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

As a writer the “oh bet you thought the black guy can’t pick lock” scene in this game made me vomit in my mouth. Not the first time this game has done this, but this is the most noteworthy time of it. God, not only is it extremely, awfully racist, a bad version of a good ass joke from Telltale, it’s also just actually written really poorly! It’s disgusting to look at with my eyes in every way possible.

Truth be told, in my “this but good” idea, Alex just straight up is the one that killed Sammy. He’s obsessed with her to such a degree that I feel like that might be the case even in this shitty version of the game.

Oh also a thing to keep in mind for The Future tm: draft your posts in a word program or something first. That way if the forum farts or has to update you won’t lose any progress. I realize you’re probably doing this already, but I wanted to put it out as a suggestion.

Those Mall Rats are giving me a “is this lifted from South Park” vibe, specifically the Vampire Kids. Great.

it’s also a lot more uncomfortable after Christopher Niosi’s shit came to light like holy shit

9_2iVBrO_400x400: So uh, before I start this update, I’d like to point out that I was JUST NOW made aware that there are already two VLPs of this game done by people on SA. I don’t have an SA account, thus I had no idea that they existed. One of them is done with the game, the other is… maybe about an hour or two ahead of where we’ll be at the end of this update.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I know that there’s not really that much left - with any luck, I’ll have this done before Ni no Kuni 1 gets re-released so I can do that. Still, I wish I had known this BEFORE I started a godawful SSLP of something that had already been VLPed twice by people better at this than I am. Apologies to both GrandmaParty and Diacorn.

Douche: “Why was I so convinced finding this android was such a good thing? Why was I putting myself in danger like this?”

Douche: “A lot of times, I felt like I was an airplane circling the landing strip waiting for clearance, waiting for a purpose.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I really want to see a video in the style of one of those “REAL LAWYER REACTS TO ACE ATTORNEY” videos that Youtube’s shitty algorithm always puts in my recommended videos, only it’s an English teacher responding to Alex’s monologues.

Douche: “Maybe I was Alex, Android Hunter. No, that didn’t make sense. Alex, Soul Survivor hunter? Still not right.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This sounds like something taken straight out of this one kids book I read to a little girl when I was still doing volunteer reading. The book was called… I want to say Sophie the Awesome, but I might be wrong there. Congrats Allansons, you can write at a second-grade level.

Michael: “What do you see? Anything interesting?”

Douche: “She’s incredible.”

Bitch: “In…credible?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I think this screen transition is meant to symbolize the fact that Alex has now gone so far up his own ass that he has finally come out the other side.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: When I read this, I immediately thought of that one line from The Room with the random lady who tells Tommy Wiseau’s character that he’s her favorite customer.

Aigis: “I imagine you are wondering who I am, why I know your name, and where we are going.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I mean, yeah I’m kinda wondering where the fuck this plot is going myself. It hasn’t really gone anywhere in the past nine hours or so.

Aigis: “I think it is necessary that I first introduce myself. I am The Essentia 2000.”

Aigis: “I exist in all realities simultaneously and can account for all parallel versions of my soul. Now, for the questions that is burning away at you the most: how do I know your name?”

Aigis: “You and I have met time and time again.”

Aigis: “This is the part where you say ‘I’ve never met you before!’ and then silently add ‘Except in my dreams’. This can and will be explained.”

Aigis: “Many months ago, you had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of a Miss Semi Pak. Semi had begun the process of leaving her physical form behind.”

Aigis: “When you met her, she had already made up her mind to leave her body and enter into the place between places, the Soul Space. You disrupted her transition. Shortly after, you witnessed two Soul Survivors taking her away.”

Aigis: “Those two entities were that two-thirds of her soul that had transitioned - two injured parts that hadn’t begun to heal.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I feel like this is a colossal ass-pull, even for this plot.

Aigis: “I was there. I am Semi and Semi is me. When one soul leaves a reality, another can freely enter. The only requirement necessary is having some relation to the departing soul, whether it’s being a parallel version of the departing or having an emotional connection to the departing.”

Aigis: “When Semi left your reality, I entered. Before that, this physical form was destroyed, captured, and held prisoner by the two entities that you just defeated in combat.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This is another thing I feel the game never really explains well enough. Was Vella just wrong when she said that soul-people don’t give a fuck? I mean, I sort of get why Sammy got kidnapped - that was basically her kidnapping herself - but why do they care about the robot?

Aigis: “Ever since then I had tried to return, but as my physical form still held trace amounts of my conciousness, I had to wait until Semi, THIS reality’s version of me, died or escaped into the Soul Space.”

Aigis: “I lived with you for weeks as I gained my strength. Finally, I was able to appear to you and guide you to the radio tower. I needed you to find my physical form so that I could speak with you.”

Douche: “But what did-”

Aigis: “-- Vella’s record have to do with my physical form? I am glad to see you are keeping up with all of my robotic exposition.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Lady, this entire GAME has been nothing but robotic exposition.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: So uh, is it safe to say that you’re every woman? It’s all in you? Every one from A to Z?

Aigis: “I do not mean to imply that I go by all of these names and that I happen to share the name of two women in your life. I am explicitly saying that I am them and they are me.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Stop stealing from Persona, you fucks!

Douche: “You’re going to have to explain how this is all possible.”

Aigis: “First, I will begin with the dreams you had of me. As a spirit, we are not restrained by physical barriers. However, without a body, it is impossible to astral project.”

Aigis: “When you slept, I was able to enter inside of your vessel and use it to launch my spiritual form out into the world to seek my physical body.”

Aigis: “I am sorry that I violated you in such a way, but it was the only way for me to find my body and make physical contact with you.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Sounds like something Chris Niosi would say.

Aigis: “Adjacent to your reality is another that contains someone with the same soul as yourself. In one reality, I am Serna Yemima, a Palestinian girl on the run from financial trouble.”

Aigis: “In another, I am Vella Wilde, a talented musician whose only setback is the pressure I put on myself.”

Aigis: “In all realities, I am The Essentia 2000, a pan-dimensional android made of plastic created so that I can better understand myself in all of my realities.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Welcome to uh… the vore dimension? That model is just fucking hideous.

Aigis: Please bear with me as I take you on a tour of my parallel lives."

Douche: “Where exactly are we going?”

Aigis: “We are going into a very dangerous place - my Dungeon of the Mind. Here I will share with you my other selves. I am doing this in hopes that you will one day understand the nature of reality.”

Douche: “Why do you feel that I need to understand the ‘nature of reality’?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: And now, we’ve gone from the Vore Dimension to… machine cancer hell. If it were me, I’d be lighting this place on fire.

Aigis: “I feared separation from my own body, so I created the Essentia 2000… except it wasn’t THAT me, Naila El-Amin, who brought the plastic ME into existence.”

Aigis: “I came to be, through the intellect of another me, a Vladimira Tesar… in that reality, I was a Russian woman with similar goals, sans the severe sorrow and physical fatigue.”

Aigis: “As the Essentia 2000, I explored the Soul Space and became aware of all of the different versions of myself. The Essentia 2000, the Essentia 1999, and the yet to be created Essentia 28-90.”

Douche: “So you mean to say that Vella and Sammy share the same soul? But they are not the same person.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Uh. Yeah, she kinda said that several minutes ago.

Aigis: Essentially, yes. We have the capacity to be anything that we’d like to be. More often than not, we get to be the thing we least want to be."

Aigis: “If you’d join me now, I’d like to take you on a journey - a journey so that you can better know Sammy, Vella, Naila, and the other versions of myself. In doing so, I think you mean learn something that you so desperately need to know.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: So right after this part, I levelled up. What I didn’t know is that one of the existing VLPs somehow got into the game’s code and found out how all the stats work. Apparently, Luck is the best stat. Who’d have thought? It doesn’t matter much though, because as soon as we got in here and I levelled up, something fucking broke with the battle system.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Our first stop is this pile of crap that has a key in it.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This dungeon hurts to look at. This isn’t even as bad as it gets, but there’s an annoying static effect all over everything.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The broken wall just has an item in it, so let’s get into a battle so I can show off how badly I managed to break the battle system. I have no idea whether it’s intentional or not, but I did play ahead a little bit past the end of this dungeon and I think it isn’t.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This dungeon has a bunch of new enemy types, including the brains in a jar (they have a stun attack) and the frankensteins which… fucked if I know because we’re about to snap the game in two.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: See this? This is ONE LP TOSS. 371 damage is enough to kill this thing about three times over, and by the end of this dungeon, Alex was hitting for almost 900 damage with it. I think what happened is that there’s something incredibly broken about the way LP Toss scales with stats (most likely Strength) that causes it to ball out of control after Strength hits a certain number. The best part is that I didn’t have the Ultima LP equipped at this point. From what I’ve heard, the damage formulas in this game are massively fucked up.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Pretty much every room in this dungeon is a stupid, badly-designed puzzle. Some are more badly designed than others. I’m not even going to talk about the stupid pun.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This room has these weird hands sticking out of the ground. Interacting with them makes them rotate a quarter turn. If they’re pointing at a thing of bollards, the bollards will lower to let us past.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The wall wants us to fetch her some limbs, which is going to be the central theme of this dungeon.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: You can pretty much guess how all the fights go here, I’m just showing off a new enemy type. Again, you barely notice anything because of how fucked LP Toss is. By the way, one thing I found out pretty quickly is that Essentia SUCKS. See, Essentia can’t heal the way everyone else does - she needs a special type of healing item that are rare and expensive. The only other way she can heal is through using the “Charge” command, which lets you charge for a number of turns to regain HP (Maximum of 5). However… if you finish the battle before then, she gets reduced to 1 HP.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: We can access I think two different doors in this place right now, but we want to do this one first. Thankfully, I happened to go in here first.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This room fucking hurts to look at. There’s a lot of flashing bullshit and it just… sucks.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: There’s a puzzle in this room that I figured out on my own. The game will outright tell you how to solve it if you go down the hall, but I guessed it out. See the footprints on the floor? We have to follow those.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The ghost spawns a combat with another new enemy type - the Millennium Bug. These cause poison if they hit you, but we have the utter brokenness that is LP Toss.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: A key gets left behind, which we then need to put into a locked door just off-screen from this position.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I should mention that these stupid tunnel effects take like… 15 seconds each. They’re pretty clearly masking a load screen.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: You know… wasn’t this the one that the robot said was supposed to be Palestinian?

