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

[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.

[Tolvo]

I skipped most of the video, which is not a mark against you it is a mark against the game. To be blunt what a terrible game. I don’t know whether I’d choose to play this or Indigo Prophecy if forced to choose. This maybe because it is easier but way less stupidly entertaining.

[Timrod]

: Just behind where the Alpaca was is a chest with $1000 in it. This is roughly equal to all of the money we’ve obtained up to this point.

: Here’s our first “break in reality” - YIIK’s version of the Lost Woods, because that’s absolutely what a JRPG needs. This part isn’t at all difficult: you follow the big, obvious Soul Survivor around. It does, however, get real annoying.

: Because I levelled Alex up, everyone got some new skills. Rory has Protest (a useless debuff) and Sacrifice, which kills him but revives someone else, which we can accomplish with an item we have like 10 of without killing anyone in the party. Rory is fucking useless and I’m dumping his ass the second we can do so.

: The second room is only marginally more annoying than the first. The camera sucks, but at least the controls still work. That’s going to change… real soon.

: Third room. Now we’re upside-down, so the controls for movement are inverted. There’s no challenge here: with only one enemy that doesn’t respawn when killed, it’s more a challenge of fighting the combination of controls and camera to reach the bottom-right door.

: Seriously, fuck whoever thought this shit was a good idea.

: The fight in this room I’m going to show off specifically to demo Alex’s attack skill.

: Not before one of the enemies hits him for HALF HIS HEALTH BAR though. Holy shit that’s some garbage - and this is after I levelled Alex up, and I’ve been putting points into defense every level.

: Alex’s new attack is LP Toss, which is basically the reason why we want to level up his PP as much as possible. You can see that barring Rory (who starts with very high PP due to his ability to switch his HP and PP) Alex has the highest PP of anyone in the party.

: LP toss is a shooter. Red enemies are worth more than the green ones, and you can rack up a pretty big combo with it.

: It apparently works by “banking” damage - it’ll take whatever your damage number would be, apply it to the first enemy, and if it kills the enemy the rest of the damage goes through to the second one and so on. Alex did enough damage to outright kill two Samurai Tortoises and nearly kill a third.

: My first thought here was “Oh boy, more Soul Survivors to banish!”… but as it turns out…

: They talk, but I doubt anything they have to say is important, so I’m going to just do this one’s dialog because there’s a choice that isn’t actually a choice involved.

: “No matter how hard we try, we can’t make him happy.”

: “I know it’s selfish… but… the real reason I’m sad is…”

: That you somehow managed to use three ellipses in a single sentence?

: “Who?”

: “…the Infinite Spirit.”

: “The what…?”

: “Master.”

: “I don’t follow.”

: It’s like I’m playing Metal Gear Solid all over again.

: “God.”

: We get three choices here. I imagine they’re all the same, but I picked the last one because Alex strikes me as the kind of tool that would have a Nietzsche quote in his forum signature.

: Just behind where “god” is, there’s a single polygon that is uh… yeah.

: It follows us around, and what we have to do to progress is to bring it to “god”.

: I thought this might’ve been Yiddish, but it’s apparently just gibberish.

: And there’s our exit door.

: “She really is gone, isn’t she? What the hell am I going to do?”

: Honestly, I don’t give much of a shit about his sister either. Rory’s entire character is “My sister is DEAAAD!”. He’s a lot like Batman in that regard.

: “Alex!! What is wrong with you? How can you be so selfish?!”

: I love how absolutely none of these people saw the fact that Alex is a colossal douche coming from a mile away.

: “Argh. You’re an asshole, Alex. I thought you came to help me!”

: “Yeah, back when you didn’t lie to us! You realize you’ve been leading us on this whole time about your sister?! You acted like this was connected to Sammy!”

: “I-- Arghh.”

: I like how the devs were willing to toss exclamation points around like they don’t even matter, but when Rory is actively having a breakdown they just give him an “Argh.”, almost like he just doesn’t give a shit.

: “And Rory, breathe with me. In. Out. Yeah, just like that.”

: I also like how Vella’s entire character is… just really liking breathing. I also like breathing, being a human and not some kind of alien who has no idea how humans behave like David Cage or Andrew Allanson.

: … what the fuck is this shit? WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT?! Did I just fucking walk into the end of Dagger of Amon Ra?

: So, this bit here is absolutely fucking godawful. You talk to one of the hooded Alexes, and then he’ll turn his back and another one will turn around to face you. I’m pretty sure what they were trying to rip off here is that scene in Persona 2 where the protagonist takes Philemon’s mask off and it’s him underneath the mask.

: “Man, school really changed you.”

: “It wasn’t school that changed you. Just think about it, dude!”

: “Why are you being such a dick, Alex? Seriously man, keep it together.”

: “I know you got scared because we almost died down there… but can’t you see that Rory is hurt? His sister freakin’ killed herself.”

: When I was recording this part, my brain basically shut off. I didn’t miss any dialog, I just… zoned out. That’s sort of how playing this game is.

: “You know full well that you’re overreacting… but you won’t just back down.”

: “Will it kill you to say you’re sorry? Seriously… just say you’re sorry.”

: Seriously, is Alex’s only motivation in life getting laid?

: “Seriously, just stop being a loser. I think Vella thinks you are a stuck up rich kid, who has never known real world problems in his life.”

: “Okay, so now you’re going back to reality… are you ready to back down?”

: “I want to say I’m sorry. I just don’t know if I can. There’s always time to say you’re sorry… right?”

: Honestly, it’s really hard to see why Alex, or the audience, should care. He’s known Vella for all of what, two weeks? And Michael is just some dumbass who lives next door.

: “Just 'cause you’re cool with Soul Survivors and astral projection or whatever the hell you’ve been on about doesn’t mean everyone else is!”

: “I-- Fine. Whatever.”

: Oh look, Michael’s still alive!

: “You said this isn’t about Sammy, but don’t you think there is a connection?!”

: I mean, other than that there were Soul Survivors involved in both cases, not really.

: “Don’t you realize Sammy was probably taken by one of those Soul creeps!”

: “No. That’s not right. That isn’t how this works. Soul Survivors wouldn’t take someone like that, they have no interest in such things.”

: “They’ve transcended things like kidnapping, or anger, or any other motivation for that.”

: So okay, if they’ve transcended everything… why do they attack Alex? I mean, other than the fact that even I want to punch him.

: “Transcending? What does that even mean?!”

: “Left – Left the reality?! You think she left her body or whatever?!”

: “Then you obviously weren’t listening when I said she was TAKEN by two of those Soul Survivors!”

: “You weren’t there when she was screaming for them not to take her again!”

: “Okay, give me a second to think. I’m sure I can explain it.”

: Bye Rory! No one’s going to miss you! Go ahead and just leave your body and find another dimension to live in!

: “Wait! Come back, Rory! Great, Alex, now look what you did!”

: Honestly, out-douching Rory and getting him to fuck off is probably the high point of Alex’s career as an RPG protagonist.

: “Hey, this isn’t my fault! Don’t blame THAT on me! He’s the one who lied to us!”

: “Dude, he was obviously just hurting - just needed someone to reach out to. Could YOU have said exactly what was going on? Even hiding behind a computer, you can’t help but think what people think of you.”

: Wait, what? What the fuck does that have to do with anything? What the fuck is he even talking about? What does that part about hiding behind a computer have ANYTHING to do with the rest of what is going on? WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT?

: “In the mean time, try not to be such a jerk to your friends.”

: “Hey, that kid isn’t my friend.”

: Yeah! I’m not your friend, buddy! I’m not your buddy, pal! I’m not your pal, guy! I thought that was from the 1999 South Park film (which came out a few short months from when this game takes place) but it’s not.

: “Cool it man, you’re missing the point!”

: “Maybe he didn’t deserve that abuse. I’ll admit that much.”

: “I was scared. So many odd things were happening around me and I didn’t handle it very well. First I met Sammy, then I lost Sammy, and then I met Rory, who had lost Carrie.”

: Is this a monologue or a goddamn math problem? I feel like he could’ve followed this up with “If this is true, then what time is it?”

: “For a moment I considered saying that we were alike, but I often have to remind myself that I didn’t really KNOW Sammy.”

: “We met only once, but still, I can’t get her off my mind.”

: I understand that the panda is supposed to be sentient and not just Alex speaking through an imaginary proxy, but damned if it doesn’t feel that way. Alex is too much of a tool to even have a yes-man so he has to invent one.

: “How could you tell something is troubling me?”

: “You’re making your ‘I"m thinking’ face.”

: “Mainly, I’m thinking about what Vella said - about detaching your soul from your body, or whatever.”

: “She seems convinced that Sammy had done that. But somehow that just feels wrong.”

: I really, really want to make a joke about the early 2000s Sega-Sammy merger, but no one would get it. The Atomiswave was a mistake.

: Here’s what I don’t get. Why is he telling the panda this? The panda was ostensibly there when it happened!

: “That doesn’t seem like she willed her Mind to separate from her Body. And I don’t know, it’s just-- ever since then I’ve just had this terrible dark gloom following me. No matter what I do, I can’t shake this feeling.”

: “I just feel like all my focus has been on the wrong thing all this time.”

: That pisses me off! We should be out there looking for her.

: “Where do you think you’d look for her? Do you really even know anything about her?”

: “Arghh. I don’t know maybe I’ll–”

: I haven’t been keeping track, but I’m reasonably certain that by now, we’ve had more scenes of Alex talking to himself either directly or by proxy than we have anything resembling a plot.

: By the way, we’re almost four and a half hours in.

: “Did you get taller? Always getting taller.”

: “Haha, I don’t know, Mom. How was work?”

: “Terrible. I’ve slept at the office for the past few weeks. I smell, I need a shower, and I don’t even work in fast food any more.”

: “How’s the project coming? Everything done?”

: “Yeah, it’s done. Alex, would you mind sitting down for a bit? I need to talk to you about something serious.”

: “What’s wrong?”

: Is it just me, or does this feel like a conversation out of The Room?

: “Holy crap!! Can they do that?! Weren’t you, like, the project lead!?”

: “Well, everyone has a boss, Alex. But it’s going to be okay. Just things are going to be tight for a while.”

: “But don’t we have savings? Like, you have money, right?”

: “Yeah, I have a bit. I spent most of it on your last semester.”

: “But I had a college fund. That should’ve been separate from your unemployment fund!!”

: “Well Alex, it was.”

: Welcome to the “everyone is taking a shit on Alex” segment of the game. Unfortunately, the game isn’t self-aware enough to know that Alex really is a colossal douchebag - it’s going to be portrayed largely as people being unfair to him.

: “So what do we do?”

: “I paid a LOT of money for that fancy degree of yours.”

: “Doesn’t have to be today. But by the end of the week, you should at least have some interviews lined up. Okay, you can go.”

: But mom, how am I supposed to be a protagonist in this dipshit RPG world if I have to get a job? It’s not like I’m the protagonist of Persona 4 and/or 5!

: Seriously, does Alex do this shit every time anything doesn’t go his way? Does he do this when he goes to the fridge and they’re out of ketchup?

: “Come on don’t you want to work for yourself… put that degree of yours to use?”

: “Mom did everything for us… and now we can’t repay her this way. Just be nice. Play it cool.”

: “When did you start acting this way, man?”

: “You love your mom, and you’re grateful for everything she’s done. Why can’t you just do a better job of showing her that?”

: “Sounds pretty simple to me. Just don’t be mean.”

: “Yeah, it’s easy to not be a jerk… but I just want to know why you’ve changed?”

: “Have you changed though?”

: “Yeah. Yeah, you’ve totally changed. But… can you change back?”

