Yooooo Madotsuki be like me fr, only sleeps and plays videogames.
In my Mario & Luigi: Dream Team review I lamented the fact the game didn't really do anything crazy in its dream sections aside from Luigi's gimmicks in puzzles and combat, but I feel like I didn't elaborated that much on that point; the concept of translating dreams into media has indescribable potential, but I do recognize the difficulty of doing such a task. Dreams are something more than ''movies in our heads'', a movie has structure and a meaning, a dream, for the most part, does not. Defining a dream is almost impossible 'cause there's no such thing as a dream, they are disconnected passages that our brain forms through the ideas and experiences that we have while we are awake: they are meaningless, yet they can say so much. I know that even this as a definition is barebones at best and I do apologize for the lecture, but I need to say this in order for you to understand how difficult adapting such a thing can be, and how Yume Nikki, a game made by only one person in RPG Maker, succeeds where so many others would fail and gives us what is possibly the closest thing to a playable dream we will ever get.
The landscapes of the dreams of Madotsuki go from the perturbation of reality to the absolute wildness of the impossible: haunted forest with passages that don't make sense, areas that circle around each other and have no end, enigmatic creatures with impossible forms on a path of white footsteps, lifeless concrete structures that surround a bed, ... The different sections almost never have a clear end, not even a beginning, as you could end up in one zone without knowing why, or traversing the maze that connects all the different dreams and ending up in a completely new place. After a while, what shouldn't make sense starts making sense, and what shouldn't scare you starts to give you goosebumps and chill you to the bones. It's a game that the rewards usually it's not a new ability or progression, but rather the sensation of discovering something that no one else could and the fact that experience sticks with you. It's almost baffling how well everything connects to form this surreal experience: the constantly changing visuals, the design of the zones and the music flow in a manner that makes you go from a apocalypse feeling wasteland to an upbeat space party without feeling jarring... but sadly, with such immaculate work on the dream-like aspects of the game, it was inevitable that as it progressed, some cracks would start to show up, two, to be exact.
The game has no gameplay aside of walking and interacting, which it's more than enough for the purpose of the game, as the lack of action, even if it can make the game's zones and creatures feel a bit static, it's perfect for the purpose of sinking you in this strange world. Rather, my problem comes in a more technical aspect; much of the game is designed on a perspective more akin to Earthbound, which makes the areas feel expansive, but the character only moves in the four directions of the axis, which makes going up or down in these zones, which are a lot, a total headache and can pull you out of the experience while you are trying to make your way out fighting the controls. However, my biggest problem with the game is something that pains to qualify as a negative, as it's a byproduct of how Yume Nikki manages to pull out everything else: to achieve the ending of the game, you must recollect the 24 different ''effect'' scattered across the dreams, and when a game asks you to find 24 specific things in a map that feels gigantic, with bast spaces with nothing that have the thing or passage you need in a very specific point, and the possibility of you skipping something in a zone and having to go back for it, is destined to hinder the experience in one way or another. I honestly don't know how else a natural progression could have been implemented without making the dreams feel too linear and a one note and done, but this wasn't also the correct way in doing it, as returning to a zone that when you first discovered feel magical, that special moment can lose its magic... And yet, despite these flaws, the game manages to pull you back in.
After collecting my last effect and saying out loud a tired ''Finally!'', I saw a passage I didn't see before, and so I took it. It led me to a black and white world, populated by creatures that seemed to be born from the earth itself, plunging outwards in agony, yet they remained still. They watched me, creatures bigger than life itself stared at me while the sounds of a seemingly broken world covered my ears, and after one of those creatures, it's jaw contorting and massive, blocked my pass, I need to wake up. And so, I did. And so, this game managed to enamored me again, even though I thought I'd seen everything I needed to see and, and the game proved me wrong.
Once I reach the finale, I couldn't help but to just try to grasp what exactly had I just played: it was a flawed game as a whole, it lost part of this magic as it went along, and it certainly can be tiresome to reach the finish. It's not one of my favorites, and yet, it still captivated me like so other few games have, it reaches what it strived to be tenfold, and some of its individual moments, those spaces within a bigger dream, I'll be thinking about them for a long time.
It's not for everyone, god no, even I struggled to keep going sometimes, but the experience is more than worthy: it's not one of those games that tries to say a lot and ends up falling short; it's meaningless, yet it says so much.