9_2iVBrO_400x400: She then has a mental breakdown for like seven textboxes that I’m not even going to bother posting. Fuck this game.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This room took me a minute to figure out, because it sucks from a design perspective. This is where you get warped immediately after that last cutscene.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: What you have to do is hit the left switch, then use the Amp on the statue.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: We’ve found what I believe to be the final tool - the Flamethrower. The flamethrower does exactly two things: it melts giant candles and lights torches.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The two chests hidden behind the candles in this room just have some PP restoration items in them.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: If we go to the end of that last room we were in, there’s six torches around an altar. You can probably guess what comes next.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: We have all the tools we need to clear the dungeon, and we can melt these candles to go upstairs … but we don’t have a key for the door at the top. Instead…

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I sure hope this is prophetic, because goddamn that’d be fun to watch.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: We can also take the dead body’s right arm. This is the only body part we don’t have to do a puzzle to get. What I find hilarious is that Alex has no reaction whatsoever to seeing himself dead on the ground.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Our next destination is behind those rocks over there.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This room is EXTREMELY badly designed. It has a gimmick that the game explains - but only AFTER you’ve figured out what the gimmick is. So naturally, your first instinct would be to light the torches.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Nope! If you do that, you can’t do anything. No, the solution here is about as fucking dumb as it gets.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: So, let me explain what the gimmick is. When the lights are off, the border around the edges of the room disappears, and it allows you to wrap around to the other side. I had to find the guide the developers put up to figure out what the fuck the deal with it was - at one point I figured you had to drop down from somewhere else to flip a switch or something.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The problem is that most of the chests and switches in this room can’t be accessed unless the lights are on. These chests have around a thousand dollars and some healing items, with the one on the left containing a 9-volt, which heals Essentia to full.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: In the middle is this fucker, who explains the gimmick… after you’ve already figured about half of it out. Also, that would be typo number nine.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: There are a couple of okay chests in this room. This one has a Platinum Bracelet, which gives one more HP than the Gold Bracelet does. I equipped it to Alex because his HP is the lowest out of any of the party members. Not that it matters.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: There’s also a fur lined coat up here, which is still only marginally better than the Camo Jacket we picked up for Alex at the start of the game. I equipped it even though it lowers his strength by one - at this point, we don’t give a fuck.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The goal is to press a couple of switches to lower some bollards and then wind up here, where you can grab the key we need for the main room.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Leaving this room puts us up here, where we can create a shortcut. I don’t know why you’d want to do this unless you missed chests or something.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This is the third puzzle room of this dungeon. It looks complex, but is actually pretty simple - the guide from the dev lists like 50 steps and I skipped a bunch of them. The goal here is to go to the right first.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: See that brown switch? The brown switches turn the wind from the giant masks on and off, which opens up different routes for you to take the moving platforms through. We need to get this one first to open the door up top.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The problem is that while the door is open, we can’t actually get there unless we turn on a mask right in front of it. That’s what the left side is for. The right side chest has an Ambrosia in it. I’d describe all of the steps I needed to take to do this, but I did the left side first. If you do that, you have to do the left side twice because hitting this switch stops you from accessing the right side. As long as you hit all the brown switches you encounter and do the right side first, this is easy.

Token: “We are not born the same year. We do not, obviously, die at the same time. As Naila El-Amin, I was a mother of three, a very intelligent scientist living in Sweden.”

Token: “My children, whose names I will not reveal to you for various reasons, lived with their father.”

Token: “He took his anger out on the men who worked for him. And they feared him.”

Token: “I was very lonely. I met a man, whom I loved very much. I gave myself to him in every way possible. I forgot about my children, my husband, my life back home.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I’ve seen some hentai in my day, and this sounds like a line from an h-manga.

Token: “When I was with him, I forgot my name. I forgot my purpose. This relationship lasted six weeks and then he vanished. Gone.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: So is it just me, or is there a pattern of Essentia or whoever having very poor taste in men?

Token: “I returned home, prepared to tell my husband everything, but he wasn’t there. My children were gone too.”

Token: “I felt myself becoming increasingly ill, and I deteriorated over the next days. Finally, I saw a doctor and was informed I had a terminal illness. Then I began to develop my android self, The Essentia 2000.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: You ever just have such bad taste in men that you develop cancer?

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Immediately after the cutscene, we get warped to this room with the severed left arm in it. That’s three body parts down, one to go.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: To progress, we now have to turn that blue hand in the ground so it points to this hand, and then use this hand to open that barred door just north of Alex’s position.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This room has toxic goo in it, but we can avoid it by walking around the edges just so.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: One switch and one poorly-hidden button later, and we can cross the bridge to…

9_2iVBrO_400x400: A giant comb. We need to carry this back to a door that was north of where we entered this room.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This particular spot shows off one of the more poorly-designed aspects of this dungeon. See those pillars in the middle, with what look like vines on them?

9_2iVBrO_400x400: We can Amp those to get to the door behind them.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This is the final big bullshit puzzle of this dungeon. It’s a maze where certain platforms have skateboard ramps between them, and there’s also light bridges.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: You can’t see it very well, but there’s two doors we need to bring to the faces at the very top. One is in the top-left corner, the other in the bottom-right.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The first thing I did was go around collecting all the chests, of which there are quite a few. The most notable is this mimic, which is one tile up and one tile right of your starting position.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: One LP Toss erased it, giving us a free level up.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The mimic drops some money and a Football Helmet, which gives Alex some pretty decent stats. We want to equip this because there’s a chance we’ll miss an enemy with LP Toss in a multi-enemy fight, and Alex is pretty low on HP.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: There’s a switch just below where the red door is that shifts the bridges so that we can get the red door in place.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The platform next to the mimic also contains a new weapon for Alex.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Anyway, after some more bridge shifting we eventually get the green door into place. You have to do two switches I think, one to get the green door to the middle of the right side and a second to get it up to the door.

Dumbass: “The memories here are very painful. So please bear with me as I can only tell parts of the story.”

Dumbass: “I lived as a young girl with my parents in Pontresina, Switzerland. I had four brothers. My brothers and I rarely spoke, as I was much younger than them.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This entire dungeon feels like one of the dumb stories Drebin tells you in MGS4 after you kill a member of the Beauty & Beast Corps.

Dumbass: “My father was always away on business and my mother was a teacher at my local school. I spent most of my time alone, wandering the Pontresina Valley. I dreamed about writing and other worlds.”

Dumbass: “In that valley, I found another world - the world of my other selves. Getting lost in solitude is the quickest way to other-worldliness.”

Dumbass: “Someone who is surrounded by others can achieve this, but only if they are selfless. If you so love another person that you could follow them from the world itself, you can truly see the wonders of all the universes.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I’ll just cut the rest of that out. We have another big monologue coming up.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This room has a series of puzzles that have no real reason to exist.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: There are two of these sets of switches - one on the right of the guillotine and one on the left.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This room has two torches in it. Lighting one but not the other will open one set of bollards, while lighting both will allow access to the chest. The chest has a new weapon for Vella that we’re probably never going to see because of how broken LP Toss is.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The executioner wants us to find people to kill. The one we’re looking for in this room is directly at the bottom.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Not pictured: carrying the guy back to the guillotine, then carrying his severed head to the statue on the top.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The other side is equally stupid. There’s a poison pool that we can just barely skirt around.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I really, really do not understand what the fuck the point of this is, or why we need to do it twice.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: We need a third victim, and there are no more volunteers, so let’s just watch Alex die.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Unfortunately, he doesn’t die and we instead unlock the final door out of this shithole.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The masks will blow Alex off the ledge if he walks by, but we have to do that to progress.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: It might not be obvious what to do here, but what you have to do is follow the hands to the outline.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Just gotta make a trip to the freaky glue room and then open the door with the comb. The game will warn you to save first, and I actually did, in addition to levelling Alex up a bunch. What I learned is that while all your party members will get a full heal on level up, Alex does not.

Aigis: “These machines - they’re so familiar. And yet, something feels wrong.”

Douche: “Is it safe to approach him?”

Aigis: “I cannot say. I would never harm you, Alex. But it is logical to assume that one of my many parallel lives may have some reason.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This is Yuzu Imajo. Yuzu is a Japanese soldier who comes completely out of left field. It’s never explained what his deal is (as far as I know) or why he hates Alex so much other than for the perfectly obvious reasons.

Yuzu: “Somehow you look different. So many lives wasted, taken, and experimented on in hopes of obtaining this moment. And now that I’m looking at you, I don’t know if I should love you or hate you.”

Yuzu: “To kill you, in the way that you killed me time and time again, has been my only dream, my only waking thought for the past fifty lifetimes.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Something tells me that if Alex started a fight with this guy in any universe that doesn’t involve LP Toss being an instakill, he’d kick Alex’s ass.

Douche: “What’s he talking about?”

Douche: “What did I do? What’s wrong with you, man?”

Yuzu: “Everything was taken because of YOU! You bastard! I lost everything - my research, my wife, my kids. And all for what?! For you!? What the hell were you worth!”

Aigis: “Alex, I can’t recall this life. For some reason, it’s blocked off to me. There is a void in my mind. There are white spots where I should see this life on the astral plane.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I don’t understand it any better than you do. Honestly, my brain had long since shut off by this point. What it kind of reminds me of is the intro to Senator Armstrong in Metal Gear Rising.

Yuzu: “Alex, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to say such terrible things. Come here. Let me hug you. Let me say I’m sorry in your ear.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: If there was an option to hug him, I would ABSOLUTELY force Alex to do it.

Douche: “What!? Get away from me!”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Welcome to a boss fight that is going to be as boring as the rest of this game.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Yuzu starts the fight by healing himself for around 30 HP before we even get to go.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Alex goes right after him and LP Tosses, killing him in a single hit.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: But what’s this? A second form using a meme that wasn’t concocted until sometime in the 2010s?

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Yuzu shows back up in a battle mech, because of course he does.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Levelling up strength by somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 points caused LP Toss to go from 350 damage to 843, killing Yuzu in a single hit once again.

There’s a bunch more exposition I don’t feel like typing out, so that’ll do it for this update. Next update, we’ll learn about Alex’s destiny and… well, we’ll learn that actions have consequences.

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Okay so… ignoring the fact that there is just so much contradictory in the whole “Semi got dragged into soul space by two thirds of herself” or whatever the fuck, I really, truly must say that this entire segment of the game is… basically the worst it’s ever been.

The idea that Vella is Alt-Semi is a thing I kinda guessed since they were both vaguely Asian. I didn’t expect them to go this balls to the wall stupid about it though. The idea that your alternate selves are not the exact same age or even gender as you is… interesting, but feels like a mistake.

But the presentation of all of this, especially given Alex is the one responsible for all of their lives being ruined, and seemingly Alex is always Alex no matter the reality, makes for one of if not the worst presentations of a thing I’ve ever seen. If this really is near the end, I CANNOT tell, because not one fucking thing has actually happened in the plot.

Also, side note. The writer is so bad I doubt they’d even notice or care, but saying that the only thing holding Vella back from stardom is her own self confidence is fucked up given the entire reason she did a soul suicide is because she fell in love with a manipulative bastard pedophile.

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I know the “can’t use conventional healing on an android” thing is more common in tabletop games but I can’t help but think this case in particular was “”“inspired”"" by Phantasy Star IV, but with much worse alternative methods

Aigis: “However, while I am with you, nothing bad can ever happen. I am here to protect you.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: So, the entire reason that Essentia is here kind of doesn’t make any sense. In fact, there’s a pretty good reason (as we’ll see shortly) that putting a bullet through his head would be a better option for everyone.

Douche: “I think I need you to answer some more questions. I’m really confused. Why did this Japanese guy know me? Why did he attack me? What did I ever do to him?”

