I don't know much about the game myself, though the title claims that it's a post-modern RPG, which I guess is a bit like a post-nuclear RPG except without so many super mutants. I'm sure mecha-neko will bring us all the facts.
| Developer: | Ackk Studios | | | Release Date: | 17th January 2019 | | | Systems: | Windows, PS4, Switch |
Take a seat and enjoy the strange, warbling, echoing elevator muzak. It is time for our minds to be expanded and our preconceptions to be obliterated as we begin Y II K: A Post-Modern RPG.
Other than knowing it's an RPG set in the modern day (yaaay!), I'm completely oblivious to all things YIIK. Some people can't stand it. Maybe I'll like it! There's only one way to find out:
Click the pictures to enlarge!
YIIK: A Post-Modern RPG (PC) - Guest PostPart 1 - Part 2
The very first thing I see is a message saying there's about to be a 'Content Warning', and asks me if I'd like to see the warning. So it's warning me about the warning?
After answering a couple of questions in this vein, we can finally begin our YIIK adventure... after we've answered a few more questions.
Hello there! Welcome to the wonderful world of YIIK. That's said "Why-two-kay!" in case you were confused by the font choice in the logo. The developers thought it would be a cool idea to make the "2" a Roman Numeral, for some reason. Grab your tin foil hat and prepare your eyes, as they are about to be opened wider than you could have ever thought possible. This is going to be a wild ride!
This adorable sprite is Marlene the Krow. He's got some questions to ask me that'll improve my YIIK experience. First of all, he wants to know my name - the player, that is. I called myself Mecha, naturally, and Marlene yells that's a SUPER HIP NAME for a SUPER HIP CAT. Spot on, bird!
Please enjoy his goofy bippety-boppety slap bass music. (YouTube link)
A few more questions and we'll be on our way... First things first... these are questions about real people in your IRL life! So, do your best to answer truthfully as it will hurt my feelings if you lie to me. And I've had enough of that... but you already know about that, don't you? So, name real people, be honest, and give thoughtful responses!
- The coolest girl you know.
- A friend who is smarter than you.
- The Yin to your Yang.
- The nerdiest guy you know.
- A friend who is always there.
- A piece of technology close to your heart.
Which is kind of a bunch of personal stuff to be telling a bird I've only just met! I feel like the moment I turn my back, he'll have reset the password on half my online accounts. You're lucky you're cute, Marlene.
And yes, if you haven't read Ray's EarthBound post, that game starts off pretty much the same way with its own bippety-boppety slap bass music (YouTube link), except the crows Ness encounters are a bit more Spiteful than Marlene here.
We're ready to really begin this time.
APRIL 4TH, 1999
Aw, what? Everything's 3D? What happened to the sprites! That crow looked cool. Bring back the crow!
A visual novel illustration shoots up out the bottom of the screen and starts talking to us about his life. He's just graduated and returning to his home town, and he's got a voice!
I had no idea what adult life held for me, but I was optimistic.
And that's our hook! I'm not sure where to go now or what to do. Might as well rummage around and see what happens.
One of the neighbourhood kids told me My Dad says the economy is doing great, and he was not kidding. Frankton is so prosperous that people don't mind chucking away big piles of cash. And Alex has such low standards that he can't resist fishing out cheese burgers and drinks from every trashcan you steer him towards. He might have graduated, but he hasn't shaken off student life just yet, I guess.
Beside the 'WELCOME HOME' billboard is a smaller explanatory 'CONTROLS' one, which is handy. I picked keyboard controls, and the default layout is WASD for movement and IJKL for actions, working like a SNES pad. You get used to it. You've got to reach all the way up to the F2 key for the party menu though, like so:
They've really nailed the hastily-romanised 3DO/Saturn/Dreamcast import RPG look. It's got the nearly illegible narrow fixed-width font, contracted attribute names, no button legend and no help telling who can equip what. Food items restore HP, drinks restore PP, and they're scrambled up in there together with the equippable weapons and armour no matter how you tell the game to sort it.
I have no idea what kind of Weapon a 'He Wants it That Way [Single]' is, but it's what Alex has got. The 'Graphic T-Shirt' is his starting armor, except he doesn't begin with it equipped... except he does, except it shows up as 'None' until you remove it and put it back on. Maybe he had it on back to front?
I'm really racking my brains trying to figure out what YIIK's ugly, flat, vibrant cardboard world looks like. The RPG menu is trying to trick me into thinking 'retro', but all the flat, un-lit polygons of colour don't look like any retro system I know of. As soon as lighting and textures became available, games jumped on them.
