I don't think I have a more confusing relationship with another game. This game ticks me off on so many levels it's hard to describe, but I'll go over the things I like first.
I love the art style this game goes for. It has a cool shell shaded look with PS2 looking graphic that blend really nicely together. It also runs great on my 4k monitor with a GTX 1070 which was great. I also love the low frame rate animations that adds nicely to the retro theme, overall a great and memorable visual presentation.
The soundtrack is also great. I know a lot of people say that "Into the mind" by toby fox is the only good song but I actually disagree. The other battle music is good and some environmental songs like omnism 1999 and Wind Town are lovely tracks. However the quality ranges way too much, since this game was apparently composed by like 12 people so the soundtrack isn't that consistent.
The character and world designs are also nice and varied, each location like wind town, flag town, mt town cave are all cool locations, and going into the brain of someone is also cool, even if the dungeons can be tedious.
I also like the concept. Being a group of friends to discover conspiracy and paranormal theories sound like fun especially since I'm into those kinda things.
Everything else? Fucking awful. Seriously this game feels like it's having identity crisis it doesn't know what to fucking do with it's story. First of all most of the characters are unlikable or just boring and uninteresting, Alex himself is such a confusing character I could never tell if the game wanted me to like him or not. They try to give him an "asshole" personality but he's not like that all most of the time and is just inconsistent with his character in general, the other characters are just boring and just follow whatever Alex does, they yell at him from time to time but no growth ever comes from it.
Another thing is the voice acting. Some voice actors do a great job, but it's the presentation that makes the VA laughable at best. The whole story is presented with PNG’s of the characters in generic poses with text boxes. Without the voice acting it actually would be good but the actors try way too hard and it makes any serious moments just come off wrong.
The story is just horrible. Lots of potential but the pacing is so backwards. First it's about finding a missing girl, then it's about getting a job, the it's about finding a robot girl and then your trying to stop a world ending meteor? I really just couldn't care less about what was happening. The ending of the game tried to pull off this 4th wall breaking moment that's supposed to make you “Question reality” when really it just makes me question what the fuck they were thinking? The execution In this part is so horrible I just don't care.
Combat is generic and nothing special, it gets really boring real quick with no variety or fun to be had with it.
Overall this game sucks. I don't recommend it to anyone other than to have a good laugh and to not take it seriously. I dont mean to punch down on the developers they're clearly talented, I just think maybe they bit off a bit more than they could chew, this game was clearly too ambitious for them but I'm genuinely exited for 1.5 update. They seem to take all of the flaws and improve them for free! So I'm gonna be there day 1 to support it. I love the concept here it just needs a lot of improving.

My savefile got softlocked in E2k's dungeon, 10/10 game

This game really needed an editor. And some testers. This game has a lot of inspirations it wears proudly, but I don't think it quite got why the games and media it apes do the things they do.

There's worse JRPGs, but I don't know if there's more convolutedly mid JRPGs out there.

Such a baffling game. You can really feel how much effort and care they put into the game, only for it to crash and burn so spectacularly. I may have developed some sort of post-irony Stockholm Syndrome with this game because I have such a fondness for it.
I love all the embarrassing monologues, the out-of-place scenes and head-scratching plot points and by god are there a lot of them.

Major props to the devs for actually going back to try and improve their story and gameplay. Hopefully 1.V is worth checking out.

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.

I’m not gonna pretend like this game isn’t bad but it honestly is a game that had serious narrative potential that’s ruined by the developers not seeming to know what they wanted the game to be in the first place. The strongest aspects of this game is when it goes fully in on the surrealist art project vibes and is willing to just show something weird and not have any of the characters give overly detailed reactions to it. I do think that provided the developers can figure out a way to make the gameplay feel less torturous and know when the characters need to just stop talking that they can definitely make a very high quality game that is worth talking about for positive reasons. Maybe I.V will fix things but for now I would just leave the game as sometimes interesting but very very deeply flawed and sometimes even pretty uncomfortable.