"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.
: 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.
: “I don’t think it feels real when you say it like that.”
: “I imagine that if Vella were to suddenly become me she would feel very ‘weird’.”
: We call that browsing pornhub where I’m from.
: “Aroused?”
: “I experience every human state.”
: “Okay, moving on.”
: Of course you would, Chris Niosi. Of course you would.
: “That’s when somewhere in a parallel life she is kicking your ass for asking such stupid questions, Alex!”
: “Hahaha! Easy there!”
: “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.”
: 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.
: “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.”
: 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.
: “Yeah! I could be like you. Except I’ve have more of a personality.”
: There’s a bit more to this cutscene, but I feel like this is a fitting end to it.
: “I will do my best.”
: “Does Mahou Shoujo Haru no Shimai exist in other realities? Am I crazy in thinking that this anime transcends time and space?”
: “Yes.”
: “Damn. I was really hoping it actually was as important to everyone as it is to me.”
: 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.
: “Dating cats? But they’re still sisters, right?”
: “Yes.”
: “Please tell me you’re joking. There is no way that is a thing.”
: “I’m afraid it is.”
: Oh boy, Claudio’s interested in an anime about incestuous lesbians. I hate him.
: “Yeah, it’s nothing.”
: “Ah, okay cool. As long as you’re okay.”
: “Vella is lying.”
: “WHAT!? She just said she was okay! Man, I wish I could get in her mind like you can.”
: “You do not need a pan-dimensional mental link with Vella to see that she is lying.”
: “That’s how it feels sometimes.”
: “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.”
: “I couldn’t imagine my life without this reality. Without this Alex. You are so very important.”
: 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.
: “What’s up?”
: “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?”
: “You really don’t think we can win, do you?”
: “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.”
: I think the word she’s looking for is binary, but whatever.
: “What’s it like to enter the Soul Space? Does it hurt?”
: “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.”
: “You are adrift in the void. It is magical and does not hurt.”
: “So how do I do it?”
: “You must realize how unimportant you are. You must surrender yourself to the Soul Space, and forfeit your right to a physical form.”
: “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.”
: “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.”
: “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.”
: “What’s up?”
: “I find it unlikely that she expects you to answer it Alex. Obviously, this question is aimed at either the Essentia 2000 or myself.”
: “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’?”
: “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.”
: “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?”
: I uh, think that’s supposed to be a joke but it doesn’t really make any sense.
: 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?”
: “No. God does exist in some realities. In others, he does not.”
: “So are you saying in some realities God is a present force that you can get direct feedback from?”
: This writing doesn’t sound like a real conversation anyone has ever had.
: “How nicely worded. And yes, that is correct.”
: “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.”
: “Who is?”
: “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.”
: “Now I don’t know what to believe.”
: “There might be a God - there might not be. Don’t let a piece of electronic junk, no offense, tell you what do to.”
: “Okay, if she’s leaving, I’m going to get out of here. Way too many dudes.”
: “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?”
: “Look man, I’m getting tired. Let’s sleep on that.”
: 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.
: 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.
: “Day would dawn and I would repeat my alternation of spending time with my friends and honing my powers in the Mind Dungeon.”
: 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.
: “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.”
: 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.
: “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.”
: Way to acknowledge Columbine a full eight months after it had already happened, dipshit.
: “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.”
: I bet this is how he destroys his reality, by being so fucking boring that everyone dies.
: “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?”
: “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.”
: “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.”
: “I sat still and listened hard, but the only sound I could hear was the faint, dry thumping of my own heart.”
: “Months ago, I hated when my heart raced. It either meant I was nervous or I had been forced to exercise against my will.”
: “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.”
: “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.”
: “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?”
: “Where did she go at night? Why didn’t she ever stay with me? Where do transdimensional androids go at night?”
: 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.
: “4:00 AM.”
: “What’s wrong? Is the house on fire?”
: “No. Where do you think the Essentia 2000 goes at night?”
: The good news is, we’re actually almost done! There’s this cutscene, two more, and then we’re out.
: “Probably to stay over a hotter guy’s house. yawn”
: “You think so? Think she has an android boyfriend out there somewhere?”
: Why am I not surprised that Fuckhead here only really gives a shit because he might not be able to fuck the robot?
: “Wow, I can’t believe another year is almost over.”
: “Don’t remind me.”
: “So, are we going to do gifts or what!?”
: So much for him not giving a shit about material things anymore.
: “Where is the Essentia 2000?”
: “I guess she isn’t much of a holiday person.”
: 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.
: “Sure, why not.”
: “For Christmas 1996, my mother got my dad a computer. It was a really good one too.”
: Who the fuck says “mother” but then says “dad”? Who does that?
: “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.”
: “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.”
: 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”.
: “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.”
: There is absolutely nothing funny about that statement.
: “Now tell me, how the hell can a computer connect to a chatroom that is in another reality? Something is screwed up here, guys.”
: That’s all you’ve fucking been saying since you took your shirt off, you dipshit!
: “Dude, this might be our last Christmas together or ever! And you want to waste it talking about this?”
: Typo/grammar count is now well into the double-digits. I’m typing out the dialogue exactly as it appears.
: “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?”
: 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.
: “Dude, things change. That’s li–”
: Clearly, Michael was walking in high cotton. Those fertile fields are never far away.
: “Things are so different.”
: “Can you give us an example, Michael?”
: 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”.