I don't believe there was ever a niche in time where flat polygon gaming and RPGs (especially JRPGs) intersected. Polygons in games were awkward, clunky things in the 80s and early 90s - people were continually lied to and hoodwinked by a sensational media into expecting 'virtual reality' to be The Lawnmower Man, when it was really Freescape games like Castle Master and Craig Charles' Cyber Zone TV show (YouTube link).
Blinding the player with an immersive world of huge, flat and slick polygons in games was mostly a Sega arcade thing with Virtua Racing (1992) and Virtua Fighter (1993), but they'd found where the textures were hidden by 1994 with Daytona USA and Virtua Cop, and Virtua Fighter 2 (1995), and that was the end of flat polygons in the arcade. By 1996, untextured polygons had become obsolete in all game genres, and not yet old enough an aesthetic to have nostalgia. If you were playing a game with flat, unshaded polygons between 1996-1999, you were probably a loser using a hand-me-down PC to play old MS-DOS games, or a really big fan of TIE Fighter and Fade To Black. (Interstate '76 is a special case because... well, who knows what that game was supposed to look like.)
Alex runs around jerking between frames like a Quake model, but the 3DO never and Saturn very rarely stumped up to having 3D characters in RPGs like this. All the characters in Lucienne's Quest on the 3DO are sprites on a 3D field, same with the cast of Grandia on the Saturn and PS1. N64 and Playstation games wouldn't dream of being untextured and unlit like YIIK (and in the PS1's case, Sony Computer Entertainment America would probably refuse to publish you if you weren't hyper-detailed). The high-resolution characters and awkward menu in YIIK scream 'Dreamcast' to me, but the Dreamcast came out in the US five months after this game is set, so that doesn't work.
In 1999, Mega Man Legends had been out for over a year and it's the most similar match to YIIK I can find. Runners up would be Tom & Jerry in House Trap and Incredible Crisis. A lot of late 90s cartoon licensed 3D games, like the South Park and Rugrats games, still had lighting, which made everything look like soft plush toys. EarthBound on the SNES was a cartoon game resembling the comic 'Peanuts', but EarthBound 64 (YouTube link) would've looked textured and blurry like every other N64 game does.
YIIK's designs look like modern, faux-retro, cel-shaded games like Horizon Chase Turbo and Island Saver where our real-life technology has advanced to the point where we can simulate HD-quality versions of those late 80s virtual reality flat coloured polygons in real time. Ultimately, YIIK just looks like YIIK, existing in its own nostalgia-land!
Mother: Alex, dear son of mine, please see if you can muster up the energy to walk into town and pick up some groceries. I've included a list below.
Alex may gripe, but it's nice to have something specific to do. It's hard to place Alex's character. I don't know exactly what he wants to do. Doesn't he want to meet anyone here now that he's back?
Although it looks like a static background, I'm free to explore the house. It's just that thinky-Alex is in the way of my 3D guy right now. Alex's house is eerie too, since the table is set for way more people than seem to live here, and there's mysterious cookies laid out that I can inspect but not eat. There was nothing to snag except a bit of cash from a dresser and a hidden 'Collectible Pog'.
If Alex has been at college for at five and a half years, and it's 4th April 1999 now, he must have started college in August/September 1993. The original Playstation came out in December 1994 in Japan and September 1995 elsewhere. Where'd he get the Playstation from, and what is it doing in his bedroom? Did he come home for Christmas 1995 and get it as a present, I wonder? And then... wasn't allowed to take it back with him? It didn't seem like he'd been home since he started college, though. I nitpick because I care!
BUT THEN the phone starts ringing. It also says 'Ring ring!' in case you're deaf, which is nice.
I like how Alex is still talking to the player from time to time, and he's still voice acted - not always, but he is for plot stuff. It elevates the game a lot over a cheap, rushed visual novel. Not that the illustrations look cheap at all - I think they work great.
Hmm, I can't find the grocery store, so I've done all that I can here in Frankton. It's time to venture... outside.
L'il chunky Alex stomps about wielding an LP as a shield, waiting for action. There's a whole bunch of places to go: another town, a bunch of places labelled 'Monster Den', and a foresty area to the South. But I know what we're here to see. Gimme a random battle, YIIK!
You would think that a regular contemporary guy like Alex would be a little disturbed by being confronted by a six foot tall grinning yellow ball on a spring, but he has no reaction whatsoever. This must be second nature to him - maybe when he was at college he fought dozens of these things on the way to the campus and back every day.