: So one, this makes me feel like the developers assumed anyone playing this game would be a loser like Alex. Second, what the shit?

: Instead of getting a job, I figured I’d spend the rest of this update exploring. There’s a couple of rocks we can Amp at the construction site, and one of them has a box with nothing good in it.

: There’s also this completely nonsensical path that we ran into earlier. This is the one I was going to try and explore back when we were in Windtown, but couldn’t. Let’s do that now.

: What I didn’t know at the time I recorded this is that what we did has a very minor effect on a cutscene coming up when we advance the plot next.

: A radio tower. At this time of year, at this time of day, localized entirely on a mountain path that can only be accessed from behind Alex’s house.

: The reason the sky is so dark is that… we’re actually not supposed to be here yet. I don’t know why the developers didn’t just lock it off until after we advance the plot. When we do come back here, it’ll be night time.

: The radio tower is basically a maze with chests in it. There’s only one with anything good in it, which I’ll point out when we get to it.

: This game uses so many words, but it couldn’t be bothered to tell us this until after we fought the first real boss.

: There’s also some enemies in the maze. I was going to retreat and wait until I had the whole party, but later I realized we won’t have our party when we come back through here. The skull (with a crown) and bat aren’t really anything we haven’t seen before: they’re both single-target attackers and go down in one hit to Alex and his overfilled strength stat.

: Here, we run into another new enemy type: aliens. Aliens fucking suck to fight, and you should immediately just LP toss them to death.

: As you can see, not only do they have an undodgeable attack, but they also fucking HURT. That’s almost a third of Alex’s HP in one hit.

: Thankfully, while their speed is high enough that they’ll usually go first, Alex can take them down in one decent combo.

: Nothing interesting here, just a running shoes and some healing items, but I figured I’d show this just to give you perspective of how the maze goes.

: There’s a chest over here we need Dali for that has a pog in it. The two encounters are both two bats, but one of them gives you a whopping $1000 for beating them.

: I don’t get why Alex doesn’t just, you know, give his mom the $3500. It’s not much when you’re a homeowner, but it’s definitely enough for a mortgage payment.

: We can see a Dali bridge up there, and we want to hit that Dali bridge, as it contains the only item we want from this place.

: To get there, we have to go up the path and cross another Dali bridge, then drop down from the far side.

: The Back Alley Boiz LP is a straight upgrade to the Sergeant Salty EP. There is some new stock in the record store, including one that has two less attack but has +5 PP on it, but this one has the most STR on it.

: There’s another chest behind it that we can reach from the other side (top of the path) that has a Bike Helmet in it. Fuck defense, I want to load up on STR for maximizing LP Toss damage.

: Onward through the maze! We have no real reason to come this far, except that there’s more enemies.

: This right here is why I’ve been levelling up STR and PP first.

: The last chest before the radio tower has $200 in it, bringing us to $3900 overall.

: Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do in this beaten up radio station. Let’s go look for a job!

: Let’s try the arcade first. Surely Korean Man will hire us. I mean, Korean Man is the name of a robot master from Megaman, right? He’s a renegade Korean BBQ robot that slings bibimbap? Alex could be Whine Man, with the power to complain so loudly that Megaman loses interest in going any further into Dr. Wily’s base.

: That’s okay! Surely, Alex can make pizza and/or pasta… right?

: Yeah, you know what? I don’t think I’d trust Alex to make a pizza.

: Even the burger place refuses to let us work there! It’s almost like this is a really, really ham-fisted commentary on the fact that millennials got fucked out of jobs… even though Alex would be too old to be a millenial!

: Also, I’m going to post this NPC’s dialogue because I love him.

: We can keep going, but after… I think one more stop, Alex will give up.

: Also, you want to see something that pissed me off?

: Fuck you, Allanson! You don’t get to reference Mother 3! Only good games get to do that, and most good games wouldn’t because they don’t need to compare themselves to something else like that!

: Next time, we’ll advance the plot some more. We’ll also the first part where our choices at the beginning come in! Sort of.

: Well, actually, there is one more thing I want to do. Someone pointed out in the thread that Alex’s voiceactor is a guy named Chris Niosi. As I was making this LP, I found out that he recently got patched out of Fire Emblem: Three Houses both because he had broken an NDA with Nintendo, but also because of multiple accusations of sexual assault and abuse against him.

Therefore, I figured I’d just cut him out of this game too. Here’s my demo tape. I apologize for nothing, except to Tim Curry, Tom Hanks, and possibly Grant Goodeve.

[Nidoking]

It’s possibly ironic that Niosi has posted a giant list of public apologies while you play the “Reluctant Apology Tour” portion of this game. I’ve been waiting almost a week to point that out.

Another thing I need to point out is that this game, which makes a big deal out of the Roman numerals in its own title (“It’s pronounced ‘why-two-kay’”), uses lowercase ls instead of capital Is for the names of the hooded Alexes. You may not be able to tell the difference in the font on this forum, but the font in the game makes it very obvious. It’s like they were trying to find every tiny way to make this game as terrible as possible.

[Chowder]

Man, I WISH I’d graduated college in 1999, when “have a few job interviews lined up by the end of the week” was a totally reasonable ask.

[Timrod]

It’s possibly ironic that Niosi has posted a giant list of public apologies while you play the “Reluctant Apology Tour” portion of this game. I’ve been waiting almost a week to point that out.

Another thing I need to point out is that this game, which makes a big deal out of the Roman numerals in its own title (“It’s pronounced ‘why-two-kay’”), uses lowercase ls instead of capital Is for the names of the hooded Alexes. You may not be able to tell the difference in the font on this forum, but the font in the game makes it very obvious. It’s like they were trying to find every tiny way to make this game as terrible as possible.

I noticed it, but I thought they were 1’s with the bottom line, which shouldn’t make sense either but I think by this point my brain had shut down most of its functions and I was just sitting there like “Okay.”

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.

The Korean Man, coming in 2022 from the producers who saw The Quiet Man and decided they needed a second game. And yeah, I feel like the entire tool system in this game has no reason to be there - the game is so linear that I feel like they could’ve cut out the hairwhip entirely and it would’ve had zero impact on the game except for speeding it up.

I skipped most of the video, which is not a mark against you it is a mark against the game. To be blunt what a terrible game. I don’t know whether I’d choose to play this or Indigo Prophecy if forced to choose. This maybe because it is easier but way less stupidly entertaining.

So honestly, I didn’t expect to record the entire fight, but there’s one other video of it up on Youtube that I found while searching for music from the game. It’s much shorter, but that’s because I was going to collect as many souls as possible, while the other one ignored that and just went right for the boss with everyone. I do feel like they should’ve taken a cue from Earthbound and added attack items so Rory could at least do SOMETHING.

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.

Please don’t play it yourself, oh god this game is bad. I feel like if I played through it again with a hotkey set up to mash K, it’d probably be half as long as it is.

[Riley]

Nioisi having his voice removed from FE means his most notable last game was YIIK and well what a suiting fate for an asshole like him

[Timrod]

: After a long… five minutes or so of job searching, Alex returns home in the middle of the day to go to bed, which is perfectly normal for someone in their twenties. But first, the phone!

: “I couldn’t deal with this. I was going to unplug this phone. I winced every time the stupid thing rang.”

: I like how the developers were just too goddamn lazy to make a reskin of Alex in pajamas, or just a blanket or something.

: “It was a weird dream - the sort of dream that shouldn’t be scary because the imagery is actually pretty tame.”

: “But still, no matter what I did, I just couldn’t shake the feeling the dream gave me the next morning.”

: “Yes, we are. You and I. We observe her motionless form, and discuss the state of her condition.”

: Okay, wait, what the fuck? Since when does the player have any agency whatsoever in this game? Are they trying to “compensate” for the way Alex has no character motivation by just saying “oh he’s like that because you’re controlling him”?

I could understand if this was a thing that had been done throughout the game, like in Baten Kaitos where you’re playing not as the protagonist but as yourself, but to call it up now out of fucking nowhere as if we’ve had any kind of agency AT ALL is just… bad.

: “We’re not doctors in the dream. We have no intention of helping her. But at the same time, I don’t think we want to hurt her.”

: “There is a third person there, but she doesn’t speak. In fact, we never see her face. I think she is judging us. In a way, you and I are trying to impress her.”

: I’m obviously not going to replay the entire game just to get to this point again, but I know when I did the opening the second time (with people’s input) I randomed the gender question and it landed on female.

: The other thing I think I hate about this is that he implies the viewer isn’t normally female, which I can imagine is probably really offensive to trans people.

: Oh look, it’s that entity from the jump scares that happened a few times earlier on. This is another design decision where I just want to shake the developer and go “What the everloving fuck were you thinking when you did this?”

: So for starters, this part is incredibly counterintuitive. I wound up Mike Dawsoning my way out of it. What we have to do, for no obvious reason, is go to the kitchen.

: “I don’t know if you’ve noticed. I certainly did. In fact, I’d been trying to ignore it all along.”

: “It followed me around. It was lurking in the corner of my eyes at all times.”

: What I also hate about this is that he makes this thing seem scary when they go on and tell you it isn’t really MEANT to be scary.

: “I don’t think that was it. Something told me the figure wasn’t bad. It had been here a while. Haven’t you noticed it?”

: “It had been here since I returned home from college. Maybe even before.”

: The thing is, I’m pretty sure I know what this thing is meant to be. It’s his mother’s Soul Survivor. You can tell because it goes into all these places we can imagine Alex’s mother going (it sits on the couch in the same spot she was, and goes to places you can imagine her going). Keep in mind that pretty much everything I knew about this game in advance happened before the Golden Alpaca fight. I know NOTHING about the plot.

: And if it’s his mother’s Soul Survivor, I’m guessing that means his mother is like Vella, which means this is rapidly turning into Ni no Kuni 1.

: “I think I needed to speak with it. It was materialized. It was no longer transparent. Was it an entity? Why the hell was it living in my house?”

: That’s another thing I don’t get. If you knew this thing was in your house, why would you not tell Vella about it?

: “This isn’t even a real TV show!! DO YOU EVEN SPEAK ENGLISH!?”

: “Strong silent type, I see. Okay, what to do, what to do?”

: This is where shit gets even more confusing. You’d think that we’d want to leave the house. Instead, we want to go to Alex’s bedroom.

: Then, we want to bring the ghost to the kitchen, where the back door is mysteriously open.

: Remember when I said we weren’t supposed to be at the radio station yet? The reason I knew is because I had recorded this part before the last update hit. Thankfully, this means it’ll be way less of a pain in the ass with all of the “puzzles” solved and enemies dead.

: The maze is somehow more annoying the second time, because you have to follow the ghost. Every few seconds, it’ll stop and do a 5 or 6 second animation of it teleporting short distances to show you where to go. Shit’s irritating.

: “Everything came down to this night, in the end – what I would do next, you know.”

: “I didn’t have to follow the entity here, but I’m glad I did.”

: “I couldn’t imagine life if I hadn’t, but maybe there wouldn’t be life if I hadn’t.”

: Alex acting like he’s a generic Chosen One.

: And of course, more self-fellation by the Allanson brothers.

: “I knew what the entity wanted. It wanted me to play the record, to drop the needle, to broadcast the lush and soaring tunes of this masterful LP for the world to hear.”

: “Okay, I’m getting ahead of myself. I didn’t know that exactly, but I had my suspicions.”

: “Hey, not my fault. Do you know where it is? Does it have to be this record? What about one of the others?”

: “You CAN talk. Okay, fair enough, what do you want me to do?”

: “Oh great, now you’re mute! Look, I’ll swing into town in the morning and see if they have this record, this ‘Mystical Ultima LP Legend’ or whatever.”

