YIIKES! Let's Dunk on YIIK: A Plagiarism RPG

[Timrod]

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.

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.

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 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.

[Chowder]

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.

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.

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).

[yaodema]

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.

[Combat_Lobster]

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,

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.

[Riley]

God I just remembered what Alex reminds me of it’s one of the Players from CAD

[Timrod]

“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.

[RJWaters2]

If it’s a digital camera you don’t get to have a film lead on your attack for retro cred points.

[Timrod]

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.

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.

God I just remembered what Alex reminds me of it’s one of the Players from CAD

FUUUUUUCKKKK! Someone do a goddamn Loss edit because I am entirely too lazy for that.

If it’s a digital camera you don’t get to have a film lead on your attack for retro cred points.

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.

[Chowder]

I know what he means but Alex calling her “my Sammy” feels really uncomfortable. Word choice, man.

Yeah, that bit about “collector’s item” sounds weird.

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.

[yaodema]

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.

[Tolvo]

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.

[Chowder]

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.

This is supposed to be the new generation’s Earthbound/Mother right?

[Tolvo]

It would have really impressed me if this game for every shot showed either 70% sky or 70% dirt/soil/stone. If it had done that then had a the protagonist get captured, then switched you over to playing as the mother as you rally the town to go save your son from the starmen. With the climax being you storming their fortress only for everyone to die in a downer ending. Pudovkin and Dovzhenko, Mother and Earth, combined into one game. But perhaps the author is not familiar with early silent communist films and as such missed the opportunity to make this game more pretentious.

[yaodema]

I spent five seconds talking about that game store story, to segue into the weird video games market in the '90s and set up a dunk on Michael. It’s not about you.

I’m gonna think about more Soviet films, something else that’s more interesting than this game. They made an adaptation of The Hobbit in 1985 that was an hour long, done mostly with techniques and props that would work for a play on stage. There’s even a huge puppet for the parts of Smaug that they could fit in frame. I’m surprised at how much they could pull off with such a low budget.

That could be a neat setup for an RPG, having everything as cheap stage sets. Though going too far in that direction, you just look like you’re trying to make Paper Mario.

[Chowder]

I think there’s merit to the idea. Own it. Take it further. Don’t just set the fight ON a stage; actually make it a staged battle. Weapons that are self-evidently harmless props, exaggerated fake deaths, magic attacks that are equally transparently just special effects. The enemies scuttle away with the help of a couple stagehands after they’re defeated, or walk away unharmed at the end of a fight. Entire game mechanics rooted in old theater superstitions.

[Tolvo]

There is a great episode of Garo Makai Senki about this. Where the Horror he faces is the Horror of theater. And fights using props, can fly thanks to wires, has stagehands who give him items to use. Obviously foam weapons would cut and he’d throw red confetti that lit things on fire. Garo had to figure out the way to win was to start saying cool lines and putting on a dramatic voice to “Win the audience over” so that he had enough stage presence to defeat the Horror.

[Timrod]

: “I think my sister’s soul is down here. So let’s look for her.”

: “Rory, I think you might be a bit – okay, no, this will be fine.”

: “Let’s look for her. I just want you to prepare yourself that what you find down here might not be her.”

: “Whatever, but I know it’s her.”

: Now that we have Rory, combat is about to slow down even more than it already did. This is for several reasons, but let’s demonstrate by fighting that monster over there.

: I feel like “Poo appears” could easily be the title of this game. I also forgot to heal up after all of those earlier fights, but whatever. We’re pretty overpowered right now even with Alex at level 5.

: The Samurai Tortoise here starts out with a whole-party attack, which is now longer because we have to do an extra QTE for Rory.

: There’s an achievement for killing three of these tortoises that lists them as “minibosses” but they’re really no tougher than any other enemy.

: Vella takes off 3/4 of its health in one hit, and Michael finishes it off pretty quickly thereafter.

: The piles of shit are really no tougher than the rats and skulls from the last dungeon. Alex can take one out in one attack, provided he reaches a decent non-time energy combo.

: Now let’s get to Rory. Rory is fucking useless. He has no damaging abilities, and his “attack” is replaced with something called “pacifism” which is the Cover command from Final Fantasy.