: “Okay, why the hell haven’t any of you asked what the Entities were doing driving the android around!?”
: This is a question that never gets answered.
: “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.”
: 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.
: “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.”
: “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.”
: “It was a loss of self, a complete dissolve of everything I had ever known, the only thing that was a step beyond death.”
: “A complete dissolve”? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?
: “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.”
: 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.
: This next sequence consists of answering the phone, taking a few steps, then having to answer the phone again.
: “You know, the important one.”
: “Who is this?”
: “Have you been taking care of my cat?”
: “Sammy!? WHERE ARE YOU!?”
: “Dad?”
: “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!”
: “Dad!!!”
: “What is ‘go screw yourself’?”
: “Did you remember to pick up my cat from the dry cleaners?”
: This is another reference to Two Brothers. Fuck you, Allanson.
: “Did you know that I died and it’s all your fault? Pretty screwed up. Pretty colors in heaven.”
: “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?”
: “Have you seen my hula hoop or my headphones? Also, I’ve been thinking of changing my hair. It’s getting so big.”
: “I’M STUCK IN THE MIND DUNGEON!!! WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME?!”
: “MICHAEL!!!”
: “I can’t find you. Where did you go? You left me at the elevator and you vanished into the crowd.”
: “Why do you always disappear on me like that!? YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I HATE THAT!!”
: “I don’t even know. Didn’t I dream that? Man, I wish I dreamed that.”
: “Talk it out. Why do you think you were getting all those strange calls?”
: “I have no idea, but Panda, have you noticed how weird things have been?”
: “You mean with all the soul survivors, androids, and long haired punk kids you’ve been rolling with lately?”
: “No, even before that.”
: “When do you think it started?”
: “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.”
: 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.
: “Mostly normal.”
: “No, it wasn’t. Something is weird. Where’s my dad been? Don’t you remember?”
: Did the Allansons forget that his dad ran away when he was a kid?
: “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?”
: 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.
: “Yeah, I do. Of course I do. Everyone has a dad.”
: “Then where is he?”
: “He’s-- and then Michael. When did Michael move back to Frankton?”
: “Didn’t Michael move away when he was ten?”
: “When did he move away?”
: “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.”
: “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.”
: 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.
: “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.”
: “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.”
: Those… those statements don’t line up at all.
: “The house he moved into was a mid-century model-style built sometime around the late '80s.”
: Who the fuck cares? Who the fuck even gives a shit what kind of house he lives in? WE’VE SEEN IT!
: “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.”
: SHUT UP! SHUT THE FUCK UP! SHUT UP! GOD DAMMIT SHUT UP ABOUT HIS STUPID FUCKING HOUSE!
: 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.
: “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.”
: 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.
: “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?”
: 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.
: “Didn’t they move to Canada when his dad got that publishing deal?”
: “He sold his house, right? didn’t a cute girl move in there?”
: “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?”
: “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.”
: “You should go ask him.”
: “What time is it? It’s dark outside.”
: 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.
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.
: 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.
: 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.
: 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.
: 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.
: 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.
: 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.
: 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.
: 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.”
: 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.
: See those sneakers? I’m 99% sure those don’t exist anywhere in YIIK, or they’re unused assets.
: 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.
: 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.
: 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.
: 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?
: 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.
: 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.
: 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.
: 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.
Oh, I should’ve made it more clear. I fully intend to do both. I have MOST of Ending A recorded from when I did the last update. The vote was for which one I was doing first.
Honestly, I don’t think they did it to get attention. YIIK is sort of in this category where everyone knows it sucks, and it’s not one of those situations like No Man’s Sky where the possibility exists that the developers could fix it. I’m pretty sure they don’t have the money to do that, and no one is going to donate to them after what happened with the plagiarism accusations.
I think what probably happened is that it’s a combination of bad taste (they probably think the whole ARG thing is cool) and not wanting to show their faces in public anymore. As far as I know, they’ve done all of one interview since the plagiarism story broke. If they came out with a video on their own blog, I think what would happen is that they’d be flooded with comments about it and I don’t think either of the devs could take it.
The reason I think they didn’t just release it as a patch, by the way, is because of the console releases. I doubt they have the resources to also patch the Switch and PS4 versions, and they probably don’t want to answer people who might be angry that their platform of choice didn’t get the patch while PC did. Speaking of the console releases, I’d like an answer from Reginald Fils-Aime about how YIIK was considered good enough to get a devkit for the Switch, but Disaster Day of Crisis wasn’t good enough to be released in the US. At least Day of Crisis is a fun trainwreck.
: After that, uh… riveting conversation with what may or may not have been Alex’s dad, we get put into a blatant ripoff of Moonside from Earthbound. It looks like Ending A won, so we’ll do Ending A first.
: I don’t know why they put a healing item here, because as far as I know, there is no more actual combat for the rest of the game. I didn’t actually FINISH Ending A on this recording run, however, so there might be combat that I don’t know about yet as of the time I’m starting this update.
: You might ask what triggers Ending B, and it’s that tree over there. We COULD trigger that this run and still get Ending A, but I won’t.
: I wish I knew what the reason was for choosing this artstyle to show reality breaking down. Moonside looked the way it did because it sort of symbolized things that the characters didn’t understand: it had an enemy called Abstract Art.
: Following the path shows us New York (gotta love how you can see what are apparently the Twin Towers in the front) with a giant Alex-faced meteor about to crash into it.