: Well, let’s see. He’s a manchild, a complete douchenozzle, a blatant author self-insert…

: “Hey, don’t pretend that you wouldn’t have done the same! It’s, like, morbid curiosity and whatnot.”

: “I wanted to see what it wanted, why it’s been living with us.”

: "Har har. So, I’m going to go knock on Michael’s door and swing to town, see if I can find this ‘Mystical Ultima LP Legend’ ".

: No! That’s the entire point! Alex is a completely unlikable asshole! He’s Mao from Disgaea 3 only worse!

: “Hey, easy. Why are you always trying to make me feel bad? Anyway, I’ll pay him a visit. You’ll see. No one is mad at me. They’ve just been busy.”

: Well, let’s just go to Michael’s house, which the game pointed out to us is right next door, and…

: You know, this image of four Alexes in hoods surrounding a character from an over-rated JRPG is kind of like a one-image summary of how this game was written.

: I don’t really like FF7 anymore - not since Square-Enix tried to turn it into a multimedia franchise with movies and shit. Advent Children was a goddamn mistake, so was Dirge of Cerberus and Crisis Core. Still, this just offends me. The hooded Alexes do have stuff to say and disappear once you’ve talked to all of them but fuck that nonsense.

: Let’s just advance the plot, and…

: I think this is supposed to be something to freak the player out, but my first thought was that Michael hired a girl to answer his door and tell Alex that he never lived here.

: “That was weird. I’ve known Michael forever, and I swear to God he always lived in that house. I needed to relax. I was letting all the paranormal get to me.”

: Technically, the house next door is Alex’s house, but we want this one.

: “Nothing to worry about, see? Stupid Panda. He’s just sick, probably.”

: You might think we want to go see Vella or something, but we want to go to the record store first.

: “Let me check. Na, we don’t have it. It’s like - yeah, I think it’s like, sold out, dude.”

: “Damn. Okay, anyway, can you order it?”

: “Uh, the manager has to do that.”

: “But don’t you pick the indie music here? You literally just said that.”

: “Hey man, lay off. Look, if you want something good, you can check out the Wind Town music shop.”

: Oh look, the Allansons got 1999 confused with 1950 again.

: “Hey, what do you want?”

: “Can you get away from work for a bit? It’s, like – it’s about Sammy, and the entities, and all that stuff.”

: “How long do I need to be away for?”

: “Not long. Just need to run to Wind Town! So like, 3-4 hours, tops?”

: “Are you serious? Y – you want me to just walk away from my job for 3-4 hours?”

: What a fucking asshole!

: “I need the money, Alex.”

: “Hey, I’ll pay you. What do you make an hour? Like minimum wage? I’ll give you the $30.”

: What’s funny is, not only is Alex an asshole but also they’re wrong on the amount. The federal minimum wage in 1999 was $5.15 an hour, meaning it’d be more like $20.

: “Alex, you don’t get it, do you? You have no idea what hard work is. You don’t get having a purpose besides your own stupid whims.”

: Wait, what? What the fuck? This game takes place in fucking New Jersey? Okay, so, hopefully there’s someone reading this who is good at game modding. Can you please, for the love of God, make a mod for this game that replaces all of the characters with the cast of Jersey Shore? And also edit the dialog so it’s in that accent they all have?

: “Sure, it got my DDR game to be amazing, but I’m used to honing my skills to something with more of a purpose.”

: “One day, Alex, when you finally GET A JOB, you’ll understand how everything can’t be ‘conspiracies’ and ‘missing mysterious girls’ all the time!!!”

: “Okay. Yeah, I get it.”

: By the way, this LP is sponsored by Uncle Charlie’s Quality Used Cars of North Bergen, New Jersey. Uncle Charlie’s - best used cars allowed by state law! Now only 51% mafia-owned! You need a car? Come see Uncle Charlie. You need someone whacked? Come see Uncle Charlie!

: “No, I get it. That’s how you feel about me. Nothing I can do to change it.”

: I’ve read some things by the people who accuse Chris Niosi of abusing them, and this sounds EXACTLY like something he’d do.

: “Get over yourself, Alex. Could you be any more of an entitled little brat!?”

: “Last night an entity was in my house. I followed it to an old radio tower, and there I found THIS.”

: “…What the hell?!”

: “Yeah, the entity was IN MY HOUSE --”

: “No, not that. I don’t care about that. That happens all the time.”

: “This – this has to be a joke. Are you screwing with me? Where did you get that?”

: “I told you, it was in the radio tower.”

: “But HOW did it get HERE?”

: “What? I–”

: “But don’t you think this is all connected? Sammy vanishing, me meeting you, Rory, the entity appearing in my house!?”

: “Sometimes a record is just a record and an entity just lives in your house. Don’t try and connect everything together like there is some giant cosmic plan.”

: “Look, don’t look for that record.”

: “Oh, I’m going to. You really can’t stop me.”

: “I–”

: “If you find it, just leave me out of it. I want nothing to do with it.”

: “What, do you like, really REALLY hate this band or something?”

: “Alex, just get the hell out of here. I don’t want to see you for a while.”

: “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

: “What do you mean?”

: “Your mom said you’ve been under the weather when I stopped by this morning.”

: “Oh, yeah. cough What’re you up to?”

: “While we’re there, why don’t we stop in and check on Rory? Make sure he doesn’t hate y- our guts.”

: “I almost got defensive. I almost pointed out how Rory endangered our lives with his stupid attention-seeking lie, but I let it go. At least externally.”

: So, on the way to Wind Town, I found a glitch that is going to give us a pretty significant (read: six level-ups) power boost. I was able to replicate it through reloading my save and replaying this part.

: See that little grove of trees directly south of Wind Town? That’s where the glitch occurs. The glitch only exists while the game is in this specific state: if we go to Wind Town (or go back to Frankton) it won’t be there when we come back.

: Around that area, there’s a number of random encounters - which as far as I understood it was something that wasn’t supposed to happen in this game. These enemies are level 15.

: There’s also these crown rats, which do significantly more damage - they hit Alex for 7 if he doesn’t dodge. Thankfully, all I had to do was LP toss at them and they died.

: What I noticed is that the encounters do a cycle: you hit the group of two rats and a smile, then the crown rats, then an encounter with a bat and two shit piles. I was able to get six full level-ups out of this, bringing Michael to level 21.

: “Want to hit up the record place, and if we have time go see Rory?”

: “Uh, I think we should see Rory first since that’s more important. Geez, dude.”

: “I’ve got the record jacket, but not the record. Any idea if it’s in stock?”

: “Mystical Ultima LP Legend… that hast o be by far one of the greatest records ever recorded. It’s other-worldly.”

: “So you’ve heard of it!?”

: “No man, that’s out there. In the ether. That sounds like it’s from a different world. Just by the name alone I can tell it’s amazing.”

: “Any idea where we can get it? Can’t you like, order us a copy or something?”

: “Let me check the record catalog. Does it have to be on vinyl?”

: “I don’t really care. I suppose I’d prefer it to be. More of an authentic sound, you know?”

: I’d just like to point out that I have David Bowie’s entire discography in FLACs that were ripped from vinyls by some German guy with too much time on his hands. The files are over 1GB each and sound no different than a regular-ass FLAC rip of a CD.

: “Yeah, but only if you’re playing from a tube amp. You have a tube amp, right? If you don’t, it’s like you’re only --”

: “Hearing half the song!”

: These dumbfucks remind me of this picture I saw once from an “audiophile convention” where they had a setup with cables that had roughly three foot thick shielding on them. Shit was fucking insane.

: “Hmm… uh, yeah. We don’t have it in our catalog. But we have two sister stores that probably will. They’re both East of here. If they don’t have it, I KNOW they’ll at least know where to get it.”

: “A quest for great music is always a worthy one, man. I think you’ll find this is worth it in the end.”

: “So they’re both East of here? Any specific directions?”

: “There is a strip mall east of here. That’s the closest one. The one after that is Northeast a bit. It’s a standalone building. It’s our flagship store, so I doubt you’ll miss it. Good luck, guys!”

: “He doesn’t get a lot of visitors. Why don’t you come inside?”

: “Oh, you guys. Yeah, Mom. I’m gonna take them downstairs. Come on.”

: “You sure you don’t want to come in and have something to eat?”

: “Leave them alone, Mom!”

: “Wow, Rory! Your mom is all legs.”

: This… is this supposed to be a joke? I’m pretty sure this is supposed to be a reference to Welcome to Night Vale, which makes sense because that podcast sucks.

: I picked the top option because we all know that’s what Alex’s VA tried to do IRL.

: “Look man, I was out of line the other day. I was scared. I don’t know what came over me. So I’m hoping you can forgive me, and we can be friends.”

: “Also, I was wrong to lie to you guys. You had a valid point.”

: “So, we’re trying to track down this record. You want to come with us?”

: Oh boy, Rory’s back! Hooray. I fucking hate him, and how much fucking pointless dialogue there is this update. I really hope you’re enjoying all this pointless dialogue, by the way, because guess what the next 30 minutes of this game is?

Next time, we’ll watch half an hour of pointless cutscenes, visit a new town, get two new party members, and… maybe find the plot? In any case, I accidentally posted half this update early and I don’t feel like transcribing the rest of this trash right now.

[Timrod]

: I hope you’re ready for what is almost 30 minutes of straight cutscene.

: Our first cutscene is 33 textboxes, followed by a monologue.

: “Hi, I’m Rory. I’m a scene kid with a dead sister. Uh-- that’s it.”

: Historical note: no one would have described themselves as “scene” in 1999. That was more of a mid-2000s thing that sort of went hand-in-hand with “emo”. The worst part is, the game’s about to double down on the whole being set in 1999 thing.

: “Yeah, I work at this shitty video store, Planet VHS. We can get you any movie six to twelve months after its continental U.S. release on VHS. So basically, we suck.”

: “Any plans for college or anything?”

: “I don’t know if college is really in the cards for me.”

: “Why do you say that?”

: “Well, after my sister died, my parents aren’t really themselves. They’ve had a rocky relationship as it is. So I think if I left, everything would fall apart.”

: “But that’s not your job. You don’t have to keep your parents together.”

: “Do either of you have jobs?”

: “I used to deliver papers, but nothing lately. Now my dad pays me to proofread the things he writes.”

: Here’s what I really hate about this cutscene. They’ve already used a lot of words, and we’ve learned surprisingly little. I feel like Andrew Allanson must’ve had a motivational poster on his wall reading “TELL, DON’T SHOW” or something.

: “Oh yeah, and Alex is unemployed.”

: “I might be able to get you a job at Planet VHS.”

: “Oh yeah. No, I’m good. I’m just holding out for the right job. I’m not really in a rush.”

: “Didn’t you tell me on the way that your mom lost her job and you needed to help her out?”

: Wait, wha- did they just… did they just summarize to almost avoid repeating a plot point we’ve already known about? My god. Why couldn’t they have done this FOR THIS ENTIRE FUCKING CUTSCENE?

: “I think she was just saying that. But I know she wouldn’t want to push me into anything I’m not ready for.”

: “Did you go to college?”

: “Yeah, I graduated earlier this year. I have my B.L.A.”

: I have never heard anyone refer to a degree that way in casual conversation. It’s an actual term - Bachelor of Liberal Arts - but still.

: I wish I had kept a count of typos in the script, but that’s at least the third one I’ve noticed.

: “I’ll find something. I just need to hold out a bit longer til it feels right.”

: “Jetset City” is obviously a stand-in for Jersey City. I’d look up whether Frankton is a stand-in name for an actual place in New Jersey, but I’m too lazy.