: He picks a person to cover, and I think his defense is applied to the attack instead of theirs. He also takes any damage they would otherwise take. Since most things go down in a hit or two at this point, Rory is worse than useless because having to do two extra button presses (plus an attack “animation”) just adds to how slow combat is. Rory’s “weapon” is a protest sign.

: There are doors to the left and to the right of where we started, and I figured I’d do these first.

: We could just do what I did in the factory and use Dali to get the chest without fighting, but fuck that we want the EXP.

: Samurai Rats are slightly tougher rats. They’re otherwise exactly the same as regular rats.

: Vella takes the tortoise out in a single hit, and the rat and shit die soon thereafter.

Uploading: YIIK A Postmodern RPG 2019-07-22 17-31-19-33.png…

: It’s a good thing I chose to go to the right first, because there’s a key in there we’re probably going to need later.

: Behind the other door is a toilet, which… what the fuck is a chemical toilet doing in the sewer? Anyway, it’s a trap.

: I then took the time to go back to the pay phone and level everyone up. Except Alex. I’m really banking on there being an infinite Entity farm at some point.

: Vella in particular got a really good levelup, gaining 5 HP and 2 defense.

: To the south of the first room is this room, which has a pipe blocking the way forward… and rocks up above. All we can do is climb.

: There’s a chest behind a pipe we can get with Dali. By the way, this whole thing feels like a giant Paper Mario ripoff, doesn’t it?

: The box contains a hat that I equipped to Vella because she didn’t have one, and because fuck Rory.

: Now we can break rocks! I distinctly remembered that there were breakable rocks in Frankton, particularly behind Alex’s house. The first thing I did, naturally, was see if I could go back and deal with that.

: Unfortunately, the game locks us into Windtown until the sewers are complete. Fuck.

: This is what Amp looks like. It explodes the rocks a second or so after we use it.

: We can then use that Dungeon Key we found to progress.

: Naturally, given what this game is, the next room is just busy work. No combat, just eight rocks to break. A part of me wonders if the devs put this in expecting that people would speedrun their game and find a way around that first rock, but let’s be serious here: no one is ever going to speedrun this game.

: In the next room, we find… trees? Didn’t we just pick up an ability two rooms ago that let us break rocks? What gives?

: Problem, Alex doesn’t have bangs. In fact, I think you’re the only person in the party who does.

: This is what Hairwhip looks like. No, it makes no fucking sense. It also just seems like bad pacing that we got a new ability two rooms after getting a different one. This feels like the kind of thing you’d expect to see at the end of a game, but we’re only like, three hours in by the end of this update (granted, a bit of that time was me running back to the fountain in Windtown because I’m too cheap to use healing items).

: The chest, which we can get with Dali, only has money in it. We now see the other thing that Amp does: break cracked walls.

: One thing I forgot to mention: while the rocks we destroyed will not respawn, the trees WILL.

: There’s a trash can up here with some healing items, but what we really want is in that chest down there.

: The new keytar is important not only because it has better stats on it, but also because it adds a fourth hit to Vella’s attack.

: What’ll happen is that after getting the first QTE perfect, the green icon will flip over and give you a random key to press out of a choice of like, four. It’s lenient enough on the timing that it’s almost always a free fourth hit.

: There’s another dungeon key in the chest, and while we can go past the green crap dripping off that ladder, we can’t go up the ladder.

: Nothing terribly interesting here either - just a fight with a single… sort-of new enemy type?

: This time, Vella managed to floor one instantly with a crit, so if anything these enemies are somehow even less threatening than the first time we encountered them.

: One thing I’ve always wondered about with games like these is why they bother making you pull out the stupid hair whip at all. Even Pokemon figured out that no one wanted to go into the menu every time they had to use Cut or Rock Smash or something so they just made it a prompt.

: I also made a stop at the Mind Dungeon again and levelled everyone but Alex to 13.

: We can use our second key to pass this door, leading us to the penultimate room of the sewer system.

: Three doors, and if we go up the ladder…

: Having a vending machine that says “Crack” on it seems kinda distasteful. The "combat’ sign tells us about Vella’s ability to banish Entities.

