To note, a code was supplied by the game’s publisher Ysbryd Games for review.

Party like it’s 1999.

Do you remember tape players, phones with cords attached to them and the weird dial-up tone PC’s used to make? Well, developers Ackk Studios ‘members, and has based their modern (or Post Modern) JRPG YIIK (Y 2 K) around their 90’s nostalgia.

Though I like the setting of the game. It’s story and gameplay mechanics are divisive. It’s the epitome of a love-hate relationship for me. One minute I’m all in and the next I’m taking a two month break from it. It’s weird for the sake of being weird but touching in places that make you feel for the flawed characters.

The division of quality is best shown between YIIK’s story and gameplay. So first I’m going to start with the story.

It’s starts off pretty normal….

The story starts with you playing as Alex. A 20-something graduate whom returns home after finishing his degree. Arriving in his home town Frankton, Alex finds that having a degree in Art History isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Which honestly hits a little too close to my own experiences ( I have a degree in History)! His life of freedom and experimentation at university are now behind him. As a result, he finds himself settling back into a mundane life – damn this really is too familiar!

His life is changed when he comes across a stray cat out in the woods. The cat leads him to a derelict factory where things start to get a little weird. For instance, inside the factory Alex meets Sammy, an unusual girl whom claims she in not from this dimension.

Even though he’s just met her, Alex feels like he’s known her his entire life. The empty feeling of returning home is filled with Sammy. However, the high comes crashing down as she is torn away from him, by what can only be described as aliens.

Distraught, Alex starts to surf the web in the search of answers. With the help of his friend Micheal, they find ONISM.com, a chat room set up to discuss the supernatural.

On the site, the pair find other people with weird stories that sound like the disappearance of Sammy. Therefore, with the help of the new girl working in the arcade Vella, they set off to the culprits behind Sammy Pek’s kidnapping.

Now the not so normal part…

YIIK is heavily influenced by Earthbound and the quirkiness and weirdness of the story shows that. I’d argue that the theme of the story is weird for weirdness sake, however I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. To boil it down to its purest form, you could say YIIK is a coming of age story about a group of hipsters that go on a supernatural and macabre adventure.

However, what I didn’t like about the ‘weirdness’ of the story was the meandering of the plot. As more characters get added, the more the plot gets complicated. Eventually leading you to forget what Alex’s main goal is, as you get side tracked again and again by random story arcs.

For example, one such arc is Alex’s mother loosing her job. As a result, she forces Alex to get off his lazy backside and go and find a job in Frankton, as they need money. What’s contradictory about this sub plot is that the game gives you money hand-over-fist. Therefore, I had about $3000 sat in my inventory, as the game is pushing me to go and find a job in a burger restaurant- it doesn’t quite make sense.

Obviously, the point of this sub plot was to get me to explore Frankton, resulting in Alex meeting Vella. However, there are so many oversights like this throughout the game that I kept having to ask myself ‘why am I doing this’?

This example was the most normal I could come up with. As the story gets deeper, more intwined and bloated, these leaps of belief and logic happen all the time. Even at the very end of the game, the story makes revelations about Alex that haven’t been addressed at all through the previous 20 hours. However, they’re set up as if they’re supposed to blow your mind, when all it ended up doing was making me roll my eyes.

The Gang

The cast of characters did improve the story. All but one are unlikable, but they are at least all believable. This is helped by the incredible voice acting done throughout the game. The actors behind the characters made each one come to life. Which for an indie game is surprising, as I’ve never experienced this quality of voice acting in other indies.

Nevertheless, I found the characters all to be self obsessed and highly critical of their actions. They’re all linked by a sense of loss and a past trauma, which is pretty sad. Nevertheless, they all help each other get over their own respective demons. As a group they all complimented each other nicely and the tentative romance between Vella and Alex was touching.

What wasn’t touching however were Alex’s monologues. They were always on the side of pretentious- feeling a bit like a 14 year old Emo’s diary. Though I wouldn’t want to hang out with him in real life, he was my favourite character and I’m glad I went back to see the end of his story.

The other members of the gang include Micheal, Rory, Vella, Chondra and Claudio.

Vella is the cool, mysterious goth girl. Everyone assumes she’s cold and distant but as we get to know her, you learn she is warm and open, even though she has issues with her complex past.

Micheal is Alex’s childhood friend. The type of guy that’s always there when you need him and his trusty camera.