: I’m not exaggerating. I didn’t want to remember any of it. It was so pathetic.The more I thought about my life up to then, the more I hated myself."

: “It wasn’t that I hadn’t been happy or hadn’t enjoyed my high school experience. I could recall a handful of really great times. But if you added them up, the shameful, painful memories far outnumbered the others.”

: “When I thought of how I’d been living, how I’d been approaching life, it was all so trite, so miserably pointless. When I made it to college, I knew this was a time for reinvention.”

: “All I needed to do was imagine the Alex I wanted to be and work towards him. Forget the old Alex and be someone worth being.”

: God, he is such a fucking tool! And the thing is, I don’t think the devs were doing this in a way that was like “Oh, that’s how you’re meant to see it, he’s supposed to be that way”, they probably thought it was actually good writing! Fuck!

: “So anyway, I got to college. Made friends with people I never thought I’d hang out with, got interested in poetry, started listening to Dylan.”

: “I was in with the hip crowd, but being hip doesn’t mean you have direction. That isn’t to say some of the kids I met weren’t going places and I hear many of them did.”

: Okay, so we’re at a train station that we apparently took the bus to? This looks way too anime. Let’s just take a break and grab that trash can and…

: Nope! The game forces us straight into another cutscene.

: “Yeah. I am.”

: “You don’t sound so excited!”

: “It’s just scary. Not the leaving home part, I don’t care about that. But you have four years to ensure that you have a future. That’s a lot of pressure isn’t it?”

: “When my parents were kids, you didn’t HAVE to go to college. I bet, in 10 years, you’ll need your master’s to even be considered for a job.”

: “I’m also scared of the debt, you know?”

: “Did your parents set up a college fund?”

: “Nah. They didn’t really have that kind of money. They did good for a while, but my dad’s work hasn’t been going so well.”

: “Do you know what you want to go for?”

: “It’s 1999 and the economy is terrible compared to my parents’ day.”

: The economy was actually good in 1999 due to the fact that the dot-com bubble was still a thing. Even after the bubble popped, nothing was really that bad until the financial meltdown in 2007.

: “Imagine what it will be like for our kids’ kids if we don’t get our shit together.”

: This reminds me of that one page in the Doom comic.

: “Yeah, it’s scary. But you need to face that reality eventually. What are you leaning towards?”

: “Computers, probably. Maybe I’ll make computer games.”

: OH! Michael’s a self-insert too. I hadn’t realized.

: “Huh. I have no idea. I wonder if they have to translate programming languages.”

: “They don’t. All programming is done in English, unless you’re working in pure binary. Then you have just ones and zeroes.”

: 01010100 01001000 01001001 01010011 00100000 01000111 01000001 01001101 01000101 00100000 01010011 01010101 01011000

: “How do you know this?”

: “Oh yeah. I’ve tried making games before. I used Objective C. It’s pretty fun. Not great at making graphics, but I’m getting there.”

: Just going to skip the next five textboxes because even the game admits they’re pointless.

: This part is particularly fucking egregious. See how there’s stores here? We can’t go in any of them until we’ve gone to Burger Joint. You can’t see it very well, but right next to the “Toys & Sports” store is the Planet VHS Rory ostensibly works at. Worse, after we do the Burger Joint cutscene, we STILL can’t go in any of the stores except the Record Stop next door.

: “Michael, concerned about the future. Rory, who had something to aspire to.”

: “At the time I told myself I had a purpose: I was looking for Semi Pak. I was going to find her, save her, I don’t know. Something was going to happen. Somehow there would be meaning in all this craziness.”

: I really can’t think of anything more exciting you could do in a game than watch people make uncomfortable small talk.

: “Yeah.”

: “Really seems like the world is going to shit, doesn’t it? First Alex loses Sammy, I lose Carrie, the economy is tanking. Future looks bleak in 1999, boys.”

: By mid-1999, local news stations would run shit about Y2K all the time. It was 1999’s equivalent of those days where they have the weather guy standing on the tarmac at the airport so they can say there’s a heat wave. The fact that this is the first time they even mention the thing their game is named after, and that they do it in a completely irrelevant small-talk segment, does not bode well.

: “This will cause various problems with dates and finances, and will probably cause a big mess. People all over the world are panicking.”

: So, let’s talk about the real Y2K ‘crisis’ for a bit. It wasn’t really a crisis. The problem had been thought about for years before 1999, and by 1998 the U.S. government had an entire task force devoted to solving any Y2K-related issues before they popped up. It got to the point where there was even an international body called the International Y2K Cooperation Center that formed specifically to address this problem.

: Most private organizations that had systems that might’ve been effected had long since patched it or found workarounds by the time January 2000 hit. By the time all was said and done, according to the BBC over $300 billion had been spent globally to mitigate Y2K.

: So, did anything actually happen? Not really. Wikipedia has a list of possible Y2K bugs, and the worst was a minor issue at a nuclear plant in Japan that may not have even had anything to do with Y2K in the first place. In fact, there’s a lot of people who argue that the entire Y2K taskforce was a gigantic waste of money because plenty of systems that hadn’t been “Y2K-prepped” never had any issues.

: Really, the only silver lining to the Y2K ‘crisis’ was that it helped mitigate the effects of 9/11.

: One other thing I found that was kind of amusing was that apparently, there was a miniature “Y2k10” crisis in Germany revolving around a credit card system not being able to handle a date of 01/01/2010.

: “What’s wrong with you guys?! That could cause serious problems! This is crazy. How have I never heard of this before?”

: “Probably because you live under a posh little rock and only hear about the things your mommy wants you to hear about.”

: “Screw you, man.”

: “Maybe that’s why everything is going to shit. Maybe the world will end in the year 2000, we’ll all die, and our souls will float up into the Soul Space.”

: Maybe I died in 2000 and this is what hell looks like.

: “Could you imagine?”

: “Do you really think Y2K could have something to do with Sammy’s disappearance?”

: “No, I mean, that’s a computer problem, right? But then again, the world does feel like it’s falling apart - all that war and what not overseas.”

: “What wars?”

: I really, really don’t get where the fuck this conversation is going, or why they’re having it, or really anything at this point. My brain shut off like thirty text boxes ago. I also took the liberty of fact-checking this, because at this point doing research is less boring than this game is. All of them check out, but with the time skip the Kosovo War would either already be over or be very close to being over - it ended in June of 1999.

: “I had no idea there were so many wars happening. What are they fighting over?”

: In order: the border between Ethiopia and Somalia, Communism, the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, separation from Yugoslavia and the persecution of the Albanians by the Serbs, the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea, and overthrowing the government of Sierra Leone but also diamonds and PMCs.

: “Isn’t that what war is usually about? War for war’s sake?”

: Who the fuck are you, Kazuhira Benedict McDonell Miller?

: “I’m so uninformed. Geeze, I used to read the newspaper in college, but now all I read is ONISM 1999.”

: I feel like this was supposed to be the setup for a stupid Family Guy style “joke”, but they never deliver.

: The record store cutscene is a whopping eleven textboxes long, and all they really needed was this one. So we’re free of the godawful cutscenes now, right? …right?

: Nope, because we need to get on the bus again!

: “There was something fun about our little quest for this record.”

: No there isn’t! No there fucking isn’t!

: “Far from my mind were the things that brought me here: Sammy’s disappearance, the entities, Vella.”

: You thought about Sammy in the fucking burger place! You know, where you just were not even minutes ago! You fucking assclown!

: “Vella - she was probably still mad at me, fuming away at her arcade, taking out her anger at me on unsuspecting tweens. I wondered why she didn’t want us to find the record.”

: “I wondered if she had some bad memories associated with it or if there was something about entities that I didn’t know My mind turned to Y2K. Could the world really end this year?”

: “If you asked me six months ago I’d have laughed at you. But now that I’d seen so much strangeness, I could honestly say that stranger things have happened.”

: Welcome to Flag Town. There’s… really not much of a point to a lot of this place. The shops sell the same stuff we can get in Frankton, and nothing new has been added to them since we left. Let’s go hit the record store.

: "Hey man. I’m looking for this record, you’ve probably never heard of it. It’s called ‘Mystical Ultima LP Legend.’ I have the jacket, but I’m missing the record.

: This is Claudio, one of the two people who will shortly be joining our party. Claudio is… quite literally a black Travis Touchdown. The thing is, he’d have to be REALLY into anime to have a shirt like that in 1999. Importing stuff from Japan was not nearly as easy as it is today. I also like how they had to rip off Travis’s shirt rather than make something even vaguely original.

: “What?! Yeah, I mean. I go on there but how did you know?”

: I kind of hate all the characters in this game for being badly written, but Claudio has one thing going for him: he uses an actual weapon… even if it’s a katana.

: “I’m guessing it wasn’t you who posted it then, was it? Haven’t you checked the forum today? Someone posted a photo of this record jacket, and they’ve been asking people if they have a copy. They said it has to do with Semi Pak’s disappearance.”

: Typo counter: at least 5 that I know of.

: “I go on the forum too, obviously. Yeah, I’ve been following Semi’s story for a while. But aren’t you the guy who posted the photos of her last known location?”

: “I am. But – wow-- it’s just-- I had no idea anyone around here even knew about Semi. I’m just shocked.”

: RIP punctuation.

: “I’m Alex. This is Michael, he is the one who took the photos. This guy here is Rory. He also lurks on ONISM.”

: “Great. So you’re looking for Mystical LP, huh? Well, sorry we don’t got it.”

: sigh

: “But I do know where you can get it! It’s going to sound a bit odd. Hell, you know what? I’ll come with you. I own this stupid place, I can take a break whenever I want.”

: “Yeah, we’re down. Where do we go?”

: “He’s a really chill guy, a bit out there, but he has the biggest record collection on the east coast. He’s bound to have it!! Let me just grab my sister.”

: Gotta love how they go ahead and repeat shit we’ve already heard IN THIS SAME FUCKING CONVERSATION.

: The menu is now a clusterfuck. The four people on the left are our active battle party. I immediately dumped Rory for Chondra, because she has an actual attack. However… let’s talk about what happened when I tried to equip Claudio and Chondra.

: “Timrod,” I say to myself, “You should probably get some battle footage with Claudio and Chondra, and maybe show off their stats to cap off what is otherwise going to be an entire update of nothing but cutscenes.”

: First, I went and explored the town. Flag Town is very big, in that it’s bigger than Frankton, but also very empty in that the only “hidden” chest is in this dipshit maze over here. It’s a pog.

: Then, I say to myself “I’ve been pretty stingy with money, but we’re fucking loaded. Let’s go get some proper equipment for the new party members because we have none.” What you’re looking at right here is a softlock.

Apparently, the game has a bug where if you are within interaction range of an NPC that brings up a menu (basically any shop owner) and attempt to open the main menu to, say, equip your characters and take a look at their stats, the game stores the menu state and then locks up if you hit F2 (the menu key) again. I got a video of this. You’ll notice menu sounds - that’s me pressing buttons. I took this as a sign from the gods that this update would not in fact be the update where I show off any actual gameplay.

: I’m going to end the update on that softlock, but here’s something that also pissed me off. See these? This is the equipment store’s loadout right now - the only things missing are the default weapons for Claudio and Chondra, which aren’t visible. They sell flip-flops THAT DO FUCKING NOTHING. JUST LIKE THIS GODDAMN GAME. IT’S LIKE A FUCKING METAPHOR!

Next time, we’ll head to the mountain and hopefully get some actual gameplay in, and not softlock a third time this game.