: The purple door has a chest with money in it. If you’re wondering what was in that chest briefly visible in the previous room, it’s some healing items.

: Here, we have a “puzzle” that’s really just a colossal waste of time.

: You might think “Oh, we could just ignore the obvious miniboss and grab the chest with Dali” only the chest is, for some reason, immune to Dali.

: In case you’re wondering, of COURSE they all come with painful TMNT puns. Why wouldn’t they?

: This fight is basically exactly the same as that optional one we did a few rooms back. The only difference with these enemies is that their full-party attack is a bit stronger, doing around 5 damage if we don’t block it.

: There’s three of these miniboss enemies, and each one drops $100. By the end of this update, we go from having around $400 to around $1000.

: This is the room behind the silver door. The chests have a Fitted Ball Cap and a Golf Cap in them, both of which are useless to us.

: It’s a testament to lazy game design that the developers couldn’t be bothered to at least make unique models for the minibosses, or change them in any meaningful way from the regular enemies.

: This is the green door. It’s… yeah, it’s lazy. We should also be able to grab that chest with Dali, but it’s immune as well.

: Michael somehow wound up going first and oneshotted it.

: Naturally, the game makes use each key individually instead of just letting us go through.

: Oh boy, a boss… and it’s just a recolored Soul Survivor. Fuck this game.

: “Can’t you see her too!? That’s my sister! That’s Carrie!”

: “Oh shit! It’s an Entity! We need to get the hell out of here!!”

: “Wait. We need to remain calm. We need to try and talk to him.”

: Ahh, dear little Ocelotte. Where have you gone? Are you hiding from me? Come out, come out, don’t be afraid. You were born a child of dragons. What could you possibly fear? Remember when Dark Souls 3 did this same thing, only it happens during a boss fight and takes like 10 seconds?

: “Rory, that isn’t your sister, it’s–”

: “SHUT UP! That’s CARRIE!”

: “Can’t you feel it? It’s so familiar. I can prove it. She understands what I’m feeling, what I’m thinking. I’ve never been this close to anyone. Trust me, it’s her!”

: “Rory, that’s not Carrie.”

: Oh, god FUCKING DAMMIT! GOD FUCKING DAMMIT! FUCK YOU! You fucking stole this from Persona 4! You fucking stole it and it doesn’t even fucking work! You know what made this shit work in Persona 4? The fact that they had an art team who did fucking art for bosses that reflected the whole idea of the shadows being someone’s repressed inner desires! Fuck you!

: “What!?! What the hell are you talking about?!”

: I’d like to point out that they probably got this line straight out of the Persona 1 battle theme.

: “How can that be? I’m RIGHT here!”

: “Vella, what the hell is going on? You need to explain this.”

: “Rory, what really happened to your sister? Something about your story doesn’t add up. Let’s hear the truth.”

: “Rory, that’s-- that’s terrible. Why did she do it?”

: I’ve never dealt with someone who has had a family member commit suicide, but I would think that “Why did they do it?” is not the kind of question you want to ask.

: “What the hell kind of question is that?! It was those bastards at school.”

: “Stupid shitty girls always ragging on her, going out of their way to make her feel bad, picking on her for being MY sister!”

: “Arghhh!! This is all my fault. It’s all because of me. Because of what I’m like, you know?”

: “How did you find this place, Rory? When did you first see your Soul Survivor?”

: “It was two weeks after she died.”

: “I found her things. I came down here thinking she fell down, or something, I don’t know.”

: So this drags on way longer than I feel it probably should, but we’re clearly getting into some pretty heavy shit.

: “But you knew she was dead, didn’t you?”

: “Of course, but I-”

: “It’s okay, you can tell me. I’m not judging anything you say here. Tell me all of it.”

: “I do. Go on. What happened when you left your body?”

: “I didn’t get far. I separated from my physical form and then I saw my body and my sister – what you say is me.”

: “Did you leave the earth?”

: “I was so close. I was so far away and then I saw it.”

: “The ‘Soul Survivor’, the ‘Entity’, whatever the hell you called it.”

: “That soul over there is not hers. It is yours.”

