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.
I really have to object to calling VA-11 Hall-A a “good” game. Strenuously so. This isn’t really the place for an in-depth argument about why I disagree; Cliff’s Notes, some of it is I hate the way the game is written and some of it is that everything associated with Dorothy is monstrous.
I will concede that the writing I hate is better edited than this game, though. It’s still kind of nothing, overall, but it doesn’t spend as much time beating around the bush about it. Word count is not IQ, Alex.
Short Google search gives me what has to be a fan-made video with gag subtitles but has elements I vaguely recognize as familiar to the commercial. Also, a forum discussion asking if anyone else had seen this damn commercial; it seems like it definitely existed (several people remembered an oddly accented voice announcing “Chrono Tree-gah” at the end of the commercial), but wasn’t aired much. It was probably dumb luck that I saw it at all; either way my parents are just lucky that I focused on the wrong part of their excuse (seventy dollars would certainly have been expensive for a SNES game at the time, but not “extremely rare collector’s item” expensive).
Yeah, that bit about “collector’s item” sounds weird. RPGs were more expensive cartridges than action games or basically anything else, by a lot, so the rest tracks. The bigger ROM and save RAM were expensive, and the games were costly to develop on top of that. $70 wouldn’t be that outlandish. Phantasy Star IV was $100 at original retail, in 1995, for one example.
I knew about all three of Michael’s titles when they came out, though Lufia II was kinda “yeah that exists.” I didn’t own them because, money. I knew about them at all because while they weren’t advertised much if at all on TV, they were in game magazines. And for some stupid reason I had a subscription to one of those for a while.
Michael’s parents probably had him subscribed to one of those, and bought whatever RPG he crowed about to keep him happy. That was still three years ago, so him calling it “my childhood” is really weird.
What I really don’t get is why this Nintendo fan fawning over RPGs wasn’t all over Pokemon when it was the biggest thing ever. That was 1996 too, after all.
I don’t know why I’m trying to make sense out of anything happening with this game, I’m sure it’s not going to help us out there, what with the solipsist crow in Alex’s head and everyone talking like a bored philosophy major.
It probably doesn’t help that Andrew Allanson, this game’s writer, said that this game doesn’t actually take place in 1999 but instead 2017. Then again, he could have easily been drunk again and was talking nonsense like he usually does in his YiiK discord.
God I just remembered what Alex reminds me of it’s one of the Players from CAD
“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.” - Andrew Allanson, interview with Gamasutra, 08/21/2018.
Here’s an update that’s almost entirely filler.
: “Some kid sent us an email saying his sister vanished.”
: “Really?”
: “Yeah, said it was similar to the Elevator Girl’s disappearance.”
: “Okay, and he wants us to come check it out? I’ll meet you at the Frankton Bus Stop. That’s the easiest way to get there without a car.”
: “You want to leave NOW?!”
: “Yes. I don’t have work till tomorrow afternoon, so it would be best for me to do it today, so I can get some sleep.”
: “Fair enough.”
: “Oh, and Alex, I thought you should know. The Elevator Girl has a name. Her name is Semi Pak. I was able to get some information on her. I’ll share it with you in person.”
: I’d just like to point out that for one simple phone call that should’ve been maybe four or five lines tops, the game used a whopping 12 textboxes. I combined a few of them when I transcribed it, but trust me, there’s 12. I’d also like to point out that Alex has not told Vella WHERE the disappearance was, but she just somehow knows. Twelve fucking textboxes and they left a goddamn hole in!
: On the way out, there’s another pop scare, just in case you didn’t have enough of those the last time.
: Also, there’s another idiot on Alex’s lawn. You know what, let me go ahead and change that sign.
: Much better. Can’t believe Alex’s mom approved a Dipshits Anonymous meeting hall in front of her house. Also, if Alex has a sister - why did she not have a bedroom? There’s only the two: Alex’s room and his parent’s bedroom.
: Nah, fuck that shit. You know what we’re going to do before we watch fuckface monologue on the bus? We’re going to go back and kill the Soul Survivor.
: Now we’re about to see one of the most poorly-explained mechanics in this game! Vella has an ability called Banish, which only works on “entities” - things like the Soul Survivor here.
: Using Banish toggles a mini-game in which we must beat the Soul Survivor before it beats us. Otherwise, the Soul Survivor is (as far as I know, even though I didn’t try) still indestructible.
