- Joined
- Feb 25, 2019
What is, YIIK: A Post-Modern RPG?
Well, in short, it is an RPG developed by two brothers: Andrew, and Brian Allanson , who set out to make an RPG in vein like that of Earthbound. The end result however, was a terrible game, with an unlikeable protagonist who alienates his friends, sets about to find a robot woman who intended to use him from the get-go, destroy the world and the universe he lives in, and is forced to resolve the issues occurring in the game by breaking the fourth wall and directly asking you the player to do it.
One might think, oh, it's just a shitty game from two retards who didn't know what they were doing. However, this is not their first rodeo, but their second in a line of games made terribly with the ambition of striking it big with stories that would be remembered. Oh, they will be remembered. For all the wrong reasons. Starting with their first foray into gaming: Two Brothers.
Two Brothers, and a fuck ton of bugs.
Two Brothers is the Allanson Brother's first attempt at publishing a game. If it's not obvious from the trailer, the design, music, and overall art style of the game is everywhere, and not in a palatable way. The music design is shit, and the premise of the game is rather terrible from the get go:(A 2013 interview with both brothers and a third person, who all developed the bug laden mess that was Two Brothers.)
With this, the game has garnered negative reviews, but not in a way that you would expect. A majority of them don't gripe over the art, music, or even the terrible story (though many note that the game's nonlinear story telling requires a guide), but bugs. Oh boy, did the game have bugs. This was in part due to the Allanson brothers not having had any coding experience, opting to use a game dev platform called Multimedia Fusion 2. While one might argue that it was done on a terrible engine, Multimedia Fusion 2 is the game engine that Scott Cawthon used to make the original Five Nights at Freddie's, Stephen DiDuro used for Freedom Planet, I Wanna Be The Guy and Baba Is You also being notable examples of MF2's best hits. The difference to why Cawthon, DiDuro and few others succeeded while the Allansons failed is simple:
They did not QA the game.
At all.
In any capacity. The steam reviews note several game breaking bugs and soft locks, as well as the first telltale signs that the Allanson brothers were in over their heads attempting to explain their nonlinear means of story telling. Or simply put, their story sucked because they didn't hire a writer to help flesh their story, and spent little time on QA.
To my knowledge, and efforts, the game was never ported, and allegedly, the Allanson were forced to stop selling the game as the music composer (Andrew) rather blatantly ripped off Demise of the Ritual from Shadow of the Colossus. There was a tweet accompaning this video, but it was deleted, BUT, someone else was able to recreate the comparison to the Two Brother's game to SoTC's Demise of the Ritual.
YIIK: A POST-MODERN FUCK UP
YIIK first came to be known in 2014 with the trailer above. Ignoring the quirky, and interesting little RPG with mini-game fighting mechanics, FUCKING MECHS, and lol so random events, you might come to notice a scene involving an elevator, well... there's a fun little story behind that. Our little story starts in the shithole to end all shitholes: Los Angeles.In 2013, a young Asian woman by the name of Elisa Lam would come to stay at an infamously haunted hotel called the Cecil Hotel.
During her stay, she would suddenly come to vanish only to be found days later, deceased, and mysteriously in a water tank on the roof of the hotel. During police investigation, the last confirmed sighting of her was from eerie CCTV footage in which Lam would appear to have a psychotic break stemming from multiple mental health issues she was likely neglecting to medicate herself over. Now, why or how is this relevant?
Because the Allanson brother's, specifically Andrew, was so influenced by her death, he incorporated it as a plot device for the protagonist Alex to further investigate the sudden and odd occurrences going on in his home town, as quoted from a Vice article, and a reddit post:
If it has not been obvious, the Allanson suck at original ideas, and Andrew's obsession with Elisa Lam's case is rather concerning to say the least. And that is not mentioning the only other ending in YIIK is Alex choosing to abandon his friends on New Years, a critical day in the game, to be with the dead girl he met only once and grew infatuated with for no discernible reason. Speaking of Alex, we also come to the elephant in the room.
The giant, red headed, annoying, and unlike-able elephant that refuses to shut the fuck up. Our protagonist, Alex 'Who cares about your dead sister?" Eggleston.
(Audio is from The Dick Show from which Andrew went on to vent his frustration regarding YIIK's mixed success. The man in the photo is not ether of the Allanson brothers, he's just a retarded ginger who wanted to cosplay.)
(Andrew looks like this. Source: Destructoid interview from 2016 PAX East.)
Andrew's most frequent counter-critique of those who detract YIIK is that he intentionally made Alex an unlikable protagonist, who by the end of the game is "Forced to grow up and change."