Aigis: “I can only deduce an answer based on the information I have. This information is the same information that you have, so these are simply educated guesses based on my own personal bias.”

Douche: “Okay, fine. What do you think it is?”

Aigis: “I think it would be a safe assumption that in a parallel life, you have harmed me. That this Yuzu Imajo had some sort of relationship with you and you hurt him in some way.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Wait a second, what? Yuzu never said his name.

Aigis: “When he saw you, he recognized something in your soul and became angry. This is why he attacked.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Is this like that reboot of Prey where people inject Alex neurons into themselves to gain douchebag powers, but everyone can tell that you’ve got alien stuff in your head?

Douche: “I harmed him in a parallel life? I harmed you?”

Aigis: “There are times where someone expresses how they have been harmed, and as humans our immediate reaction is to become defensive. In our defense so that we do not harm others, we become offensive.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This is another one of those things where it really, really does not sound good after all that stuff about Chris Niosi came out.

Aigis: “It is in these moments where we decide what type of human we will be. Which is worse: to harm someone in the past and continue to harm them by justifying your past actions, or harming someone in the past and accepting that your choices hurt them?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Keep this in mind, because it is going to be relevant immediately after we escape this stupid dungeon.

Aigis: “Yes, you might feel harmed in the process by admitting your mistakes, but this is a good type of pain. Pain that heals you into a better person is always better than the small pain of accepting you are wrong.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: What the hell kind of writing is this?

Douche: “Did I always deny I harmed someone? Do I always feel the need to justify my actions?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Well, yeah. I mean, really this is true both in and out of the game.

Douche: “Maybe. Yes. I totally did.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Clearly, this isn’t a sentiment shared by the developers.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Yeah, like hiring a fucking proofreader to fix all these spelling and grammar errors.

Aigis: “There are moments when I understand intellectually how I must act, but then something happens. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, like a warm light in the distance, an idea forms - a completely human, flawed, and kind intentioned idea something that all versions of me know to be a mistake.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Things like making this game.

Aigis: However, the overwhelming feeling of doing the ‘right thing’ takes over and I am forced to make a choice. And every time, this version of me chooses the kind path. I cannot allow any harm to come to you."

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Gee, this doesn’t sound at all like an abusive relationship, sort of like the ones Chris Niosi had.

Aigis: “So just remember: It’s not important, Alex, to worry about what we will accomplish. Somewhere out there, we have both accomplished and failed at all tasks. Take solace in this.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I hope that there’s a dimension where this game never existed, and I wish I was in it.

Aigis: “There exist perfect versions of us who didn’t fail or harm others. Just keep working as hard as you can and you’ll be able to be that perfect version of yourself.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: So, uh, this advice is total fucking bullshit. This is basically the Jungian idea of the “true self” - it’s a concept that gets brought up a lot in Persona 4 to the point where the title screen track is called “Pursuing My True Self”. The only thing is, Jung himself admitted that actually attaining the true self was impossible.

Douche: “So should I feel guilty that I harmed him in a parallel life?”

Aigis: “That question is irrelevant. Just acknowledge that the part of you that harmed him exists in all humans. And then work to polish the blemish on your soul that had led to that action.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I feel like they really did not handle this whole parallel dimension thing well at all. It would’ve been one thing if they had done it where you see the parallel Alex doing whatever it is he did to Yuzu - but you don’t. It also is really hard to have an impact when it’s basically “Well, some other version of you - who isn’t even necessarily physically or mentally anything like you and who you can never meet - did something horrible at one point.”

Douche: “Wait, I have one more question. Did – did I harm any of the other women we met, the ones who are also you? Oda, Naila, Serna, Vella?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I had been suspecting for some time that there was going to be a really dumb plot twist where the guy who abused Vella was an alternate version of Alex. At this point during recording, I said to myself “How much do I want to bet that every single one of them was harmed by a parallel Alex?”

Douche: “Looking at her, I thought of a satellite floating in space - a drifting piece of man-made material, traveling through a place man can barely go.”

Douche: “What I had said was out of pure curiosity. I had no way of knowing with any certainty that I had harmed any of these women. My words, though, seemed to have jabbed at something in there. I could read the effect on her face. Eventually, without a word, the Essentia 2000 turned away and proceeded from the room.”

YIIK%20A%20Postmodern%20RPG%202019-08-17%2014-56-37-95

9_2iVBrO_400x400: As you can probably tell, the answer is absolutely yes.

Aigis: “There is one last location I would like to show you, and it’s quite a distance. I will answer more questions when we get there.”

Douche: “I longed to wash away the bitter taste in my mouth. But even sipping from a water bottle wouldn’t cleanse me of it. The whole situation felt like a dream, as if I was wading through pools of jello.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: You’d think Alex would learn to just shut the fuck up by now.

Douche: “Even then I kept telling myself that the things around me weren’t ‘that weird’. That seeing Sammy vanish, meeting entities, and entering inside a dungeon in my mind should have prepared me for this. But you know, I don’t think it did.”

Douche: “I wanted to ask the Essentia 2000 if I could feel the feelings of my parallel lives. I realize now that I was just seeking an explanation for the various feelings that were surging through my heart.”

Douche: “I felt closer to Vella, closer to – well, every single parallel life of the Essentia 2000, and yet furthest from Sammy.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Wait… what? Why do you even still care about Sammy? She’s fucking dead. The robot just told you that she committed soul suicide and that she’s gone forever.

Douche: “Did I really ever want to find her now that I know what ‘finding her’ actually meant? No, I did. I really did.”

Aigis: “Those stairs were the exit to my Mind Dungeon. Now we have returned to the foyer. In order to proceed, we must first return to the beginning. Allow me to open your mind, to grant you access to the Hall of Parallel Lives.”

Aigis: “Inside are the various parallel lives that your soul is currently engaged in.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: And I believe it would be a good idea to HIRE A GODDAMN PROOFREADER!

Aigis: “Our destination is at the far end of this hall. That room is used to chronicle the past and future of this Alex, the one I am speaking to now, my favorite.”

Douche: “Why aren’t I here?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The dumb thing is that from his perspective, he should be able to see where he is. It’s hard to make out, but notice how there’s a body-shaped outline on that big red disc in the background?

Aigis: “You are, and you are speaking. What I’m about to show you is something that lies at the heart of all of your selves. Please, prepare yourself for a harsh amount of bitter truth. What you are about to see cannot be unseen.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Okay, let’s see, bitter truth: this game sucks. It wasted all of its potential in the first ten minutes and never recovered. The story sucks, the combat is laughably broken, the writing is godawful, there’s typos everywhere. The Allanson brothers should be banned from all major game stores for plagiarism.

Douche: “Should I be worried?”

Aigis: “No. Not if you took to heart what I have taught you.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Fuck you, Alex! I’m the only one who gets to shut my brain off during these pointless fucking cutscenes!

Aigis: “To recognize your flaws and work to correct them. I am about to show you your greatest flaw of all. Destruction.”

Captain: “Then the sky lit up and we were overcome by a bright aura. My soul left my body, as my body disappeared. Where am I now?”

Captain: “It’s a curious thing, losing your body and universe. We don’t have a good way of describing reality, so we show it as the earth, since that’s all most people ever know. I’m sorry it came down to this. You tried your best. I would do it too. In fact, maybe I did.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Now we can go up and inspect the disc, and…

Aigis: “In a way, it is everyone’s flaw. Destruction. To be destruction, or to be creation. We can only be one in the end.”

Douche: “But what will I destroy?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Pffft… there’s no way. Alex is such an unimportant fuckwad. Is there a term that’s like, the opposite of a mary sue? Where the character has literally no redeeming qualities whatsoever, but they’re not supposed to be the villain?

Douche: “How could I destroy a reality? What powers do I have that could lead to this type of devastation!?”

Aigis: “Inaction is just as much an act of aggression as taking up arms.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Someone should tell that to Rory. Let’s make a note to do that as soon as we get back.

Douche: “When will this happen? How will I do this?”

Aigis: “I do not know. But what’s important is that it hasn’t happened yet and --”

Douche: “Wait, you’re saying we can still stop this?”

Aigis: “All realities cease to exist. The only thing you get to decide is if you aid in the destruction or fight against it.”

Douche: “Fight against it? But you said it was doomed! NONE OF THIS MAKES ANY SENSE!”

Aigis: “This reality will fade away, and another will take its place. But this doesn’t mean that you can’t prevent the loss of future realities.”

Douche: “How would I do that if we all die!?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: You know what would’ve been perfect for Alex to reference right here? No wait, let me do it.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: So what Essentia’s saying is that it’s closing time? That every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end? That you don’t have to go home (even though it’s going to be destroyed) but you can’t stay here? That song’s actually from 1999, by the way. I remember when it was still on the radio. Suck it, Allanson! This is what, the third time I’ve done that? I feel like it gets better every time.

Aigis: “We can take your friends with us. Together, we will protect realities from the ultimate loss - loss of souls who perish with worldly attachments in their hearts. When a soul is bound to the planet by thoughts and obsessions of worldly things, they die with the reality.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: What a great idea. Let’s send Fuckface, Destroyer of Worlds into different realities so he can teach everyone some kind of fucked-up cyber-buddhism and then it’s just Jonestown on a dimensional scale. Great idea!

Douche: “But I want to save this reality. What about my mother, my friends? I couldn’t just convince them to enter the Soul Space. I don’t even think I could convince my mother that there IS a Soul Space.”

Aigis: “What do you want to do, Alex? Whatever you decide, I am with you every step of the way.”

Douche: “But wait, why is this – why is this my choice?”

Aigis: “Because this is your reality, not mine. I just want you to be happy.”

Douche: “Essentia, how do you know me? Why do you care so much about me?”

Aigis: “Because you have been in all of my lives. And at every turn, I have been there for you, even when you have harmed me. I have always loved you. I would fight a losing battle for you.”

Douche: “I-- what do I even say to that?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I feel like “helped” is kind of a strong word here, given that Alex basically sat in an elevator pissing himself while Sammy got taken by… well, by herself. Now, are you ready for the fucking stinger? Well, the first fucking stinger. There will be another at the end of this update.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I don’t normally include mailbag updates in the regular LP, but even better, the entire reason Vella killed herself was BECAUSE OF ALEX!

Aigis: “Shh. Alex, regardless of how much you have harmed me in any of my parallel lives, I am always here for you. I want to help you be the best you can be.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This doesn’t feel like unconditional love. This feels like a fucking hostage situation. This feels like those stories I hear about people who get abused by a partner and won’t leave the relationship.

Douche: “Can’t you help me be the me that saves this reality? From whatever the hell all those things are falling from the sky?”

Aigis: “It is impossible. But if you could like to try, we may try.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I remember reading an interview someone did with Yoko Taro in regards to Drakengard. This is the first one mind you, not 2 or 3. I remember that the interviewer asked him why it was that all of the endings to Drakengard were bad endings - the protagonist dies in all of them. Yoko Taro replied that it was because he felt that Caim (the protagonist) didn’t deserve a good ending.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Now, Caim was a murderous bastard, but the way the world in Drakengard is portrayed, there are virtually zero people in that game who aren’t assholes of a caliber equal to or greater than Caim. I feel like Alex is worse than most of the characters in Drakengard in a lot of ways. He doesn’t deserve a good ending. Something tells me that the Allansons were not at all aware of this and he’s going to get one anyway.