: What the fuck even is this shit? Like, I get that they’re trying to set it up so that Vella is into some occult bullshit that we don’t fully know about, but still, what the shit? It’s like they’re playing bingo with new-age buzzwords.

: “I’ve traveled the Soul Space and I understand what I am seeing when I look at the Entities. I see the marks of your soul and I can tell you that that is another you.”

: “Somewhere out there in the Soul Space, this you left his world and stumbled on yours. That’s you from another plane. It’s likely it was experiencing the same suffering as you.”

: I think they mean “dimension” here. Planes don’t really work that way, at least not in the D&D sense.

: “Vella, can you PLEASE explain what’s going on here?”

: "I understand what you were feeling. ‘This depression is unbearable. I can’t take it anymore.’ "

: “The depression/pain part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can overcome it is up to you. You decide if you’re going to keep going.”

: Yeah, you know what? It pains me to see this fucking game rip off Persona 4 so hard, but I’m going to keep going. Mostly because of what’s about to happen next.

: “Your sister is gone. There is no changing that. But traveling the Soul Space is incredibly dangerous and if you’re not careful you’ll end up like him!”

: “You can’t help but feel the pain, but you can get through the suffering. That will go away.”

: “Look, I know it’s easy for me to say. I’m not the one whose sister is dead.”

: So, if you’re like me, you’re probably half asleep from this godawful bullshit writing. To fully appreciate what’s about to happen, I need to do this in video format because simply revealing it in screenshot format isn’t really good enough. I will do screenshots of it - after the video. I ask you, the reader, are you ready… to see the moment that made most of the people who played this game drop it?

Here’s the same part in screenshot format so I can talk a little bit about the upcoming boss fight. I apologize about the bossfight in the video being so bad - the game has this weird control lag that gets introduced when I try to stream it.

: So yeah. Boss that reflects Rory’s survivor guilt over his dead sister? Nah, we’re fucking a fucking alpaca. I’d be more pissed, but honestly, I’ve just come to expect this game to be utter shit with no ambitions whatsoever.

: The Alpaca has one main gimmick: it takes a turn to summon two Soul Survivors, and will eat them on the next turn. It has two actions on its turn: one to summon/eat and one to attack. Unfortunately, this means that it’s impossible to stop the Alpaca from eating the Soul Survivors: even if you’re perfect with your banishes and don’t get screwed by RNG, the Alpaca will always eat one.

: The Golden Alpaca is also a fucking tank. I’m pretty sure it has somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 HP. Vella is mostly kept busy banishing every turn, so only Michael and Alex can even do damage. This last shot was from my first attempt after like… two rounds of attacking it.

: If you fuck up a banish, or just get screwed by RNG (because banish can fail even if you pass the minigame), the Alpaca starts evolving. It doesn’t actually do more damage - but I’m pretty sure that if you let it evolve too much, it’ll eventually instakill the party. Banishing it will reduce its evolution by one stage.

: I apologize for the low-quality shots. When recording the video, I forgot to have my screenshot tool open. Anyway, this is the Alpaca’s second evolution. If it gets here, it is very hard to banish it back to its original state.

: I’m pretty sure this is its final evolution, but by this point its health was low enough that I was able to take Vella off banish duty and just finish it off. I should note that as far as I know, each Soul Survivor you banish does count toward boosting Alex’s stats. In the video, I think I managed to get at least six of them.

: “This is insane! WHAT IS A SOUL SURVIVOR?!”

: “Calm down Alex, I’ll explain it now. I haven’t been intentionally leaving you in the dark, so don’t act like I’m some anime character.”

: “Fine. Just – This is too much.”

: “Deep breaths, Alex. Michael’s taking this better than you are. By now you’ve seen enough visual proof that what I am going to tell you isn’t a lie.”

: “I need you to understand that I don’t have all the answers. I can only say what I KNOW to be true from my experiences.”

: “I get it. Spit it out already, Vella!”

: “What you just saw was a Soul Survivor or an Entity. Both names are acceptable.”

: “These beings are a visual representation of a soul that has escaped from its body. You see, it is entirely possible for a human being to separate their soul from their body.”