: The description for what Banish does is badly written. It implies that what happens is you banish an enemy - but it doesn’t say it only works on “entities”. This is what happens if you try to use it against a non-entity.
: Vella’s attack hits a full 360-degree arc, and the enemy will shoot fireballs to damage her. The best way to handle this is to approach from a diagonal.
: By the power of constantly looking like she’s in a state of shitting herself, Vella banishes the Soul Survivor in one hit to the depths of Fuckface’s mind.
: We also get a full level up for everyone (actually, it’s 118 EXP so that’s a full level up and then some) as well as 5 ambrosias and 5 holy waters. Ambrosias can be sold for $10,000 each so I don’t think we’re going to run into any money issues anytime soon.
Now, if we go to the Mind Dungeon…
: There will be black smoke outside one of the doors. If you’re going for max stats, you probably want this to land on the +2 or +1.5 door, but whatever.
: This triggers a second copy of the Banish minigame. This whole thing is tedious bullshit and I hate it.
: When I went through that door, we got a 2 stat increase instead of 1. My guess is that eventually there’s going to be a place where we can farm entities, so I’m going to hold off levelling up Alex unless there’s a really good reason to.
: Now, then, back to our regularly scheduled monologue.
: “When we sat on the bus with Vella and began to talk, it felt as if she was a different person. The edge to her personality had dulled a little bit, and she seemed almost happy to see us.”
: I still can’t get over how Vella constantly looks like she has to take a shit.
: “She was an only child and lived with her mother, until she moved to Frankton on March 2nd for her job. She was some sort of legal clerk and hadn’t begun working yet when she vanished.”
: “Apparently the organization she was going to work for does a public TV Korean news show. The friend who got her the job did the reporting.”
: “The police have no leads. It is currently being treated as a missing persons case.”
: “Are you Korean?”
: “No. Do I look Korean?”
: “It’s hard to say. You look vaguely ethnic.”
: Being constipated is an ethnicity now?
: “Really!? That’s what you’re going with?”
: “I just meant like, you know, exotic. None of the other girls around here look like y–”
: “Stop. Please, just stop. This is seriously uncomfortable now, Alex.”
: They could have shortened this entire exchange to just “I read it in a Korean newspaper at work”.
: “I called the police and asked them if they’d seen the video and they said that the detective in charge of the case would get back to me shortly. This was four days ago.”
: “I’m not surprised, really. It’s almost like no one cares that she’s missing.”
: “I’ll check through more newspapers though, see if there are any leads.”
: “Might not be a bad idea to try and talk to the woman who reported her missing after we visit the guy in Wind Town.”
: I’m imagining the bus driver pointing to a sign that reads “No Monologues While Bus Is In Motion”.
: “The Sammy I met was strange. She didn’t seem like the kind of girl who could have grown up in a city, and moved to a small town, and worked for a television station.”
: “People who don’t know what elevators are usually aren’t capable of such tasks.”
: “My Sammy, and the Sammy in the newspaper, may have looked the same, but there was a difference there. I could feel it.”
: Here we are on the world map. The world map has a vocal theme, but I can’t find it on Youtube and don’t feel like sifting through the 60+ video playlist some guy made of most of the OST to see if it’s there. The world map sucks about as much as the rest of the game. See how there’s crosswalks in the road? Those are the only points where we can cross a road.
: This is a really baffling choice, as there are no random battles on the world map. To get to that “monster den” across the street, we have to go all the way around past Wind Town. I did that just to see if I could find anything good in there.
: Just a lot of random enemies. I didn’t even touch this one, mostly because I was curious about what that little area to the south-west of Frankton was.
: There’s also a few more monster dens back near Frankton. I cleared these out and got both Vella and Michael to level 10 while keeping Alex at level 5. They’re full of monsters we’ve already fought before, just with two or three times the HP.
: This is South Town, by the way. It’s completely pointless. There’s some healing items in trash cans and a fountain, probably so you don’t have to go all the way to Frankton’s shopping area to heal if you’re clearing the monster dens. There’s also not a SINGLE Geese Howard reference.
: Enough of that shit, let’s go to Wind Town.
: Windtown is real fucking annoying, mostly because everything is at a weird camera angle.
: “Hahaha!”
: “Did you just laugh?”
: “Hmm, I think this is the first time I’ve heard you do that.”