[Chowder]

You notice that the game is setting Alex up to be a victim here? I’m not just talking about the part of last update where he’s trying to guilt trip Vella for having the temerity to be mad at him for being a complete and utter fuckchimp. I’m talking about how all Vella will actually say about The Quest For The Cursed Long Play is “don’t do it I swear to God” several times over before she finally loses her temper and tells him to make like a tree and fuck off. This way, when this inevitably blows up, it will be Vella’s fault for being an irrational bitch, and not Alex’s for ignoring an extremely strong and clear warning.

In a better game she would have told him straight up and Alex would have had a compelling reason to consider ignoring her anyway but that’s kinda the rub now isn’t it. This game was MADE to have someone like Niosi in the starring role.

[RJWaters2]

01010100 01001000 01001001 01010011 00100000 01000111 01000001 01001101 01000101 00100000 01010011 01010101 01011000

01001100 01001111 01001100

[Timrod]

You notice that the game is setting Alex up to be a victim here? I’m not just talking about the part of last update where he’s trying to guilt trip Vella for having the temerity to be mad at him for being a complete and utter fuckchimp. I’m talking about how all Vella will actually say about The Quest For The Cursed Long Play is “don’t do it I swear to God” several times over before she finally loses her temper and tells him to make like a tree and fuck off. This way, when this inevitably blows up, it will be Vella’s fault for being an irrational bitch, and not Alex’s for ignoring an extremely strong and clear warning.

In a better game she would have told him straight up and Alex would have had a compelling reason to consider ignoring her anyway but that’s kinda the rub now isn’t it. This game was MADE to have someone like Niosi in the starring role.

Oh, I absolutely do. I have to wonder if Niosi had some kind of input on the character, since that’s a thing that has happened at larger studios - I know as an example that JK Simmons had some issues with the script Valve made for Portal 2 and outright refused to read some of the lines because they sounded too creepy. Sure, Niosi doesn’t have anywhere near the pull JK Simmons does (especially now) but when he’s a relatively big-name voiceactor working with a studio consisting of two chucklefucks whose claim to fame was some indie game no one ever played I can imagine him having the pull to get script changes made.

I think what this game really shows is why it’s important to have a diverse audience of beta testers, even if you’re a small studio and have to rely on giving copies away to people because you don’t have the money to pay full-time testers.

[Timrod]

: Now that we’ve managed to avoid softlocking the game yet again, let’s check out Chondra and Claudio in battle.

: Claudio has the highest HP and strength stat by far of anyone in the party. He’s… also somehow less useful than Vella was when we had her. Chondra has a higher strength score than Alex but does about 1/5th of his damage.

: This is the world map near Flag Town. To the right is a burger store, which sells nothing we need.

: The blue house is an internet cafe, which conveniently has a healing spot inside of it. You can access ONISM to pick up a couple of sidequests, but I don’t think we can do any of them right now.

: There are… several monster dens near Flag Town, but the EXP they give is jack shit compared to those random encounters from the last update.

: Chondra… Chondra fucking sucks. She’s better than Rory, but only because Rory can’t attack. Her gimmick is that she has four stances and the ability to spread items across the party.

: Devil Stance outright fucking kills one of your party members, and also costs a bunch of Chondra’s HP and PP to boost her damage from maybe like, ten with a max combo to… around fifteen. Still well short of Alex and Michael.

Strong Stance costs HP, and Wild Stance costs PP with each attack.

: This is Chondra’s QTE. The hula hoop has a hand on it, and the hand will touch an icon on the left or right which has a random button on it. Now, here’s the shit part of this. Missing an input will SET YOUR COMBO TO ZERO, causing you to automatically miss your attack.

: In contrast, Claudio is much easier to hit with, but his damage… still isn’t great.

: His QTE is a bastardized version of the power meter from Neo Turf Masters. If you manage to hit the green line, Claudio attacks all enemies instead of just one for a bit more damage. You know what I want? I want a Neo Turf Masters RPG.

: In contrast, I can routinely hit for 20+ damage using Alex’s attack.

: One thing I haven’t shown off is that this game has an assist mode. You can turn it on, and it will give you infinite time energy. Given how bad Chondra’s attack is even at max combo, I might consider using this if we run into another Golden Alpaca level boss fight (and I’m sure we will) just to maximize damage assuming we don’t get Vella back before the next boss. Correction: by the time I recorded the dungeon coming up, I turned that shit on and never looked back.

: There’s a couple of other locations we can visit now, including the place where Alex presumably went to college, the news station Semi worked for, and a mall that has fuck-all in it except a healing item store and a pog.

“Usually it’s so quiet here. Any ideas, Claudio?”

: “Well… there may or may not have been a post on ONISM about a ghost sighting nearby.”

: “Oh yeah, I saw that. Some people said the ghost of Semi Pak was haunting the cave nearby.”

: “SAMMY?!”

: I wonder what Alex’s codename would be if he somehow got into MSF or Diamond Dogs. Whining Panda? Douchebag Duck?

: “I really doubt it’s her… one of the commenters on the post said it was his sister, who was haunting a cassette tape, or something. Personally, if you want to details I’d just check ONISM.”

: What this is supposed to be is an intro to the game’s sidequests, which are hidden in ONISM posts. I didn’t even know about these until I looked up how to solve one of the puzzles in the dungeon and someone mentioned it on the Steam boards.

: “We need to check it out. If it’s Sammy, I need to know.”

: To get to the cave itself, we need to go through Mount Town until we reach the northern exit. There’s a bunch of fuckheads wearing proton packs and some vending machines, and that’s about all there is in Mount Town.

: The chests contain healing items and money, which we’re going to need because of how badly designed this dungeon is.

: I figured that guy would be a Pokemon reference and fight you, but he isn’t.

: There is, however, a bridge that needs to be lowered.

: The solution is easy: climb up here, and then use Dali to hit the switch.

: Past the bridge, we have a single enemy encounter of two bats and a shitpile that awards an amazing 11 EXP. We also have this sign, which is one of the reasons this dungeon is very badly designed. This pink shit is the same stuff we saw outside the factory: it’ll do damage every second we’re in it, even if we’re not moving.

: A lot of people apparently didn’t bother reading that last part, because the developers have an FAQ on the Steam forum for this game telling you that you have to run through the shit to progress. This is BLATANTLY lifted from Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne which had multiple dungeons like this, usually followed by a bullshit boss fight.

: To get to the stairs, we need to take two hits minimum from the pink shit. That’s about 2-3 damage.

: The next floor has a hidden chest up here with nothing good in it, and an enemy directly in front of a long path of pink shit. This is where a lot of people apparently got tripped up - we need to wade through the pink shit to get a key.

: The encounter contains a new enemy: the Stop Sign Man, which is basically a rat but tankier.

: The enemies here hit like trucks, doing as much as 8 or 9 damage on a successful defend. Combine that with the damage from the pink shit, and I wound up leaving at one point to go find a healing fountain. Yes, I could use healing items… but fuck that.

: I also had to level up Alex because of how bad our damage is right now. I was holding out hoping we’d run into more Soul Survivors, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen anytime soon. There’s another cutscene on Floor 20 of the Mind Dungeon. I’m not posting the whole thing, as it is… 17 mostly full textboxes long.

: On the other side of the room from the pink shit is a wall we can blow up with Amp. This dungeon abuses the FUCK out of both Amp and Hairwhip for no good reason.

: The next floor has an immediate battle, so I wanted to show off one of the new skills we got: EP Strike. We also got a useless ability for Rory and the Final Fantasy “Throw” command for Chondra. An achievement popped up letting me know I had all the skills, so we have all the skills now - meaning that my guess is we’re not getting any more party members.

: EP strike is some bullshit. Without assist mode, it’s not terribly hard to hit the red area, but it’s annoying as hell if you miss.

: Here, we have a split in the path. To the right are a couple of hairwhip trees blocking the way to the next floor. To the north is a giant field of bullshit that will probably reduce your entire party to 1HP.

: There’s two doors. The one on the left is a bunch of chests, four of which contain healing items. The last one is a Camo Jacket but you have to go through more pink shit to get it.

: The one on the right is a puzzle, which we can’t fully solve right now… at least I’m pretty sure. The idea is you blow everything up - the trees have switches underneath them that you can put Panda on to lower one of the three gates.

: There’s also three levers that lower the bars halfway, so you can get whichever one Panda is sitting on the switch for. This room is also really badly designed. You’d think that we’d need to be on the lower level where Alex is to grab the chests, but Dali won’t reach them from there. I thought you had to drop down from a different room (a mechanic we’ll be seeing shortly) to get them, but instead you have to just do it from the upper level.

: The chest on the left and right aren’t important, but the center one has a camera for Michael that is a straight upgrade even to the ones we could’ve gotten from the camera store.

: Now, here’s the thing. I actually wound up almost game overing and thus re-recorded this part. You don’t want to go up to those rooms with the chests just yet. Instead, you’re going to want to go back to the internet cafe, heal, and come back, then go this way first.

: This room looks like it’s got a lot going on, but really it’s fairly simple but also BULLSHIT FUCKING REPETITIVE. You’ll notice there’s a switch in the bottom-right. We can’t reach that with Dali (actually, I’m pretty sure you could) and if we drop down, there’s no way back up.

: Down below is a monster fight. There’s only one of these in this room.

: This is, I believe, the only time we’ll encounter Traffic Cone Monsters in this dungeon. Traffic Cone Monsters, which are absolutely not a ripoff of the Putrid Moldyman from Earthbound, are a complete pain in the ass. Their attacks are dodgeable, but they have… a fuckload of HP. The trick here is to get rid of the alien first, not because it’ll do much (it does maybe 2 damage) but because it has that unblockable party-wide attack that is fucking annoying as shit to sit through.

: This right here? This is why I said make sure you do this part first and go out and heal. I came in here with 1HP on the entire party the first time because I’m fairly good at dodging and Alex was able to kill the alien before it could use its unblockable attack. The chest on the left has a healing item. The chest in the middle has a dungeon key we need to progress. The one on the right?

: The one on the right’s a fucking mimic.

: The mimic is a miniboss with as much, if not more, health than the Golden Alpaca had. While it only possesses one single-target attack, that attack is undodgeable and will hit for 7+ damage even if you make the QTE.

: This is after I had Alex use EP Strike, which did 46 damage to it. EP Strike will pretty much oneshot any regular enemy, so this is how much HP the mimic has.

: I also decided to use this time to show off Claudio’s only skill: Bushido.

: Bushido’s deal is that after a three-second countdown (in Japanese, of course), the game will give you a directional button to press. If you miss even one, the entire attack fails.

: I hit all the prompts I could and it still only did like 20 damage, which is about the same as Claudio’s regular attack if we hit the green zone on his attack QTE. By the way, 17.25 seconds feels like FOREVER. Really, the strategy here is to have Alex use EP Strike every turn and have everyone else use regular attacks.

: This battle gives the entire party a full level-up. Why do we give a shit? Because levelling up also refills your HP and PP. Granted, you could also go into battle and have Chondra use Spread Item (which stupidly enough she can’t use outside of combat) a few times, but this is easier.

: The Mimic also drops a walking stick, an accessory that boosts PP by… 5 I think. Equipment comparison in this game sucks.

: More unavoidable pink shit and two ladder animations we’ll have to see multiple times later…

: The chest has another collectible pog in it. Once we clear the area out, you’ll notice that there’s three holes. We have to do the whole “walk through pink shit, climb two ladders” routine a total of three times, because this game is shit and it knows it.

: The first time, we land on the southern pillar and can hit the second switch.

: I have absolutely no idea why the developer thought that they needed to make you do this twice. Did they think people would find one hole but not the other somehow, even though they’re mere inches apart?

: Anyway, the third hole lets us cross the bridge and go back to the room we came from.