This battle theme... defies description. Have a listen. (YouTube link.) It's goofy. It's goofy layered on top of goofy. It's inexplicable and weird, and dammit I'm going to be humming that motif for months afterwards. If I had to pick a word to describe it, I'd say it was "YIIK". If it were an image, it would be this:
We just have to accept that YIIK has a fictional 90s American setting... where the wide open spaces between towns are populated by giant rats and smiley faces on springs that will eat you alive if you leave the safety of civilisation.
I can't think of any other RPG where the random encounters aren't justified somehow. My old favourite Animorphs has you doing covert operations during an alien invasion. And in EarthBound, you are reminded constantly (and I mean constantly) that hostile creatures, items and people are being affected by an evil being named Giygas. (Sorry if that's a spoiler, but the game is called EarthBound: The War Against Giygas.)
Anyway.
So how does YIIK's combat work?
YIIK's battles are turn based. Alex has barely any skills to his name - I can choose between slashing at the enemy with a timing minigame, or burning a bunch of my very limited PP to slash at the enemy with a different timing minigame. On the Smile's turn, Alex gets to defend himself using another timing minigame. Every - single - turn.
If you don't like timing minigames and just want the battles to play out, YIIK is not the game for you. The timing minigames replace what would be an accuracy calculation in other RPGs. The power bonus for a successful attack is immense; whiff it and you've basically wasted your turn. The bonus for a perfect defense lets Alex evade the attack completely, and it's not that hard.
I let the success in my encounter with the Smile get to my head, and strode down the world map into 'Monster Den Lv. 2'. I'm Lv. 1, so it couldn't be that difficult I reckoned. And then I was wiped out by a trio of Lv. 10 Giant Rats. The game offered to let me 'Continue?', which was nice. Except it just restarted the same battle, which was not nice.
The ever-helpful Hint menu tells me that this is entirely the wrong direction to go. I was supposed to go to the other exit East out of Frankton.
New battle music alert! We're actually progressing and things. I'm always ready to offer kudos for context-aware battle music choices in games. Now if only the music looped correctly in these gigantic, uneventful battles - you'll hear the same song a few times in any given encounter and there's a really grating few seconds of silence when the song loops, like it's a DOS game playing from a CD... huh, I guess that is nineties accurate!
That caption on the left isn't the cat speaking. That would be weird! It's a helpful HP/PP water fountain, which, like the save game phones, can thankfully be found everywhere.
Alex's iron composure begins to falter as he enters the spooky factory's spooky lift, and he narrates his terror to us in an earnest but sort of not-quite-right way.
"Relax, and quiet down. It's me, Panda. I came here to help you. I am always there for you when you need me."
It's a stuffed panda named Panda! I like pandas. He's here to help, somehow. He offers his services as an out-of-battle floor plate paperweight and multi-purpose platforming lump, and offers a traditional 'since you were a liberal arts major, want me to explain this entire thing again?' joke which I found kinda amusing.
With Panda's assistance, I can progress to the next room:
Alex is speechless again - or perhaps just saving it all up for a major freakout later. I don't see the cat, but I might as well clamber all over those towers over there and swipe anything that looks cool. Panda pulls his weight in some mild switch-and-bridge puzzling along the way.
The Eye begins to cry a waterfall of tears, which activates a pair of waterwheels at its base, powering the elevator out of here.
This floor (or whatever) is a weird, dark imitation of a garden, with polygon trees covered in letters, ghostly figures that I can talk to but say nothing of use, and the odd trashcan with equippable clothing inside.
There's some more enemies in here: the same Rats and Smiles and big Skulls I've been facing outside. The battles haven't gotten any more interesting, but at least the battle music keeps changing as I move from place to place. Enemy parties appear as Gengar-like ghost blobs on the field - I could just walk around them all, but giving up the EXP doesn't seem like a wise move. Marlene the Krow wouldn't have offered me an Easy Mode option if the regular game wasn't going to become a challenge, and these guys aren't reappearing. I'm slogging my way through it all to get to some lonely looking floating doors in the distance.
Halfway through, Alex interrupts their conversation with a monologue telling us about the conversation he just interrupted, because that's apparently better than just letting us listen to her explain the situation in her own words. He tries his best to convey the full experience of meeting Sammy: her body language, the tone of her voice, but he doesn't quite pull it off beyond saying that, yes, she had body language.
This corridor looks like it has rooms off to the side, but the doors are just for show. There are a sneaky bunch of hidden items hidden to the left and right of where Alex is standing at the far background.
There's still yet more meaningless, bizarre areas to traverse before we can finally escape. Dali the cat joins Panda the panda in our pocket of pets as a switch-activating boomerang. Yep, the first thing we do with Dali after rescuing him from a warped Illuminati dimension is to chuck her away again.