Instead, upon your forced death when you fight Proto-Alex for the one and only time, you are taken to meet with the protagonist Roy from Two Brothers, which the Allansons seem to gleefully plug despite the game being unsellable. During this, Roy, who is voice acted, essentially goes on to rant about how he wasn't given a chance to succeed, blatantly referring to the game's overwhelming failure to launch and ignoring the fact the Allansons left the game to rot and never fixed any of the game breaking bugs and potentially copyrighted audio it had.
Now, not every person into games is in it for the story, some enjoy good gameplay. Well, unfortunately for you, the Allanson managed to screw up gameplay as well, as shown here:
The Allanson brothers used their dying mother as an excuse for the game's poor quality. (Article archived here.)
A lot of ... homage, but not a lot of substance
(Thanks to @SpaceAce for this, I've decided to copy it verbatim to abridge reading the thread)I'm going to be watching this thread but probably not contributing much because A LOT about this game and the devs makes me legit MATI and even I don't need that many top hats in my life but I do want to point out one thing:
You forgot the fact that YIIK allegedly plagiarized a scene in verbatim from Haruki Murakami’s After Dark, which was published (in Japanese) in 2004.
Haruki Murakami also has a story called "Kafka on the Shore" that the devs of this game are no doubt hoping no one in their audience read or else they may start seeing some parallels...
Kafka is the first protag of the book is the protag with an imaginary friend (one may say that he only exists in the protags mind) named Crow (who can also take the form of a crow) who works as his inner voice, sometimes offering advice, sometimes berating him.
At one point Kafka's love interest (who appears to him in multiple forms) tells him of a song she wrote for the boyfriend she had as a teenager but refuses to sing it for him so he goes to his music obsessed friend to find the original record.
He does (without having to climb a mountain) and he sees a different, younger version of his love interest on the cover and listens to the song. He believes the song was written for him and that he's somehow this dead boyfriend in an alt timeline, and has to figure out if he loves this alt, younger version of this singer or the one who is older and living in his world now (who may also have an alt that's his mother. It's weird), and she reveals how after her boyfriend died she wanted to escape from their reality and live in a world where she could feel the happiness she felt while singing that song forever.
Oh god this is already turning into the essay I promised myself it wouldn't. Okay, quick bulletins on other "similarities"
- The second protag is Nakata who, after his mind travelled to another world as a kid, can talk to cats. His story is about how attempting to return a cat to its owner leads him on a search for "The entrance stone" which is described as looking like a white, stone LP.
- Music is used as a catalyst for change in characters and situations
- Kafka, like Rory, is obsessed with finding his sister even though he knows it's pretty much impossible.
- There is the casual use of strange, real world pop culture icons like a man dressing like and calling himself Colonel Sanders.
- The character's themselves talk about the "inner labrynth" that one must solve to better understand themselves and overcome their trauma/flaws/obsessions.
- There are huge themes on overcoming the guilt of what you're destined to do, even if YOU didn't do it.
Okay gonna stop there. The TLDR; I think every single bit of this game is stolen from other sources, even if we don't know which ones yet but its like they were put through a retarded photocopier where all nuance and metaphor is lost and replaced with whiny, hipster shallowness.
Upon being called out for a heavy amount of borrowed material, Andrew and his brother made a reference page on the main menu, this is what's written there.
If you notice, a lot of material to their story comes from Haruki Murakami. As SpaceAce best put it: all nuance and metaphor is lost and replaced with whiny, hipster shallowness. There is also a noticeable amount of passive aggressiveness in noting Miriam Webster's dictionary and how language works. Clearly they're not showing how butthurt they are over being called out for writing a lesser version of Kafka on the Shore.
YIIK I.V: a Post-Modern patch?
Currently, the Allanson brothers are working on a patch for YIIK, named patch I.V, or 1.5. The overall plans for it are to overhaul the terrible gameplay, as well as change and rework old boss battles, starting with the current iteration called 1.25, which they've dubbed The Deviation Perspective. Time will only tell if the game actually improves upon 1.5 release, but as the old saying goes: First Impressions are important, and that first impression was so far the worst impression.(ETA: To a mod who reads this, I was intending for this to be put into the gaming subforum, but I did not want to make another YIIK thread without at least writing more in depth to what makes the game and the dev both funny and shitty. I felt putting it in PG would be the best idea. If it could just be posted as-is with edits or posts added later on into the gaming subforum, please feel free to move it there.)
Attachments
Last edited:
