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drinkrust · 2 years

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heaven knows you postmortem

hi! i’m drinkrust. i made a kinetic novel called heaven knows you back in july together with my dear friend Enzo. it was the first time i ever made a game, even if some don’t consider a visual novel with no choices a game (i kinda do). now that i’m a few months removed from the process of making it, i feel like i can better look back at my experience with the project.

heaven knows you was made in 15 days for VN Cup, which was a yuri game jam that had some people from team cpu behind it. it was because of them that i ended up hearing about it. i love archangel:nemesis and instantly got interested when i saw the jam announcement. even better: it seemed like something feasible. i was surprised to see a bunch of artists i really admire were also going to make a VN for it, so the pressure started to build up. it was especially frightening since our artstyle was pretty different from the other projects in there. it's kinda traditionally cartooney with thick lineart and angular faces. even though i was nervous, i think it made me more compelled to actually finish the game.

VN Cup had few restrictions: the VN had to be less than an hour long, have no choices and be yuri as hell. that was it. for someone with absolutely 0 programming experience, it was also helpful to know that the engine we’d be using was ren’py, which is made for babies like me to understand without much trouble. that was it. why not make my first game there? my main problem was that i was a completely awful artist. like, really, i’ll show a few of my pieces in a few paragraphs. so i talked to my friend Enzu which is an extremely talented artist with many cool potential artstyles and he agreed to help out. during the 15 days we had to develop hny, he had work and college and i had some freelancing stuff to work on and also college, so we had less than ideal free time.

still, we managed to pull on with only one or two days of crunch!! i mean, that could’ve probably been avoided, but i personally did not know what the hell i was doing most of the time… so i can prolly avoid it in the future if i can help it. Enzo had a lot of work to do as well: multiple backgrounds and 7 character sprites, three detailed ones and four silhouettes, all with a full range of expressions. he also did the logos and part of the graphic design.

i got a bit ahead of myself. what is heaven knows you?? well, it’s the final manifestation of an idea that had been floating around my head for a long while. it’s first draft in my head was that of a first person dungeon crawler where you played as an adventurer that got stuck in a castle with witches that were waiting hundreds of years to seal a person there to execute a spell to open one’s mind. so, basically the same idea that ended up on the final game. but the tone was drastically different, and it was going to be more of an adventure-puzzle dungeon crawler thingy. the witches were going to be unhelpful and barely talk, and there was *probably* not going to have any romance.

so i started thinking about ways to make it work as a yuri VN, and it kinda just wrote itself. one of the witches is Selena, and she even had some sprites already done that i could use for inspiration for the eventual redesign. in the original dungeon crawler version she was going to be a mysterious character that forgot how to comunicate properly with humans because she was stuck in the upper section of the castle without talking to the rest of her coven. brace yourself for her icon below.

her hair was supposed to look withered and her face scary and pale because of how recluse she was. a perfect fit for the love interest of my newly conceptualized VN! Enzo redesigned her with his style while inspired by Deep Sea Prisoner’s games and my insane references, which gave her a more welcoming and charming look. i think her design in hny makes her come off as clumsy as well which is nice.

as for the protagonist, Inno, i wanted her to be androgynous and represent the culture and look of the people of the fictional city she came from, Calandria. her and Tara’s outfit were inspired by the weirdo retrofuturistic take on clothing from the early Phantasy Star games.

i wanted Inno to be a little annoying at first. someone who’s ghosted her friends and justified to herself that abandoning most of her connections in order to forge a path alone was worth it. one of the themes is making her realize that, you know, that was a mistake and all. she’s that kind of simple and curious protagonist that works well for this kind of story, but with a little dumb edge that (in my mind at least) makes her a bit more active in the plot.

her and Selena are kinda similar in how they aren’t thaat great at talking, but each have their own quirks. writing their interactions was pretty easy because of their dynamic. but then there’s the rest of the coven, which is made of extremely ambitious witches that dealt with their situation stuck at the castle way better than Selena, and started to bully her.