: “We’ve been waiting here forever!”
: “What’s going on?”
: “You okay, dude? You look terrible.”
: “Yeah, maybe you should sit in the back seat, far away from me in case you barf.”
: “Seriously, are you okay?”
: “Yeah, let’s get going.”
: Some of you have been asking why the developers chose the name YIIK when the game has seemingly nothing to do with the Y2K bug other than passing mentions. I’m pretty sure they did it solely so they could make a Prince reference.
: “I can’t remember the last time I did something fun for the new year!!”
: “We should leave now if we want to get shopping in before the new year!”
: I haven’t gone back through Ending A yet, but when I recorded this I was getting massive amounts of audio desync and I’m not entirely sure it was intentional. The voiceacting would be three or four lines behind where the text was.
: “How can you even think about shopping? Wasn’t it just Christmas?”
: “Exactly. All the best stuff is on sale now.”
: Typo! That’s what, 15? I bet if they’d hired a professional writer instead of blowing all their money on voiceacting, this wouldn’t be an issue.
: “Why did I feel like this? Why was it that when I looked at Vella I felt as if I was looking at someone else altogether?”
: “When I looked at Proto-Michael, I felt like I was looking at a beautiful image that was stained. His features were too rounded.”
: Come to think of it, why doesn’t Michael’s sprite thing reflect the whole shirtless dipshit thing he had going on?
: “Claudio, Chondra. How were they even talking? I looked at their mouths moving up and down and felt a strange detachment to them. As if they were speaking a foreign language without making a sound at all.”
: “I turned to the Essentia. Her face felt blurry and out of focus.”
: “No. What’s happening?”
: “This reality has already started to break.”
: “But this didn’t start today, did it?”
: “I see, so you have noticed.”
: “Only just today. I’ve been pretty oblivious to things I don’t want to see, if you haven’t noticed.”
: “So would you like me to clear some things up?”
: “Of course. Give it to me straight.”
: “Our souls are in constant transit if we do not enter the Soul Space and take control. So this Michael here is not the Michael from your childhood. Proto-Michael is, as he is a combination of all Michaels.”
: You have to love how the camera never moves from this spot for a good… probably two minutes?
: “So did the old Michael leave this reality?”
: “No. This reality is shattered. Lost souls in the Soul Space are slipping in and out of it.”
: “So Claudio and Chondra?”
: “That is one I’ll let you figure out yourself. It will be good for you.”
: “So does Sammy. When Sammy left, Vella took her place.”
: A lot of people have also pointed out in the thread that the entire mechanic of how souls work in this game makes no sense and is wildly inconsistent. For the record, Vella has stated before that she’d been in Alex’s reality for a year - meaning that this shouldn’t be possible.
: “I took advantage of Sammy leaving this reality and forced my spirit into this physical space. Understand so far?”
: This also makes no sense, because they’ve established that it’s a one to one thing: one soul leaves, another can enter. So no, I don’t understand what the fuck the point is.
: “Michael, like Rory, Chondra, Claudio, and myself, are important to you in every reality. When this reality broke, they entered. So a version of Michael, Rory, Chondra, and Claudio all come to this reality.”
: Okay, so did this happen years ago, or just now, or what even the fuck? This feels like I’m reading a bad fanfic where the author can’t keep anything straight.
: “For what?”
: “To find you. To find me. We’re going to help them.”
: “How? This reality is broken. And from what I can tell, it’s been broken for a long time.”
: “I do not know. We must first see what form you take to destroy this reality.”
: Here’s another thing I don’t get. From what the robot is saying, their reality was already collapsing in on itself before Alex even got here, and was probably going to wind up dying anyway. The way they present it, this weird drawing shit would’ve happened even if Alex WASN’T going to destroy reality.
: “Why does it have to be me?”
: “If it wasn’t you, it would be me, or Rory, or Claudio. We are all capable of destruction. We can create or destroy. The choice is ultimately yours.”
: “Then I choose not to destroy this reality!”
: “Excellent. Now if only your parallel selves agreed.”
: “I was playing the events of the past year over and over again in my head. I thought back to when I first arrived in Frankton. Everything felt so different.”
: “Seeing Michael again. It seemed so normal for him to live next to me. Then we met Vella and that felt the most real out of all the things that had happened so far.”
: If I had to guess, the answer is from you and because she hates you.
: “Probably for the best. This reality has gone to literal shit. Did she, perhaps, sense that the end was coming? Was her reality torn apart along with mine?”
: “I thought about the Mind Dungeon. I had never heard of a Mind Dungeon before, and yet I accepted it.”
: “There you can go and toughen up and learn to do magic. Magic? Why hadn’t I found this strange? It was all so obvious from the start. This wasn’t my reality.”
: “Mind Dungeons, cats with moustaches, beautiful women who come in and out of my life, mysterious pan-dimensional androids.”
: “This wasn’t my life. Of course something had to be wrong. I had sensed it all along, but I was so intrigued by the fun and mystery of it all. Who wouldn’t be?”
: New York is pretty much just a cutscene you walk through, which is pretty accurate from what I remember the one time I visited there.
: You’ll notice that once we get into New York, all of the characters are back on-model.
: Ahh yes, New York’s famous Food District. Who could ever visit New York and not see the Food District, right next to the Business District and the Ey I’m Walkin’ Here District.
: At this point I’m starting to question whether this was an actual design choice or they just ran out of money.