Douche: “But how do you KNOW it’s impossible?”

Aigis: “I can feel the reality breaking apart. I can feel souls fleeing in every direction. This world will soon end.”

Douche: “But there has to be something we can do - some way to be strong enough to take down whatever is going to destroy this reality!”

Douche: “But what about me, Vella, you, and the others?”

Aigis: “It pleases me that you want to fight for something. I know this isn’t your usual way. It thrills me to see the passion in you.”

Aigis: “Together, we can attempt to fight this ender of realities. Just know, we will fail, but we will fail together.”

Douche: “Don’t be such a downer. If I’m going to die, I at least want to go down swinging. What other choice do I have?”

Aigis: “I understand now that in your heart, there is no other choice. Perhaps you, Alex, are different from the others. I will stay and fight with you. But if we are going to do this, we must convince your friends to help us and we must train. Even I am not at my most powerful.”

Aigis: “We must complete the Mind Dungeon before the end comes and be prepared to fight it.”

Douche: “How do we convince them that the world is going to end?”

Aigis: “By convincing them that this reality will soon perish and by making them understand that this world is just a byproduct of that destruction.”

Douche: “Okay, so what’s this great destruction that will be obliterating reality?”

Aigis: “It’s the same destruction that destroys all realities. And yet, I can’t give it a name. But when you see it, you will recognize it.”

Douche: “I think I want to go home now. Everyone is probably wondering where I went.”

Aigis: “Yes, we’ve been gone quite a while.”

Douche: “Really? How long?”

Aigis: “I’m not sure. Maybe we can take a bus?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I’m going to skip the rest of this pointless conversation (it’s only a couple of lines about “America has no mass transit”) and get to what I’ve been wanting to get to for a while. Also, it’s now apparently December despite the fact that Alex was only gone for 5 days.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The fastest way back to Frankton is via Flag Town. There’s a couple of random encounters on the way, but you can imagine how those went. I managed to level Alex up to 41 and got his strength to 88. I’ll find out how much damage that makes LP Toss do at some point.

Douchemother: “ALEX!!! WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN!!?? I WAS SO WORRIED!!”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Holy fucking punctuation.

Douche: “Missing!? You reported me missing!?”

Douchemother: “I haven’t seen you for days, and none of your friends knew where you were!”

Douche: “Hey, I’m sorry. I, uhm–”

Aigis: “I’m sorry, Mrs. Eggleston. Alex was with me. My car broke down and he was kind enough to walk with me to the auto body shop and help me out.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Very believable excuse for why he was gone for over 5 days.

Aigis: “He’s been with me and has been perfectly safe.”

Douchemother: “Who are you? Why is your hair green? Alex, why are you hanging out with a woman with green hair?”

Douche: “Mom, that’s the latest fashion. Everyone does it. It’s the 90s. Multicolored hair is the bomb, or whatever.”

Aigis: “Yes, my hair is the bomb.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I get that the cop is probably a Reno 911 reference, but he looks like Mike Dawson.

Douche: “That’s awesome!! What are you doing?”

Douchemother: “Basically, I’m rebranding all their products as Y2K compatible, and selling them for twice the cost.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: She then goes on a long spiel about what Y2K is. I should think everyone who has read the LP would know what it is.

Aigis: “I’m sorry, I could not resist.”

Douche: “Okay, so you do have a sense of humor. I wasn’t sure if being part android took out the fun parts of a personality.”

Aigis: “I can be very funny. Would you like to hear my stand up routine?”

Douche: “What? Really? Now? The world is going to end, this is no time for jokes!”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I hope you’re ready for the worst excuse for a joke I have ever seen.

Aigis: “We should begin by asking your friends to join us. Although there is a possibility that they may be smart enough to enter the Soul Space before the end.”

Douche: “Do you really think they’d do that?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: “It is a possibility.”

Douche: “Okay, if we’re going to do this, I need you to stop reminding me that you think this is a lost cause. I’m determined to try and stop this - whatever it is!”

Aigis: “Okay, I am sorry. I did not mean to upset you. I am here to help you with whatever you need. I think it would be wise for me to speak with Vella alone as we are one and the same. Perhaps you should call her and arrange a meeting.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Let’s do just that, because it’s time for me to end this update with the second plot bombshell we’re going to see.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Now, this will go just fine. I mean, Alex was gone for almost a week but it’s not like anything drastic could possibly have occurred. I am going to go pure screenshots for this part because I need you all to know that I am not making this shit up.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: …what? How could this… well, actually, I could see exactly how it could happen. But wait…

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Wait, what? Why did it just go back to… Chapter 4.1? What is this shit, Earth Defense Force?

Douche: “No… it can’t be. I remember what we did that night. How could I forget? He came up, and asked me…”

Douche: "Yeah, that’s right! He asked me if we could talk, so we went to Burger Joint and he told me how he was feeling.

Douche: “I probably wouldn’t have remembered it normally, but I remember trying to kiss him. It was weird, but I just… felt the need to do it.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Oh my god, is this doing what I think it’s doing?

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I can’t convey this in screenshot form, but the game automatically selects the second option.

Douche: "WAIT, WHAT?! I NEVER SAID THAT!!! I never, ever said that! We went to Burger Joint, talked it out, and I tried to kiss him! That’s what happened!

Bitch: “Alex, that’s not what Rory told me. I talked to him on the way home from the mall, after you went missing in that stupid van. He told me that you told him to fuck off and take his bullshit with him. He even said you threatened to hit him if he told anyone else.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Holy fuck. This is… wow. I mean, it’s basically ripped straight from Silent Hill 2, but god DAMN. I wonder if they added this in with one of those patches after the plagiarism accusations.

Bitch: “You might not have actually pushed him off the water tower, but you may as well have. Tell me, Alex. Why did you do it? You knew he was depressed. You KNEW he was reaching out to you for help! Why didn’t you help him?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I mean, they didn’t exactly keep Vella’s characterization the same but that’s to be expected since the Allansons can’t write for shit. I wonder if they had someone else write this for them? Who would even volunteer to do that?

Bitch: “And another thing. I talked to Michael, and he says there’s someone on ONISM who found a video of you following Semi Pak into that elevator. Only, there was no elevator, just an open elevator shaft. I didn’t believe you could do it. Michael didn’t believe you could do it.”

Bitch: “But I know the truth now. You pushed Semi Pak into that elevator shaft. I don’t want to believe it. I don’t want to believe you could do it, but…”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: GODDAMN! This game just took a fucking 180-degree turn. I mean, it’s not great, but compared to the rest of this pile of shit it’s fucking amazing!

Douche: “I didn’t do anything! I tried to save her!!! Are you saying that you think I killed her?!?! Vella, that’s insane!!! The Soul Survivors did it, not me!!”

Bitch: “Alex, you did it. I don’t know what you did with her body, but the police are going to find it. And what do you think they’re going to find on it, Alex? They’re going to find your fingerprints and your clothing fibers all over her body.”

Douche: “Vella, you have to believe me!! I DIDN’T KILL SEMI, YOU STUPID FUCKING BITCH!!”

KNOCK KNOCK

Cop: “Alex Eggleston, are you in there? This is the Frankton PD! Open the door! We have a warrant for your arrest in conjunction with the murder of Semi Pak! Open the door now, and come out with your hands above your head!”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I couldn’t capture it, but there’s a black screen and then you can hear a door being forced open, then a gunshot. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be the cops shooting Alex, or Alex killing himself. God damn, that was one incredible way to end this game. Is this that “third ending” people kept talking about?

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Well, I guess this is the end of this LP. I’d like to thank everyone for reading. I’ll probably do Police Quest 3 next since as far as I know, no one’s ever done it, and then I’ll move on to Ni no Kuni 1 when that gets re-released next month. This is probably the best ending to a trash game I’ve ever seen.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: At least… that’s how I would’ve ended it. Unfortunately, I’m not the first person to do a complete LP of this game, so pulling something like that is easily disproven. Next time, we’ll see the rest of the suicide scene. Before I go though, people who have watched the second LP will know that something else isn’t kosher here, so let me explain.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Remember that scene I just flashed back to with Rory at the radio station? If you do what we did in the LP - even if you try to kiss him - Rory doesn’t die and that scene doesn’t play. What I actually did was recorded an entire second run of that area just to do that scene the other way, which is now the canon run for this LP. I got spoiled on this while looking up how to finish that stupid part where we had to talk to everyone in Frankton before heading off to the mall.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Surprisingly (or not) whether Rory lives or dies has almost zero impact on the game. I don’t think he has any more lines even if he lives (not that I’d know) and has zero impact on which ending you get. I don’t know what the endings ARE, just that Rory has nothing to do with them. The game treats his death as so unimportant that the scene that plays if he DOESN’T die plays immediately after the call about his death as if nothing even happened. We’ll see that next time.

I think I’ve figured out that this game’s whole “alternate versions of you” dealie just doesn’t work as described. There are too many questions it doesn’t even bother to answer. The only connection an alternate “you” seems to have to you is that, if you “leave your physical form”, they’re blocking you from occupying their reality. But you don’t like, take over their life when they leave, you’re still the you that committed suicide back in your old reality, but you don’t transplant your old existence, so…what then? Do you just…appear? Naked and confused, in whatever spot maps metaphysically to the spot you entered the universe from? Does the universe generate a history for you, so that even though you literally couldn’t exist until this moment, now you always have existed? Semi Pak’s death and therefore the window for Vella to come in happened like, a day before we saw her glaring at nothing in particular in that arcade where she works. How do you have a job when you didn’t even exist a day ago? If your alternate yous can have nothing to do with you and who you are and still be you then what makes them you? If Vella is here now then how can Essentia 2K, the Ur-Vella, also be here when there can only be one you in a reality at any one time?

I’m frustrated.

Because of an Alex who was explicitly pedophilic, so my point counts. And is gross as hell good fucking lord.

Unironically if this was how the game ended, it might be almost vaguely worth it, barely. It’s absolutely horrendous but having the reveal be the pretty obvious “Alex is a shit-heel whose perspective is warped and wrong” thing would be what a good version of this game would have done.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: What we’re about to see is Alex set the world record for fastest 180-degree turn. Also, this is going to be a short update because… well, there’s a vote at the end.

Douche: “What the actual hell had I done? I was so stupid. He tried to reach out to me. He asked me for help. ME.”

Douche: “For some reason he had picked me as his confidant and I turned him away.”

Douche: “Were my own personal whims so important that I couldn’t see he was begging for help?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: So honestly, this feels like it just should’ve been the only route. When, at any point, has Alex shown that he gives a fuck about anyone other than himself?

Douche: "A year ago I would have thought ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself’ or ‘If someone wants to die, there isn’t anything you can do to stop it.’ "

Douche: “I would have convinced myself it was somehow not my fault. I wouldn’t have allowed myself to feel guilty. Why was I so afraid of feeling guilty?”