: “I do it all the time. Well, usually it’s in my head.”
: “And normally it’s aimed at you two.”
: “Ouch.”
: “Uh. Well. Crap! No he didn’t.”
: “How do you propose we do that?”
: “Find the nearest person and ask them about the girl who disappeared here recently. Pretty easy actually.”
: “Just be direct, Alex. They won’t bite. Well, maybe they won’t. This town is pretty suspect.”
: Let’s take a brief tour of Windtown. Up north is the record store that is totally fitting for a trailer park. Next to that is a permanently-closed convenience store.
: Just south of that is this tall grass area, which has a chest hidden in it. There’s really nothing else here, apart from the ability to drop down to the graveyard using a hole in the fence you can barely see on the far side from where Alex is.
: The chest is right here, just in case you decide to play this pile of shit yourselves. There’s also a couple of NPCs here, but they’re not the ones we need to talk to.
To the east of that area is this single house that is absolutely not totally out of place architecture wise. Maybe this is like the Four Corners, only this house and the land immediately surrounding it are part of Arizona while the rest of the town is part of… I dunno, somewhere that has grass and deciduous trees?
: The Hook Handed Jock isn’t much of a fight - the most notable thing about him is that he gets a surprise attack on you. One attack from Michael wiped some 80% of his HP, and Vella finished him off. He drops the Hook Hands, an accessory that boosts strength but decreases luck.
: By the way, you’ll notice that the Time Energy bar is almost empty. I was working under the assumption that it automatically refilled at the start of combat. It doesn’t. As far as I can tell, what happens is that the bar has a reserve, and we just had enough in it to fill it ten or fifteen times. This makes Alex’s attack SUCK. The way his attack works, which I figured out after a bit, is that he hits for 1 or 2 damage a few times, and then does a final hit equal to how high your combo was plus a small amount. Given that you can easily reach a combo of around 20 with Time Energy versus 7 to 9 without it, his damage is effectively cut in half and then some.
: Welcome to the theme of Windtown - go to place, fight miniboss, go to new place.
: The Underpaid Cashier is where fights in this game really start to suck. It’s not because they’re hard, but because this is where they start slogging down.
: What happens is that she attacks…
: And then we get a new kind of defend QTE. This one is much harder to hit without using time energy, and we have to do this once for each member of our party. Since there’s usually a water fountain nearby, it’s usually easier and faster to just intentionally fail these.
: I did, however, make one without using time energy just to prove that I could.
: “But boy… boy… oh boy!! I FEEL SO ALIVE RIGHT NOW!”
: “So how can I help? Oh, that poor girl? Her mom got fired from here, haven’t seen her in weeks.”
: “I hear she mostly works nights now if you know what I mean.”
: “My daughter used to see her at the playground. You can talk to some of the kids there… it’s southeast of here.”
: This particular NPC just… doesn’t seem to fit with the rest of the game. This is the kind of dialog I’d expect to see in like, Lisa the Painful.
: This is one of those things I really hate about the way they did the camera angles here. You SHOULD be able to see the house with the hook-handed guy from here, but you can’t. I also like how half of the trees here are apparently in autumn… in April. If there was some weird time bullshit going on, this would be the perfect kind of thing to introduce that but I don’t think there is.
: The kid with the gun is more annoying than anything. Like the Cashier, he has a full-party attack and uses it pretty often. Unlike the Cashier, he has more HP and takes maybe five hits to go down.
: Not shown: the 10 additional lines of dialogue this kid has before he gets to this point.
: Still following the same old pattern.
: Unlike the last three fights, the Adolescent Smoker has two skulls with her. They’re slightly tougher than the ones we fought in the factory, but not much. I kind of wish the devs had, I dunno, at least recolored the enemies? It feels weird having the exact same enemy in a bunch of different places with different HP.
: She’s a freaking tank, too. It took me… I want to say at least 10, maybe 12 attacks to get her down. She also has a full-party attack which she used at every possible occasion, in addition to the two skulls attacking. This fight takes several times longer than it has any right to. The worst part is, this is (supposedly) after the developers buffed the party’s damage.
: “I think they live to the south of here. But… their house is always locked by a big fancy gate.”
: “Mom says you need to do something pretty bad to have a house like the Mancers got.”
: You might ask if we can read the gravestones, and we can - most of them are just references only the devs would understand or dumb in-jokes.