they were all completely created by Enzo, and i like their presence in the story! they’re mean out of boredom, mostly, and i tried to make the way they teased Selena to not be completely awful. they’re not bad guys, but they do fuel some conflict throughout the plot. i wish i had written more for them…

then there’s Tara, a character that i won’t really talk about much because she only shows up near the end. she’s a weird one.

writing the whole thing was an extremely fun endeavor, but damn it was tiring. there are many pieces which i constantly altered up until the last day before the deadline, and i cut a bunch of stuff out to streamline it a bit. if i had known more ren’py before starting, i would’ve done some fancier tricks to shake up the visuals, but i had already spent a couple days just trying to figure character portraits out, so that was probably way out of reach.

honestly, i’m extremely happy that i could get one of my stories out there. i have a bunch just lying on my mind, and i wish to make them all one day. in my mind, heaven knows you was a great success. more than 60 people downloaded it!! like, getting people to take time out of their day to download my game was something i was straight up not expecting. i’ve made a bunch of art in different disciplines over the last eight years or so, and never before had this much attention to one of my first projects on it. it’s crazy.

now i really feel like digging deeper into the development side of videogames and making more stuff. first of all, i’ll update heaven knows you. there aren’t that many songs on it, so i’ll add a couple more. also, maybe better programming on some of the particularly barren sections. maybe more art as well? i wanna make a “post-jam” edition so that it becomes a more polished experience.

after that’s done, i’ll get deep into work on my next game project, which is a unity thing. i also wanna do a sequel to heaven knows you. it’s already mapped out, so maybe i’ll work on it before the unity project? oh no, this postmortem is turning into a diary. thanks for reading. bye!!! here’s an extra Selena artwork i did on my own weirdo artstyle a few months back!!!

#gamedev #indiegamedev #indie #visual novel #kinetic novel #postmortem

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drinkrust · 2 years

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Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure makes me smile, and that’s all it needs to do

Amid the games offered in the Nis America’s rerelease series “Prinny Presents NIS Classics”, Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure doesn’t fit as well as the others featured. While a good amount of them offer complex combat and a huge amount of potential playtime, Rhapsody is rather short and… probably one of the easiest SRPGs ever made.

The only way you could guess why it got chosen to be a part of these rereleases is the fact that it is one of the first two tactical RPGs developed by Nippon Ichi Software before they hit it big with Disgaea, which changed the company’s destiny forever. This makes a lot of sense knowing that the game that accompanies it in its PC and Switch rerelease is La Pucelle, which is the only other SRPG title they made before the first Disgaea. Just by taking a glance, you can already see a big difference in how they chose to approach both games’ remaster. While La Pucelle received many quality of life changes, Rhapsody went relatively unchanged (besides now offering a beautiful CRT mode).

The reason for this is that the original 1998 Atlus localization for Rhapsody was already uncommonly complete for the time. It had options for both Japanese and English voice acting, extra unlockable illustrations, and the game was already easy enough that it didn’t warrant any balance changes for the west. Unfortunately, it did not sell well enough for its two sequels to also be localized, which is a shame because both seem incredible.

Note: Even though there are no currently available in-game translations for Rhapsody’s sequels, you can find fully translated scripts for Little Princess: Marl Ōkoku no Ningyō Hime 2 and Tenshi no Present: Marl Ōkoku Monogatari here and here, respectively.

Even the game’s songs were completely rerecorded with English voices (though they are the only parts with any amount of voiceover at all). There lies the most intriguing part of Rhapsody. It’s a whole damn musical. Like, there are six unique songs coupled with some special versions of the main theme. Every song is sung in a perfectly (and sometimes beautifully) acceptable manner by the American cast. I was expecting the next song to arrive at every step I took while playing. Fortunately, the best songs here are sung by Cornet, and there are a lot of them because, well, she’s the protagonist and all.