: “Would we survive the night? Would this reality continue to exist? What would happen to our souls? I wished I could jump inside their brains and make them remember, but were these even the same friends I was with the past year?”
: If you’re wondering, the blue rings on the map are all shops. We don’t need any of them because there are no more real fights left.
: Ahh, this must be the famous Times Square, located straight in the heart of the Anime District.
: “I don’t know how, but I can feel it in my bones. This is how it ends.”
: You ever just steal something right out of Majora’s Mask, but it’s never quite the same?
: Meet the Proto Meteor. It’s the laziest boss design ever.
: “THIS IS ALL SO FAMILIAR!”
: "Prepare to fight! This is it. This is the end!’
: “Okay guys, we trained for this!”
: “WHAT DO YOU MEAN WE TRAINED FOR THIS!? Isn’t that Alex’s face!? HOLY SHIT!!!”
: “Michael!!! You’re back!”
: “I never left.”
: “Holy shit. I remember everything now. What’s happening!?”
: “I hope that means you all remember what’s going on here!”
: We’ve got this. Alex has over 110 strength and is at an 89% chance to critical.
: Yeah, I’m thinking that’ll do it… only it doesn’t. The Proto Comet is an entirely scripted boss fight that is a BLATANT ripoff of Persona 4’s final boss. It can be reduced to 1HP, but cannot die.
: As soon as it can start taking turns, the Proto Comet starts banishing your party members, one by one.
: Eventually, you’re left with just Essentia and Alex.
: This is basically a colossal ripoff of Persona 4’s final boss, which unlike the Proto Comet had an actual boss fight before it got into the scripted stuff. However, the way that Atlus did it was far better: all of your party members have an ability by default where they will step in automatically to take an otherwise-lethal hit for the main character. The final boss in Persona 4 exploits this by targeting the main character with an instakill attack, and one of your party members will take the hit and die instead.
: “I am all that’s left. How did this happen? How can I have everything one moment and be so completely alone the next?”
: “My world is destroyed. I am destroyed.”
: So what you’re saying is… you know you let us down? You’ve been a fool to yourself? You thought that you could live for no one else? You’ll never love again, your world is ending?
: “We could live alone on this island forever. You and me, what do you say pal?”
: “Yeah, you’re right. That’s a terrible idea.”
: This actually would’ve been a pretty good ending by itself. Alex is so self-absorbed that he ultimately winds up in his house with only himself for company until the end of time.
: “Where you do think the Essentia 2000 is?”
: “I don’t know, but I really wish she was here. And Vella. And everyone else.”
: “Video games, music, TV, expensive record players, all of these material things have value, but they can’t be valued above the people in your life.”
: “Vella lost the man who hurt her. Sammy lost her mind. Rory lost his sister. What had I ever lost?”
: “It’s a funny thing, to grow up with everything in life. When I was four I vacationed to Italy one summer. I did every year for the next two years and you know how much I appreciated that travel?”
: I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use the phrase “every year for the next two years”.
: “You guessed it, I didn’t appreciate it all.”
: Typos! Typos fucking everywhere!
: “I met a kid in college who had never left the state. He said his parents didn’t take vacations. I didn’t realize people didn’t travel.”
: So you… met Charlie from Always Sunny in Philadelphia? Alex would fit right in on that show, in that he’d absolutely be a side character who gets destroyed every time he shows up.
: This is among the longest monologues in the game, at a whopping 35 text boxes. Nothing to look at, just a black screen with text on it.
: “But now that there is nothing there, I realize – I realize what a little shit I was. I thought about my soul and whatever the hell that meant. Did I even believe in souls?”
: “Well, I did to a certain extent. I think the problem is people of a hundred different ideologies say different words. Soul means one thing to one person and something entirely different to another.”
: “I thought about my mom, my sister, about Vella, Rory, Michael, Chondra, and Claudio. I thought about all my friends from college, my past girlfriends, teachers, random people on buses.”
: As much as I hate to do this twice in an update… what you’re saying is that you heard telephones, opera house, favorite melodies? Saw boys, toys, electric irons and TVs? Your brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare? You had to cram so many things to store everything in there. And all the fat skinny people? And all the tall short people? And all the somebody people? And all the nobody people? Never thought you’d meet so many people?
: “And they were all gone. Simply gone. Where? When you die you don’t enter the Soul Space. Soul Space isn’t heaven or anything stupid like that. It’s the place between places. No, that’s not entirely right though, is it? It’s the place-between the place between places.”
: “If I stayed here, I’d die. I’d starve. I’d go insane from the loneliness. The only place to go was to that place between places, the Soul Space. But how? How do I do this? How do I separate my brain from my body?”
: “How can the physical and metaphysical be separated? What happens to a mind lost to the Soul Space? What becomes of it? There were so many questions I should have asked The Essentia 2000.”
: “You’re now face to face with God. You can ask him any question, and all you can ask is what’s for dinner. This is me in a nutshell. I lacked appreciation for those around me. I should have – no, don’t think like that Alex.”
: “There is no use beating myself up. Is there? I don’t even know any more. ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself.’ This is what my mother said to me whenever I made a mistake. But was this the mantra I really should have adopted?”
: That’s the entire point! You’re a fucking failure!
: This is apparently the Soul Space. In front of us, we have a cosmic horror too awful to look at. The blue arrow tells us which direction we need to go.
