YIIK: A Post Modern RPG / Ackk Studios / Andrew Allanson - "I wanted to make a game with a protagonist who was very unlikeable" - From Someone who is equally unlikeable. Currently developing Version I.V (1.5)

[Neurotypical Mantis]

so glad someone made a thread on this, ive been waiting for one

 

[Boobie Bomb]

Was wondering why there wasn’t a KiwiFarms thread about this game or the game devs. Seems like it was worse from the start! Jesus!

 

[Jeff Boomhauer]

I recently played this for a torture stream and it has one of the most tediously long turn based combat systems, it's such a boring chore to play, made only worse by the dialogue and plot. As I described it, YIIK is a game written by someone who believes they are writing a successor to Infinite Jest but who in reality made an even worse Ready Player One.

That's the main reason why I can only experience this through others. Say what you will about a game like, I dunno, Sonic 06, but you can at least attempt to have fun with how broken it is, along with the absolutely stupid plot.

An RPG with a long, tedious, and unrewarding battle system is just a bad RPG, and no amount of bile fascination will make people want to play it.

 

[Least Concern]

An RPG with a long, tedious, and unrewarding battle system is just a bad RPG, and no amount of bile fascination will make people want to play it.

The Final Fantasy games are really popular though.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

Earthbound is the reason the term "Mother Fuckers" was coined.

The one thing I hate about that crowd is their inability to let go, EB is long and boring by SNES JRPG standards and it and M3 have some great memorable bits but really you're only supposed to play through each of them once so the memorable bits land as payoff for all the slog you just endured. All the copycats try to do multiple ending bullshit or new game plus without realizing their quirky humor won't land at all for most people without the novelty, and said quirky humor isn't a substitute for a strong gameplay loop.

E: a good example of an eb-inspired game even sloggier than earthbound that nails the effort to payoff ratio is Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass. It goes from being a cute EB homage to a tense unsettling nightmare about an hour in and stays there for the duration. It's as close as you can really get to a videogame interpretation of Stephen King's It, and that includes all of the really uncomfortable parts.

They have no idea about giant, reetarded box it came in.

I bought that giant idiot box new for 25 dollars as a twelve year old and kind of regret it being one of the few games I didn't hold on to. It goes for obscene amounts of money these days.

 

[Velcheetah]

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.

Even if you consider fair use and the idea that Alex (the game’s protagonist) read the book. How can someone in 1999 read something that wouldn’t exist (in English) until 2007?

The plagiarism evidence.

 

[Kiwi & Cow]

This was in part due to the Allanson brothers not having had any coding experience, and opting to use a game dev platform called Multimedia Fusion 2. While one might argue that it was done by two lazy people, Multimedia Fusion 2 is a game engine that Scott Cawthon used to make Five Nights at Freddie's, and what Stephen DiDuro used for the original Freedom Planet.

Are you for real? I thought it was made on Unity.
This engine is ill-advised to make 3D games, it worked for Scott because I think everything in the game were sprites, YIIK uses actual 3D models. I need you to double-check this, if those guys did really use Fusion over Unity or whatever else, then they are inbred levels of exceptional.

 

[comfysocks]

Haven't you fucks played minit?

Save 70% on Minit on Steam

Minit is a peculiar little adventure played sixty seconds at a time.

store.steampowered.com

I hate Earthbound and Mother or whatever they call that RPG on steam but Minit is delightful and I have a mini-snes or maybe a mini-nes? They need to put out a mini-Sega Saturn and let me beat people up while I'm a catgirl nun that is trying to make a copy of CATS for Broadway, except I can be a catgirl and beat up a sasquatch.

 

[JamusActimus]

Haven't you fucks played minit?

Save 70% on Minit on Steam

Minit is a peculiar little adventure played sixty seconds at a time.

store.steampowered.com

I hate Earthbound and Mother or whatever they call that RPG on steam but Minit is delightful and I have a mini-snes or maybe a mini-nes? They need to put out a mini-Sega Saturn and let me beat people up while I'm a catgirl nun that is trying to make a copy of CATS for Broadway, except I can be a catgirl and beat up a sasquatch.