It’s really impressive how unique Rhapsody ends up being because of its stylistic choices because deep down, it’s a pretty by-the-numbers JRPG. Enough so that it feels weird that they bothered making this a tactics game at all considering how little it matters for the game aside from making battles last longer since you have to position your party members on range to hit an enemy before attacking. On a normal RPG, it would take one turn to hit your opponent. Here, most party members take two to get their first hit in.

The easygoing difficulty on offer by Rhapsody is enough to get hardcore fans of the genre to completely ignore its existence, which makes sense if you’re only on the lookout for a challenge and nothing more. But I’d argue that Rhapsody is much more interesting when seen through other lenses.

For starters, it works perfectly as a potential first game for people who have never touched a game in their lives. Even some simple 3D titles considered to be good entry points by game fans end up being a headache for beginners, but Rhapsody here speaks for itself. If you ignore some repetitive dungeon layouts and one or two innocuous dialogues you need to trigger to advance the story, none of the mechanics here would seem confusing for a complete newbie.

This is understandable because the actual target demographic for this game is kids, even though it can handle serious topics in some story beats. Rhapsody is structured in a similar manner to a Disney Princess movie (only with the roles reversed), which is a big compliment coming from someone like me, who absolutely adores Cinderella and the likes of it. Cornet is a daydreaming girl that can talk to and understand any puppet/doll. Now that I mentioned it, she can even transform them into party members by playing her favorite melody on her cornet. They’re not only important to the narrative, but also to the combat, where they work kinda like they do in Dragon Quest V.

However, the only puppet that can’t fight is Kururu, Cornet’s favorite that has been with her since her mom was murdered during a mysterious war that was going on at the time. Kururu is present throughout the whole game and acts as a mentor figure that forces Cornet to make difficult decisions (and sometimes makes some for her, which often backfires). The first song that features any vocals (excluding the intro one) only gets to play because of Kururu, when she asks Cornet to play “her favorite song”. Now the same song she loves playing on her cornet gets to be interpreted vocally for the first time in the game. It’s called Let’s Go On and it regularly gets different verses when it gets reprised in later sections of the plot, from which it adapts its tone to fit.

The cutesy animations that Cornet and the other characters make when they sing their tracks are immensely adorable and help them be more memorable than they would otherwise. They’re essential little touches that serve to not make the songs seem like they completely halt the game’s narrative. Oh, besides, they also advance both the story and the characters’ individual arcs!

This makes me a little bummed out since there are one or two songs that are not only way too short, but also don’t help out that much in developing the story, particularly the ones placed in the middle of the adventure. Nevertheless, I’d say that the way they incorporated the musical elements into the rest of the game was made with care, and forms an irreplaceable piece of the emotional impact Rhapsody’s story seeks to usher in.

Cornet loves singing as much as she dreams about being rescued by the beautiful Prince Ferdinand, who she’s completely obsessed with. Her dream kinda comes true when he randomly shows up to rescue her from a dragon conjured by Myao, an easily irritable witch that controls the population of anthropomorphic cats that live in the Wonder Woods. Unfortunately, Cornet is just as human as any of us and completely freezes when confronted by her crush. While Ferdinand tries to talk to the anxiety-ridden static girl, she can’t as much as move a single pixel.

In the end, she ends up not even being able to share her first name with the prince, which worries her because how lucky would she have to be to find Ferdinand again? He lives in a castle inside the big city of Mothergreen while Cornet lives in the rural Orange Village. He’s royalty, and she’s a plebeian. So of course she goes out to find him anyway.

Let’s skip a tiny bit of the important character stuff established early into the first hours of the adventure because I really want you to actually play Rhapsody instead of only reading my article about it. Amid an annual (and official!) contest in which girls take part to gather the prince’s attention, Cornet manages to reconnect, even if negatively, with her spoiled and fashionable childhood friend Etoile and ends up tying with her at the top spot of the contest.

