As somebody who played it with friends over the span of its release, the game is a fucking slog to get through in almost every aspect, even making jokes along the way. The movement is slow enough (until you get the skateboard which takes you in one direction lol) that everything takes for fucking ever to get anywhere. The combat is so tedious and boring that there are fights that took half a fucking hour not because of difficulty, but because of the overly large amount of shit that has to be done in a single turn (4 slow minigames that take 10+ seconds each at a minimum, the attack animations which take about 5 seconds on average, the enemy's attack animations, the stupid ass dodge minigames for each fucking party member) which adds up and kills the flow for fights. It almost punishes you for using anything other than the basic attack due to the sheer amount of time wasted for each spell. The worst example of this is the dialogue though. The game thinks its a verbose book instead of an RPG and puts too much detail on things that don't matter and too little on things that do. The only saving grace is how graceless and hilariously bad the plot and dialogue is as a whole. It really is the most joyless game to go through, even with friends. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, there really isn't anything anybody can say about YIIK that hasn't been said before.
You're right on the combat and the dialogue being a slog, and I think bringing them up together shows another contradiction in YiiK itself; Now I've only seen the Oney plays version, which was after the release and when the devs were already tweaking things, but they tried to speed up the combat by having the in combat dialogue boxed go so fast they can't be read.
This says a couple things to me, and I could just be reading too far into this but first off by doing this, you're telling your audience none of that is important (same with the "turn off monolouges" option) so why have them at all? Your battles already take 8 years to load, so why not speed things up by
optimizing them and trimming the fat completely rather than keep the broken, bloated system and insult your players intelligence by fast forwarding all your flavour text?
There's really only two reasons to make something "optional" in your game; accessibility and playstyle. Accessibility would be like, being able to speed up or slow down how quickly text appears in dialogue boxes, or having subtitles on or off. Play style would be things like easy mode, or having side quests be optional (the idea there being "hey if you want to hang out in our world with these characters more and enjoy exploring, here ya go" or "Do you enjoy an extra challenge? Here's a big baddie to test your skills but you more chill players can move on"). What
shouldn't be optional are large swathes of your protagonists dialogue. If that is something considered optional than you're saying it adds nothing to the game (same message as the flavour text in combat) and if entire chunks of your story add nothing to your game by your own admission than you should not have them in there in the first place.
Both in the story and the guts of the game itself nothing is optimized, everything is just a bloated mess and I think it says a lot that the game devs aren't just cutting it all out but instead trying to work around it. I'm torn though, I don't know if it's because they just know nothing about writing and making games or if they're so far up their own ass that they won't allow any of their masterpiece to be discarded, but in a spiteful little "fuck you" to their detractors they go "Oh combat is too slow? Well lets speed it up. Is that better, you Neanderthals? now no one gets to have fun!" and "Oh you don't want to enjoy our deep, emotional story rife with monolouges? Here, you can turn them off for your wittle baby brain. The story won't make sense but you weren't going to make sense of it anyway."
I might be projecting some of the writers knee-jerk defensiveness on to the whole process there though.
Honestly, I think one of the biggest fuckups with the game overall is how the game handles Rory. They make the big deal about how you can cause Rory to commit suicide(literally the only character with a “choose your response” to them), but almost every single story beat regarding him and his shot life is heavily offset by a “lol so random joke”.
You get his confession about how his sister killed hersefl and he thinks it’s his fault, seeing essentially a “what if” Soul Survivor version of himself and finding out just how fucked up he is…which immediately leads into a random boss fight with a golden alpacha.
You go back to see Rory after the events of the previous chapter, both setting the stage for what’s supposed to be Alex trying to be a better person and knowing more about the life Rory leads….and then he has a giant leg for a mom.
Rory asks to speak with you, and how you respond and what plays out is a major factor in if he mills himself or not, where he essentially pours his heart out to Alex and admits he’s lost on life and doesn’t know what to do, and Alex finally managing to show some real humanity and comfort the guy…which ends with a joke scene option of “Kiss Rory”.
And then if he does survive, you get him saying “lol suicide is not cool, I would never do that” as some kind of wink wink nudge nudge moment.
It’s just really odd to make your most tragic character also the one with the most random jokes and gags attached to him.
Doesn’t help that it looks like his art looks like he was originally wearing a hoodie and they just changed it to his hair.
That's actually a really good point, I was too distracted by the tonal shifts themselves to realize they were all kind of attached to one character's plot like that.
It's also not something I can really even take a guess at, to be honest. All the source material for YiiK is stuff that is very character centric and yet the writer of YiiK could not give less of a shit about any of his except God-King Alex and his haram of Elisa Lams. Like your example with Rory, or how Michael just kind of becomes a mute meat puppet that may as well be carted around in a wagon. Claudio and Chandra could be interesting but if memory serves they're never used to any great effect; they don't have their own subplot, they never save the day and aside from Claudio pointing them towards the LP, they don't even have an effect on the main story.
To get a bit snobby about this shit again, let's look at something like Lord of the Rings, where you have a full RPG party's worth of character running around at once, some which disappear for extended periods of time but they're still all absolutely vital to the good guys winning in the end.
A quick example would be Merry and Pippin who, at a glance, seem like the easiest of the crew to dismiss (they're not a unique race (being 2/4 hobbits rather than, say the sole dwarf or elf) so they're not going to have any hidden knowledge or skills that Frodo or Sam don't also possess, they're not connected to any factions, they're not particularly skilled and if anything come off as a liability) but as the story progresses their actions have bigger and bigger effects; from getting the ents to battle with them, to Merry helping take down the Nazgul leader to even leading an entire hobbit rebellion.
There's more, obviously those books and movies are overflowing with content, but my point is that guys were not just there to talk about food the way Claudio talks about anime; they have roles and reasons that impact the entire outcome of not only wars but the fate of their entire world. That's big stuff!
Meanwhile nothing Michael does solves the over-arching mystery of what happened to Sammy Semi Park Pak, he just tags along to the location Alex Yiik already found. Nothing Rory does gets them closer to solving the mystery, his whole segment just serves as an info dump. Nothing Claudio does progresses the plot or digs up new clues; he isn't even the one to tell Alex about the record or anything, he just points them in the direction to find it (and the whole record arc doesn't progress the Sammy Lam mystery either) and Chandra just holahoops. I don't think she even gives a reason why she's tagging along.
I hate to circle back around to my own previous posts but its another example I think of the writer only understanding these sources (hell, I'm actually willing to say "all media" at this point) on the shallowest level. He knows a story needs characters but treats them as props to pull out whenever he needs to fill time or to further highlight something about Alex, who is clearly the only "character" he actually cares about.
All this being a big, dumb way of me saying that I think you've made a really interesting observation about his use of Rory, and the only reason I can think for it is that Rory is just an in-game item to try and add emotional depth to a shallow experience and the writer heard the Joss Whedon quote "Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then for the love of God, tell a joke." and didn't know how to use it effectively.