: Well, I guess we found Carrie.
: This is the house we’re looking for. It has two gates, both of which are rusted. There’s a chest hidden behind it. However, this isn’t where we want to be. I got a bit confused because I assumed you were supposed to find an alternate way in - but no, what you’re supposed to do is go one screen west to the trailers.
: “Why… did she give you a key too?”
: The Robust Alcoholic is the real boss of Windtown. He has a load of HP…
: An undodgeable single-target attack like Vella had…
: AND a full-party attack he spams whenever he’s not doing his single-target attack. This guy is just the most tedious bullshit to fight. I’m cutting the four extra lines of dialogue he has: “Take this key, my wife thanks you” etc.
: Now, you’re probably saying to yourself, “Timrod, you’ve been cutting out some dialogue, why are you suddenly showing mercy?” and the answer is because we’re about to run into the only person with worse writing than Alex.
: “So do we just knock?”
: “Let’s give it a try. Worse comes to worst he’s sleeping and we wake him up.”
: Meet Rory. Rory is our next party member. Not only does he look like he has a cat nose (seriously, I’ve seen furries on Twitter before with characters that have faces like that) but he is the biggest dipshit in this game… at least, the biggest one we’ve met. I haven’t played this before.
: Way to use a meme from the mid-2000s, dipshit! There’s one thing that’s been bothering me about this game, and that’s this: why did this game have to take place in 1999? So far, we’ve seen no mention of the Y2K “crisis” - and yes, I’ve talked to every NPC so far at least once off-screen and none of them have mentioned it. Someone mentioned in the thread that the developer has stated it takes place in 2017. What I don’t get though is why put yourself through the position of having to research what 1999 was like when you could’ve just made it take place in 2017?
: “Oh. One sec. Come in.”
: “If not, why would I be letting you into my room? Anyway, what’re your names?”
: “I’m Alex. This is Vella and Michael.”
: “No, I mean what’re your screen names? That’s how I know all of you so that’ll be more beneficial.”
: Seriously, what the fuck kind of line is that? “That’ll be more beneficial.”
: I hate Alex so much more now.
: “The one from Windway87’s post about the girl who was ripping up holes in reality in his town!?”
: “I am. But don’t believe everything you read on the internet. You boys take that stuff too seriously.”
: “Hey, I INVENTED lying on the internet, so no need to warn me. Anyway, I’ll have my eyes on you.”
: See? He’s a dipshit.
: “Don’t need you ripping a hole in my basement with your mind powers or whatever the hell it is you do.”
: “Well, then just remain on my good side.”
: “My sister, she vanished about three weeks ago. Went to school one day, left school, and now she’s gone.”
: “No crazy elevator video of her either. She’s just gone.”
: “Oh, did your parents get the police involved?”
: “No. My parents aren’t exactly what you’d call proactive. They aren’t the type that jump to their kid;s defense when they’re in trouble.”
: “Do you think it would be okay if we talked to them?”
: “No, that wouldn’t be okay. It’s complicated.”
: “I see. Well, who else knows that she’s missing?”
: I’d say someone did, given that she’s apparently got a grave at the local graveyard.
: “Well my sister Carrie started acting weird a few months back. She was having trouble with some girls at school, but nothing she couldn’t handle.”
: “So one day, things get really weird when I find her in the attic. She was holding some of her baby toys - stuff that’s been boxed up for years.”
: “I asked her what she was doing and she said she needed them for gifts, gifts for kids who had less than she did, so then she left.”
: In case you’re wondering, this entire story goes absolutely fucking nowhere.
: “Anyway, the weird thing is each place a toy was found, an accident happened there shortly thereafter.”
: This sounds like an idiot trying to write a Stephen King novel while not realizing that Stephen King has a lot of the same issues the writer for this game has.
: “One of the toys was left at an underpass and the next day a kid was killed when a car hit him.”
: “And I know that sounds like a coincedence, but then at the train station, a woman got robbed and the guy who grabbed her purse ran onto the tracks and got hit by - not a train - but a cop car that lost control and plowed into him.”
: “You can’t tell me all that is a coincedence!”
: “Did anything happen to you personally when you went to these locations? Were you the one who found the toys?”
: “I - yeah, yeah to both.”
: What the fuck is that? Why is no one commenting on the fact that the sun has apparently been usurped by a giant Soul Survivor?
