This Loser is You: On Ackk Studio’s YIIK (The Nostalgia Trap, part 6)
Really working on a Scott Pilgrim thing here.
Today is going to be a chronicle of an ambitious failure – on several fronts. Due to changing work schedules, I had to get the piece ready much earlier than I normally do, and so I’m writing this the night before. Given that I haven’t had a chance to let things stew as much since the piece on bureaucracy, it’s going to be something that I had on a slow burn that isn’t quite ready.
Originally, I wanted to do a comparison between two video games, Else Heart.Break() and YIIK: A Postmodern RPG, especially in relation to masculinity. The first is a fascinating cyberpunk adventure game from Sweden, and the second is an ambitious American-made RPG in the Japanese style. I had intended to play through both and then compare some of the major themes (both deal with absence, and the pursuit of a young woman by a young man [if there were LGBT themes, there’s a good chance that you probably would have heard about them – the pool of queer indie games is bigger than it once was, but it’s still pretty small,] and the place of a young person in the world.)
Needless to say, I didn’t complete either playthrough, but I got further into YIIK than I did into Else Heart.Break(), so I’ll be writing on that.
I first heard about YIIK around the same time I heard about Night in the Woods and Where the Water Tastes Like Wine. It was slated to come out roughly contemporaneously with them but was delayed due to several members of the design team – which included several siblings – dealing with the loss of their mother. A perfectly valid reason for delay.
As such, it kind of dropped off my radar for a while and I only happened upon it when it went on sale on Steam a while back. The reviews were mixed. Now I know why.
Okay, let’s back up: YIIK (pronounced, the narrator tells you, “Y2K”) is an RPG that borrows heavily from the 16- and 32-bit eras of gaming, and is packed to the gills with 90s-era nostalgia. It also notably borrows heavily from other games, because it is self-consciously postmodern – as such, it makes heavy use of remixing and referencing other works.
Don’t be fooled by the cutesy aesthetic — one of the most prevalent theories about this game is that you can only beat the final boss by aborting it.
YIIK very much wanted to be a new version of Earthbound, the seminal 16-bit RPG that was essentially John Carpenter’s Peanuts, mixed with Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series. It has the same quality of self-consciously blasé psychedelia, but can’t seem to match the thematic weight of its source material.
The game follows a recent college graduate named Alex, who returns to live in his mother’s home without any real plan for what to do in his life. Alex is, I feel, self-consciously unlikable. He lusts after every (white or east Asian) woman he meets, lives in his mother’s house and expects her to provide for him without getting a job or doing any work, and obsesses over a young woman he met once for two hours.
Let’s dive into that, as it’s possibly the most egregious point. There is a segment near the beginning – the first of the game’s several dungeons – that references the real-life tragedy of Elisa Lam, including the abduction of a character (Semi Pak) from an elevator in a horrific fashion. I’ll let you look into the original event if you’re so inclined, but needless to say it seemed incredibly tasteless. This is redoubled by the fact that, at a later point in the game, she comments that her disappearance was used by the villains to reach the main character.
Which seems fairly left-field.
And that’s really the main issue with the writing: they created an unlikable, pretentious main character, spent a fair amount of time following him and showing him to be unlikable, and then they pulled a fake-out with his character development. The first twelve hours or so of the game are meant to display that this young man views himself as far more important than he actually is, and make you think that he’s going to learn not to put himself at the center of everything.
And then they put him at the center of everything. He turns out to be the literal most important person in the universe. There’s an unwinnable boss-fight and all of the companion NPCs are killed, and then the main character has to team up with a variety of other versions of himself from other universes to fix it.
In short, because he’s the protagonist, he is positioned as important by default. The game has far more patience for his foibles than for any other character’s, which is mechanically reinforced. In the random battles that pepper the game in true 1990s-era fashion, each character has a signature minigame that goes with their attack (sometimes many signature minigames – it gets a bit tedious) and I noticed something interesting: with at least one character, Chondra (the sole black female character I’ve encountered in my play-through), you have to play her minigame almost perfectly to deal any amount of damage; with Vella and Michael (two white characters, female and male respectively), the game is more forgiving, just cutting the minigame short if you make an error, but still allowing you to partially achieve your goal. With Alex, the main character, you are given up to three chances to fail.
No payoff, that is, other than the art, which is rather inspired.