: Hey guys, remember Planet of the Apes? Huh? Do ya? Do ya?
: “I’m terrified. I miss my friends, my family.”
: “I’m sorry.”
: “What do you mean you don’t have answers!? You always have something to say!”
: I haven’t seen it in years, and I’m too lazy to look it up, but I’m pretty sure those last two lines are stolen straight out of Cast Away.
: Moving around in the Soul Space is incredibly slow, and it took me a good few minutes to find our next destination even with the arrow.
: Now we’re on the Planet of the Dipshits. I’m pretty sure all of these Alexes here are earlier concepts for the main character.
: “Yes. Can you tell me where here is?”
: “It’s your room, of course.”
: “Look, I just got to the Soul Space. I’m lost. I’m so confused. I don’t even know what we do here in the Soul Space.”
: “Ah, I understand. Well, we’ve got a bunch of the latest games from each reality, some dope beats. So, just kick back and enjoy.”
: “I was with my friends, and then something happened. I was myself, but I was also a meteorite. They’re all dead, I think.”
: “Shit are you serious?”
: “Of course I’m serious! What kind of question is that!?”
: “Usually we leave our body when she comes to get us.”
: “Wait, who is she?”
: “Well the Essentia 2000. She appears to us, warns us, shows us what we’re going to do, and we get the hell out of reality before anyone gets hurt.”
: Wait, what? How does that… how does that make sense?
: “I didn’t do that. I thought I could fight it!!”
: “Phffttt. Wow, you’re a brave one. But ahh— it’s impossible. How could the decent few of us actually stand a chance? There are just too many of them.”
: “Too many of who?”
: “Look, I think it would be best if you just relaxed a bit. You’re going to give yourself a panic attack. Whatever you do, just don’t go to the other side of the rock. We’re not allowed to go there.”
: The other Alexes don’t have much interesting to say, but…
: Apparently, Chondra’s missing brother is an Alex? I don’t quite get how that works.
: Behind the rock is a group of Alex in a hood.
: I’m pretty sure that agreeing to join just gives you a game over… even though the dialog that follows afterward seems like you join them anyway.
: “I was losing a part of myself. I was a burst pipe and I was the plumber desperately trying to hold it altogether.”
: I think the Allansons need to be put into a new language classification where they technically speak English, but they’re so bad at it that they actually do not know a language.
: “I was a metaphor for a metaphor for a sad, sad man.”
: I don’t have much else to talk about, so let’s talk about how I bought a copy of After Dark and read about 2/3 of the way through it.
: “Each time, it was as if I lost all my friends again.”
: After Dark is not a great book. It reads like a stageplay, and the whole thing kinda feels like Haruki Murakami is trying to give you an elevator pitch for a movie he wants to make, only the movie is about nothing.
: “My mom, my sister, my dad. Everyone I couldn’t remember. Why couldn’t I recall everyone?”
: As someone pointed out, all of those cutscenes with Essentia in them were basically ripped straight from the book. Every other chapter is basically “We are looking in on a Japanese woman sleeping on her bed, only there’s a man in a suit with a mask on the TV” to the point where I was reading a few pages in and then just skipping the entire chapter because nothing fucking happens.
: “I was the sole survivor of my reality. It would be a fitting fate. I tried with earnest desperation to hold on to what made me, me.”
: “A star in the distance. You’re gone again. Your soul’s destroyed. I don’t know how many times I’ve witnessed the loss of a reality at the hands of myself.”
: “What could I do? I wasn’t strong enough on my own to defeat so many. I was cold. I didn’t have a body, and yet somehow I was cold. Desperately I longed for – what was her name? She was a woman, made of plastic.”
: It’s called a realdoll, dipshit.
: “She was essential to my survival. How had she saved me? Why didn’t I do…? What was her name? What was my name?”
: Your name is shut the fuck up and get on with this goddamn game already.
: “I needed to keep my mind. I needed to stay me as long as possible. But for what? What was I going to figure out? What was I going to accomplish? Why am I here?”
: I’m just going to go ahead and skip the rest of this monologue, because it’s a recap of the entire game up to this point.
: This isn’t really a dungeon, in that there’s no enemies. The basic idea is that we need to get to where Michael is, but the stupid panda is in the way. There’s two ways you could do this “puzzle” - there’s chests you can pick up that have small amounts of cash in them.
: Opening any of the chests will cause this guy to spawn. He sells keys.
: You can pretty much guess where this is going to go. Alex has lost all of his money and all the items we picked up throughout the game - but he still has his equipment. Given that Alex is strong enough to kill anything with a single LP Toss at this point, you can also sell his equipment off and just buy all three keys in one go.
: You’ll notice that Rory is standing on a little platform near where the new path opened going up to the stage. I don’t know if there’s a separate thing to rescue Rory or not if you didn’t let him die, but I suspect there isn’t.
: The annoying part is that you have to open this chest, go back to the store, sell the Panda Key and buy the Dali Key before you can progress.
: Here, we have to open that chest you can see in the background, and then go back and sell the Dali Key to afford the Entity Key.
: What I don’t quite get is why he doesn’t understand that his friends are dead. I mean, he saw it happen right in front of him.
: “How is the meteorite not already here? Something is happening. Somewhere in the isolated recesses of my mind, like a warm light in the distance, an idea is forming.”
: “A completely human, genius, and kind-intentioned idea. Something that no other version of me would do.”
