1999 was a weird year. Boy bands and Brittney Spears ruled the airwaves, the dot.com bubble was at peak inflation, the New England Patriots weren’t an unstoppable NFL juggernaut, and by the time the year was half over, people were getting seriously worried that January 1, 2000 would herald the end of the world thanks to a massive computer bug. Against this backdrop of global paranoi comes YIIK: A Post-Modern RPG, a love-letter to ‘90s JRPG that weaves a story of paranormal weirdness within heartfelt elements of tragedy, loss, and the uncertainty of post-college life.
December 31st, 1999 saw my friend Alan and me turn a four-hour half-day at work into a twelve-hour ordeal filling five-gallon bottles of water for customers. It was the culmination of the strangest couple of months I’d ever seen in few years that I worked at a bottled water store. Our sales had steadily increased as Y2K (the year 2000) drew ever closer. The thing is, everyone who came in for just a couple of extra bottles almost all said the same thing. “I’m not worried. I’m doing my normal restocking.” All that not worrying and just restocking sold us completely out of bottles, necessitated an emergency drive to a distributor, and repeatedly sold more water on cool December days than we normally sold during the desert heat of July and August. I still can’t explain it, other than as a slowly growing mass panic fueled by a combination of relentless media coverage, nascent internet speculation, and neighbors “just talking.” In December 1999 it felt like anything really could happen, and maybe the world really was about to just fall apart.
When you don’t have anyone else to talk to, you make do having an argument with your favorite stuffed animal.
YIIK: A Post-Modern RPG (pronounced “Y-2-K”, like the computer bug) taps into that sentiment perfectly. The story revolves around Alex, a recent college grad who returns home to try and figure out what he’s going to do with the liberal arts degree he’d spent the past five-and-a-half years pursuing. A simple errand run to the grocery store goes haywire when his list is stolen by a cat whose whiskers bear a strong resemblance to those of surrealist painter Salvador Dali. Pursuing the cat takes our hero to a seemingly abandoned factory where he finds a girl named Semi “Sammy” Pak to whom the cat belongs. While riding an elevator to the main floor, Sammy is suddenly stolen away by otherworldly entities, leaving a stunned Alex behind to try and make sense of a reality suddenly turned upside-down.
Then things start getting weird.
Sammy might have been a little bit odd.
With the new year, and possible end of the world slowly drawing closer, Alex slowly assembles a group of likeminded people who frequent a paranormal message board called ONISM1999 to investigate Sammy’s disappearance. They talk, and find that they have a lot more in common than just posting to the same message boards.
While traveling through various dungeons and the overworld map, players will have a variety of combat encounters. These play out in classic JRPG format, with players selecting an attack, special power, item, or other action for each character. Where things depart from the classic formula is that every attack and ability have an associated minigame.
For example, Alex uses records as weapons. When it’s his turn to attack, players need to hit the color segments on an old record to string together a longer combination. Michael, who uses a camera for his weapon, unrolls a strip of film and players need to tap the correct button to as a cursor passes across each prompt. Weapon upgrades increase the combo abilities. It’s an interesting idea which adds a unique skill element to each combat. However, it can also get annoying repetitive to a point where this review desperately wished for a skip button or ability that would automatically do the combat and let me trade those extra seconds for some guaranteed damage. (The developers are on record as saying that they plan to address this and a few other quality of life issues in a 1.04 patch. Ed.)
Alex’s attack sequencer is a turntable. Because of course it is.
When not in combat, the game follows some general JRPG conventions familiar to fans of the genre. Players eventually gather a party that’s larger than can be put into combat, and need to make choices on who to use. Weapon and gear upgrades can be bought in shops, or looted from chests and enemies. Travelling from location to location utilizes a combination of “fast” travel from bus stops and moving across an overworld map.
The high point of the game is the writing for each of the characters. While YIIK is set in 1999, and is faithful to the feelings of that year (at least as far as this writer’s memory goes), there’s a lot of commonality with how things feel in 2019. The cast of characters and how they talk rings true not only for anyone who experienced the adventure and angst of preparing for or being recently graduated from college in the ‘90s and early Aughts, but also for anyone who’s having that experience now.
Twenty years later, some things don’t change.
The storyline itself is a delirious fever dream that somehow retains coherence despite the many themes interwoven within. YIIK packs more “WTF???” moments into the first two hours of story than most explicitly weird walking simulators manage in entire games. YIIK also didn’t make me want to uninstall it out of pure boredom after two hours either. Instead, the surreal story is a motivation to push forward, and try to understand what crazy mysteries Alex has accidentally run himself into.
Like you’ve never had a mental argument with a bunch of different versions of yourself?
The soundtrack compliments the game’s ‘90s art-style perfectly. It evokes the chiptunes style of 16-bit JRPGS, and does some really neat dynamic changes in battle that seem linked to Alex’s choice of records. I may have found myself humming the post-battle victory tune a few times after long play sessions.
Nineties nostalgia has created a boom in retro-style RPGs that try to harken back to the classics of consoles past. A lot of these are good, but don’t compare well to the originals, like a art student’s half-copied rendition of a Rembrandt. YIIK does something different, taking some of the best memories of classic games, folding it in with brilliant writing, and creating one of the most evocative RPGs I’ve ever played that didn’t have “Final” in the title. For fans of the genre, great writing, or supernatural mystery, this game should be immediately on a lot of 2019 Must Play lists.