Douche: “Why did I continue to convince myself that nothing was ever my fault? Sometimes things ARE your fault.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I think this is supposed to be berating me as the player, but honestly I just did what we all know Alex would have done.

Douche: “Or in this case: me, me, me.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: God dammit Alex, that song didn’t come out until 2015.

Douche: “I wanted to tell Vella that he had reached out to me. I wanted to tell her I had been cruel. I had been so selfish.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: What’s amazing is how even in a situation like this, the only person he gives a fuck about is himself.

Douche: “I did my best to not let her know I felt guilty. Why? Because I wanted her to like me. I needed everyone to like me. I needed to be a solid guy in everyone’s book.”

Douche: “No. I just needed to seem like a good person to myself. And I needed to change that. Self love, disguised with gifts and lies, does not make a good person.”

Douche: “Inward appearances? If I wanted to like myself, I needed to be someone worth liking. Grief - it can make you forget about all the things you thought were important.”

Douche: “But time goes on and we were running out of time. I needed to get my shit together and focus.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: There’s also one thing I realized just now that kind of makes no sense. If you’re in a world where you can commit soul suicide and potentially wind up somewhere where there’s at least a chance you could be happy, why would you ever kill yourself the regular way?

Douche: “The Essentia 2000 worked hard to console me. She reminded me of a mothering Vella, a truly all knowing being. Vella - I needed to call Vella. I need to bring myself back to a functioning level and actually DO something.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: So basically, the devs were too lazy to actually make a different gameplay sequence for if Rory offed himself. What happens is that you get the death scene first… and then the game switches over to the same scene you’d see if he hadn’t.

Douche: “Vella, this is the Essentia 2000. Essentia 2000, this is Vella.”

Aigis: “Hello, Vella. It’s nice to see you.”

Bitch: “Likewise… what’s going on here?”

Douche: “I don’t even know where to begin. It’s so complicated.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Something about this just made me fucking laugh. “Alex, you’re so irrelevant that we could easily continue this game without you, please fuck off”.

Douche: “Do you know how weird was thinking that? No, you really can’t. Well, maybe now you can that you’re in the same situation.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: What the fuck is he talking about? I seriously don’t get it. Are they trying to go for an Omikron the Nomad Soul thing here?

Douche: “One soul, but many people. In the darkness, thinking about the end of all reality, knowing inside myself that all of this was true.”

Douche: “These concepts, previously absurd, were now mysteriously vivid in every detail, to the point where I felt I could grasp them in my hands.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: What the fuck kind of metaphor is that?

9_2iVBrO_400x400: God, this line is just so…off. It sounds like something you’d see in a game written by someone who doesn’t speak English as their primary language.

Douche: “Everyone was gone and then she floated by. Sammy. But she wasn’t Sammy, she was Vella. But also not Vella, she was the Essentia 2000, Oda, Yuzu, and Naila.”

Douche: “Somehow these people were linked by their ‘soul’. Whatever that meant. What did it mean to share a soul, but be a different person?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: What’s funny is that as many of you have pointed out, I’m not even sure the developers understood what the fuck the deal with the soul thing is.

Douche: “What had the Essentia 2000 called it? A parallel life? I thought of Buddhists and their concept of past lives. Before I was Alex, I was a pirate or a poor village girl living in Croatia.”

Douche: “But in a parallel life, I was Alex, a pirate, and a little girl in Croatia. I lived all of my lives at once, in distant but similar realities.”

Douche: “Similar was only an assumption. I realized how how little I knew about reality.”

Bitch: “I have explored the Soul Space, and I have seen the beginnings of destruction to many realities.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: It honestly feels like for this part, the Allansons contracted the dialogue out to like, one of those late-80s anime fansub groups who did literal translations.

Bitch: “I have seen the remains of many souls, and Alex, this scares the living hell out of me. I will do anything I can to help stop whatever is coming for us.”

Aigis: “You spoke to us in the past, specifically to Vella, about a feeling that fate brought you two together. I am that fate. This was meant to happen. I do not know if we can stop whatever is coming, but I know that we are meant to try.”

Douche: “So what’s next? What do we do? What’s the plan?”

Bitch: “We should get the others onboard.”

Aigis: “And then we should train in the Mind Dungeon. Alex, you have seen what is coming for us, and you know better than anyone else the only way to stop it is to understand yourself.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This part is really weird because of our entire seven-person party (counting Rory), only three of them have ever been to the Mind Dungeon.

Aigis: “If we can get as far into the Mind Dungeon as possible and learn as many abilities as possible, we may stand a chance of dying with dignity.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I feel like this is a thing saying “Hey go grind those monster dens” but we really have no reason to. LP Toss already oneshots everything. I feel like that isn’t likely to change given that we’re fighting every enemy we come across.

Bitch: “Alex, what did you see in the Mind Dungeon? What did the end look like? Why did she say that?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I was really fucking torn on this one. On one hand, I kind of wanted to know what the fuck he thought he saw other than just himself on fire. On the other, dodging the question might piss off Vella, which is EXACTLY what Alex would do. That’s why I picked the second option.

Aigis: “Alex, I believe the best course of action now would be to go and find each one of your friends individually and talk to them about the current situation. Remember that the better you do, the more Mind Dungeon Keys you will unlock and the stronger you will become.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Why do I have a feeling that this is going to be like Ni no Kuni 2 where I farmed out overpowered equipment only to have the game force me into using worse equipment?

Aigis: “It is vital that all of your friends are onboard. Without achieving the highest level by the time the end comes, our futile efforts will be even more futile.”

Bitch: “But we don’t even know when the end is coming! It could be tomorrow for all we know.”

Douche: “Y2K. Could that be it? Could the turn of the millennium be the date?”

Bitch: “I don’t know, maybe. What do you think, Android-me?”

Aigis: “It is possible.”

Douche: “I’ve had a weird sense of impending doom ever since Rory and Michael mentioned it. That might explain why '99 has gone to shit. I’ve been looking at the newspaper a lot lately and things are really screwed up out there.”

Bitch: “Well, I suppose having some estimated date is good enough for me.”

Aigis: “Alex, you can return to the Mind Dungeon at any time to see how many days remain.”

Douche: “WAIT WHAT!? You mean that date was real!? It has so many numbers and zeroes. How do I even calculate that into a date?”

Aigis: “I could not see the number myself, but if you take me there and tell me the number I can help you convert it into days.”

Douche: “Well damn, why didn’t you tell me that sooner?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Why is it that the devs can never just let a cutscene end?

Bitch: “Well, she didn’t. Lay off of her. We’re not perfect you know!”

Douche: “Is that your new thing? Referring to her as you and et cetera, et cetera?”

Aigis: “Yes.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: And… it’s now winter in Frankton. What I like is how the devs put in the effort to do things like add icicles and decorate some of the houses, but Alex (and all the NPCs in town) are wearing summer clothing.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: It’s strange to me that they also never bothered to give Claudio and Chondra a house. In fact, we don’t even know where they live.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I’m going to skip a bunch of this because just like the last time, a lot of what they have to say isn’t important. However…

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This to the guy who caused someone else to commit suicide.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I wonder if Claudio committed soul suicide and someone else took his place.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Chondra is over here. She has pretty much the same thing to say Claudio did: that she had a dream about Alex and… yeah.

Douche: “Did I really deserve everyone’s help? Nope. Not at all. Maybe this is why I was exceedingly grateful.”

Douche: “I thought about Michael. He was the only one I hadn’t seen since I returned from my trip into The Essentia 2000’s mind. Where had he gone? Why hadn’t anyone else seen him?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The Forest Meadow is an area I actually visited once way back before we did Flag Town.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: That chest there contains an Ambrosia, which I picked up the first time I visited.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: There’s also $5,000 in this chest, located behind some candles. This is mostly important if you want the achievement for having $15,000 without selling any of your ambrosias.

Douche: “I’ve been looking for you for the past week! I called your house, knocked on your door, and no one ever answered.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Meet Proto-Michael, who is attempting to do his best Naked Snake impersonation. Somehow, I can’t picture someone with that build having that much chest hair.

Michael: “It’s so trivial. Don’t you see? No, of course you don’t. I wouldn’t have a week ago.”

Douche: “What happened? You sound different. Your voice is different. What’s going on?”

Michael: “Alex, something has happened to me. I am transformed. I’ve come to understand certain things. I’ve been exposed to the truth.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I feel like Michael just smoked weed for the first time and now he’s ready to write a 3000-word thinkpiece on it.

Douche: “What do you mean? What happened?”

Michael: “Something happened to me. Something very startling at first, but now - now it’s just incredible.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: So apparently, being “proto” means that you just keep saying the same line over and over with slightly different wording.

Douche: “Are you going to tell me what happened or are you just going to keep acting like Vella?”

Michael: “I met a parallel self. I lived so many lives. I am everything.”

Douche: “Uh, what?”

Michael: “Alex, I entered the Mind Dungeon alone and I wandered and wandered. Soon I stumbled upon a hall of names. Each of these names was etched into a door.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Way to describe what we literally just saw, fuckhead!

9_2iVBrO_400x400: “Alex, what I’m trying to say is that I’ve seen the Vore Dimension. All of it.”

Michael: “The very act of experiencing a parallel life is mind shattering. When we are born, we immediately begin developing a series of biases and defenses that help us ground our lives in the ‘reality’ that we invent for ourselves.”

Michael: “In doing so, we lose sight of the temporary nature of life. We forget everything. We lose track of where we came from and only look to the future. Experiencing a parallel life disassembles all physiological constraints that have been built up over the years.”

Michael: “Do you know what the funniest part is?”

Douche: “What?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Say what one more goddamn time, motherfucker! I dare you!

Michael: “I know what you’ve come to ask me. And I know that I’ll say yes even though I always turn you down. Do you realize how many times we’ve had this conversation? It’s like clockwork.”

Michael: “He soon asks me to try and save him from self-destruction. Every time I say no and every time you destroy our reality.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: If someone could please, for the love of god, draw that last line and the one in the screenshot above it, only Michael is Odie and Alex is Garfield, I would greatly appreciate it.

Michael: “Maybe it took for me to realize what not helping a friend can do to that friend, but I’m in. Let’s win this thing.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This feels like it’s meant to be a burn on Alex for letting Rory die.

Douche: “Michael, did you see how reality ends?”

Michael: “No. All of my lives end with you destroying everything, but I’m never there to see firsthand how you do it.”

Douche: “Crap. I was really hoping you knew the answer.”

Michael: “I’m surprised you’re not alarmed by what I’ve told you. What have I missed while I’m away?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: God the grammar just kills me.

Douche: “I think you should meet our new android friend.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: What the fuck is this, Pocahontas?

Michael: “Their positions have changed. Did you notice the colors?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Have you ever heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon? Or asked the grinning bobcat why he grins?

Michael: “Everything is wrong. This isn’t what it was like. Something is wrong. Something is broken. Can’t you see it?”