: These lines are all really fucking stilted and I hate it. “And more often, you can’t retrieve it.” It sounds like a PS1 era JRPG translation.

: “A human usually stumbles on this facet of reality after undergoing a transformation of a grave nature. In Rory’s case, it was the loss of his sister that pushed him towards exchanging his physical nature for a metaphysical one.”

: “This is where things are about to get strange, so bear with me. Our souls do not belong to ourselves, in the traditional sense of the word ‘belong’.”

: Whoa whoa whoa, time the fuck out. You’re saying that one soul is shared by a bunch of people? Then… would it be safe to say… that Rory… killed his soul?

: You can’t hear it in the video because I cut it off before this part, but I absolutely did the Peter Stillman “Ah killed mah soul!” after seeing that line. Also, I would’ve just used Chip and Ironicus’s MGS2 LP for that but I couldn’t find the line.

: But… but… you just said… you just said there’s only one soul for a potentially infinite number of people! How the fuck does this make any kind of sense? FUCK THIS GAME!

: “Normally when you abandon your physical form, you become an omnipotent entity, who exists just in their own reality. You can’t return to your body once you’ve left it behind.”

: “Soul Survivors are Souls whose realities have been destroyed and they manage to leave their reality in hope of finding a physical form.”

: “So that being right there is Rory - a different Rory - one whose reality was destroyed and he’s attempted to find a physical reality to exist in.”

: “But you have a physical form! How did you return to your body when you say it isn’t possible?”

: “This is not my reality, Alex. There was another me here and she left. I was able to take her physical space because her soul had already left this world.”

: So wait, what she’s saying is that Rory should theoretically be a different person, yet I’m pretty sure he’s the same person because he remembers his sister dying and shit.

: “And? What is the Soul Space?”

: “The Soul Space is – how do I explain this?”

: This entire thing sounds like it was taken out of some crappy sci-fi paperback the devs found at an airport.

: “This is crazy. How did you figure all this out!?”

: “That’s personal. Look what leads people to find the Soul Space is different for each person, and I’m not going to share that with you.”

: “Rory, it’s okay. Take a deep breath with me-”

: “CUT IT WITH THE DEEP BREATHS!!! THIS ISN’T OKAY!!”

: So one thing I’d like to point out. I had a save shortly before the Golden Alpaca when I made my second attempt at it, the one you can see in the video. That fight took me over 15 minutes to finish. Counting all of the cutscenes we’re about to see before we gain control again, plus the last one, there’s been more cutscene than gameplay this update.

: No jump scare this time, which is always a plus. However, there is another nonsensical monologue.

: “It was waiting to sting, waiting to have its full impact. From my bedroom window you could see blooming green leaves of summer popping up here and there on the rolling suburban hills, their branches reaching up to the sky like magic ropes.”

: That’s a D-, please see me after class. Holy fuck that is the worst goddamn writing. “Like magic ropes” what the fuck is this garbage.

: “I hadn’t spoken to Michael, Vella, or Rory in almost eight days.”

: So yes, we’re witnessing a timeskip, but right after this we’ll be… back in the sewers like nothing happened. I’d also like to point out that with the last timeskip, Columbine has already happened at this point.

: “Michael was stuck in his house, pretending to study for finals.”

: “I spoke with her manager, the Korean man, about Vella and Sammy, but he offered very little information. ‘She said she needed to take some time off, so I gave it to her.’ Lots of help, thank you, see you later, jackass.”

: I think that’s a natural response to Alex.

: “I hadn’t spoken with Rory since that night either. As soon as we got out, Vella went into depth on her Soul Survivors and metaphysics, then he ran off without saying a word.”

: We fucking get it! You already said you hadn’t talked to him since before the time skip! You fucking moron!

: Self-promotion. Fuck you, Andrew Allanson.

: “Sammy. I missed her. I didn’t know her really, but I felt like I did. In the unreal twilight hours, in-between sleep and waking, she slipped into my dreams, got tangled in my thoughts, like the blankets tangled between my legs, her brain melting with mine.”

: I have my doubts that anyone ever playtested this game, because I’m positive that any playtester would have quit hours ago, but if anyone had ever tested this I can see them being like “Man, you really need to cut the purple prose.”

