do the booby make you squeal with rage? do you eyeball squeeze back into head with satisfying crunch if you no have game oxytocin stimulate every 5 min? stay away baddies.......
but you know, this game same problems danganronpa, like stupid minigame you don't want play. there less stupid minigame this time, but still a silly! environment very pretty though, very good atmosphere of doing a miserable. thanks you for reading. i have not complete the game. it fun tho! me hate you. im inside of the chapter 3, you worm

I and many others spent an incredibly long time waiting for this game. Given how much I unintentionally built it up in my mind with such grand ideas of what it could be, and what it might do, I wasn't disappointed even a little bit.

This is one of the most accessible long ass adventure games of it's kind. I say this, but if I were to rattle off descriptions of what it's like, you'd probably think that's crazy. Fuck it, in the spirit of what this game is, let's do that!

The entire design of the game is maximalism applied to the systems they've created, 13 intersecting plotlines with protagonists who are from entirely different genres of storytelling, a combat system that scales up for as long as possible and has a ridiculous post-game you're unlikely to ever see the end of, and a story structure that emphasizes your personally selected route through the game in a way few others do. Other players will experience plot revelations that hit you hard in your playthrough very differently, because it's something they already learned in their route through the game. The background artwork looks entirely like a painting come to life, and the character art is a particularly detailed style of shoujo (teenage girl) oriented manga, and yet the mechs are the most industrial and greasy looking things you've seen in your life. The unreasonably long soundtrack covers so much ground that getting sick of a specific track seems almost impossible. If there's one thing I hate in writing, it's attempting to redeem a boring adventure through twists that are designed to shock instead of contribute to a consistent world and themes. Not only does this game manage to tie everything together, there's a LOT of twists and turns that reframe the entire story and make you question not only it, but your own memory of it. Accompanied by a system that lets you view every scene and bit of plot relevant info in the game in a list, you're encouraged to fact check yourself and actively think about what is or isn't real. Ontop all of that, the emotional core of this game, the characters, frequently opt for a less is more approach. They often show their emotional development through subtext building up to climactic moments. When characters do something different and unique, which they do frequently, it feels special as a result. Analytical players who tried their best to figure everything out on their first go will greatly appreciate the last protagonist you unlock.

So, how the fuck does this contribute to my take that this game is extremely accessible? Am I not just making it sound like a giant spaghetti of a project barely held together, and with very little cohesion? My answer to that, is that there's a reason this game took as long as it did to make. It would be sane and reasonable to scale back this game, take less time to make it and focus on making a short but high quality game. But nah, they set out to do the unreasonable, polish the rough edges for as long as it took until this insane concept was realised. Obviously it won't land for everybody, nothing ever will, but there's a reason this game is beloved despite being a niche among niches. The game itself says much more than what I can by writing bullshit on a gamer psychosis website. Weird, 50 hour visual novel adventure game hybrids don't get this kind of broad positive reception from people outside it's target demographic. This isn't to say that critical response dictates how worth your time something is, only that it's really easy to discover an appreciation for this one. Accessible.

Oh shit, forgot to mention that you drop big bombs on a grid and make it explode into 6 million particle effects.

one of the the biggest proliferaters of what I'd call the modern "fad game design". everything about it. it started as a barebones god game of sorts where all you really do is fuck around with some freaky little caricatures, but it took advantage of its hardware in at the time novel ways and had a premise still kind of unique to this day, "we will add new content every week". of course that couldn't really keep up, but it rewarded you as an early adopter with little surprises every week. a fad.

when the already shallow pool of ideas ran thin, they took to chasing after other people's fads, from random ongoing memes (double rainbow, charlie sheen is winning/ a tiger, etc) and adding in significantly worse copies of other popular mobile games.

if you were to turn the game on today, all you really get is a few screens full of dated gags. you click an object and something silly or strange happens. far from the response it was made for, my personal fascination with this game is changed by time. a quaint little toy, a product of the turbulent time it was made in with the rise of the smartphone, and shockingly unfunny. it holds a similar appeal to a dead MMO, this was made for somebody and was once a live, active thing. it was never built to last, and it's hard to say if anybody really cares at all.

Propping up video game reviews and out-of-context clips as if they hold incriminating value against a product or group of people is a cancer on this medium. It has done more work to de-legitimize games as a form of art than almost anything else. Honestly, you would laugh if somebody reviewed an album they had not listened to and simply said "it sound no good". me too lol.

You can dress up review as a flowery philosophical inquiry, a comedic retelling or most pretentiously a definitive answer to the question of "how good is it". I don't appreciate any of these and I don't think what I'm about to say is reductive, these are pretty much just time wasters that bring less to the table than the thing they're riffing on. I know this man, I absolutely love wasting time. It's not a bad thing that they exist, but let's stop pretending they're anything more. I believe reviews at their most valuable are either a showcase for the opinion of a reviewer with an understood character, or an assessment of what kind of person might appreciate the product.

I was convinced I hated this and that it was a piece of shit. I actually properly played it only after catching wind of a plot interpretation I was not aware of. When I had first tried to play it years ago, I was so blinded by indifference and the expectation that it was trash, I had missed the unbelievably blatant symbolism that unlocks almost all of the narrative's depth. I'm not saying it's without faults as any game might have, and it's no doubt a niche rpg, I just want you to know that a huge number of people discuss or comment on this game as if granted divine knowledge of it's quality from a higher authority, while in reality they don't even know what's happening in it. At the very least, this game forced me to re-examine my views of the online reaction culture that I already loathed, as I'd fallen victim to it. That's a bigger personal impact on me than most games.

It's funny what website I'm writing this on.
A game about a guy who treats both his life and his relationship with media as a grand and noble ordeal, while he also misunderstands them and treats them like disposable trash. And so, the response to YIIK somehow manages to be one of the most strange and fascinating things about it. I don't like the combat in this game very much btw, I like just about everything else in it quite a bit.