YIIK is one of those games that for better and (mostly) for worse is going to leave the player speechless. It blurs the line between what is being done deliberately to annoy and frustrate the player and what is actually just a bad idea implemented terribly. It's a game that's endlessly fun to talk about, but actually playing through the game is an exercise in patience. Its inspirations are obvious and plentiful, but they don't do anything interesting with them. It takes so much of its time to say things to the player, but in the end doesn't say anything of interest.

The story starts off simple enough; Alex Eagleston comes back home after graduating from college, and very quickly gets himself embroiled in the disappearance of a woman named Semi Pak (or Park, the game appears to not pronounce this name correctly). The first thing the player is going to notice is how fucking wordy this game is. Alex keeps constantly monologuing about stuff that is only tangentially related to what's happening. It gets tiring very quickly and it never stops. I get that Alex is meant to be unlikable, but the worst part is that its verboseness is not a trait unique to him. Everyone just does not stop talking, and they just keep going on and on and on. This has the undesired effect of making the story difficult to follow, since the game throws so much uninteresting dialogue at you that you start to mentally check out. You get the impression that the devs would have rather written a book than make a game, which isn't terribly surprising seeing as they've often cited the works of Haruki Murakami as inspiration for the game. Deciphering what's actually happening in the game is the hard part, but the actual themes of the game are pretty easy to grasp. Themes of self-improvement and standing by your friends are pretty obvious, but they aren't very convincing coming from our main character, who doesn't seem to change all that much throughout the game. Also, the fact that he has any friends to begin with is hard to believe in it of itself, but I digress. The story is easily the worst part of the game and is the main reason why the game is as infamous as it is.

That isn't to say it's the only thing bad with it. The gameplay might be the worst I've played from a JRPG, and I've played quite a few of them. For reference, I played this game after the combat rebalance patch they put out, and if it actually improved anything I'd be terrified to know how the game played beforehand. The combat takes inspiration from the Paper Mario and Mario and Luigi games, where your attacks will have inputs that you can do to increase your damage. The main issue with this is that you have to do the minigames if you want to do any sort of damage, and they are way too long for what they are. It also doesn't help that battles themselves last forever. A battle with random enemies can easily take several minutes to complete, where in a better game they wouldn't even last a minute. The game would probably be several hours shorter if they made regular enemy encounters take a reasonable amount of time to beat. I get the feeling that they didn't playtest their own game, because how one person plays it and comes out saying "Ya, this is perfectly fine" is beyond me.

The only thing I'd say that succeeds in any sort of capacity is the soundtrack and art direction, and even then there are some massive caveats. The character portraits are generally well drawn, and the main cast have some pretty appealing designs, but it's held back by some characters having only a handful of expressions, making some scenes play out very awkwardly. I generally like the games' art style, and some of the dungeons can be quite nice to look at. It feels like one of the few things that had a lot of thought put into it. The soundtrack has some decent tracks to them, with Alex's theme being an especially catchy music. I was actually surprised to see his leitmotif used pretty frequently throughout the game. Unfortunately, the soundtrack also comes with a lot of bloat. The game has an ungodly amount of battle themes, and the quality of them vary wildly from pretty good to unlistenable garbage. It reminded me of Shin Megami Tensei V, in that that game also had a ton of battle themes. But unlike that game, where it spread out its battle themes and placed them in appropriate parts of the story, YIIK just throws them willy-nilly in any battle, regardless of context. This makes it that these themes just blend in with each other and lose any sense of identity they have. Even when the game succeeds, it finds a way to fail in some way.

I played YIIK because it was a game that fascinated me from the outside looking in because of how people talked about it. I'm still debating whether it was worthwhile to play it. There were moments where I was trying to figure out what the author was going for, if a certain narrative or gameplay choice had purpose behind it, or if they were simply doing a bad job. With the I.V story update coming soon, I might get a better understanding of what they were trying to go for. Or maybe it'll be a similar exercise in futility.