Rory is a troubled soul trying to come to terms with the disappearance of his sister. Incredibility smart, I enjoyed his philosophical debates with Alex and the other characters. Even if he’s useless in battle.

Claudio was the only character I liked in the game. He’s older, a successful business man and loves anime! What’s there not to like?

Finally, Chondra is Claudio’s sister. Her character was a little bit too stereotypical of a 70’s black woman for me. I always felt a little awkward listening to her talk because she was such a bad stereotype, it made me feel uncomfortable. However, I think the devs did this on purpose- as a ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ sort of thing. This is because, much like the other characters, she is troubled by her unfortunate past.

The World (is a Vampire)

Like any 90’s JRPG worth its salt, YIIK has a wide and varied world to explore. The story drives you to new towns and cities like Flag Town and Wind Town, which are packed with NPC’s to talk to. It’s especially cool because the NPCs and dialogue will change from chapter to chapter. This often results in NPCs having their own little stories that play out with the events of the game. Plus, with the weather changing to account for time passing in the game, it makes YIIK’s colourful but basic looking world feel alive.

The overworld opens up the further you progress into the story. It also hides some secrets, so be sure to check every nook and cranny! Random encounters occur on the overworld too. However, the random encounters have a limit per chapter. So once you hit the limit you won’t be bothered by enemies again.

This is both good and bad. Good because you can explore the overworld without being bothered. But if you come across a tough boss and need to grind for experience, there’s no enemies left to fight. The game counter-acts this by dotting mini combat dungeons on the overworld. They’re packed full of enemies so you can go and grind there to your heart’s content if you want to.

Dungeons

Each chapter of the game is concluded by a lengthy dungeon that usually ends with a boss to beat into submission. The dungeons are full of battles and puzzles you have to solve with Alex’s unusual tools. They include a guitar to smash rocks, his hair to cut bushes and a skateboard to jump gaps. Most of the puzzles are simple enough, though there were a few that had me breaking out the Mac to look up the solutions.

The dungeons themselves all looked great. Especially the sewers in Wind Town that have been inhabited by a bunch of adolescent terrapins.

Mini Games

Developers Ackk Studios describe YIIK as a ‘Post Modern RPG’. The game harkens back to the JRPGs of the 90’s with turn based combat. On the other hand, instead of using swords and magic, you use vinyl disks, hula hoops and a Keytar. The modern setting is an easy way in for new players of the JRPG genre, however YIIK’s combat will soon scare those new players away.

At first, I found the combat novel. Each attack you use is a mini game, which acts as a combo meter. The better you are at the game, the higher combo and damage you do to an enemy.

Taking Alex as an example, his mini game revolves (get it?) around a vinyl disk spinning on a vinyl player. The disk has three different sized coloured strips (2 yellow, 1 red) on it that you have to hit with the stylus of the vinyl player. Hitting the yellows adds to your combo meter and hitting the red makes the disk spin again. Therefore, hitting the red is important because it lets you extend your combo up to 10. As you can imagine, this all takes a bit of time. And after doing this same game a thousand times, it soon becomes repetitive.

Unbalanced

What’s even more annoying is that this time investment is not worth it. Alex’s normal attack, even with a 10x combo would only take about 10% of the enemy’s health away. In comparison, Alex’s special move ‘EP Toss’ does so much more damage and all you have to do is hit one line on the vinyl disc. And I’m pretty sure you don’t have to hit the line, there was times where I missed by a mile and the move still did tons of damage.

This problem was the same with other charcters. With some like Michael it was the reverse. His specials didn’t do enough damage compared to his normal attack. It just left me feeling that the combat wasn’t balanced. The devs had great ideas for how they wanted the combat to play out. However, it felt like I was playing an alpha build of the game, and that tons of design and balancing improvements needed to be added.

The same can be said with experience in the game. For some reason, you need 100 EXP to level up your characters. It doesn’t matter if you’re level 2 or level 50, you always need 100 Exp. The problem is that in the early game you feel like you’re levelling up too fast. As you gain 10 Exp from basic enemies, that means you’re 10% towards the next level up. However, in the late game, every battle feels like a grind. For example, I played against a pretty difficult boss and was awarded 1 Exp. 1.

So when you get to the penultimate chapter of the game, the game tells you- ‘ok now it’s time to grind for 15 levels’. This was the point where I had to put the game down, I just couldn’t bare the thought of grinding for another 10 hours in the repetitive slog of YIIK’s combat.

Are you out of your mind?

The idea of levelling up is beneficial, but the actual action of doing it was a pain. To level up, Alex has to go into his ‘Mind Dungeon’.