The only problem is that Myao remembered how embarrassed Ferdinand made her feel the day he defeated her, so she ran a dragon through the castle walls and, accompanied by her friends Gao and Crowdia, let her mentor Marjorly steal the prince for herself. Being as clumsy as she is, Marjorly ends up transforming the poor dude into a statue by accident instead of using the love spell she intended to.

That’s when the game starts to open up. Cornet gains a new stylish outfit, the famous elemental stones are introduced for you to hunt down, etc. You know, the classic structure of a run-of-the-mill JRPG of that time. I’m not going to lie here, some narrative concepts Rhapsody tries to explore are not that interesting, but… I’d be a complete liar if I omitted how much the characters and their individual arcs are used to transform what could be a boring story into an actually engaging one.

First off, the dynamic between Cornet and Etoile represents a good example of this exact thing. They’re always fighting and the person who most often starts throwing insults around is Etoile. But you can see in the way in which they interact (and confirm with later story events) that in reality, they are just inseparable friends. Etoile is also searching for Ferdinand, but instead of taking Cornet’s puppet-based heroic approach, she hires bodyguards to protect her with guns. A bunch of them. She even gets some herself. Yeah, this seemingly medieval RPG introduces firearms out of the blue. How cool is that?

Even as rivals, they can’t help but give each other a hand to move on. This is made clear right at the beginning when Etoile and Cornet start to fight to see who says sorry first to the close person which they emotionally hurt during the contest’s events, and it gets even deeper as their relationship develops while you’re on the search for the elemental stones.

Each of the stones is located in a remote place that has its own history attached to the artifact. This part of the game focuses on telling five different tales independent from the main story arc with a surprisingly high variety in tone and unfortunately, quality as well. Of course, it’d be weird to expect complete consistency between the five stories, but some of them don’t even look like they came from this game because of how tonally off they are.

The search for the Waterstone on the pirate boat is a good example of this. You meet pirates that have been victims of a shipwreck that killed a big chunk of the crew in the past. The victims’ dad and best friend are still on the high ranks of the crew, and they both blame themselves for the dude’s death. This part doesn’t offer a traditional dungeon but instead the boat you can explore, which is pretty tiny. Together, the three pirates involved in this plot have about 30 lines of dialogue, and that’s it.

This doesn’t go for all of the elemental stone quests though. Some of them end up in tragedy, and almost all of them require Cornet to make a morally questionable sacrifice in order to get a stone. I’m not going to go into much detail so I don’t spoil anything, but what I’ll say is that the game presents very abrupt and heavy scenarios on occasion, which is pretty cool. These end up making up the most interesting pieces of the middle section of Rhapsody, which needs to have a bigger emotional heft to function properly because of its problematic dungeons.

Funnily enough, I haven’t been that satisfied with the dungeons in most recent RPGs I’ve played, even though I have a bigger tolerance for grind and repetition than most people. Games like Crystar and Cruel King and the Great Hero were way too repetitive for my thumbs to even enjoy playing them, and unfortunately, I can say some of the same things for Rhapsody’s dungeons. The common link between these games’ dungeon crawling is that they only exist in order to space out combat encounters instead of requiring thorough exploration.

In Rhapsody, there are two types of dungeons: caves and towers. If you’ve seen either one of them, you’ve seen them all, because the only difference you can spot is an occasional color palette swap. They’re just collections of square rooms with paths — Zelda style — but with a whole bunch of nothing inside. They only lead to new floors, maybe some items and extra collectibles, and eventually a boss. Navigating the dungeons isn’t a difficult task since the combat never drains your resources, but I still lost a couple (maybe more) hours just trying to get my bearings because of how repetitive they feel. Don’t feel bad for looking up a dungeon map online if you’re getting bored.

The dungeons do take a considerable amount of the overall playtime, but that sure wasn’t enough to ruin my experience, not even close. What matters here is that outside of them and during the dialogue and beautifully drawn areas, things work out much more smoothly. Cornet manages to create a genuinely deep connection with the rest of the main cast because she’s constantly humanized. Her decisions are what make her strong and Kururu, Etoile and her grandpa are all there to reinforce exactly this.