Douche: “Michael, I – I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe things feel different. But dude, they’ve felt different for a long time. The very feeling of being me has changed. I can’t really put my finger on it, but something is wrong, you’re right.”

Michael: “Do you ever remember things wrong?”

Douche: “No, I don’t think so. What does that mean?”

Douche: “As we walked back to my house, a strange feeling of nostalgia overwhelmed me. It was as if I hadn’t seen Michael in a really long time, as if the Michael I’d spent the past year with had been broken and now he was fixed. This was the Michael I remembered.”

Douche: “In the cooling winter air, I had a series of memories return to me. All of them involved Michael, but none of them felt real. As if I had experienced them in a far off distant life.”

Aigis: “Although in a way, we have met many times before, both in the past of our parallel lives and in the future of our parallel lives.”

Aigis: “I am going to make this brief. Starting tomorrow, we will train in the Mind Dungeon.”

Chondra: “But tomorrow’s Thanksgiving.”

Aigis: “Thanksgiving? Tomorrow?”

Chondra: “Yeah, so we should start on Friday.”

Claudio: “What about shopping on Friday! Just kidding. Seriously. Just kidding.”

Aigis: “Many of my parallel lives were Canadian so this is somewhat a surprise to me. As I experienced Canadian Thanksgiving a few weeks ago. All right. Fair enough. Friday we begin.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I really think this entire gigantic cutscene-monologue hybrid is here entirely to pad the game out, because the rest of this game is going to be real underwhelming.

Douche: “Now with the threat of impending doom, I realize how silly it was to do so. But what else could be expected of me? I’ve lived the past 25 years knowing nothing but a series of tomorrows. In fact, ‘I’ll do that tomorrow’ had become my mantra over the past two and a half decades.”

Douche: “Tomorrow there may be nothing. Today may be the last day. This knowledge triggered something in me to fall away. It was as if the core of my personality dropped away and nothing came in to fill the hole.”

Douche: “It was like being hungry all the time, except food, mindless fun, and things that normally bring happiness had lost their appeal. The knowledge that this was all temporary had stripped me of the ability to experience basic human pleasures.”

Douche: “What I craved was a sense of normal. The desire to go back. No, that’s not right. I didn’t want to go back. If I went back, I’d be the same person I used to be: selfish, unfocused, lazy.”

Douche: “I had no purpose. I was a blank slate that was covered in war paint. I was going to defeat whatever was coming for my reality, even if it was me. I would defeat myself. What that meant, I didn’t know. But I was prepared to do whatever it took.”

Douche: “It feels good. I was so excited to get to the Mind Dungeon I barely slept last night.”

Panda: “Impressive! Well, get to work!”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: As you can guess, the game just basically became Persona, only way shittier. Alex now has a phone in his room that he can use only to save. Now, you might think we want to head to the mind dungeon - but doing that only brings up the standard level-up menu. What we want to do…

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Is go explore the town. Spending time with friends gives you 100 EXP, but wastes an entire day.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: If you look on ONISM, a whole assload of sidequests just opened up. Most of these are pretty boring, so I’ll gloss over a lot of them. By the time I finished recording for this update, I had basically 100%ed all of the side material.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: First up, if you’re dead-set on maxing Alex out, there’s a couple of places with Soul Survivors in them. This is one of them.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The one annoying thing is that every time we complete a sidequest, the game will send us back to Alex’s house.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: It’ll also cross off a day. We have just over 30 days, which is WAY more than enough to max everything out.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I also found the true final tool, the Monster Flute. The Monster Flute is used specifically for monster dens. You see that skull icon on the ground behind Alex? Playing the Monster Flute turns that into an encounter. Naturally, it’s an Ocarina because references.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The main draw of this sidequest segment is this chest, which was going to be part of a hidden ending to the game that never came to fruition. To get this chest, you have to do a sidequest that involves talking to a ghost in Wind Town’s graveyard, then talking to a second ghost at the Strip Mall, then talking to the Wind Town ghost again and finagling your way in here. This sidequest does NOT end the day.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Next up, there’s another Soul Survivor here, by the water tower. I’d like to think that this is Rory.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I should mention that against these lower-level enemies, LP Toss was doing like 1400 damage.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The next day, I went to finish the pog sidequest. The last one is hidden down here behind some trees.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: So, what’s our reward? An ultimate weapon? A few ambrosias?

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Nope, just worthless money. The shops haven’t stocked anything new since we did the cave near Flag Town. We also get 100 EXP and get sent home.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Next up is this pathetic excuse for a sidequest. Back at the reservoir, there’s a group of high-level aliens. They SUCK to fight, mostly because of the fact that they can chain-stun Alex and can also dodge LP Toss, but I got them down no problem.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I like that this quest, which takes like two minutes to do, gives more of a reward than finding all the pogs.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Our next time slot gets taken up by trading the buried treasure we found to this guy for…

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Pokemon cards… and 100 EXP and a trip home.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: We can then trade the cards for a geiger counter. This is where the trading quest stops having a point - neither this nor the final step get you anything.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: What this was supposed to do is lead you back to where we met Sammy at the start of the game, which would then send us through the window room to find the combination to the locked chest we were never able to open.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Next up is this kid, who is “missing”. He gives 100 EXP and $400.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: There’s also one I’m going to ignore in Wind Town which consists of fighting a handful of samurai tortoises and getting 100 EXP for it.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Finally, there’s this lady. She wants us to hang up missing posters for Semi… which is incredibly dumb because someone on ONISM posts that they found her dead right after we went into Essentia’s mind dungeon.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: There’s six spots we need to put these. One is right here, in the mall.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Then there’s one at the university…

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Strip mall.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Gas station.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Wind Town.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: And finally on the arcade. As for our reward…

9_2iVBrO_400x400: We get what I believe to be Michael’s ultimate weapon. Now that we’re done with this shit, our only objective is to level up to whatever the maximum is.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This is after I cleared out all the monster dens, and did pretty much every encounter in the game. I think we’re down just a bit of EXP (probably like 30) because there’s a specific sidequest for the Soul Survivor that was in the factory that we couldn’t do because it was already dead. Also, then the game glitched and docked me like 200 EXP when I had to reload, which is not a big deal.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I levelled Alex up to like… level 54 I think? I’m not sure what the max level is, but someone on the Steam boards for this game insisted it was 50. You’ll notice that we’re only on the 5th of December. We have to go ALL THE WAY TO NEW YEAR’S. The fastest way to do this is going to the Mind Dungeon and immediately leaving. However… we could do some of the scenes for “hang out with friends”. Let me put it up to a vote. We can SKIP THAT SHIT or keep doing the visit with friends thing and I can post a few shots of each cutscene until there are no more. Let me know what you want, and next weekend I’ll finish the Endless Eight here and get us back on track.

By the way, if we do go for cutscenes… there’s one other thing you’ll need to vote on.

Go to hell go to hell go to hell go to hell go to hell go to hell go to hell GO TO HELL I don’t know why but this, THIS makes me so mad.

I vote you look at all the scenes and force us to look at them too. Also, wuss out. Alex deserves nothing and I bet at this point if you try to do a kiss you get it, since Essentia is basically a fuckbot made from Sammy’s corpse and Vella’s brain is broken from talking to her.

1 Like

"I did not kill him, it’s not true, it’s bullshit, I did not kill him! I DID NAAHHHT.

Oh hai Vella"

also so I guess aside from unique cutscenes the only benefit of hanging with not-actually-friends is the unique cutscenes, which I vote for and also insist Alex just backs out of everything that requires the slightest bit of courage

I just wanna put it out there that even though Alex now has a broadly stated goal of “save the world” I still have no fucking clue what this game is about or how the Y2K bug ties into any of it.

Don’t kiss anybody. Just, like. For the sake of all of us. Don’t kiss anybody.

EDIT: Wait, is that it? Is that the joke, are we playing Seinfeld: The Game? It’s a game about nothing?

We’ve come this far, might as well go all the way and see these extra cutscenes.

…Right?

I know wussing out is what Alex deserves, but I absolutely believe that he would try to kiss the robot.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: So as it turns out, there aren’t actually that many cutscenes at all - there’s only like five of them. At this point, I’ve finished YIIK - I did so while recording for this update. There isn’t much left of the game, and it’s 100% cutscenes. I also realized that I hadn’t saved after levelling up, so I did that at the end of the cutscenes. The following cutscene takes place on December 5th.

Bitch: “I don’t think it feels real when you say it like that.”

Aigis: “I imagine that if Vella were to suddenly become me she would feel very ‘weird’.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: We call that browsing pornhub where I’m from.

Chondra: “Aroused?”

Aigis: “I experience every human state.”

Bitch: “Okay, moving on.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Of course you would, Chris Niosi. Of course you would.

Bitch: “That’s when somewhere in a parallel life she is kicking your ass for asking such stupid questions, Alex!”

Douche: “Hahaha! Easy there!”

Chondra: “I wonder what I’m like in my parallel lives. I have to say, this parallel life stuff blows. Compared to the concept of past lives, this isn’t very exciting.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I hope to god I don’t have any future lives because they’re all going to have to live with the fact that I LPed this pile of shit.

Chondra: “If we had past and future lives we would get to be something different in the future. Now I just get to be me and not realize I’m so many other things at the same time.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Like, I’m just imagining dying and being put in the Lethe or Styx or whatever and every memory being erased EXCEPT the fact that I LPed this game.

Chondra: “Yeah! I could be like you. Except I’ve have more of a personality.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: There’s a bit more to this cutscene, but I feel like this is a fitting end to it.

Aigis: “I will do my best.”

Claudio: “Does Mahou Shoujo Haru no Shimai exist in other realities? Am I crazy in thinking that this anime transcends time and space?”

Aigis: “Yes.”

Claudio: “Damn. I was really hoping it actually was as important to everyone as it is to me.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: So, I’m guessing this means there are dimensions where everyone is a furry. My guess is that Alex is just a giant talking pile of shit in that dimension.

Claudio: “Dating cats? But they’re still sisters, right?”

Aigis: “Yes.”

Chondra: “Please tell me you’re joking. There is no way that is a thing.”

Aigis: “I’m afraid it is.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Oh boy, Claudio’s interested in an anime about incestuous lesbians. I hate him.

Bitch: “Yeah, it’s nothing.”

Douche: “Ah, okay cool. As long as you’re okay.”

Aigis: “Vella is lying.”

Douche: “WHAT!? She just said she was okay! Man, I wish I could get in her mind like you can.”

Aigis: “You do not need a pan-dimensional mental link with Vella to see that she is lying.”

Douche: “That’s how it feels sometimes.”

Bitch: “I am so happy I left my reality for this one. Even if this one ends, that year I’ve had with you and everyone else was totally worth it.”

Aigis: “I couldn’t imagine my life without this reality. Without this Alex. You are so very important.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The pic I posted at the end of the last update is what happens if you hit “Ask about kissing”. We’ll just avoid that entirely and end the cutscene here. Alex isn’t getting a fucking kiss on my watch.

Douche: “What’s up?”

Aigis: “When the end comes and there is nothing left to do but die, will you leave your body behind and join me in the Soul Space?”