Minit is more zelda oracle of Age/Season on cocaine.

 

[Coolio55]

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:



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.

View attachment 2765765

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.

Shit. This is so common in this era I should have known but I'm still extremely disappointed at how much of the interesting bits of YIIK were directly ripped from somewhere else. (and from the sounds of it, done MUCH BETTER there)

They have no idea about giant, reetarded box it came in.

I liked Earthbound. Enough to buy it back in the day when it first came out. There really wasn't any other rpg that was like it at the time.

That being said, I rather replay just about any other of the popular rpgs on the snes besides Earthbound. It's not really that fun to replay IMO, especially compared to something like Final Fantasy 2 or 3, Chrono Trigger, or BOF2.

Chrono Trigger and FF2 are especially fun to replay. I usually do at least every few years.

I've had Earthbound since 1998 and I think I played through it the whole way twice. The last time I attempted it, around 5 years ago, I made it to the Moonside part, got annoyed and bored, and quit. Haven't picked it up since.

It's a great game to play through the first time around. I'd recommend anyone who likes rpgs of that era to play the whole way through at least once. I just personally don't consider it the legendary rpg that most soyfaced millenial types on the internet do.

It's unique, has a decent sense of humor for a vidya game, and has some goofy, fun characters, I just don't find it all that much fun to play once you've finished it and know what's going to happen next.

I'll just say it. Earthbound isn't a very good game.
It's quite funny and has a nice style but it's combat is astoundingly primitive.

I'm not a big fan of FF4 and I'd probably replay earthbound over it because of how dry it is but FF4 DEFINATELY had better combat.
It pretty much set the standard for modern JRPGs ...but as a result it feels super generic by today's standards.

What I like about Mother 3 is that they took the crappy combat system from Eathbound and made it REALLY fun without deviating too much from the original style.
It's no surprise that Brownie Brown was all ex Squaresoft.

 

[Belial]

Watched part of a playthrough of this game, and the one thing it stood out to me as doing incredibly "well," was perfectly capturing the feeling of being at a really shitty party or other social gathering with people that you don't really know or like very much, and listening to their inane, stupid conversations.

Every single dialogue scene that lasted for more than a couple of text boxes immediately brought on the visceral sense of lingering by the punch or the chips, counting the seconds until you could leave without insulting the actual friends who brought you here, get back to them and away from these douchebags, or at least wrestle back control of the conversation to something that won't bore you to death. But you never can, because it's a game and the character that's supposed to be you is the most insufferable one of all. I'm stunned that anyone actually managed to play this shit through to the end.

 

[Jeff Boomhauer]

Watched part of a playthrough of this game, and the one thing it stood out to me as doing incredibly "well," was perfectly capturing the feeling of being at a really shitty party or other social gathering with people that you don't really know or like very much, and listening to their inane, stupid conversations.

Every single dialogue scene that lasted for more than a couple of text boxes immediately brought on the visceral sense of lingering by the punch or the chips, counting the seconds until you could leave without insulting the actual friends who brought you here, get back to them and away from these douchebags, or at least wrestle back control of the conversation to something that won't bore you to death. But you never can, because it's a game and the character that's supposed to be you is the most insufferable one of all. I'm stunned that anyone actually managed to play this shit through to the end.

The worst part was when the story came to a screeching halt to deliver some of these inane conversations.

I don't remember the full context, but there's a "bonding" moment where Claudio and Rory talk about some stupid magical girl anime Claudio is obsessed with, and Rory finding it stupid and saying it sounds generic for an anime. I'm pretty sure anime wasn't THAT prominent in '99 (save for presumably DBZ and Pokemon), but ignoring that, this conversation comes towards the end of a dungeon unprompted (I'm sure you can skip it, but it's so unnecessary that it shouldn't exist in the first place) for no reason other than to say, "Look! The party is getting to know each other!"

At least with Tales of games, there are party skits that are in a similar vein (not about anime, of course) that are entirely optional.

