way, I did look at ONISM 1999 during the last update, and it’s all just unreadable walls of text.
: “Man, are we even cool enough to hang out with someone like her?”
: Oh, and that one. Any cutscene in which Alex is getting dunked on is still trash, but at least it’s more readable trash.
: The cutscene dimension is not going to let us go that easily.
: “I would love to just come out and say it, but I think it would scare you to death. And that would ruin everything.”
: “Nope. I haven’t figured anything out. Look, if you’re just gonna keep calling me and say vague creepy shit, you should at least tell me your name.”
: “Oh, it’s your BEST childhood friend. Think back to when you met me. We were kids. I think ‘Losing My Religion’ by R.E.M had just become a big hit.”
: “My mom didn’t want me listening to it because she was afraid it would turn me into a bad kid, or something.”
: “I went over to your house and we listened to it on your stereo for hours. My mom came to pick me up from your house, heard the song, and freaked out!”
: “How can you not remember that? It was the funniest thing.”
: “It sounded so familar, and yet, I couldn’t place it. It was like I had read it in a book somewhere, or watched it on a T.V. show. But still, no particular name or day came to mind.”
: “sigh Yeah, you’re right. You probably wouldn’t remember that. Look, I’m going to keep calling you until you remember me.”
: Glad that shit’s over. Let’s take a look at the Mind Dungeon.
: Oh look, it’s the dipshit crow!
: The crow has, and I am not shitting you here, TWENTY BOXES WORTH OF TEXT. TWENTY.
: This blue guy in the corner will level up your party members when you talk to him. I’m not sure how this works: I hadn’t levelled up Alex yet when I talked to him and he made Michael reach Level 2.
: I will confess that I looked up how I should build Alex, and had a little secret leaked to me. We actually don’t want to level Alex up at all past level 5. We have enough experience to get him there, but I don’t want to grind any more than that.
: The Mind Dungeon works a lot like Mario RPG’s levelup system. Each door has a number on it - that’s how much you’ll get in whatever stat you choose. You can only pick each stat once per levelup.
: This is actually a really time-consuming process because each door requires two dialog boxes and a screen transition. This is what I put our level 2 stats in, and how I’ll be levelling up Alex from now on. STR comes first (due to a mechanic we’ll see in a minute), then PP, then HP, and then finally Defense. Stats you haven’t picked in a while get a bonus to keep them up. You might also notice that some doors have a .5 with an arrow next to them. This means it gets rounded to the nearest whole number. Why they bothered with the fractions, I have no idea.
: On the second floor, we get a party skill that is going to make Alex’s attack suck a whole lot less.
: The ability is “Time Energy”, which is a new meter in the top-right. You can have this on for the earlier fights if you use assist mode, but I don’t.
: Time Energy slows down time, which makes racking up combos as Alex way easier. Here, you can see I got 11 hits off just the first yellow block. Time Energy starts full at the start of each battle, and recovers through taking and dealing damage.
: “I think you can see my biceps now!”
: “Hell yeah! I’m not really worried about how I look, I’m more concerned with how I feel.”
: “Yeah, you would say that.”
: “Do you think we’re strong enough to call Vella up?”
: “So what do you think? This interesting enough to bother Vella about?”
: “Yeah, probably not bad.”
Next time, we’ll call Vella and head to Wind Town, for what I’m sure will be an exciting - who the fuck am I kidding, it’s going to be more badly-written cutscenes and we all know it.
So,
Now that we have the reveal of the Mind Dungeon, I’d like to talk a little about something and why YIIK: A Postmodern RPG has a lot of press surrounding it, and a few things that bother me in particular.
Back around this time last year, Gamasutra published an article titled “Meet some of the indie devs quietly pushing the JRPG genre forward”, of which Andrew Allanson was interviewed for his hot upcoming title, “YIIK: A Postmodern RPG”
(I’ve spoilered it just in case you don’t want to be spoiled on such things, but I think we’re past the points shown in the screenshots.)
A specific part of it caught my attention:
“The other thing is that almost all classic JRPGs have a ton of filler. In every FF game, there’s a sequence where you need to go to the castle, but before you can do that, you have to do a bunch of fetch quests for these people over here, so you can then talk to someone who will tell you who to talk to again so you can walk into the castle. It’s not just JRPGs that suffer from this, but most games that are 60 hours can probably be done in 30. That’s why we aimed for about 25 hours.”
What I find so funny is he says this, then makes the Mind Dungeon. A pointlessly obfuscated Level UP system that…didn’t need to be there, since the large portion of it is just allocating numbers. Though unlike Paper Mario, these choices don’t appear to have much impact in the way that, say, 5 FP in PM would. Congratulations, Andrew Allanson, you have somehow made the most fun part of an RPG boring.
Also, not to beat a dead horse, but on the particular bit of name-dropping SNES RPGs, if Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals that a boy in Smalltown, America can get it along other very niche titles, maybe NeverLand Software wouldn’t of had to file for bankruptcy in 2013. (Of which, I remind you, they aren’t even credited on the “bibliography”. Natsume, the publisher, is instead.)
Mind Dungeon has a pretty nice track, at least. Particularly the whistling.
I’m pretty sure that the other party members collect experience the same way Alex does, but since there aren’t doors for their growth, they just level up with either fixed or random stats when you talk to the blue figure, at the same rate of one level per 100 experience.
You’re right in that the Mind Dungeon has a good theme, and honestly the music is probably the only thing from YIIK that ISN’T utter garbage. I thought about it a bit after I first encountered the Mind Dungeon, and my thought was that if it was the only thing that was wrong with YIIK, I could forgive that. It’s not that godawful, it just takes something that should not take more than a couple of seconds and turns it into a multi-minute affair that just drags on - sort of like the rest of the game.
I also understand that there’s a reason they did it that way, that being a mechanic I know about but we haven’t seen yet where Vella has a special ability that instakills a monster and then you use that to boost stat gains in the Mind Dungeon, but I think if they were going for that as a mechanic they should’ve made it like the Draw thing in Final Fantasy 8 where every character can do it. Hell, maybe even do a thing like Land of Carnage Mode in Disgaea D2 where using some ability on an enemy with low enough HP kills it and you get some kind of stat boost from that.
Also, that quote about filler just kinda pisses me off. I checked the timer again when I saved after the last update, and I was actually off a little bit - we hit the 2-hour mark at the end of the update. I feel like if I just button-mashed through all of the cutscenes and dialogue, I could’ve cleared the same amount of content in about half the time. It feels a lot like Final Fantasy 14 in that regard, only with FF14 the developer had every reason to pad the game out as much as possible because they survive on people paying for subscriptions.
I didn’t even know Chrono Trigger HAD TV commercials - the only time I can ever remember seeing anything by Square on TV was when FF7 came out. What’s funny is that I have a story that’s almost the polar opposite. My dad got me an N64 at launch when I was a kid - up until then I had a NES but I think the connector on it died. My dad didn’t know (and still doesn’t know) anything about video games, so he and my grandfather almost got me Clayfighter 63 1/3, which is an absolute pile of trash. My mom insisted he get me Mario 64 instead. Thank god for that.