: For this segment, we have to follow Rory around town. No, you know, just having the game teleport you there. Rory runs faster than Alex does, but it’s still tedious as shit.
: Don’t you just love it when a character starts spouting unrelated bullshit?
: “Basically, I think we all have a set number of days to be in our bodies and they usually end with our bodies being destroyed.”
: “What exactly happened here, Rory? What makes you say this?”
: I’d say it’s probably that he’s an idiot who read some new age crap on the internet once.
: The thing is, he absolutely could explain it right now. We’ll find out why in a few minutes, but I could summarize it in two sentences.
: Oh look, it’s plagiarism! The original source for this, and the line immediately after, is https://malagabay.wordpress.com/2014/03/15/99-of-your-molecules-are-water/
: “What we love to forget is the ‘soul’ when we talk about our makeup.”
: What is this guy, a fucking preacher? I’d make a joke about never forgetting the soul in my makeup only I don’t wear makeup, and I’m pretty sure if I tried, it wouldn’t end well.
: “I don’t really believe in ‘souls’ in a religious sense, I like to think about the soul as our mind.”
: Well yeah, I mean, unless you’re one of those really hardcore fanatics like that one guy who cranked out hundreds of Youtube videos about how deep Dark Souls was.
: “Like, the brain is a physical part of the conscience, but the moment it’s in a new body, the old soul, brain, or whatever enters back into the body and poof, we’re back to being ourselves.”
: “Do people really know that the brain contains our thoughts?”
: How can mirrors be real when our eyes aren’t real? Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like? Fucking magnets, how do they work?
: “Yeah, and before you tell me the science behind it, I know you’re right. I just think about this from time to time.”
: The first part of that sounds like a dril tweet, only taken completely seriously.
: When was the last time anyone heard from Michael? Do we know he hasn’t died of starvation?
: “In my head, the rational part of my brain was already thinking of a variety of corrections to his ideas.”
: “But after this week, I knew pretty much anything was possible.”
: I like how he’s already forgetting there was a timeskip.
: “Sometimes it feels like my sister is still in her room upstairs. And I don’t mean to suggest that I forget she isn’t there.”
: “Like, in the same way I can feel my foot is attached to my leg without actually having to touch it with my hand.”
: “But she isn’t here right now. There’s one other place we can check. Let’s go back to the overpass.”
: The worst part of this is not even that it won’t just teleport you there, but also that you can pass Rory if you take the most efficient route there. If you do, he’ll sit still until you go get him.
: “Okay, someone lift the sewer cap with me.”
: “You want to go down there?”
Next time, we’ll descend into the sewers.
If it’s a digital camera you don’t get to have a film lead on your attack for retro cred points.
I talked about this in the latest update a bit because I saw this but I was working on the update so I couldn’t post anything else, but it doesn’t surprise me in the least. Him being drunk, I mean. It absolutely makes sense that the game takes place in 2017.
FUUUUUUCKKKK! Someone do a goddamn Loss edit because I am entirely too lazy for that.
To be fair, I think his first camera is actually listed as a disposable film camera. I haven’t seen any equipment lists for this game so I have no idea if any of his other ones are film-based, but yeah, fuck that noise. They could’ve even done a different QTE for the digital cameras, but that would’ve required effort.
I know what he means but Alex calling her “my Sammy” feels really uncomfortable. Word choice, man.
The important thing, to them, was that they weren’t buying me the video game. The excuse didn’t need to hold up to scrutiny two and a half decades down the road, it just needed to sound reasonable long enough that they didn’t have to have an argument about it with their pain-in-the-ass eight-year-old right now.
I mean, “that costs $70. we don’t have seventy bucks for that, do you?” seems pretty solid, especially when other games next to it cost half that. That’s a shrug from me.
Right now I’m more confused why the game has you run around town following this kid only to go into the sewers for who knows what. In Earthbound you knew exactly what you were hoping to find, at least.
Maybe some day some kid will make a fan mod of this game which is dumb then later go on to release an Indie gem that everyone loves. This is supposed to be the new generation’s Earthbound/Mother right? Also I’m surprised this game isn’t just called some variant of Mother with how much of a momma’s boy the protagonist is. Small children in Earthbound/Mother are more independent than him.
You’ve put way more effort into analyzing my parents’ decisions than they did in making them. Which honestly should go a long way towards clearing up why they made them.