: Oh look, more unavoidable pink shit. In fact, apart from that one square of it in the room with the camo jacket (which we technically didn’t need to pass as we could’ve used Dali) I don’t think any of the damage floors in this dungeon are optional. Fuck this game.

: Directly on the other side is an encounter with another new enemy type: the sheep man. Sheepmen are basically tankier aliens - you’ll want to LP Toss and/or EP Strike them to death before they use their undodgeable attack.

: An empty room, and a room with a couple of vending machines in it. Something tells me we’re in for a boss fight and…

: God dammit! I mean, the gameplay part of this sucked, but god dammit! The worst part is, this cutscene is totally fucking pointless!

: “So how did you get interested in the disappearance of Sammy Pak?”

: “Can we not get into that now? I’m sick of hearing about that poor girl.”

: “Easy, Chondra. I’ve been interested in missing people for a while. The idea of people vanishing is something that hits close to home, you know?”

: “So, I started going in chat rooms for people with missing kids and someone on there was talking about Sammy Pak. I followed the link and it brought me to the ONISM 1999 post - the one with the video of her on the elevator. I kept going back each day and keeping up with what you guys posted.”

: “That’s a little dark, isn’t it? Going on chat rooms for parents of missing kids.”

: “Oh, no I don’t, like, get off on it or anything. My little brother went missing when we were younger. I guess I still wonder if he’s out there.”

: “Okay. Let’s go see the Wizard. I don’t want to hear any more about missing kids. It really drains me.”

: If this was where the cutscene ended, I’d be fine with that. It sort of establishes a character motivation for Claudio, even if it’s a little weak. The thing is…

: Fuck you, Rory!

: “Most guys aren’t brave enough to walk around in a shirt like that. Also, you know that’s a girl’s shirt right?”

: You’re saying this to the guy who I’m pretty sure is wearing lipstick.

: “This is no more a ‘girls’ shirt than Mahou Shoujo Haru no Shimai is a ‘girls anime’! This show represents everything that is good about life.”

: “Oh, well, I’ve never seen it. I just uh, assumed it was a girls’ anime with all the exploding flowers, pink and Sailor Moon rip-off characters.”

: I don’t think you can call something a ripoff when you plagiarize an article about the composition of the human body.

: You know what, Claudio strikes me as the kind of person who posts on 4chan’s music board about “essential patriciancore” and insists that Neutral Milk Hotel is the be all and end all of music.

: “Without this series, the art form never would have progressed. You see, while the anime premiered in 1985 in the US, there were already episodes of this magical series in production, in Japan, in 1977.”

: One thing I realized right away while recording is that the dates for this more or less line up with Shin Lupin III (“Red Jacket”) which in reality WAS a pretty major influence on anime as a whole. Why they didn’t just go with a Lupin ripoff is beyond me. Probably because it would’ve required effort.

: I’d also like to point out that magical girls as a genre have existed since 1966. I think it’d be pretty hard to say that Sailor Moon was inspired by any one work, especially given that it’s almost a completely different genre than earlier stuff. You can thank the guy on my twitter who posts about nothing but magical girls for that.

: Again, this would absolutely be Lupin III he’s talking about - not so much the TV show (which was rushed out on a weekly basis for like 3 years) but definitely Castle of Cagliostro.

: “If Father Spring had never laid with a human woman, the world would have been destroyed time and time again by his evil daughters, the Winter Sisters! It’s the balance of humanity that allows them to control their powers. And don’t even get me started on the soundtrack.”

: “The amazing blend of funky jazz and Japanese pop blows my mind every single time!!”

: This is pissing me off so much. What they’re talking about is the original OP for Shin Lupin III, which I can’t fucking find anywhere and it pisses me off.

: Here’s an overview of the next room. I’m not going to go through most of it, simply because it’s really straightforward and a time waster. You have to extend the bridges so you can drop down to the lower level.

: This bridge is particularly bad because you can’t see it from where you have to stand to launch Dali at it.

: Once you’ve done all that, there’s a rock you can bomb to get a switch that opens half a bridge we need to progress.

: There’s also another mimic in the bottom-left corner. This one drops an “Occupy Bank Street” sign for Rory, which we will never use because fuck Rory.

: Oh, and guess what! SOFTLOCK NUMBER THREE! I forgot to save after recording most of this, and went back through real quick… and softlocked after climbing a ladder. As it turns out, if you’re playing the game in windowed mode and click anywhere outside of the window, the game will probably softlock. Anyway, once you kill the mimic I highly recommend using the free level-up it gives to heal everyone.

: The third lever is up here, by the bridge. There’s two bullshit enemy encounters down here - they’re just regular enemies with super-pumped stats to the point where one of them hit Chondra for 16 damage even though I made the defend QTE. You might ask why I’m glossing over this part, and friend, it’s because this game’s writing is about to take a fucking nosedive.

: Surprisingly, neither of the chests in here are mimics. They have… cash and healing items. So clearly, there HAS to be a boss through there… right?

: You can’t hear it, but the same music that played in Sammy’s area in the factory is playing here.

: Oh fuck, an anime ghost! Somebody grab a fucking proton pack, we have to kill it before it can spread!

: “Oh, shit. I didn’t expect this…”

: Surprise, motherfucker! It’s another cutscene! Boss? What boss, there is no boss in this dungeon.

: “Is that her!? Is that Sammy Pak!?”

: “NO! No, it’s not.”

: “But, then I thought about the spirit of the ghost woman in front of me. I realized that there was someone out there missing her, just as much as I was missing Sammy.”

: So, it was about this moment that I realized that I know what the fuck this game is going to pull simply by the fact that it’s playing the same music. Sammy is fucking dead, and what we met was her ghost. I don’t know this for sure, but at the same time it’s so incredibly predictable.

: “Someone out there lost this girl. She was someone’s daughter, or sister, or friend…”

: Yes! Yes I fucking can! You’re an asshole!

: “She’s a ghost. How much harm can she really do?”

: “So, what do we do now that we’ve found her?”

: “I think we should talk to her. See why she’s here.”

: I don’t know what song this is they’re quoting, and I’m guessing I should probably be glad for that. Edit: I looked it up and of course it’s fucking Ace of Base. Why wouldn’t it be?

: “Hi… I’m Alex… this is Rory, and Claudio. Are you okay?”

: She’s fucking dead, you dipshit!

: Is that… did that fucking ghost just quote fucking Wndrwll? They’re aware Neil Cicierega didn’t write that song until like, 2013, right? Moreover, how do you go from Ace of Base to Neil Cicierega? I don’t think he’s ever sampled from them. Anyway, it’s not in their bibliography so I’m gonna go ahead and say it’s plagiarism.

In fact, please just play this for the remainder of this cutscene.

: “Why are you here?”

: This could practically be a tagline for this entire game. “YIIK: Shit, I feel stupid.”

: “Guys, what the hell am I supposed to say to a freakin’ ghost?”

: “You’re doing fine. Just keep talking. You’ll make a connection… I hope.”

: “Why are you here? In this cave? Why aren’t you… moving on? Is that a thing guys, do ghosts ‘move on’?”

: Correction. “YIIK: Shit, I feel stupid: I honestly feel like I’m just plagiarizing movies at this point.”

: Fuck this game for trying to resurrect that shit song.

: “Are you haunting that boombox? Guys, I think she’s haunting the boombox.”

: “You’re my…”

: Honestly, I was too busy laughing at just how badly my life had spiralled out of control that I’m watching a scene that is ostensibly supposed to be serious with a ghost fucking quoting Wndrwll at me. I mean, imagine if, say, Nier Automata had Wndrwll play over Ending C or D instead of Weight of the World. Unfortunately, I didn’t want to do that because there’s people who probably haven’t played Automata yet, so have one of the original NieR instead (NieR video credit: The Dark Id). Unmute the bottom video first, then hit play.

https://viewsync.net/watch?v=zkRwcc1O3Fo&t=0&v=3yQFebRcznA&t=3

: “He was supposed to be my… boyfriend. I made you this mixtape. I made it, and gave you everything.”

: Here, we see the rare female Reginald in action. I never thought I’d have to post that comic in a second LP. Also, this would ABSOLUTELY be Alton’s girlfriend if she was in Why Am I Dead At Sea.

: “You forgot about our date… I ran across the street when I saw you. I was so excited to throw my arms around you… and what did you do when you hear me shout your name?”

: “What did SHE have that I didn’t have? I made you… this… stupid… mixtape… I was never good at talking. I can’t say things like you can say things.”

: “So I thought… I thought maybe these stupid songs would make you know how I felt. But… you didn’t want me for me.”

: Gotta love how they crammed another pointless 90’s song reference in there, this time to a song I did not know is called “Hey Leonardo”.

: “You were so cruel… you didn’t even stop when the car brakes screeched, and my body hit the asphalt. When the red from my head poured onto the ground, and everyone screamed. I was invisible to you. I was… dead.”

: “This mixtape was for you. Wherever you are… I know if you could just hear it, I could be at peace. You would be able to feel the pain you caused me. Feel how much I loved you.”

: You know, I’d probably do the same thing if someone handed me a fucking mixtape with Wonderwall on it.

: Poor girl…"

: “… I wonder what we should do with it.”

: “Way I see it, we have two options. We can give it to that Shane Irving guy, or… we can return it to her brother who posted on ONISM.”

: “I don’t know what’s right. On one hand, her brother really wants his sister’s cassette back. And on the other, what if we give Shane Irving the cassette and she just haunts him for all eternity? What if that revenge doesn’t bring her peace?”

: This sounds a hell of a lot like that quest in Witcher 3 with the ghost on the island.

: I think that’s about all I can stomach of this game for right now, so I’ll skip the other six textboxes. Next time, we’ll start with a lengthy and equally stupid cutscene, and then finish this sidequest. I’ll do both solutions, so there’s no need to vote or anything.

[Timrod]

: We’ve got a very lengthy cutscene coming up, so I figured what I’d show first is finishing the sidequest. There’s two solutions to it: you can either deliver it to a guy in South Town, or deliver it to an identical guy standing outside the university. As it turns out, the cutscenes are basically the same save for one detail.

: As with everything else in this game, the cutscene is stupidly overwritten, so I’ll pare it down a bit.

: “She wanted you to have this.”

: The reward for finishing it the other way is identical, only her “soul is finally free”. Whatever. This will bring our party up to level 25 - though I could go higher if I felt like clearing out all the monster dens.

: Back outside of the tunnel dungeon, we find a single cabin on top of the mountain. As it turns out, I’m pretty sure you can’t come back here without going through the whole dungeon again. There’s a few chests around with money in them.

: Strangely, the game starts using this other chest model and I don’t know why.

: I know this is supposed to be based off some celebrity, only I don’t know who.

: “And Chondra, did you get even more beautiful? Always changing for the better, you two.”

: “I brought my friends Alex, Michael, and Rory, with me. They wanted to check out your record collection and see if you could help them locate an album.”

: I like how they not only do an Oxford comma in that last line, but add one after Rory for no apparent reason.

: Thanks for reiterating that, Claudio, I might’ve forgotten the plot thread we’ve been following for the last hour.

: “We’ve been looking for it for a while… we’ve been to literally ten record shops. Claudio says you’ve got quite the collection?”

: “I do indeed. So what sort of music interests young people these days?”

: “Err… I mean, I’m not really into metal. I mean, it’s cool.”

: “That’s more of Vella’s thing I think… with the eyeliner and choker.”

: “Who is this enchanting young woman…? Is she here as well?”

: “Nah, she isn’t here. She threw a hissy fit when she found out we were looking for this record.”

: “Hissy fit…? Do people even say that?”