Just like a dream.
In my Mario & Luigi: Dream Team review I lamented the fact the game didn't really do anything crazy in its dream sections aside from Luigi's gimmicks in puzzles and combat, but I feel like I didn't elaborated that much on that point; the concept of translating dreams into media has indescribable potential, but I do recognize the difficulty of doing such a task. Dreams are something more than ''movies in our heads'', a movie has structure and a meaning, a dream, for the most part, does not. Defining a dream is almost impossible 'cause there's no such thing as a dream, they are disconnected passages that our brain forms through the ideas and experiences that we have while we are awake: they are meaningless, yet they can say so much. I know that even this as a definition is barebones at best and I do apologize for the lecture, but I need to say this in order for you to understand how difficult adapting such a thing can be, and how Yume Nikki, a game made by only one person in RPG Maker, succeeds where so many others would fail and gives us what is possibly the closest thing to a playable dream we will ever get.
The landscapes of the dreams of Madotsuki go from the perturbation of reality to the absolute wildness of the impossible: haunted forest with passages that don't make sense, areas that circle around each other and have no end, enigmatic creatures with impossible forms on a path of white footsteps, lifeless concrete structures that surround a bed, ... The different sections almost never have a clear end, not even a beginning, as you could end up in one zone without knowing why, or traversing the maze that connects all the different dreams and ending up in a completely new place. After a while, what shouldn't make sense starts making sense, and what shouldn't scare you starts to give you goosebumps and chill you to the bones. It's a game that the rewards usually it's not a new ability or progression, but rather the sensation of discovering something that no one else could and the fact that experience sticks with you. It's almost baffling how well everything connects to form this surreal experience: the constantly changing visuals, the design of the zones and the music flow in a manner that makes you go from a apocalypse feeling wasteland to an upbeat space party without feeling jarring... but sadly, with such immaculate work on the dream-like aspects of the game, it was inevitable that as it progressed, some cracks would start to show up, two, to be exact.
The game has no gameplay aside of walking and interacting, which it's more than enough for the purpose of the game, as the lack of action, even if it can make the game's zones and creatures feel a bit static, it's perfect for the purpose of sinking you in this strange world. Rather, my problem comes in a more technical aspect; much of the game is designed on a perspective more akin to Earthbound, which makes the areas feel expansive, but the character only moves in the four directions of the axis, which makes going up or down in these zones, which are a lot, a total headache and can pull you out of the experience while you are trying to make your way out fighting the controls. However, my biggest problem with the game is something that pains to qualify as a negative, as it's a byproduct of how Yume Nikki manages to pull out everything else: to achieve the ending of the game, you must recollect the 24 different ''effect'' scattered across the dreams, and when a game asks you to find 24 specific things in a map that feels gigantic, with bast spaces with nothing that have the thing or passage you need in a very specific point, and the possibility of you skipping something in a zone and having to go back for it, is destined to hinder the experience in one way or another. I honestly don't know how else a natural progression could have been implemented without making the dreams feel too linear and a one note and done, but this wasn't also the correct way in doing it, as returning to a zone that when you first discovered feel magical, that special moment can lose its magic... And yet, despite these flaws, the game manages to pull you back in.
After collecting my last effect and saying out loud a tired ''Finally!'', I saw a passage I didn't see before, and so I took it. It led me to a black and white world, populated by creatures that seemed to be born from the earth itself, plunging outwards in agony, yet they remained still. They watched me, creatures bigger than life itself stared at me while the sounds of a seemingly broken world covered my ears, and after one of those creatures, it's jaw contorting and massive, blocked my pass, I need to wake up. And so, I did. And so, this game managed to enamored me again, even though I thought I'd seen everything I needed to see and, and the game proved me wrong.
Once I reach the finale, I couldn't help but to just try to grasp what exactly had I just played: it was a flawed game as a whole, it lost part of this magic as it went along, and it certainly can be tiresome to reach the finish. It's not one of my favorites, and yet, it still captivated me like so other few games have, it reaches what it strived to be tenfold, and some of its individual moments, those spaces within a bigger dream, I'll be thinking about them for a long time.
It's not for everyone, god no, even I struggled to keep going sometimes, but the experience is more than worthy: it's not one of those games that tries to say a lot and ends up falling short; it's meaningless, yet it says so much.
Just like a dream.