All aboard Dali's magic carpet, and off we go to adventure!
This doesn't look like it's going to be easy, so it's time for Alex to call upon his most potent skill...
Panda is awesome. He completely prevents two turns' worth of damage, for everyone, without a minigame. That alone is worth him costing Alex's entire PP gauge to use.
And a good thing too, because this boss bot's too special for timing minigames. Without Panda out, Wilhelm blasts the whole party with an unavoidable attack, which isn't very cricket. I had to double check my notes and replay the game to be sure, because that's pretty un-YIIK of him. Fun fact: I couldn't find any videos of this boss battle online to verify this as I was writing. Did they patch in a Wilhelm boss battle recently or something? Maybe mentioning Wilhelm in the original version of the game without him showing up just confused players? (E.g. Let's Play Zone also shows no boss battle here! What the heck?)
I'm really thankful for the vending machine just before this boss fight. We're constantly on the verge of death.
Well that's about it as far as special commands go. Now all I can do is trade standard attacks with Wilhelm for five minutes trying my best to get those critical hits until the boss decides to blow up. He has a health gauge, but it has a tendency to get obscured by the characters because of the unimpressive camera angles.
Wait a minute... YIIK is music themed, right? Then that means the flat-coloured graphical style could be a throwback to the video for Money For Nothing by Dire Straits (YouTube link). I figured it out!
Boom! We've defeated the robot, saved the cat, rescued the girl, all that's left is to get in the lift and get the heck out of here!
Sammy was taken from your party.
Dali the cat jumped onto Alex's shoulder in the confusion so at least she's safe. Drawing a new set of visual novel portraits showing her hanging out with Alex would be too expensive though, so we'll just have to remember that she's there.
I had to drive Alex all the way home myself and he was monologuing the entire trip.
Alex: The calm night wind of spring seemed to contrast the inner workings of my brain. I was moving on autopilot towards my home. I felt as if I'd seen something that wasn't meant to be seen. As if the curtain had lifted on reality and exposed the man upstairs. Like I had just found out Santa wasn't real. I couldn't yet put into words what I now understood, but something had changed inside of me. Pulsating through my veins was the energetic charge of irrevocable loss all for a woman I didn't know. This feeling wasn't pure. It was cut with something I couldn't put my finger on at the time. I believe now that it was a profound sense that I had discovered something. Only problem was this something wasn't meant to be seen. In that moment, I was a child finding a magazine meant only for an adult's eyes. I was both intrigued and repulsed, confused by the images spinning inside my head.
There's a few things I know I'm not good at evaluating in games, and the quality of a game's writing is one of them. Dialogue and narration just gracefully flow over and around my mind as I play games, like a wind tunnel air flow experiment. I don't know, or frankly care what good writing is. But, if you need my opinion, Alex's monologues feel genuine to me, and it might mainly be because of the conviction of the voice actor. As he goes around in circles trying to explain how his bizarre life is affecting him, I feel like Alex doesn't understand his own words, despite speaking to the player from his perspective at the end of the adventure. So, monologue away, Eggleston. I'm all yours.
This was added in January 2021, and I can kind of see why. But if you take out the main character's main trait and half his dialogue, I wonder why you want to be playing YIIK. It can't possibly be for the battles, because they're not that great.
And it's just as well since the e-mail he just received contains a link to a video of Sammy's abduction! How mysterious! Anyway, it's time for bed.
You know, you look a lot smaller during the day, Panda. Back in the factory, I was standing on your head to cross gaps and things.
Luckily for Alex, he bumps into an old friend he hasn't seen in years. Meet Michael, a paranormal nerd who likes urban exploration (isn't that more of a 2000s thing than 1990s?) and helps run the website where the sinister abduction video was posted. He's just finished his school exams and has nothing to do, so he's right on board with running into a creepy factory that might lead to Hell itself.
If you're wondering if this looks like that one scene from the hit nineties movie Toy Story with Buzz and Woody...
What you see here is two dweebs standing outside an arcade discussing whether the best new games come from Japan or the US, because, well, that's what two dweebs do when they're trying to reconnect after not having seen one another for a few years and they're awkwardly trying to not talk about the abducted, possibly murdered girl they just saw on the Internet.
And speaking of nineties stuff and the Internet, there's a guy outside Alex's house looking for contributions to crowdfund a special videogames print 'Zine' to stand as a testament to the awesomeness of 90s gaming. This guy had me scratching my head since he seems to be a few decades ahead of his time. Not only is he lamenting that the Internet is ruining print in April 4th 1999, he's worried that all those websites aren't going to last forever and he wants there to be a permanent record of what the 90s were like.