The Mind Dungeon is reminiscent of going into the TV in Persona 4 Golden. Instead of a TV you enter through a telephone. The Dungeon has floors, which represents the next level, with five rooms on each floor. Each room has a number above the door that shows you how much a stat will improve if you assign that stat to that room.

At first, I liked this idea. However, after doing the process for 52 levels, entering 5 rooms per level *Adam does some quick math* means I entered 260 rooms. This in itself wasn’t that annoying. But what happened when you entered the room was you’d assign a stat to get the increase, then come out of the room. Then you’d have to go back into the room again, to confirm that you wanted that stat increase.

You might be saying ‘well that’s not sooo annoying’ and it isn’t. But when you have to do it 260 times it is! In the end I just let the game level Alex up, because I couldn’t be bothered to keep clicking on the rooms. Much like the other problems I have with the game, this one just feels like an oversight that should have been ironed out before the game’s release.

Phat Tunes

The soundtrack to YIIK is unbelievable. Every song is incredible. I’ve never played a game where every track spoke to me like all of the songs and backing music did in YIIK.

I’d describe each track in the game to be ‘hipster music’. I’m not trying to be a dick by describing it like that. But I think you can image what the music is like from that description. Nevertheless, it’s. So. Good. The soundtrack alone is worth picking up, even if you have no interest in buying the game. The track ‘HipsterBound Battle’ just makes me feel happy and fun fact: Undertale developer Toby Fox produced a tack for the game!

What’s awesome is that you can pay what you want for the soundtrack here on bandcamp.

Fly Graphics

The quality of the soundtrack is matched by the quality of the art style of the game. Inspired by the blocky polygons of the Playstation era, the game adopts this vintage style but builds on it with bright colours and striking forms to make something unique. Furthermore, the mix up of art styles from blocky polygons, to anime like characters and 16-bit sprites, means looking at YIIK is never boring!

Going back to finish what I’d started

Since putting the game down, I’d been thinking about YIIK often. I knew I wanted to go back and finish it, but the idea of grinding was as appealing as chewing a wasp.

However, I knew I was close to the end and hearing that the devs had patched the game to help improve the final grind was enough to nudge me back in. To ensure I didn’t get bogged down, I had YIIK walkthroughs ready to help me get through the last steps of Alex’s journey.

Honestly…. it wasn’t that bad.

It still look a long time, but thankfully there wasn’t too much combat to endure. For the final section you just need to polish off some side quests and listen to some dialogue to get yourself to level 50. This magical number that the game insists you need to hit to finish it. After completing all the side quests (apart from one) I ended up finishing on level 52 and had no problem with the final boss. Even though *SPOILERS* you’re supposed to die against him.

A Ritual

Looking back at this review, it seems to be very negative. I want to tell you I loved the game in those first 20 hours. It was a ritual I played in the first two weeks, I played it every time I had a spare 10 minutes. It was only the hard block of the final boss grind that stopped me from beating it.

Honestly, I do feel sad that I’ve finished it. It has had an impact on me and I know that I’m going to be thinking about it for months to come. There is a second cannon ending and a third secret ending to go back and experience. However, though I’m sad the game’s over, I can’t put myself through anymore of it’s combat.

And that’s the problem.

The game feels like it needs going through with a fine toothed comb. That all of the little issues that pile up need flattening out. There’s so much the game does right. The characters are believable, the art and music are out of this world and the story is interesting. Nevertheless, the game as a whole is weighed down by those small issues, almost like a death by paper cuts.

But should you buy it?

Though I think the game is good, I’d suggest you wait until you buy it. The devs are patching and updating the game so hopefully some of the issues from player feedback will be fixed. The problem is, there are so many amazing games on the Switch. Sinking 25 hours into one that’s just good isn’t going to fly. Instead you could be playing the great SteamWorld Quest or any other of the fantastic games that get released every week.

However, if my review has intrigued you, and you like out of the box games like Earthbound, then maybe you’ll like YIIK too.

I’m excited to see what comes next out of Ackk Studios and if it will involve the YIIK universe. Until then, their game has left an impression on me both good and bad. That’s why I’m giving YIIK: A Post Modern RPG my rating of

I hope you enjoyed my review. It was a challenge to write, but also a lot of fun! Let me know what you think of the review and game. Also if you’ve done the second ending, let me know if it’s worth going back to experience.

Hit me up on Twitter or come and join the SIF Discord server.

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