 

[Least Concern]

I'm pretty sure anime wasn't THAT prominent in '99 (save for presumably DBZ and Pokemon)

Eh, that was when Toonami was ramping up. There was Gundam Wing (and maybe some others), Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura, Tenchi Muyo/Universe/in Tokyo, plus random stuff on Sci-Fi (as it was still called at the time) like that one trippy Urusei Yatsura movie and I think they showed Akira too. Not yet at the heights it would hit in the early '00s (before crashing back down to Earth later that decade) but it'd definitely be on a media-aware teenager's radar, as it was on mine.

 

[Looney Troons]

Oh no, I didn't play it. I just saw the OneyPlays boys play it.

Claudio's sister Chondra goes on racial tirade earlier in the game as well.

Sorry to quote an old response to this thread, but reading this comment made something dawn on me.

The band Coheed and Cambria is fronted by a dude named Claudio Sanchez. C&C, without sperging too hard, is a band based on bad sci-fi comics Claudio writes. Claudio also has self-inserts in the comic. The IRL Claudio Sanchez is married to a woman named Chondra Echert - very uncommon name. Given the originality and writing prowess of the two behind this game, I doubt this is merely coincidence.

Edit: the Coheed and Cambria concept comes from “The Amory Wars”. We’ve seen the ‘Proto Girl’ plagiarism, but they also look like simple palate swaps of beings called the “Prise” in these comics, have a look. Their wings get burned off for some reason that I don’t remember at the moment, and it looks like she clearly has something going on resembling flames behind her. The band has a song titled “The Crowing” that references a Prise named Ambellina having her wings burned off.

I wonder how much of YIIK has been ripped straight from some band’s creative writing attempts.

 

[Sir Joahim Browinson III]

How high is the chance we will see Mandalore covering this game?

 

[Cool kitties club]

I'll just say it. Earthbound isn't a very good game.
It's quite funny and has a nice style but it's combat is astoundingly primitive.

Yeah the battle system is boring as hell but i think the easier difficulty aligns with the fact that Earthbound is basically the rpg version of a kids book like The Phantom Tollbooth, A Wrinkle in Time, or Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Also helps that the game had some genuinely revolutionary narrative bits like exploring the silent protagonist through non-verbal means in magicant (which ended up inspiring the whole genre associated with Yume Nikki) or just giygas in general which despite many other games trying to do a shift from cutesy to scary hasn't been able to top the caves of the past in earthbound. Mostly because modern indie games play their cards to early, while the giygas fight in earthbound is a radical tonal shift which is still pretty shocking decades later.

YIIK is a massive case of too many cooks spoil the broth. It wants to have so many references take up a large amount of its plot that it has no room to grow. Unlike say Undertale which took a lot from other games but showed creativity in how it mixed and matched stuff with a different style, and from the foundation of Undertale Toby has been able to make a more original and interesting game like Deltarune. In contrast I don't think the Allanson brothers will be able to spin YIIK into something truly excellent. I think they would be better off finishing the two brothers port/remake/directors cut that was announced, as for all the flaws that game has I think it offers a more novel stylistic ground to make a career off of.

 

[Sangria]

The subtitle "From someone who is equally unlikeable" is inaccurate. I'd argue Andrew is even more unlikeable, cause at least we can kinda laugh at Alex and his "WHAT IS GOING ON????///??" shenanigans. Also Alex isn't a real person.

On that note, LISA: The Painful, OFF, Nut Dealer, and Nude Alert are the only good EB inspired RPGs. Haven't tried Omori but it looks fairly interesting. The rest is mediocre aping on nostalgia.

 

[Sunflower Samurai]

Also, i don't think VA-11 Hall-A is any good either, i can see the devs being friends since they are the same type of people.

ill admit i like VA-11 Hall-A, and just wanna say that they only included cameos in each other's games because they were published by the same company

as far as i know, the VA-11 Hall-A devs are just some random possibly starving Venezuelans with no attatchment to the Allanson brothers, (i know this response is late, but i just noticed it lmao)

 

[FBI-chan]

If the game was going for a 90s aesthetic, then why is the main character an unemployed hipster with a liberal arts degree struggling in the job market?

 

[Cedric_Eff]

This game tries to be Undertale and tries to capture the “quirkiness” of Toby Fox and fails. Shit, Toby even acknowledged this game once.