: You’re going to kill yourself so that the meteor can’t keep killing people? That’d be nice.
: “And now my body is filled with that overwhelming feeling that I am about to do the right thing. I always made a choice, a lazy choice. Not today. Today, I choose differently.”
: “Could I intervene? Was there another me in this reality?”
: “I’m afraid that this reality will soon end. And once again, you’ll be destroyed, along with Vella, Chondra, Michael, and Claudio.”
: In the console versions of the game, this scene changes slightly based on what console you’re using. What would’ve been cool is if for PC they detected your monitor’s resolution and changed how the display Alex is on looks based on that: curved if it’s an ultrawide, flat if it’s a standard 1080p or 4k.
: In the end though, this is just a shittier version of Omikron The Nomad Soul’s opening, and that’s a fucking David Cage game.
: Let’s take a look at what this scene looks like on the Switch. For one, it’s zoomed out more, but I think that’s because I was clicking through the dialog relatively fast.
: What the fuck? What the everloving fuck? If I found out I was an Alex clone, I’d probably commit soul suicide right then and there. I mean, it’s not like…
: Oh, fuck. I KNEW there was a reason that creepy old lady told me I shouldn’t LP this game. I fucking knew it!
: Naturally, I hit no.
: God dammit you had to make a fucking Batman reference. Fuck it, I’m going full on Chaos. Let the galaxy burn! Blood for the blood god!
: The game then makes you load your last save, which in my case… was back when I was skipping days at the end of the last update. Whoops. Anyway, now I’ll start recording again and find out if I actually get to LP Toss a final boss to death.
: Anyway, I re-recorded. This re-recording was… ill-fated. On the PC version by the way, you get a PS4 and a Vita.
: “There are many things I have to tell you. But to tell you everything would probably take a very long time. Hours, maybe.”
: “I wish I could say how sorry I am for everything that has happened to you in your parallel lives because of my mistakes. Unfortunately, I lacked the courage to act in the past, but I plan to make up for it today.”
: “In many lives, you were different things to me. But names and relationships don’t matter. What matters now is how much you’ve always been there for me. I want you all to join me once again and do something absolutely crazy.”
: Fuck you, only Dante gets to say that.
: I plan on confronting Proto-me, and destroying it. I don’t know what will happen when I get there, but I’ve faced this thing before and I think I know what I need to do to defeat it – me – well, us.’
: This is where all those names we used at the start come in. Unfortunately, we won’t be seeing Sephiroth… because that’s Rory. Sorry to whoever suggested that.
: “No problem! So, what’s going on?”
: I feel like this game could’ve been five minutes long, and this would have been the entire story.
: Unfortunately, we don’t get to use Essentia anymore, because fighting with a 1970s-style tape drive would be too unique.
: Here’s the final dungeon. You can probably guess what we need to do. The chest on the left contains all of the items we had before the world got destroyed. The one on the right has four Ambrosias. Now, what I didn’t know going into this is that this segment is EXTREMELY FUCKING GLITCHY, ESPECIALLY IF YOU USE LP TOSS.
: By the way, here’s our new party. We have the worst girl from Fire Emblem, the worst Danganronpa, and depression. There’s always depression. Plagiarism is basically Alex but with worse stats. Hilariously, the female player character uses Alex’s voice during combat and has extremely broken animations because they use a sword and not a record.
: Our first mini-boss is Alex, but masturbating.
: “What the hell are you consuming realities for?! Why do you have to do this!!”
: This is Plagiarism, by the way. TV Head Alex poisons on hit, but that won’t matter because…
: This fight was “interesting”, and by interesting I mean the boss dodged my first LP Toss so Plagiarism had to use hers.
: Even with her strength being a bit over half what Alex’s is, she still does 5200 damage.
: Chris Niosi, everybody.
: Like all the other clones, Fat Alex can dodge LP Toss.
: What he can’t dodge is having the book thrown at him. In this case, the book is After Dark by Haruki Murakami.
: There’s a scene after this with Sammy’s ghost that I am going to skip. Let’s just pretend that he tries to kiss her and she slaps him. That’s the canon version of events.
: So if you’re wondering what the fuck is going on, this is the Essentia 995. If you paid attention (I sure as hell didn’t), this is the robot Yuzu was working on before we killed him.
: “…Essentia…? What is this? How are you here?”
: “I’m really surprised to see you here. I’m glad you made it this far.”
: That would mean this fuckstick is the version of Alex that ultimately ruined Yuzu’s life.
: “What did she say to get you here? Look, I don’t want any trouble. Just let me drink my tea.”
: “Come on Alex, attack. Take him out. You’ve come this far.”
: It’s a doggy dog world. Chumps like this guy are a diamond dozen. It’s ‘We’re one AND the same’ you fucking… you know what? I have a reaction image for this.
: “If he still wants to kill me after, then I’ll take my chances with a tussle.”
: “What the fuck are you talking about?”
: “Look man, I don’t want to burst your bubble. But she lies ALL the time. Whatever she thinks you want to hear comes out of her mouth. She envies my power.”
: “We may all be one in the same, but I drew the proverbial long straw. She needs all the help she can get. Even if it’s from a skinny MC…”
: “I’m you, you’re me, she’s us as well. The division of our soul isn’t exactly natural… and she wants out. She wants to be the last one here. She can’t accept our little arrangement. I get it. But we’ve been this way for a LONG time, man.”
: “So, tell me. What lies did she tell you to get you here?”