Douche: “You really don’t think we can win, do you?”

Aigis: “I am afraid I don’t know either way. I believe we may have a chance. All things are always fifty-fifty. They will either happen, or not happen.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I think the word she’s looking for is binary, but whatever.

Douche: “What’s it like to enter the Soul Space? Does it hurt?”

Aigis: “You are reduced to pure spirit. Your flesh dissolves, your form dissipates. You will float in space, liberated from corporeal form. You exist with the freedom to travel wherever you please.”

Aigis: “You are adrift in the void. It is magical and does not hurt.”

Douche: “So how do I do it?”

Aigis: “You must realize how unimportant you are. You must surrender yourself to the Soul Space, and forfeit your right to a physical form.”

Aigis: “Agree to give up your lot in physical space, and accept you do not need it. Admit that your physical form is nothing more than a crutch.”

Douche: “I can’t imagine not living like this - eating, drinking, reading, playing games. That’s what life is to me. I understand that there is more, I really do, but I can’t let go of what I’ve been trained to know.”

Aigis: “Maybe this is why you’ve never felt the existence of the Soul Space. You have never lost anything. Don’t worry. when the reality around you is obliterated, you will understand loss.”

Douche: “What’s up?”

Michael: “I find it unlikely that she expects you to answer it Alex. Obviously, this question is aimed at either the Essentia 2000 or myself.”

Chondra: “So, if each reality is drastically different from each other, what does it mean if two realities share a common concept? Does this make this concept more ‘real’?”

Aigis: “First, I should note that there are similarities between each reality, and then there are not. Some realities are strikingly close to one another. For me to answer the question, I will need you to give me a specific example.”

Aigis: “Perhaps something more complex than 'If the sun is blue in two realities, does that make it ACTUALLY blue over the suns that are yellow or chicken?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I uh, think that’s supposed to be a joke but it doesn’t really make any sense.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I can say for sure that there is no God, because a loving God would never allow this game to exist. Also, that is way too many words to simply ask “Does God exist?”

Aigis: “No. God does exist in some realities. In others, he does not.”

Chondra: “So are you saying in some realities God is a present force that you can get direct feedback from?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This writing doesn’t sound like a real conversation anyone has ever had.

Aigis: “How nicely worded. And yes, that is correct.”

Chondra: “So then, if God made all the realities, and yet doesn’t exist in some, does this make God less important? Less omnipotent? If there is a God in one reality and not in another, why would God make a reality that doesn’t have him in it? That seems pretty bogus to me. Almost like the people who get God in their reality are lucky or less lucky, depending on how you look at it.”

Chondra: “Who is?”

Michael: “The Essentia 2000, is lying. She doesn’t know if there is a God in another reality. I’ve seen many realities and some do not have the word God or a concept of spirituality. But there is no reality that directly has a God or does not. She can’t know the answer to this question. She is lying.”

Chondra: “Now I don’t know what to believe.”

Michael: “There might be a God - there might not be. Don’t let a piece of electronic junk, no offense, tell you what do to.”

Chondra: “Okay, if she’s leaving, I’m going to get out of here. Way too many dudes.”

Michael: “Alex, listen to me. Something is seriously wrong here. Can you feel it? It’s in the air. The air is different. The light is different. Everything this reality knows to be true feels wrong. It’s as if everything is in flux. Can you feel it? Alex?”

Douche: “Look man, I’m getting tired. Let’s sleep on that.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: For that conversation, we get the Flaming Hula Hoop - Chondra’s final weapon - and one final level-up. Now, here’s where this becomes a kick in the dick.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: That cutscene? That’s the last time you can use the “hang out with friends” option. We still have… 21 days until we can actually progress the plot and get to the end of the game.

Douche: “Day would dawn and I would repeat my alternation of spending time with my friends and honing my powers in the Mind Dungeon.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: By this he means that I spent the next probably 30 minutes walking to the door, using it to enter the Mind Dungeon, immediately leaving the Mind Dungeon, watching the calendar animation, and repeating. This monologue is one of two cutscenes that breaks that monotony up.

Douche: “It rained a lot last month. December’s uncharacteristically warm, sweaty days only added to the anxiety I was feeling about New Year’s Eve. Aside from the weather, there was hardly anything to distinguish one day from the next.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I think what I hate about this the most is that this is the ONE TIME they decided to show, not tell. Probably because it took zero effort to do.

Douche: “Each day we trained, we read the newspapers. We read about deaths, shootings, kidnappings, bombings. I worked at concentrating my attention on the real and useful.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Way to acknowledge Columbine a full eight months after it had already happened, dipshit.

Douche: “Even with all my friends with me, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drank, the very air I breathed, would feel like long, sharp needles.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I bet this is how he destroys his reality, by being so fucking boring that everyone dies.

Douche: “I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o’clock in the morning. Christmas was coming. And then in a few days, the world might end. Could I really be the end?”

Douche: “I was starting to love the world so much. All of my friends, my mom, even my sister. Everyone seemed so much more special when I realized how easily they could be lost.”

Douche: “Chimes maybe? A church? I sat up on the bed and felt for my Panda. He was still asleep. He slept more soundly than I did these days.”

Douche: “I sat still and listened hard, but the only sound I could hear was the faint, dry thumping of my own heart.”

Douche: “Months ago, I hated when my heart raced. It either meant I was nervous or I had been forced to exercise against my will.”

Douche: “That’s changed. With all the time I’ve spent training in the Mind Dungeon, everything feels clear. My mind, my muscles, everything was coming into focus. I lived for the moments when I could feel my heartbeat. I became excited for every pump forcing blood through my body.”

Douche: “I felt alive. I was going to hold on to this feeling as long as I could. Where had that music come from? Maybe I had been dreaming, after all.”

Douche: “I thought back to earlier in the summer. I used to dream all the time, but lately my dreams were fevered and confused. I missed when I dreamed of the Essentia 2000. I wondered where she was?”

Douche: “Where did she go at night? Why didn’t she ever stay with me? Where do transdimensional androids go at night?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I don’t really have much to say here. Just know that as I’m working on this update, I’m just muttering “fuck” and “shut up” a lot.

Douche: “4:00 AM.”

Panda: “What’s wrong? Is the house on fire?”

Douche: “No. Where do you think the Essentia 2000 goes at night?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The good news is, we’re actually almost done! There’s this cutscene, two more, and then we’re out.

Panda: “Probably to stay over a hotter guy’s house. yawn

Douche: “You think so? Think she has an android boyfriend out there somewhere?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Why am I not surprised that Fuckhead here only really gives a shit because he might not be able to fuck the robot?

Bitch: “Wow, I can’t believe another year is almost over.”

Chondra: “Don’t remind me.”

Douche: “So, are we going to do gifts or what!?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: So much for him not giving a shit about material things anymore.

Chondra: “Where is the Essentia 2000?”

Claudio: “I guess she isn’t much of a holiday person.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This would give me a perfect goddamn segue into something I really want to talk about, but I’ll have to do that… actually, I’ll let you decide.

Bitch: “Sure, why not.”

Michael: “For Christmas 1996, my mother got my dad a computer. It was a really good one too.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Who the fuck says “mother” but then says “dad”? Who does that?

Michael: “He used to do all of his writing on a word processor. The ones with the really tiny screen where you could see seven or eight lines max.”

Michael: “So anyway, my dad unboxes it and freaks out. He was so excited! And you know, I fell in love with it right away. Whenever my dad left the house, I’d get on the computer and play games, browse the internet.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I also fail to see how this is a Christmas story, but then again this game is called YIIK and has absolutely fuck all to do with the Y2K “bug”.

Michael: “I made a friend online. Together, we founded ONISM 1999. Now, you want to hear the really funny part? When I went and lived all of my parallel lives, I was him. I was on a computer, talking to me.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: There is absolutely nothing funny about that statement.

Michael: “Now tell me, how the hell can a computer connect to a chatroom that is in another reality? Something is screwed up here, guys.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: That’s all you’ve fucking been saying since you took your shirt off, you dipshit!

Chondra: “Dude, this might be our last Christmas together or ever! And you want to waste it talking about this?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Typo/grammar count is now well into the double-digits. I’m typing out the dialogue exactly as it appears.

Michael: “You guys have to tell me you’ve noticed it too. Do you honestly feel like things are the same as they were two months ago? Two years ago?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I feel like Alex should go get his record player and beat Michael over the head with it because he’s a broken goddamn record.

Claudio: “Dude, things change. That’s li–”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Clearly, Michael was walking in high cotton. Those fertile fields are never far away.

Michael: “Things are so different.”

Bitch: “Can you give us an example, Michael?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Well, I think today if a group of middle-aged white guys were going to get in a vehicle to sing about cotton they’d probably use a truck with two of them sitting in the bed to boost their “country cred”.

Michael: “Okay, why the hell haven’t any of you asked what the Entities were doing driving the android around!?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This is a question that never gets answered.

Michael: “So what, we save her and just forget about it? Why was she in a van in the first place? Vella, you said it yourself. Soul Survivors DO NOT kidnap people. They didn’t kidnap Sammy and they didn’t take the Essentia hostage.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I don’t get if he’s saying that the robot is wrong about Sammy kidnapping herself or what, but none of this is ever going to get answered.

Bitch: “They – sigh. Look, we just need to find the Essentia 2000 and ask her how her body ended up in the van. It’s that simple! Let’s finish opening up gifts. Tomorrow, we can sort this out.”

Douche: “Something was wrong and I couldn’t place my finger on it. I wondered if this was how people with dying family members felt - this sense of dread. But, it wasn’t a sense of dread I was feeling.”

Douche: “It was a loss of self, a complete dissolve of everything I had ever known, the only thing that was a step beyond death.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: “A complete dissolve”? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

Douche: “When people die, reality - the color of the sky, the sound of the trees, your memories - all remain the same. This was different. This was beyond unusual.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: We then have to manually skip ahead five days. I honestly don’t know why they give you so much time: even if you hadn’t done ANY of the sidequests, you could do those and hit all the cutscenes well before the time is up.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This next sequence consists of answering the phone, taking a few steps, then having to answer the phone again.

Captain: “You know, the important one.”

Douche: “Who is this?”

Sammy: “Have you been taking care of my cat?”

Douche: “Sammy!? WHERE ARE YOU!?”

Douche: “Dad?”

Captain: “Where the hell have you been!? We were worried sick about you! You said you were just going to bike to Justin’s house. Claudio and your mom are freaking out!”

Douche: “Dad!!!”

Douche: “What is ‘go screw yourself’?”

Sammy: “Did you remember to pick up my cat from the dry cleaners?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This is another reference to Two Brothers. Fuck you, Allanson.

Captain: “Did you know that I died and it’s all your fault? Pretty screwed up. Pretty colors in heaven.”

Chondra: “I’ve had the weirdest dreams. I’ve been dreaming that I’m a boy. Dreaming that I’m a boy. That dreaming boy I’m a. A I’m that boy dreaming. Isn’t that funny?”

Michael: “Have you seen my hula hoop or my headphones? Also, I’ve been thinking of changing my hair. It’s getting so big.”