In short, the game sets up this unlikable character that you have to spend twenty hours with and then doesn’t give a real payoff – the final bit of the game even makes it clear that Alex, the man-child protagonist, is meant to be an alternate-universe version of the player. In effect, the whole thing is rendered a rather large joke at the audience’s expense.
But, as I said before: YIIK is a valiant effort that can’t measure up to its source material. While it may not have been released on as many platforms, if the script for YIIK had been produced in a similar fashion to another Earthbound-inspired game I’ve played on Steam, Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass, then it may have been better received.
I don’t want this whole piece to be dunking on YIIK – which admittedly is what a lot of writing on it is doing. Part of the issue with the game is that it’s just good enough that these errors become egregious. The art design and the music are amazing; it just needed more thought put into it during the conception and scriptwriting stages.
So what’s the point?
Well, I think that this game – as well as the director’s reaction to it – can serve as an object lesson to creators all across the spectrum. Part of why there have been so many pieces dunking on YIIK (apart from its irritating name) have been egged on by the reaction of the scriptwriter and director, who is quoted as having said after the fact, "My mistake was thinking that video games are art. I wanted to make a game about a guy who's a piece of shit unlikable character who by the end of the game has to transform. But too many gamers, when they look at this, they immediately get triggered by it. So, the thing is, games aren't art, they're toys for children and it's considered in bad form to talk about anything meaningful, impactful, or thought provoking."
Instead of having a link, have another screenshot of the game, which is much better than the vitriol spouted by its creator.
This quote, by the way, was delivered on episode 144 of The Dick Show, the podcast of Dick Masterson, a right-wing commentator who once wrote a book called Men Are Better Than Women. Masterson even has an optional cameo in the game, where he gives the player character a literal red pill that unlocks a secret ending. And while Masterson is possibly a satirist, I get the feeling that the man is a grifter who is trying to occupy a political superposition where he’s either alt-right adjacent or on the dirtbag left – neither of which I’m much interested in.
So that’s fun.
The really frustrating thing is that this game could have been good. If it had been a commentary on, rather than a celebration of, its source material, looking at how nostalgia actually works in the modern day (something which we have many thoughts on) then it could have been a more valuable exercise. As it stands, though, I think that it’s going to remain an also-ran of the indie game scene, notable to future scholars by what it says about the contemporary climate rather than by what it actually does.
What could it have done to be otherwise?
Well, for starters, it could have handled the disappearance of Semi Pak differently: if she had, instead of being a mysterious waif that Alex encounters and then sees abducted in the course of an afternoon, been a childhood friend of his, then his obsession with her would have read as less creepy. If she had not been a transparent expy of Elisa Lam, that would have been a major improvement as well. If her abduction hadn’t been a means for the villains to reach Alex, that would have been the knockout blow.
Any other alteration they made would have been gravy after this point.
But still, let’s press on: if the characterization of Alex within his monologues had been less pretentious, and more in-line with how he presents himself with the other characters, and if there had been less redundancy on a moment-to-moment level, that would have been an improvement.
If the battle system had been better designed and required mastering one (or possibly two or three) minigames instead of at least three for every character, that would have made it better. I know for a fact that the game designers are familiar with the Shadow Hearts franchise, because Alex’s default attack is essentially the same as the built-in minigame from that series’s battle system – and Shadow Hearts only made use of one minigame.
Finally, if the game hadn’t backtracked on its arc for the last portion of the story, making Alex the center of the universe, that wouldn’t have undermined it. In many ways they were making use of the same formula as the last three Persona games, where the protagonists have to acknowledge their faults, recognize them and then work to move past them, but YIIK doesn’t do that. It stops at the “recognizing the fault” step, and doesn’t move on with the critique it could have made: that a lot of contemporary hipster or gamer culture is largely an infantilizing celebration of what’s already been done, and that the emphasis on nostalgia strangles real innovation.
A really innovative move on their part would have taken the aforementioned and then allowed you to move beyond the central character – if instead of killing off everyone else in the fake final boss fight, it had killed Alex and then the remainder of the game had been spent with all of the side characters, suddenly turning it into an ensemble game, then it could have had the impact that they were clearly hoping that it would.
In short: The aesthetic of the game is on-point, but the concept is just not landing. On the other hand, if the studio had allowed themselves to ignore the strictures of the genre, it could have been something really special – and that near-miss is what ultimately causes its downfall.
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