It would be cool if the puppets spoke a little more during the story, but at least they gain an interesting bit of focus on the village side quests (and the worldbuilding). They’re kinda hard to find for yourself, so I recommend a guide if you wanna play ’em all. Besides that, they let you in on more solid context to what is one of the biggest emotional pillars present in Rhapsody’s world, which I’ll touch on now without getting into spoilers.

Rhapsody has a few plot twists just like any ambitious RPG. One of them made me tear up. This is the first time this happened to me in a game where the pace is controlled by the player. In a cinematic title like, say, Life is Strange, it’s easy to get emotional in a scene cautiously acted and paced to gather this response. I know this because it happened to me a few times (lol). Now, in a JRPG with no voices (at least when no one’s singing) with the dialogue speed controlled completely by the player, this caught me completely off guard.

What happens here is a beautiful role subversion that ends up recontextualizing the whole game and that made me realize how important it was for Cornet’s arc as a whole after reevaluating the couple hundred screenshots I took while playing. Since I don’t wanna spoil anything, I’ll leave it at that.

The last thing I wanna say (exactly after saying I’ll leave it at that, no less) is that this twist ties the songs and the ambiance together both thematically and practically, so much so that it ends up stealing a bit of the climax’s shine. It was the perfect last screw to drill in my head how special Rhapsody really is.

Besides its narrative, the game also shows its personality in many other areas, and constantly. For starters, it pays out really well to poke around random objects trying to find any extra dialogue or a hidden potion or to, even more so than in other JRPGS.

Potions and extra items don’t matter in the grand scheme of things considering how easy the game is, but sometimes you get some cute illustrations or even a little jingle that sings “Nippon Ichi Software”. Yes, I checked: it said “Atlus USA” in the original version. The change may have happened in the DS version (though I’m not sure) and then reused in this current port.

It’s great to have these occasional jokes and extra dialogue that you get while just interacting with samey-looking things in different-looking places. Usually, Cornet will comment on how strange it is to see a repeated asset or even infer some difference she can see even though the graphics don't let us see it as well. Some people have a bunch of problems with how Atlus localized their titles at the time and I do agree with some of those arguments, but I can’t see how this would have negatively impacted Rhapsody in specific. Honestly, the dialogue here sounds more current than many other drab modern localizations made by other companies.

Besides that, the visuals themselves are also refreshing. The character portraits show a lot of personality, and there are so many of them that I swear some of them are just used once or twice throughout the whole game. Lastly, we have the surprisingly good fashion sense present, which is mainly represented by Cornet, who completely changes her fit as soon as she leaves to search for her prince. Remember, those are whole animations that had to be reworked for this to be implemented, and that’s something only a game made with love can achieve.

Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure was an unforgettable experience, even though the idea didn’t reach its full potential in this title. I really hope NISA is interested in localizing the sequences, but I know that’s not an easy task. Just for some perspective, one of the fan-translated scripts I linked earlier, the one for Tenshi no Present: Marl Oukoku Monogatari, has 42.000 words in total, and at least up until the sections I read there weren’t optional NPC dialogues in there… Translating and implementing the translation into the game isn’t an easy task, but I still think it’ll be worth it if this Rhapsody rerelease does well.

In order to make a special JRPG, a perfect combat system or impeccable dungeons are rarely needed. It’s honestly easier to achieve this using the genre’s biggest strengths, which are its scale and ability to use unique storytelling methods to enhance a narrative. Rhapsody takes advantage of both while adding its own secret sauce, which is the musicals accompanied by big doses of care. In fact, I think tender is a good word for summing up the experience.

May the world turn into a more tender place, and may Rhapsody provide the tenderness you need then.

bye!