Michael: “I’M STUCK IN THE MIND DUNGEON!!! WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME?!”

Douche: “MICHAEL!!!”

Sammy: “I can’t find you. Where did you go? You left me at the elevator and you vanished into the crowd.”

Sammy: “Why do you always disappear on me like that!? YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I HATE THAT!!”

Douche: “I don’t even know. Didn’t I dream that? Man, I wish I dreamed that.”

Panda: “Talk it out. Why do you think you were getting all those strange calls?”

Douche: “I have no idea, but Panda, have you noticed how weird things have been?”

Panda: “You mean with all the soul survivors, androids, and long haired punk kids you’ve been rolling with lately?”

Douche: “No, even before that.”

Panda: “When do you think it started?”

Douche: “Well, I guess around the time I came home from school, for starters. And I know this could just be a coincidence, but I didn’t see my mom for weeks.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: It’s like they’re trying to do the thing like in Futurama where if you watch the first episode closely you can see Fry push himself into the cryo chamber, only they didn’t plan any of it in advance and are now in a massive cover-their-ass spree to try and explain why this game doesn’t have a plot.

Panda: “Mostly normal.”

Douche: “No, it wasn’t. Something is weird. Where’s my dad been? Don’t you remember?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Did the Allansons forget that his dad ran away when he was a kid?

Douche: “My dad worked for Pacific Chime, not my mom. No, my mom worked for Moon Macrosystems. They met at that programming convention. When did mom start working for Pacific Chime?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This part in particular feels like they were trying to go for the whole Dark City/Matrix style “guy breaks himself out of the Matrix by thinking too hard” bit but it just doesn’t work.

Douche: “Yeah, I do. Of course I do. Everyone has a dad.”

Panda: “Then where is he?”

Douche: “He’s-- and then Michael. When did Michael move back to Frankton?”

Panda: “Didn’t Michael move away when he was ten?”

Douche: “When did he move away?”

Douche: “He was a few years younger than me but I never felt like there was much of an age gap when we hung out. The summer he moved to town we spent a lot of time together.”

Douche: “That was back when my sister and I would spend the days outside until the sun went down, counting the accomplishments of those summer days based on the number of mosquito bites and caught fireflies.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: I’d reassure you and say that this is among the last monologues in the game, but really about 90% of the rest of the game is going to be Alex talking to himself. Also, shut the fuck up Alex you fucking suck.

Douche: “Michael had moved to the area when he was twelve. 1991. The year Michael Stipe of REM sang ‘Losing My Religion’. It was a peaceful green street at the time, not a single thing to claim your attention. A handful of little white houses with a few fences, a stream full of crayfish, a two lane road they pretended was a highway, barely a yawn of a shopping center.”

Douche: “That was it. Most houses had maple trees planted in the yard and brand new not-yet-beaten fences. And there were those giant billboards advertising the mall they’d be building right off of 82.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Those… those statements don’t line up at all.

Douche: “The house he moved into was a mid-century model-style built sometime around the late '80s.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Who the fuck cares? Who the fuck even gives a shit what kind of house he lives in? WE’VE SEEN IT!

Douche: “The exterior, painted in three shades of green, had faded handsomely in the sun and wind and rain to blend in perfectly with the surrounding countryside. There was a huge yard and in it several stands of trees and a small pond.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: SHUT UP! SHUT THE FUCK UP! SHUT UP! GOD DAMMIT SHUT UP ABOUT HIS STUPID FUCKING HOUSE!

9_2iVBrO_400x400: He just keeps on fucking talking! It’s like this fuckhead read one of those CIA torture handbooks and is just fucking following it to a T. I’m pretty sure this game can be classed as a crime against humanity.

Douche: “Its bay windows hung with lace curtains faded to a nondescript color. Down by the pond, daffodils were in riotous bloom and every morning birds came to bathe. The first owner of the house, also its designer, had been an elderly oil painter, but his lungs gave out on him and he died the winter before Michael moved in.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This is seriously like one of those Grandpa Simpson stories straight out of the show before The Simpsons turned to shit, only it’s not funny.

Douche: “That was in 1990, the year Billy Joel sang ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’. Michael was my best friend until I was – didn’t he move when I was 12? When did he move back to Frankton?”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: You know what? Alex is just like Billy Joel. Billy Joel is most famous for making a song that is just him reading off a list and also no one can name a single one of his songs that isn’t We Didn’t Start the Fire or Piano Man. God I suck at analogies right now. YIIK does that to you.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Actually, no. Alex is just like the theory of the Mobius, where time becomes a loop. Where time becomes a loop. Where time where time where time becomes a loop becomes a loop.

Panda: “Didn’t they move to Canada when his dad got that publishing deal?”

Douche: “He sold his house, right? didn’t a cute girl move in there?”

Panda: “Come to think of it, didn’t you and Michael have a falling out? He moved away, you went to hang out with him and he had given you the wrong address or something like that?”

Douche: “Yeah, sort of. He had me meet him at a mall near his house and when I got there, he never showed up. That was the last I heard of him.”

Panda: “You should go ask him.”

Douche: “What time is it? It’s dark outside.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: This is the last scene we’ll see that isn’t part of one of the game’s two… well, sorta three, I guess… endings. As soon as Alex leaves the house, he has two choices: he could go to New York City for the new year with his friends - or he could keep on his overly creepy hunt for the dead girl as if nothing ever happened. We’ll call the first one Ending A and the second one Ending B.

Please place your votes for Ending A or Ending B - though what we’ll be seeing first is an ending that isn’t either of those. You’ll see what I mean.

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I’m half expecting a “Here, Alex, this will explain everything” moment some four forty lines after the update ends here.

(A) Send him to New York, or whatever it’s called in the universe he’s slipped into.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Welcome to the second, and probably last side update of the YIIK LP. Today, we’re going to talk about the third ending to YIIK. For the record, I did not find the video this update talks about by myself: GrandmaParty actually alerted me to its existence in time for me to include it.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: When YIIK first released, the Allansons teased the playerbase by insisting that there were three endings to the game, and that the third ending was incredibly well-hidden and would take forever to find, ala Payday 2’s true ending.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: What they didn’t plan on was people decompiling the game and sourcediving it. To absolutely no one’s surprise, they didn’t find a single piece of code to back that up. There was NOTHING in YIIK’s source code that looked anything like it could be a third ending.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: The clue the Allansons dropped was that the trading sequence was the key to the third ending. I believe that initially, you were supposed to take the cassette tape and use it to go back into the factory, which would allow you to open that box with the combination lock near where Sammy was.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: However, like I said, the third ending simply doesn’t exist in the game’s code. I’m also pretty sure (though I have not confirmed this) that the broken puzzle (as seen in the first side update) in the factory was broken as a result of them trying to put the third ending into the game.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: You’re probably asking why I’m posting screenshots of a Youtube video. Allow me to explain. On August 19th, a Youtube account by the name of “Mastershielder73 Robles” posted a video claiming to be the third ending to YIIK. The account is (apparently) a Spanish-language LPer… who does not talk or comment on their videos. I will post a link to the video at the end of this update - but only watch it AFTER I start Ending B, because it contains spoilers for the very beginning of Ending B.


9_2iVBrO_400x400: Now, there’s a couple of dead giveaways that this account belongs to the developers. First off, the fact that the account pops into existence SOLELY to post the YIIK video, with no prior videos showing off an LP. Second, I’m told that the Spanish description is very obviously a machine translation, though I don’t speak enough Spanish to confirm this myself. There’s also the question of why a supposed Spanish-language LPer (who presumably has an audience of Spanish speakers) would LP a game that is entirely in English.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: In case you’re wondering, by the way, the description Google Translates perfectly into “There is a special message from developer that appears before the third final begins. I removed it as requested by the developer.”

9_2iVBrO_400x400: That’s obvious bullshit for several reasons, but let’s keep going with this. Third, there are assets in the video that don’t exist in the released version of the game.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: See those sneakers? I’m 99% sure those don’t exist anywhere in YIIK, or they’re unused assets.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Another clue is the save file menu at the start of the video. There is a New Game Plus mode in the actual game, but… unless this person Cheat Engined the HELL out of the game there’s no way they hit Level 70 in 3 hours. For reference, I did every possible battle and all the sidequests in the save I used for this LP, and Alex ran out of EXP at level 62.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: There’s also the part where they’ve… played over 180 hours of YIIK. For the record, I finished the game in just over 14 hours.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: As for what happens: basically, Alex goes into that big tower in the water you can see on the world map, and then winds up in Essentia’s mind dungeon again. He then goes through a crappy puzzle area reminiscent of the factory and winds up in an alternate version of Frankton where he fights Essentia and some guy. Then they reveal that the game retcons itself ala Sonic 2006.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: One thing that the Allansons might claim is that this is a mod - but if that’s true, how is it that someone managed to PERFECTLY copy their writing style down to there being way too much fucking text?

9_2iVBrO_400x400: There’s also no voiceacting at all in this video, which means that this ending was made after the initial release. This might point toward a modder, but remember that the Allansons probably no longer have the money to call the VAs back and even if they wanted to, Chris Niosi is a no-go for obvious reasons.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: By the way, there’s one other thing that I think proves this is developer-made. You don’t see them use the LP Toss - not in the handful of enemy encounters before the boss fight, nor in the boss fight itself. I find it really hard to believe that you could play YIIK for 180 hours and not know about how broken LP Toss is… unless you’re the developer and you either fixed it or wanted to make your game look good so you avoided doing 5-digit damage and instakilling the boss.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Personally, I’d like to think that the devs have seen this LP (it’s entirely possible) and this is an attempt to goad me into playing New Game Plus in an attempt to find this stupid ending. Nope, not doing it, fuck you Allanson.

9_2iVBrO_400x400: Anyway, the video’s here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDf5gfDpSn4

I’m casting my vote for Ending A because, I dunno, I feel like Alex would shrug all these discrepancies off.

I mean, probably no one else would, but I refuse to accept a canon where Alex has learned anything.

I mean I kinda feel like both endings represent Alex not learning anything. In Ending A he’s completely incurious and just accepts what he sees without question, not learning anything in sort of a passive way. In Ending B he keeps chasing the thing that should have (but, unaccountably, has not) utterly ruined his life and alienated everyone he supposedly cares about, making the active choice to not learn a Goddamned thing.

The only proper response is to vote for both, so you do both. But I’d say go for B so that we can at least see everyone die, hopefully.

The thing that gets me about Ending #3 is, they didn’t have to do it that way. They could have just thrown up the video on their own blog saying “hey, there was supposed to be a third ending but we couldn’t finish it, here’s what it would have looked like though”. That’s a thing that’s fine to do! But noooo, they had to go and do some kind of dumb ARG social media bullshit to try and gin up some fake buzz for it. Ugh.

Or maybe buzz isn’t right, maybe it’s not about buzz. Maybe it’s about not being able to admit that they lied. If they made that post, they’d have to walk back the earlier stuff about how Ending C is totally cool and totally in the game, and they can’t do that.

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