: “In the dreams, we didn’t speak. In the dreams, we didn’t do much of anything. I could just feel that she was there and that she understood. She had to be out there - out there in the Soul Space, maybe.”

: I wish I could just hold this in front of the dev and shout “THIS IS NOT HOW YOU DO A FUCKING TIMESKIP! THIS ISN’T WHY TIMESKIPS EXIST!”

: This sounds like she’s trying way too hard to be one of the announcers from Earth Defense Force.

Next time, we’ll leave the sewers. Believe it or not, leaving the sewers takes just as long (if not longer) than the entire segment presented in this update. Before we go though, I’d like to show off how bad my luck is.

: I went into the Mind Dungeon to finally level Alex up. The thing is, as I found out, Soul Survivors can wind up attached to doors that don’t have a stat-up associated with them, which is a total fucking waste. The worst part? I got three floors like this in a row.

: Once we reach Floor 8, this cutscene happens. On the way down, I got Alex his first attack skill, which we’ll see in the next update. Said attack skill is why I’ve been only levelling Strength, PP, and Defense.

: “Oh, I guess you wouldn’t. She’s on Floor 15.”

: “There is a girl who minds the place all by herself. Tell her the Krow told you to come read old memories.”

: “She will show you the rest.”

: Fortunately, we have just enough EXP to hit level 15.

: My luck changed a bit on 13 and 14, where we got actual stat bonuses.

: The library is, of course, Marlene doing a different voice. That doll… looks an awful lot like Sammy, doesn’t it? Shit’s creepy.

: “As you can see, no one visits here. No one except the dungeon master… and s/he hasn’t visited in almost a year.”

: “Excuse me, but perhaps you have mistaken this for another floor? This is the library. I can’t imagine you’re here to read all these old books.”

: “Only the dungeon master is allowed to read them anyway. You’re… not the dungeon master, are you? No, didn’t think so.”

: Maybe I’m just missing something, but this seems very Silent Hill, and I don’t think it was INTENDED to be Silent Hill. Like, this is… creepy.

: “Anyway, why have you come? What can I do for you…?”

: “Oh, Krow told you to visit me? Oh… hehehe. Well, it’s nice to have the company. Usually Krow sends people away. That’s his job you know. Outsiders aren’t allowed in the Dungeon of the Mind.”

: “What…? Someone gave you the phone number for the Dungeon of the Mind? I don’t know what that means. Have I met you somewhere before?”

[AmewTheFox]

Why have good character design when you can have GIMMICKS!

So, Rory would be an interesting concept for a character in a JRPG, but is really undercut by him doing no DPS and and additional body to Defend for, but is actually useless.

Panda Barrier is a skill Alex has that pretty much nullifies most damage and Alex is able to, y’know, Attack. Rory has none of that going for him (can only cover one party member, takes damage in their place, and no support skills to speak of except one that swaps your HP and SP)
Also there was a funny visual glitch of Rory covering someone in an area Skill that he just pops back in the place where he should be standing.

In case you were wondering, Andrew Allanson confirmed on a…less than savory podcast that the Golden Alpaca is a “haha joke” boss, probably similar to Tesso in Persona, or…a number of bosses in EarthBound. Here’s the thing about joke bosses. YOU DON’T MAKE THEM THE FIRST REAL BOSS OF THE GAME! (Yes, this consitutes as the first “real” boss because you can’t run from it, despite Vella shouting very loudly that you needed to run, has its own special area and music, and is very durable)

And lastly,

The audacity of this man.

[Chowder]

The new “tool” Rory brings (aside from himself haha burn amirite) is basically just Vella’s again, too. They remove a designated obstacle from your path, but not the other obstacle, which isn’t meaningfully different from the obstacle it DOES effect. Keys and doors, man.

Also, “I spoke with her manager, the Korean man.” Jesus CHRIST.

[RadicalEddie]

Good lord, watching that video was just… woof. It was one thing to read about everything takes so long, and quite another to actually see it. I can’t imagine stomaching this long enough to even get to this boss, let alone fight it. Basically nothing about this is particularly appealing, which is why I’m happy to read along and not touch it myself.