#jrpg #nintendo switch #rhapsody #musical #ps1 classic

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drinkrust · 2 years

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a reluctant goodbye to YIIK: A Postmodern RPG

note: this was originally written on 01/17/2022

YIIK: A Postmodern RPG sports a unique reputation. the public opinion of the game is irreparably fucked, but few people actually took the time to play it. it is in the spectrum of works that are so big in scope and fail so spectacularly that it forms a hole of discourse around it that attracts even people that wouldn’t even wanna touch it if it was considered good.

an interesting quirk of YIIK is that it is not an unfinished game. it’s done and presumably fulfilled the artistic ambitions of Ackk Studios, the team behind it. it’s a flawed premise executed badly, and every aspect of it got discussed to the ends of the earth. it’s a confusing game, and a wordy one at that.

it drops and picks up new plot points incessantly at will, and is very happy to send the player into hours-long detours only to introduce some new characters and make you play through a boring cave dungeon. it goes to massive lengths to gaslight you to make a dumb plot twist work, and it shamelessly drags out its Paper Mario-inspired combat minigames to make battles take 10 minutes each, but still, i cannot say that i hate YIIK.

it may be a bad game, but it’s hardly boring. i couldn’t look away from the disaster in front of me. i devoured the whole 15 hours that it gave me in a weekend. i can’t say any game this interesting is not worthwhile.

the writing is just so interesting. all characters share a bit of a hive-mind mentality between themselves to different degrees, which i can only explain as the writer letting way too much of himself into the story. and it doesn’t help that it is very easy to see where that disconnection in the characters begins and ends.

basically every time someone starts a philosophical monologue you can just assume that is the case. for example, when Michael dumps his whole backstory while getting into a big anecdote about his cousin’s supernatural experiences, he lets out the same personality quirks as Alex in his long rants. when a character does this, the other characters who are listening turn into pace-breaking audience surrogates that just ask convenient questions that let the main speaker continue the monologue. in the example i gave Alex takes that role (and that really does not fit his established character, if you can even call it that).

and that makes for some very unpredictable writing. YIIK starts talking about hundreds of things, but it quickly forgets about them before even leaving the “dictionary definition” part of the discussion. some may find this insufferable, but it can be amusing in a way. it’s like taking a thorough look into what can go wrong with the stream of consciousness writing if not edited appropriately, with some passionate and dramatic voice acting going along with it.

it even surprises you from time to time. some of the later themes that YIIK wants to get into were in fact foreshadowed in a lot of the dialogue that came before, but the game gets into so much unrelated shit up to that point that it comes as a genuine shock.

the writing in YIIK is just insane like that. very uniquely insane. but it doesn’t even comprise most of the game, because sometimes, you hardly get any dialogue for hours at a time (but mostly in the mid-game). when it does this, it’s time for dungeons!

and they suck. most of the dungeons are overly long, unnecessarily confusing, blend together, and are painfully linear. it’s bad in a very similar way to the writing, which makes for an unexpectedly consistent experience.

even the dungeons that try to be different and not only slightly decorated corridors end up being linear, and even overall worse than the most straightforward ones. Vella’s mind dungeon is a clear example of this. it consists of the main hub with like 10 doors, each leading you into a linear trek through enemies and some puzzles. the thing is, a lot of these doors can only be cleared when you have some stuff that you can get in the orders, so if you didn’t luck out and went into the correct orders you need to constantly go back and forth through them to finish it. and the areas they hold aren’t that small. it’s just a more convoluted and boring way to do things. it sucks.

but, again, these dungeons can be interesting, even knowing that battles each take 10x more time to beat than they should (and that dungeons are littered with them!). they serve as big changes of pace that give you uninterrupted hours that you can use to chew the plot that was given to you.

there are even good games that do this, like Pathologic. in that game, in between all of the heavy dialogue riddled with decision-making, you take long walks that never become dull. you are always thinking about what you just experienced, and planning out ahead. in YIIK, it’s just like that, except you try to understand what the fuck the game was trying to say.

