Thoughts on YIIK
Spoilers under the cut.
Ok so like. I don’t know how to feel about this game. There’s a lot of really good things about it, like the first half of the plot, the art style, and the music. But then there are so many glaring issues you can’t just write off, like the progression system the often times cringeworthy writing, and the shitty characters.
Ok so a quick synopsis. You follow Alex, a fresh out of college 23 year old man who just moved back to his hometown. He finds his way to an abandoned factory where he witnesses a girl named Sammy Pak get taken from an elevator by otherworldy star beings called Soul Survivors. He gathers up a ragtag group of strangers in order to help find the missing girl, Sammy. Along the way Alex learns about himself and his friends and the nature of the universe itself.
So the gameplay itself isn’t bad, the most similar game I can compare it to is Paper Mario, where each action requires a quicktime event to either do damage or lower damage/dodge attacks. This is both a blessing and a curse, for the attacks your party does, its nice and varied, offering a lot of different ways to attack. But with enemies its 1 of 3 types of damage, and it gets old fast, and if the attack multihits your whole party, it takes FOREVER. It wasn’t uncommon to be in basic encounters that lasted from 10-15 minutes.
Now progression itself is nice, its a neat idea to let you customize how the main character grows, but. it. takes. forever. So to gain stats and levels, you need to enter the Mind Dungeon, which is only available at save points. In the mind dungeon, each floor represents a level, and each level has 4 doors offering different stats you can customize to your liking, sounds neat on paper. But this would require a significant chunk of time to do, 4 doors per floor and doing roughly 2-3 levels every time you go in. By the time I got to the later parts of the game, I just let the game autoassign stats because I just couldn’t be bothered.
Now........ the writing..... Alex isn’t likable at first. He’s a self-centered jerk who never shuts the fuck up, always having an inner monologue literally every cutscene almost about bullshit no one cares about. The good thing is that Alex doesn’t stay like this, throughout the game he learns about himself and learns to accept the flaws that he has and move past them to become a better person. The first half of the game is really strong to be honest though, it pulls you in with the neat supernatural concepts it throws at you, but by the midway point it gets overwhelming and you can’t really tell whats supposed to be going on. The other characters are, alright, Rory, Vella and Chandra were pretty cool, Rory being someone who pulls himself out of a depressive state, Vella being the central female character that teaches everyone about the supernatural elements they deal with. Chandra never really did anything but when she spoke she always asked good questions and had positive things to say. There’s also Michael and Claudio, both are fucking nerds and never shut up about their bullshit. Michael’s like Yosuke Hanamura from Persona 4 being a horny 19 year old and Claudio never shutting up about anime.
Some other things I could say, the game is a buggy mess, it feels like it’s going to break apart at any minute. I had the game soft lock on me literally 4 or 5 times, the most significant 2 being when I was supposed to kiss a balloon, and the dialogue didn’t advance. And the worst being when I fast traveled to the University, and the screen started flashing black repeatedly until I closed out of the app. There’s also an abhorrently racist thing I found in the enemy AI. There’s a cop enemy, and when I had Claudio (a black man) out on the field, the cop would exclusively target him, I tested to be sure and it lasted for approximately 15 turns. Its honestly disgusting that the devs would include something like that.
And on that note, I’d say this game is a solid 5/10, despite its glaring issues, its still kinda fun. Its currently sitting at $20 and roughly 30 hours at a leisurely pace. If it ever goes on sale and you like RPGs, I’d say go for it, because I’m sure that the devs will patch out their stupid shit and make it better (or at least I hope so.)