: “…Essentia… is this true? Sammy? Vella? Was all that a lie?”
: “It is often necessary to lie to yourself to get a tough job done. You’ve done it. We’ve all done it. I said what I needed to say to get you here.”
: So wait, is this just Bravely Default now?
: “…Alex… won’t you… help me… destroy him? Come on, take him out. You’ve come so far. End this division. End this strife. Without him, there will be no conflict.”
: So, this is where the game’s lazy programming kicks in.
: We get to fight a Joy Mutant straight out of LISA, plus two horse statues. Now, this is SUPPOSED to be a scripted boss fight - but I had no fucking idea going in.
: I figured it might dodge Alex’s LP Toss, so I had Plagiarism use hers even though she went before him.
: So yeah, this breaks the script. The game basically softlocks here - you can either wait an eternity for the boss to kill everyone, or you can reset. Unfortunately, I didn’t save during this route because I didn’t expect a fucking softlock. That’s what, four of them now? No wait, five. FIVE FUCKING SOFTLOCKS.
: Let’s talk about how this fight is supposed to go. Notice that there’s two glass pillars. We have exactly two turns to destroy both of these pillars, or the game becomes unwinnable. They go down in one hit from anything.
: The Joy Mutant spends its first turn charging, and its second turn to do this.
: The game then gives us a standard game over screen, which I don’t think I had ever seen before. It’ll ask you to continue, and you want to hit yes.
: Welcome to what I’m pretty sure is the inside of Two Brothers. Let’s meet a blatant author self-insert.
: “Not a lot of people do. But, I’m going to offer you some advice. I’ve lost everything. Trust me, I really have.”
: I don’t know much about Two Brothers, only that it had a Kickstarter. From what I’ve heard, the game had some massive issues - including that it was an unstable piece of shit. I wouldn’t be surprised if somehow they also screwed over their KS backers somehow.
: Enough with the goddamn self-pity! I don’t pity you one fucking bit! Your game sucks - both of them suck!
: This time, you’ll notice that there’s something different about this room. See those levers? Those were blocked off by horse statues before.
: “That’s the only thing keeping this division permanent!”
: “DO NOT UNPLUG US. WE WILL BE WHOLE AGAIN. DON’T DO IT! DON’T UNPLUG!!”
: Really? FUCK YOU, AND FUCK YOUR SHITTY GAME!
: “WITHOUT THIS EVERYTHING GOES BACK TO THE WAY IT WAS!!”
: “I don’t know what’s going to happen if we do this… but this is what my heart’s telling me to do.”
: “IF YOU DO THIS ONLY ONE OF US WILL BE HERE!”
: “I’m with you, and it’s all up to you now. Sorry again for dragging you into this. I shouldn’t have been so stupid.”
: “Everything she said really got to me. I was so worried about hurting my friends. I didn’t realize the difference between being flawed and being evil… anyway, it doesn’t matter now.”
: What the shit? This game got released in Japan? Moreover, someone edited this script? Did he quit halfway through or something? Maybe did all his editing while drunk from being forced to edit YIIK… actually, that makes sense.
: You’d think that Brian Allanson would have figured out he can’t code for shit after the first time he fucked a game up. That final boss was such a bad design choice: your first instinct is going to be to use an AOE attack due to there being three enemies, only the main AOE you have is glitched and will softlock the fight. This ending took me two full re-records to finally get.
: This game also apparently had two different testers. I don’t think a thousand testers could fix Brian’s spaghetti code.
: And I’m done. Goodbye, everyone. I’ll see you after several months of intense therapy to remove all memories of this from my brain and - what the fuck do you mean there’s still another ending? Fuck! Next time, we’ll do Ending B.
Happy 100th Post!
Ohhh BOY have I found out things about Two Brothers. It’s a Game Boy-inspired game but the graphics are way too detailed for a Game Boy game, making it rather clashing, plus there’s actual color in the heaven sequence, though not as much as actually shown. When Roy talks about people preventing him from his journey, that is literally the Allansons crying about any critique for that game, including the fucking Shadow of the Colossus music plagiarism (hey same theme!)
I want to just stress this point especially: a game that’s about the main character coming to terms with his flaws, is coming from a team where the two leads didn’t learn a single fucking thing when it came to actually improving a game and instead whined about it. It’s so fitting, but goddamn they wanted to charge, what $20+ to show they didn’t learn a single thing?
I don’t know what’s behind ending number 2, I did see into 3 and ugh, it’s lazy but at least not worth the effort of looking at.
Whew. Just reading that felt like such a goddamn mess. My eyes may have glazed over trying to read all that dialogue.
Also, something about the way the people in New York look jumped out at me. I don’t know that it was the first game to do it, but Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE did the whole “colored silhouettes for random people” thing too:
That was, rather a lot, and I shouldn’t really be surprised that the ending is basically “every Alex explodes and then credits roll” but I’m still like “that’s it? This is not worth the setup, ugh”
Also it only hit me this update that the Mind Dungeon’s phone number is 333, and I’m annoyed. I’m betting that’s a reference to Choronzon, from English mysticism and Crowley, and they didn’t even get it right.
And then there’s the final dungeon being a blatant visual riff on the Cave of the Past from Earthbound. This game just feels like a pile of, well… quotes and works from others thrown together haphazardly. Pretty much what we expected, but still disappointing.