I can't speak for America, but in my experience here in the UK, videogame magazines went from strength to strength from the 1980s to the late 2000s. Video games went from being weird, novel toys for kids to being the latest trendy gadget with the release of the mega-hit original Playstation. Then they became an acceptable, commonplace family item with the relatively inexpensive Playstation 2 thanks to its DVD player. There was a bonkers amount of hype for the Playstation 2 in 1999, and you'd read about wild American and Japanese games expos in magazines. The official Playstation 1 and 2 magazines flew off the shelves from 1994 to 2005-ish, which I categorically credit to their awesome demo discs - playable games, video news, cheats - the marketer's dream of getting kids to pay for adverts, and thinking they're getting a good deal and they were. And that's just consoles: desktop computer gaming was changing constantly, with hundreds of 3D accelerator cards from dozens of companies all vying to fill your screen with police chases and spaceships and explosions all rendered in glorious 640 by 480 in 16-bit High Color - with the magazine and the cover-mount disc being essential messengers and resources for us dialup-users. Those PC Zone and PC Gamer magazines up there are each easily over 150 pages long. From the perspective of 1999, being nostalgic for video games magazines and worrying there won't be any print record because they're dying out due to the Internet simply does not tally.
So, alright, YIIK is fiction. It did say it was 'in an alternate reality'. Back to the game.
You found him, Alex, so what're you gonna do?
I couldn't imagine a more boring camera angle. Why is everybody so small and far apart? Why are the status portraits so small? I have to sit right up next to the screen to be able to read the HP/PP bars, never mind the numbers.
Having two people in the party gives me something to do other than deploy the Panda and use Alex's default attack every turn. Now I can use Michael's default attack every turn too!
Michael's weapon is a camera, so you'd think he'd use special lenses or flashes or clever shots to disorient and damage the enemy. Nope, Michael's standard attack is to twirl his camera around on the strap and use it like a flail like a bloody idiot. No wonder we had to pick his camera up from the repair shop earlier. (Speaking of which, I anticipated a camera-user joining the party so I bought the best one for sale in advance... which Michael already had when he joined. Grr.)
Unfortunately, the inscrutable, interdimensional Soul Survivor is completely impervious to being slapped with records and bonked with cameras, so I'm going to have to do the only thing I can do... fruitlessly attack the enemy until either a cutscene happens, or he kills me. And if that's just a normal game over, I'll reload and repeat the battle so I can immediately run away. Good old unwinnable battles.
Unwinnable battles have always been risky business in RPG stories. I wonder how many people turned off Final Fantasy II when the very first thing that happens before there's even been a line of dialogue is your freshly-named party gets splattered. It's not like you'd be spoiled for choice back in the NES days, so you'd have to play what you'd got, but if there's one thing that YIIK can't rely on in 2019, it's there not being anything else better to play if you lose your flow.
Alex adorably suggests they get their photos developed (ask your parents) right away, but there's no need for that because "THIS THING IS DIGITAL, BABY!"
And that's the end of Chapter I of Y II K: A Post-Modern RPG. I don't know about you, but I'm hooked. YIIK has a really enjoyable atmosphere. I like what I see so far, and things are moving forward now Alex has someone to talk to. I'm ready for some two-buddies paranormal adventures: busting ghosts, saving the day and Figuring Shit Out.
The battles could stand to be a little less monotonous. I haven't levelled up once yet, so here's to getting our guys some fancy skills so I can start to properly outwit my opponents instead of outlasting them.
YIIK: A Post-Modern RPG (PC) - Guest PostPart 1 - Part 2
The environments remind me a bit of Katamari Damacy although I doubt that's in any way deliberate. Still, I've done my contractually-obligated mention of Katamari Damacy now.
ReplyDeleteI took my PS1 to uni for my first year, then took it home and neglected to bring it back for my second year, and then my Dad threw it out, so Alex has one up on me there.
You say that's a "Smile" but I think it's a cousin of Thing on a Spring.
Threw it out? I think I'd still be screaming to this day.
DeleteAnd yeah you're right... come to think of it, springy thingy type toys were pretty nineties too.
Also thrown out: my C64, my Master System(s), and my Amiga 600. My Amiga 1200 survived because I had taken it to university in the misguided -- thanks Amiga Format! -- that I could do my work on it.
DeleteThat explains your avatar's expression. :(
DeleteI'm about 87% bitter disappointment these days.
Delete