everything in this game tries to stretch to reach somewhere but only gets caught up in itself, and in the end, i felt a bit empty finishing it. i mean, the ending is perplexing as it is, but i did get the same empty feeling i get when i finish any RPG, where i have to say goodbye to that world.

so yeah, i do think that YIIK is a worthwhile game. but i still have something to talk about regarding it. just when i finished it, i received the news that this whole article would become irrelevant really quick.

recently, the game’s developers announced YIIK I.V., a big (and free!) update that will radically change many aspects of the game, including the whole combat and leveling systems (which are my biggest gripes with it). but well, i just finished the game. not the I.V., just the normal game. and i wish more people got the opportunity to play it as it is right now.

mind you, I.V. is not the first time YIIK gets an update. my own playthrough had some decently-sized patches applied that changed cutscenes and nerfed/buffed some skills and bosses, but it wasn’t anywhere close to the scope of what’s promised to change in I.V.

but you know, i just want the original game to be preserved in some way. i’m sure that the story will still be batshit insane when the game gets changed, and that many of its plot points will still be at the same time over and underexplained, but the tightly maddening original experience will still be lost to time.

ok, so let me explain what i mean by this drivel. with the large-scale normalization of patches as tools for developers that came to be as a consequence of online services and overall better internet, a lot of the original 1.0 versions of countless games (especially ones without physical releases) are being left only in the hands of piracy sites, many of which could go offline at any moment.

the historical shitshow of Cyberpunk 2077’s 1.0, the empty wastelands of No Man Sky’s 1.0, and all of the other underwhelming releases that were heavily patched later (and that’s not counting MMOs!). all of these are already inaccessible through normal means, and while you technically can access them with a physical version of the games (and only while setting the console to offline), this is still a major hurdle to go through, and will only get harder and harder to access as the years go by and the games physical copies go up in price.

what i’m talking about here is that even though these are just straight-up worse versions of the game, i still want them to exist. they are often more interesting than the newer, fixed(ier) versions, and are important for early historical preservation of the still brand new medium of video games. a lot of old games were already lost to time, but what about the infinite amount of different versions of the same game nowadays? i’m not saying that every version should be kept, but man, at least the first one could be preserved.

but yeah, what i’m asking for here will most likely never happen, and i understand why. no developer or publisher would like to give players a broken or worse version of their game, and that’s why in the few cases that you can easily and officially play older versions (like with Minecraft), they are still functional builds with no rough edges aside from having less content.

so, with that big aside (wow, just like the huge tangents in YIIK, how clever!!!), i want to get into why i chose YIIK to be the focus of this piece. with the examples i gave before, the games were missing content in the case of No Man’s Sky or completely broken in the case of Cyberpunk 2077, but YIIK is different.

the old version that got discussed to hell and back is complete. it had a couple of bugs, but nothing major like with Cyberpunk. and it’s not missing content because there’s a lot of shit in this game. sometimes too much for its own good even.

like i said at the beginning, YIIK as it stands before the I.V. update is a complete rendition of a vision (even if it doesn’t completely match the expectations of its developers) and it gives any player that chooses to engage with it a lot to chew on, even if it’s all horrible.

what if the update removes the honestly iconic line shown below?

what if fixes the slog that is your first visit to Wind Town, where the combat first shows its ugly and repetitive face? what about the combat itself?

YIIK’s old version will only legally be available through the countless videos talking about it. a lot of those videos are pretty cool, but people who see that won’t be able to play it like that anymore.

but still, it’s not like i want YIIK to be bad forever. i wish the best for the studio with the I.V. update i want it to be good. i want the developers to close their chapter with this game that they’ve been working on for almost a decade and then move on to something new, but i also believe that bad games deserve love too!

also, i acknowledge that this isn’t the end of the world. i just wanted a way to encapsulate my feelings about the game while also talking about game preservation, an aspect of the medium that i also think should be talked about more, even if it’s more abstractly like i just did. anyway, thank u for reading! ^-^

#yiik: a postmodern rpg #yiiking out #jrpg

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