(Winner of "Don Miguel Award" for best RPG Maker game of all time, speech below)
Every game nowadays has a plethora of guides that hold your hand and wipe your ass all the way from the main menu to the credits screen. But when you boot up Yume Nikki, you are given only a short list of instructions, and that's it. Everything else you must figure out on your own. Something like this could easily have been dismissed as horribly pretentious, but when Yume Nikki was first released back in 2004, it was practically a novelty. Yume Nikki was already noteworthy for completely ignoring RPG Maker's built-in combat system, but what made the game memorable was its adamant refusal to explain itself. I'm not entirely sure how Aztec Rave Monkey fits into Kikiyama's personal understanding of reality...
(DAVID LEAN: "Elaborate on that, if you would...")
(DAVID LYNCH: "No.")
... but hey, who are we to judge? The game offers no answers, and so it was left up to players to derive their own meaning. This has helped keep the game relevant nearly 20 years later. Sharing your discoveries, learning what you may have missed, one could argue that the players are just as responsible for making the game what it is today as its reclusive creator. The only way to discover what Yume Nikki is all about, and why it's the best RPG Maker game of all time, is to play it for yourself. But do yourself a favor and go in blind. Perhaps it will all make sense to you, or maybe truth is only in dreams.
... While you're still here, get the bicycle or you're gonna go bananas. I'm not fucking joking, just take this door, it's right here, it lets you move hella fast.
Every game nowadays has a plethora of guides that hold your hand and wipe your ass all the way from the main menu to the credits screen. But when you boot up Yume Nikki, you are given only a short list of instructions, and that's it. Everything else you must figure out on your own. Something like this could easily have been dismissed as horribly pretentious, but when Yume Nikki was first released back in 2004, it was practically a novelty. Yume Nikki was already noteworthy for completely ignoring RPG Maker's built-in combat system, but what made the game memorable was its adamant refusal to explain itself. I'm not entirely sure how Aztec Rave Monkey fits into Kikiyama's personal understanding of reality...
(DAVID LEAN: "Elaborate on that, if you would...")
(DAVID LYNCH: "No.")
... but hey, who are we to judge? The game offers no answers, and so it was left up to players to derive their own meaning. This has helped keep the game relevant nearly 20 years later. Sharing your discoveries, learning what you may have missed, one could argue that the players are just as responsible for making the game what it is today as its reclusive creator. The only way to discover what Yume Nikki is all about, and why it's the best RPG Maker game of all time, is to play it for yourself. But do yourself a favor and go in blind. Perhaps it will all make sense to you, or maybe truth is only in dreams.
... While you're still here, get the bicycle or you're gonna go bananas. I'm not fucking joking, just take this door, it's right here, it lets you move hella fast.