Well now that you’ve reach the end, now is a good a time as any to tell you that this ending, and by ending I mean a huge chunk of the final sections of the game, were rewritten after the Allanson brothers’ mom passed away. So the original ending, or at least a part of it, is still in the game’s data. (Along with other bits of cut content that is surprisingly way better than what’s in the final game.) One nice person on the YiiK discord, yes really, compiled a series of saves that you can load to view said content, and I took the time to record it.
So I’m just gonna leave this here for your curiosity:
I’m having a hard time coming up with words for what I’m feeling about all this and why. Certainly one thing that bugs me a lot is how little actually mattered in the game. The fact that “learning from your mistakes and becoming a better person” was the central theme of the game kind of came out of nowhere at me (see: previous remarks about clarity of plot). They had all these scenes where Alex realizes he’s a giant piece of shit only to change nothing. They wasted so much time on lore which was not internally consistent, did not enrich the narrative world, and did not help the narrative make more sense. It literally just doesn’t matter at all if a central character lives or dies.
What is this game. This game is nothing.
I honestly kinda forgot that Two Brothers existed, but it doesn’t at all surprise me that they had trouble making it even look like an actual Gameboy game. I backed a reproduction GB game on Kickstarter a few months ago. With that game in particular, the developers were going from having a game that worked on original GB hardware to making it work with the Super Gameboy and GBC and there are all kinds of quirks associated with that (namely the SGB’s 4-color limit and the differences between the GBC and GBA/GBA SP/Early-model GBA SP’s screens).
I think what angered me the most about this game though is pretty much exactly what you said - that if the Allansons had listened to the people critiquing their game at any point, YIIK might’ve been a halfway decent game after a couple of patches. I don’t think anyone went in wanting them to fail. I even remember seeing threads on 4chan’s /v/ board about it, and apart from the usual “hipster lumberjack protagonist” comments it didn’t seem like there was any real animosity.
The thing is, it’s clear that the Allansons knew people who could’ve helped them make this game not suck. I don’t think you get Toby Fox to make a track for your game without knowing him enough that you could ask him to take a look at what you’ve got. I think that’s what really gets me: they had every opportunity to succeed, and they didn’t take it.
Yeah, imagine how that is for me. I had to work in it for short periods at a time, because any more than that and I’d just start falling asleep.
I didn’t upload it, but I did actually stream my first re-recording of Ending A. When I hit that part, I remember just laughing really hard and being like “Of course it’s just fucking Giygas. Of course it fucking is.” That was the run where I softlocked the game by LP Tossing the Joy mutant, which is why I didn’t bother uploading it.
I wish I hadn’t used that goddamn DBZ video, because I’d have used it right here. That original ending isn’t great, but at least it’s a goddamn ending! I like that they cut it because they felt it was too depressing, but then they left in like half the fucking game being people committing suicide in some form, because that’s perfectly okay.
I also now realize that most of the stuff from that third ending video that wasn’t in the main game actually was, but it was all cut. A lot of the stuff they cut is also just… why did they cut it? They had an interior to the gas station they removed because… I mean, it would’ve just been another shop but who cares?
I think what really gets me though is the cut version of Frankton. I get that having huge maps is a problem, but they could’ve easily solved that by just having a fast travel thing. It feels like someone told the Allansons that it was too big and they responded by throwing a fucking fit and reducing it to what it is in the final game. All they would’ve had to do is put in a fast travel thing and maybe a map. That’s it.
Honestly, it feels like a lot of what they wanted to do was hampered by both the fact that Brian Allanson is not great at coding as evidenced by his dev log where it seems like this was the first time he had ever worked in Unity and by the fact that neither he nor his brother were terribly good at writing.
It seems to me like they probably would have had Rory’s death mean something, but couldn’t figure out how to make that work code-wise. It probably would’ve driven up the cost of the game as well, because they most likely would have needed more voiceacting done. I still don’t really understand why they even bothered to voiceact the game in the first place. They’re trying to mimic a PS1 game, but most PS1 games didn’t have voiceacting.
If anything, I’d almost like to see a post-mortem on this game that is just a giant list of what not to do.
I believe the audio desync is because Rory’s lines in some scenes don’t play if he’s not there, but either the subtitles or the audio still plays as if his lines were still there. I think I saw a video of that some time ago.
I wish I could say something intelligent about the ending, but having seen it at least twice, I still don’t really understand what’s going on or what motivates anyone here. It’s not the first ending I’ve ever seen where I feel like the author was trying to be really clever and the mortal minds of their audience are failing to make some leap of logic that would reveal the cleverness, but with this one, I don’t even care enough to go back and try to puzzle it out.
Projecting much, writer?
MOther fucking excuse me. She “lost” a pedophile version OF YOU, who SEVERELY hurt her. Fuck offff.
Who knows how many hours into this trash fest and we finally get something resembling a cool idea. Good job. I suppose.
I can’t say this is the worst thing I’ve ever experienced, because I didn’t really experience it you did, and because I’m an avid manga and anime fan and have had the displeasure of seeing some awful shit. That being said though… this is probably one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. I can’t really think of anything else to say other than that. There are aspects of the ending that make quasi sense, and there’s clearly… SOMETHING in this that wants to be refined into something good, but it’s not even worth considering at this point, clearly. And truthfully, some of the misunderstanding of what their writing actually means just means that it’s poisoned from the beginning.
So yeah. I’m excited to see the failure ending, if this is the good one.