: Mark sounds like a creep, but also no, the last time I heard someone say hissy fit it was a 60+ year old elementary school teacher.

: “I don’t believe they do. So what sort of music are you into, Alex?”

: I have absolutely no idea what the fuck he’s talking about.

: “Ah, I don’t think I have anything like that. Perhaps you’ve noticed my collection of guitars?”

: “Yeah, I think I saw it on my way in. Do you play?”

: “I do.”

: What I like about this is how the Allansons were either on too tight of a budget or maybe were just too lazy to get the artist who did the portraits for this to do one of Chondra where she’s not doing a weird arm stretch thing.

: “That was long before you could even walk. Hell, I was a kid then.”

: “THE POWER OF METAL UNITES ALL.”

: “You see, heavy metal is the aural manifestation of all things good and powerful in this world.”

: This sounds like a line they probably ripped from that Metalocalypse show or whatever. I never watched any of that.

: Uh… what?

: “With the power of the metal gods channeling through my guitar strings, I was able to bring peace and prosperity to the Middle East!”

: “Well, he got our cousin home.”

: “Yes, I did. Okay, I got ahead of myself. I brought peace to one family, whose son had been taken captive. It’s a harrowing tale filled with adventure and intrigue!”

: I hate Mark so fucking much. I didn’t think it was possible to be a bigger tool than Alex, but clearly I was wrong.

: “Yeah, I don’t know if we really have time for that… and besides, like I said, I’m not really all that into metal. With all the… bad fashions… and… teased hair. It’s all so… '80s.”

: Yes, this is the 90s, when music was about things.

: “Yeah, I’m going to pretend that you don’t mean to imply that heavy metal can’t be about things. Clearly you have never heard the soaring scream of the guitar paired in a perfect counterpart to an orchestra, accompanied by the sound of a trillion angels.”

: “You, my dear boy, must listen to my greatest hit: 'Murder Run: … and Melancholia Reigns Unbroken.”

: “It’s a lot less depressing than it sounds. All of Mark’s music is like that. He has albums and albums filled with skeletons and decaying corpses, but somehow he manages to make music that speaks to the soul.”

: You might ask where they’re going with all this, and the answer is absolutely fucking nowhere. In fact, this entire cutscene is about to drop in relevance again.

: “One of Mark’s tracks were featured in some pretty great animes!”

: No, I’m not having a stroke, the grammar in that last sentence makes no sense.

: “Dragon of Thy Delusion and Powered by Delirium were featured in my second-favorite anime Panic! Control.”

: Why. Just why.

: “This is something I only bring out when friends are over. It’s called Da Hong Pao. It’s a world-famous tea, exceptionally rare and difficult to come by.”

: I sure do love repeating things with slightly different phrasing in the same sentence.

: “The bushes that produced this tea are reportedly over 1,000 years old. Make sure you don’t spill a drop. This is very special tea.”

: This reminds me of a scene in The Water Margin where a couple of the protagonists are at an inn and complimenting the owner on her meat dumplings only to find out that she’s a cannibal.

: “Where did you get this? It’s amazing.”

: “It is amazing right? Can’t explain to you in detail how all these circumstances are related. It would be a very long, and very complicated story. And I mean no disrespect to you when I say this, it would be virtually impossible for you at this stage, young man, to understand.”

: Great! Way to pivot and end this stupid off-topic conversation that has no bearing on the plot of the game. Just what I like to see-

: Nope, he’s gonna fucking do it anyway! Fuck you, Andrew Allanson! Prepare for something that sounds like it came out of a Rudyard Kipling novel published in 1914.

: “I had a partner, a very good man, who became ill in his mid-thirties. At the time, I considered myself to be very worldly. I lived for the dirt under my feet, but I also did not believe in the supernatural in any form.”

: “Alas, my partner came down with a severe stomach cancer that began to claim his life. He was a spiritual man, one might say, and he believed in miracles. His faith and failing body led to the ending of our friendship.”

: Oh, phew. For a minute, I thought they might’ve written a gay character into the plot, but they sure dodged that bullet.

: “He was gone for many weeks when I received a letter from him. The letter was scribbled in the handwriting of a dying man. It featured coordinates, that upon further inspection in my atlas, proved to be in the mountains of India. So I began my journey.”

: “At the top, I found my friend - my friend, who only a few weeks ago had been on the brink of death, had been cured through the power of water.”

: This story is, I’m pretty sure, stolen wholesale from… I think Roald Dahl, but I might be wrong on that. All I remember is reading a story once where the main character was British and went to India to learn of the mystic powers of yoga or some shit and was told he couldn’t use them for personal gain but then did so anyway. If I remember right it ends with him using it to stop himself having a stroke.

: “The water boiled in the particular style of pots, created by the Doddabetta Yogis, is said to have amazing healing powers. Now, when my friend had regained his strength tenfold, I was in shock.”

: “I longed to take a sample of this drink back to an American laboratory where it would be tested and ultimately turned into a cure.”

: “But I was told that the last bush bearing the tea had burnt up in a forest fire. Naturally, I demanded proof.”

: … Didn’t you just say they used water?

: “There was no evidence that any such fire ever occurred. Angered, furious, and on the point of striking the Yogis, my friend had to take me away.”

: Also, is it just me or does Mark have a Hitler moustache?

: “In India, I’ve always felt an incredible glow of joy. On our last day, before we were to return, the earth gave out beneath my feet and I was stuck.”

: “Soon a storm came. The storm was so bad I feared it would wipe away the mountain, and I would be stuck in a landslide.”

: And then what, you had to sail through the changing ocean tides and handle the seasons of your life?

: No! No, they really don’t! None of this is at all interesting! At best, you’re plagiarizing Roald Dahl. At worst, it’s fucking boring and pointless!

: I think we just found the main backer of the Juicero right here.

:“I believe I would have died on that mountain had it not been for him. I hold true to the fact that he survived his cancer so he could save me.”

: “Wow. That’s a fascinating story, man. Really, this is an amazing cup of tea.”

: “Yeah. You know, it’s valued at $3,000 an ounce.”

: choking

: Remember Michael, guys? The character who was struggling to be relevant even when he was our only party member? And here I thought Ni no Kuni 2 did a bad job keeping characters relevant.

: “So what did you kids come for? How can I help you?”

: “That name - it sounds so familiar. How did you find out about this mystical LP?”

: “I found the jacket - here, I have it with me.”

: “Yes. But didn’t you know this already? It’s on the cover. Did you even read it?”

: “I, uh–”

: “Suddenly, everything made sense. Well, at least a little bit of sense - Vella, the keytar, her ability to fight with sound. Clearly she was a musician and the creator of this record. How stupid I had been. I told her about the record and she must have assumed I’d read the title closely. Vella Wilde, probably a stage name.”

: “Did I say something wrong? You uh, kinda stopped talking there for a while, and looked all deep in thought.”

: “I just realized something.”

: The Allansons weren’t going to draw a line at ripping off Personas 3 and 4. No, they’re going to rip off Persona 5 as well. As soon as that first line comes out, the Mind Dungeon music starts playing in the background.

: “Damn. So you don’t have it?”

: “No, how could I? It hasn’t come out yet. Check the date on the back of it. See the sticker? Do not sell until January 1st, 2000. Since I’m not a time traveler - well, at least not in this life - I couldn’t possibly have this record.”

: Stop it! Stop fucking doing that!

: “You kids should pay closer attention to your record jackets. They have lots of useful information on them!”

: “Thanks a lot, Mark. I know where to find this record now.”

: “WHAT!? YOU DO!? HOW?”

: So, what’s about to follow is a pointless recap that takes… about 15 or 16 text boxes up. I’m going to skip it, because I think we’ve all had just about enough of this game repeating itself.

: “Got on his bike one day to go to our neighbor’s, seven houses up the street, and he just vanished.”

: “Never came back. We looked for him for months. Dad never stopped. Still hands out flyers at the grocery store every Sunday. He even got an artist to draw him aged.”

: “Were there ever any leads or anything?”

: “No one really ever investigated it. Sure, they looked around for him, and for a week they had a task force. They had one guy they suspected, but every lead fell through.”

: “Yeah, it’s just – it’s complicated, Alex.”

: “I don’t remember this being on the news or anything and you’re from Wind Town, right? That’s like an hour outside of Frankton. How the hell didn’t this get national coverage?”

: “Isn’t it obvious, man? Same reason no one gives a shit about Semi ‘Sammy’ Pak.”

: “I’m sure if Aaron had been a beautiful white woman, everyone would have cared that he vanished. Everyone would have had a candlelight vigil and a moment of silence, but that’s just not how these things work.”

: Or, you know, the fact that Sammy was dead the entire time.

: I’m also not really sure why Claudio and Chondra both exist as separate characters. I feel like they could’ve been combined into one.

: “Alex, don’t you think Sammy’s parents tried to get some attention for their daughter’s disappearance? It’s not that easy. Those people you see on TV are the people who can make a great story for the press.”

: This could easily be another tagline for this game. “YIIK: I don’t think I ever gave it any thought.”

: “Yeah, man. That’s just how they get away with it. People like you don’t think about it. And people like us? It’s all we ever get to think about: where our kid brothers went.”

: Typo count: 6+

: “And they aren’t really talking about it for awareness. You guys get off on it in a way, don’t you? Some fantasy about being the white knight swooping in and saving the exotic Korean girl. Phftt.”

: “Haha. Easy now. Okay okay, let’s go find this record!!! Where uh, do we do that again?”

: This turned out to be another one of those “What does Denny do?” conversations. Note that Alex hasn’t said shit about where the record is.

: “Not a day goes by where I don’t think about him. And you know what’s really funny? I don’t even remember what he looks like. We have a few old photos, but most of them he just looks like every other kid to me.”

: “Round faced, happy, playing video games or falling off a bike.”

: “You don’t remember ANYTHING about him?”

: “No, I don’t think so. I think I only remember what people tell me about him. And you know what’s funny? He was my twin brother. I was a minute older than him.”

: "Claudio still gets frustrated with me sometimes. ‘You’re his twin, can’t you feel him out there!?’ or ‘Don’t you have special twin powers that let you know if he’s in pain!?’ "

: No, because then it’d be that movie “I Know Who Killed Me” with post-drug issues Lindsay Lohan. I’ve seen parts of it.

: “I don’t believe in that stuff. Well, not usually. Sometimes I do. It’s in those moments that I really do think he isn’t out there anymore. If there was a connection, I’d feel something.”

: “And since there is nothing there, he must be gone. Sometimes people just vanish. They’re there one moment and gone the next. Bad people take them. They fall into sewers. But life has to move on.”

: “It’s harder for my parents, I think, since they made him and whatever. But Claudio? I don’t think he’ll ever move on. It’s all he thinks about.”

: …huh? Oh, I’m sorry, I must’ve fallen asleep during that goddamn shit conversation. Let’s just keep going. Maybe if I keep believing, this game will have actual gameplay and stop being the equivalent of a Neil Breen movie. By the way, we’re over seven hours into this game now.

: The fastest route to Frankton is going to Flag Town and taking the bus.

: “As I walked across the chewing gum and popcorn-covered floor, I imagined what the title of my quest would be if my life was a video game.”

: The Adventures of Dipshit Man, the Most Boring Man in the Universe.

: “Quickly it was becoming ‘Apology Quest’ or ‘Legend of Please Forgive Me’.”

: Douchebag no Densetsu: Fushigi no “Why Does this Game Exist” no Nazo.

: “I wondered how many other people I’d have to say I’m sorry to before I found Sammy, if that’s even where life was taking me.”

: Life’s taking you straight into a dumpster, where you belong.

: Lately, Sammy was not at the forefront of my thoughts. I wanted to find her, and I really wanted her to be safe."

: Typos: 7.

: “I came here to say I’m sorry. In my infinite arrogance and constant thinking of myself I didn’t look at the record properly.”

: “I had no idea you created it. I had no idea it would upset you. So basically, if you’ll still be my friend, I’d very much like that.”

: “Haha. Okay, great. I expected to do more begging.”

: “Don’t push your luck. Just let it go.”

: “They told her about their brother. Rory talked about his sister. Michael talked about his college fears. And I just listened. I never expected to find such an amazing group of friends so close to home. It was a great feeling.”

: You know what I could really go for right now? You know that scene in Hotline Miami 2 where it shows the bearded guy walking out of his store and right into a nuclear explosion? That, but with Alex.

: “And now came the tricky part - to ask her to go inside of the Mind Dungeon with me and look for the record.”

: “So, I was wondering if you could tell us about the record. The one you made.”

: “What’s there to tell? In my previous reality, I made a record. Pretty simple.”

: By the way, this DEFINITELY breaks the record for longest cutscene in this game so far. It’s well over 40 minutes long.

: “Can you tell us why a record jacket from the album you made in another reality that was set to be released next year was found in this reality?”

: It was right here that I was immediately able to predict exactly where this plot is going. Vella is from a dimension where Y2K ended the world. I haven’t read ahead in the plot, but I just know I’m right.

: “There are reasons I wanted to escape.”

: “Yeah, no, I get it. Just – I wonder if it’s somehow linked to everything going on.”

: “I’m telling you Alex, you’re looking for puzzle pieces where there is no puzzle. You’re talking like there is some cosmic plan here. What exactly do you think is going on here?”

: “It’s just – it’s all so weird. Sammy disappearing, me meeting you, then Rory, Chondra and Claudio. We’re all linked --”

: “Fine. If it will make you stop sulking, I’ll go with you into the Mind Dungeon. I’d like to know why my record is here myself.”

: “I’m a little confused here, guys. How the hell does Alex know the record is in your Mind Dungeon?”

: “Because I know she’s trying not to think about it, and the things we try not to think about always end up on our minds.”

: “That seems like more of a stretch than the link between Sammy and the record to me. But sure, I’ve got nothing else to do. Let’s get inside Vella’s head!”

We now have a choice. I levelled everyone (but Alex, because I’m hoping we can find more entities to farm for stat-ups) to 26. I’ll let the thread decide who to bring. If you really want to make me suffer, we can bring Rory and Chondra.

: In the meantime, let’s go do a little bit of scouting. I mean, how bad could it be?

: Gee, it sure is Persona 4 around here. As in, it’s a direct ripoff of the TV world.

: Okay, so far it looks… pretty much like a blatant ripoff of Persona 4, only not done nearly as well.

: There’s an NPC we can talk to by the stage, but I’ll wait until next time for that. Let’s just keep going left.

: FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK! Not only do I hate the fact that they associated VA-11 with this pile of garbage, but they have the stupid robot from Read Only Memories on there. ROM was basically the answer to the question “What if SNATCHER was shit?”

Next time, we’ll explore the TV world and attempt to find Teddie.

[Riley]

the hindsight with VA-11 HALL-A is particularly painful

I know this is supposed to be based off some celebrity, only I don’t know who.

who would be my guess too

[Chowder]

I was actually thinking Michael Bolton myself. With Kurt Cobain’s hair. Am I giving the devs too much credit for assuming it would be music-related given the context?

FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK! Not only do I hate the fact that they associated VA-11 with this pile of garbage, but they have the stupid robot from Read Only Memories on there. ROM was basically the answer to the question “What if SNATCHER was shit?”

You know what maybe your next project should be an LP of VA-11 Hall-A. The last time someone tried around here they found it as self-absorbed and thoughtless as you’re finding Yiik, and dull to boot; they had to give up partway through. Maybe someone who likes it can make it to the end, and explain why they find it engaging.

Don’t go shittin’ on ROM if you’re going to praise Valhalla though; it is certainly not without its flaws but if you said “one of these is going in the incinerator” I wouldn’t even wait for you to finish your sentence.

[Timrod]

The site ate my post edit a few times, but here’s a video version of everything that is in this update and then some.

: Vella’s Mind Dungeon is EXTREMELY badly designed, though they do exactly one neat thing in it. The first thing we want to do is talk to this assclown.

: The very first thing we want to do is come over here and drop the panda. The stage manager will give you a hint that you need to get in someone’s way. You’ll notice the Vella on a skateboard just above where Alex is. She skates around the table area on a pre-set path.

: For reference, I didn’t do this until after I had already visited all of the things that we need to do this for.

: “It’s too dangerous for me. I’m scarred for life now. Thanks for that.”

: The skateboard makes Alex move very quickly in one direction. The only problem is that he can’t stop until he hits something, but it’s pretty good for reducing travel times.

: There’s a total of nine doors in this dungeon (but not nine persons or nine hours, because that game was actually okay apart from the digital root gambit). There’s these two…

: Four over here…

: And three over here. We want to go into this red door first.

: The red door leads to a heal room, which will be very important due to how we want to handle all of the enemies in this dungeon. The chests have a new weapon for Vella and… I think money.

: The next door we want to do is this one. We only want to go halfway in right now - in the video I go all the way in which was a mistake.

: To the right is this dungeon’s gimmick: skateboard ramps. What we’re here for is behind that door.

: This is a key item we’ll need for… you can probably guess.

: This is the next door we want to handle, because it has a key item behind it and also because we only need to go inside once.

: Beyond the door is a generic horror movie set that is absolutely not 100% post-consumer recycled assets from Alex’s house, no sir.

: The bookcases in back have $5 each in them, and there’s a fight I simply had Alex LP Toss his way through. The way we set up Alex’s stats, LP toss will kill any enemy in this dungeon in one hit.

: Nothing important in here, but you can check the fridge for a couple of okay healing items.

: This is what we came here for.

: Next up is the dark blue door two north of the Sammy room. We want to skip the green one for now because there’s nothing we can do there yet.

: This room is so badly designed that the devs actually posted a guide on how to get through it. See those three switches on the floor? You’d think that we’d need to find something to put on one, then use Panda and Alex to press the other two. I already defeated all the enemies here, except…

: There’s a mimic. This one has about the same amount of HP but hits far less hard and far less often than the one in the last dungeon. Unfortunately, it only awards 10 EXP instead of 100.

: So anyway, when I tried this room the first time, I assumed that ladder in the back was supposed to be used to hold down the third switch. Nope! Let me show you the solution.

: What you have to do, against all common sense, is have the panda on one switch, Alex on another, and then use Dali to hit the last one. Considering that every other time we’ve ever had to hit a switch with Dali it was a toggle and not a weighted switch… yeah.

: From there, we put the ladder up against the staircase and drop the panda on that newly-spawned platform.

: It’s simply a matter of lining Alex up with the panda and skateboard jumping over the hole.

: The door brings us to the Vella room, which has all four of the musicians we need to find. The middle room you might recognize from those cutscenes with the hooded figures.

: “Do me a favor. When my solo comes up, turn the volume down. We can pretend it was a technical error. I hate having to do these stupid shows.”

: Now, there’s a sort of neat thing that isn’t at all original that the game does here. The background music for Vella’s mind dungeon changes slightly every time we find a new Vella. Bassist Vella changes it the least.

: Up next is the door directly north of the dark blue door we were just in. This is where we need the door piece we found in the Sammy room.

: We need to do this for one of the other doors. There’s like… fifteen textboxes of the baby crying, and I’m not going to transcribe that shit.

: Now we need to backtrack into the first room we were in. Jumping the first ramp brings us to this door, which is an event flag we need to set for a “puzzle” in that green door on the right side that we skipped.

So, I had the rest of this update done, and then the site ate my goddamn post edit. Second time this has happened to me. I’m just going to give this the Tim Fuckley treatment and gloss over everything. It’s funnier that way. Laugh at my goddamn pain.

: There’s three stupid plot flags we need to get in order to pass a quiz about Vella in one of the rooms. This is one of them.

: So anyway, earlier I said that I handled combat in a very particular way in this dungeon. That way is using LP Toss, which instantly kills anything it hits due to Alex’s high strength stat. He also has the highest PP of anyone in the party. By the way, I also found out that EP Strike is completely useless. It actually does less damage than LP Toss does, and only does it to a single target while at the same time costing 2 more PP. The formula here is “do battles until Alex runs out of PP, run to healing room, repeat”.

: At the end of the room, past a couple more skateboard jumps, is Bathtub Vella, who also happens to be the guitarist we need to find. We need the baby blanket to give her… so she can use it as a towel.

: One of the other doors has Drum Vella, who wants a drink.

: To finish this, we have to go to this robot that looks nothing like Jill Stingray from VA-11 Hall-A and… go clear a room of monsters. By the way, Jill would know that only three people work at the bar: her, Dana, and the guy whose name I forgot.

: The loading dock is through the door in the back. marked “EXIT”.

: This room is a big fuckoff maze and I hate it. We have to kill all the enemies (not a big deal) but also find two more plot flag Vellas to get quiz answers from. There’s a weapon in here somewhere I got on my first playthrough but forgot on this run - it’s garbage anyway. It’s a record for Alex that comes with -10 HP and doesn’t have as good of a combo potential.

: Vella is afraid of being fat. Haha it’s funny because the joke is that she puts on a complex appearance but in reality she’s such a basic bitch that you could use her to neutralize sulfuric acid.

: Also she dunks on Alex if you have him examine the scale.

: The fun part is that NOTHING IN THIS DUNGEON MATTERS. Vella is going to tell us her fucking life story the second we leave this dungeon, and none of this is at all relevant.

: What’s funny about this is how this cameo of Jill is absolutely nothing like what she’s like in her own game. This is a line she uses - to herself. In VA-11, she works as a bartender at a bar that is about to be closed by the giant international conglomerate that owns every bar in the world, and thus her entire job is pointless.

: I’m seriously considering taking this LP to SA and never looking back. Seriously, I had an ENTIRE UPDATE ready with dialog and everything and then the site ate it. Anyway, welcome to the shitty piano room which has no reason to exist. The hands damage you if they touch you but it doesn’t matter because by this point we’ve cleared every enemy out of the dungeon anyway.

: I had a joke here in my original update about how I wished this was like that Junji Ito story with the balloons that look like people and they try to hang the person they look like.

: Anyway, the stupid balloon asks three questions before we get through to the last Vella we need to collect. You can get these right but unless you have the plot flags set it doesn’t work.

: You know what this site needs? A thing like that LP Test Poster thing I can’t get because I don’t have an SA account, or at least a “Hey are you sure you want to post this?” prompt so I don’t wind up posting half the update early because my mouse fucks up.

: Pointless busy work! Is this Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean or what? I didn’t have a Baten Kaitos joke in this spot originally but I just read an LP of it and this is exactly the kind of thing that game would do only you’d have like 8 seconds to do it before the scale rots in your inventory and turns into a bird.

: I didn’t show it because again, it’s in the video and I just want this update to be over, but Vella (the real one) has to volunteer to sing because… I dunno. There’s an actual song here with vocals but they covered it with booing which is real fucking dumb.

: More importantly, once we do this, the curtains open. I have questions, questions like why couldn’t Vella just open that herself? Why is her mind dungeon so different from Alex’s? Why does this segment exist at all other than to be a Persona ripoff? Why is there no bossfight?

: Also why are there so many goddamn hooded Alexes here?

: Next update, we’ll finish this bullshit and then hit another 40 minutes of cutscene.