YMMV / YIIK: A Post-Modern RPG

• Alas, Poor Scrappy: While Rory isn't exactly likable, he is a pitiable character. Indeed, Alex actively acts like an asshole to him with little actual consequences. This can culminate in Rory committing suicide, with his ghost reassuring Alex that he would have done it anyway. However, the only way to reach this point is for the player to choose to be a dick to him at every available opportunity.
• Anvilicious: The themes of the games aren't subtle in the least. The game's longwinded, verbose dialogue will outright spell it out to the player about stuff like how Alex needs to better himself, in the case of some dialogue with Claudio and Chondra, that racism is a bad thing, or Vella explaining to Rory that suicide isn't the answer and not to give up. Good messages sure, but they're dropped on the player with all the subtlety of a jackhammer.
• Arc Fatigue: Chapter 5 gives the player the in-game months of November and December to hang out with Alex's companions or go training in the Mind Dungeon before engaging the Climax Boss. This introduces the calendar system which was never utilized prior. However, that's also more time than the player needs — they'll run out of meaningful hangout events and experience for the Mind Dungeon before the time period lapses. What's left to do, barring exploration to discover missed content, is to advance the days until the next event arrives.
• Ass Pull: The endgame reveal of the Essentia being a part of Alex is this, as it contradicts all the blatant evidence of her being the soul survivor of Vella/Sammy.
• Awesome Music: While containing some duds, it's generally agreed that YIIK's soundtrack is incredibly good. To the point that some consider it the best part of the series overall.
  • "Into the Mind" is one of the tracks that stand out. Being composed by Toby Fox helps.
  • The title screen theme is actually a really nice, dreamy piece of music.
  • The Mind Dungeon theme is a soft, chill and soothing remix of the main theme that goes a long way towards making the repetition involved in exploring the Mind Dungeon and leveling up more tolerable.
  • Vella Wilde Groove, the theme of Vella's mind dungeon. Another soft, chill and smooth song but also incredibly bittersweet sounding.
  • Krow Battle Theme plays in Essentia's mind dungeon. It's a great, energetic track, mixing in chiptunes and rocking guitars that also works in the Leitmotif of the Machine and the Crow really well.
  • Machine and the Crow, the overarching theme song for the game. A moody and and off-beat track that conveys the introspective weirdness that YIIK offers very effectively while being quite catchy.
  • A Distant Voice(Chance Traveler), the headline track from Vella's "Mystical Ultima LP Legend" album. A slow, soothing and mystical J-Pop ballad that wouldn't sound out of place over the credits of an anime. In-universe the entire gang is stunned by how good it sounds.
  • Windtown Drunkard Battle Theme. Setting aside it's infamously inappropriate usage for the original version of the Golden Alpaca fight, it's a very goofy and swinging jazz track that fits quite well for...well...fighting drunkards in Windtown.
• Base-Breaking Character: Rory's a divisive part of the cast. Some people see him as sympathetic while others view him as whiny and caustic; his lack of utility in the game's initial slow battle system certainly doesn't help favors. However, balancing this out is that his more caustic elements is usually at the expense of the more universally hated Alex, as well as the fact that his treatment by Alex which may even result in his suicide leads to even people that dislike him to be sympathetic toward him.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: There are quite a few of these throughout the game.
  • The Golden Alpaca boss is...well, a gold-colored alpaca that can talk and has a penchant for saying "Lemonade!" Vella also acts like it's a horrible monster. It's never explained what exactly it is, where it came from, or why it attacks you. It's never even brought up again once the battle is over. Even more egregious as this is a Mood Whiplash right after Rory talks about how his sister committed suicide and his resulting trauma. The 1.5 update attempts to mitigate this by making the alpaca foreshadow the nature behind Alex, but it's still incredibly jarring within the context this happens.
  • During a scene where Alex and Michael visit Rory, Alex comments on how Rory's mom is all leg. She is literally just a leg, and no other comment is made about her.
  • When going to the sewers with Rory, there is a giant Soul Survivor in the sky. Our heroes never even notice it.
  • When they visit Mark to learn more about the Mystical Ultima LP Legend, he goes on a lengthy tangent about a rare tea and how it came into his possession. He eventually gets to identifying the one behind the LP, but this whole tea story contributed nothing to this and is never revisited.
  • A couple of NPCs closely resembling Sammy, the one that Alex has been searching for, are found in Vella's Mind Dungeon. No comment was made on their presence.
  • Claudio suddenly accusing Alex of being racist for asking the team if anyone knows how to pick a lock, even though the question wasn't directed at him. He also goes on to describe that he can pick half a dozen exotic types of locks anyway because of a "Sherlock Holmes phase" - just not car locks specifically.
  • Alex being given the option to kiss Rory. While their heart-to-heart mirrors the one Alex had with Vella, they lack the same kind of chemistry - in fact, given how Alex could potentially treat Rory beforehand, it comes off as a bizarre character shift.
  • The entirety of Proto-Michael, which happens in the days leading up to Y2K out of left field with a Hand Wave of becoming one with all his alternate selves. The odd thing is that this actually sticks for a bit as an actual party member and goes on to make a later scene incredibly awkward with a mad, desperate rant. But then he gets erased like everyone else anyway, making this a rather drawn-out BLAM. Not even the different alternate version you recruit for the endgame ties into this at all, just being another random Michael like the "Proto-" thing never happened.
• Continuity Lockout: Roy's presence in the game won't make any sense to people who don't know about Two Brothers and its real life history.
• Creator's Pet: The developers have said Alex is supposed to be unlikable, and has to learn and grow throughout the game. The problem is that it doesn't really work. Alex is an insufferable dick to everyone... and they're constantly apologizing to him for it. If Rory kills himself, the character involved assures Alex that it wasn't his fault - even though this only happens if you choose to have Alex deliberately hurt Rory at every opening. The ending then reveals that Alex is literally the most important person in existence, and everyone else in the world only exists because of and for him. If it were at all self-aware it would be a parody.
• Ending Fatigue: After the party's loss against the Comet, the game devolves into Alex wallowing in his own self-loathing for a long while. It’s also followed by numerous confusing plot twists, which many felt dragged the game down. The fact that, from the Comet onward, both pivotal Final Boss battles are Hopless Boss Fights doesn't help matters, either.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Based on LPs and reviews, Vella, Claudio, and Chondra appear to be the only characters that are well-liked, or at least tolerated compared to the rest of the cast. This is mainly for their more down-to-earth demeanor while also being the ones to consistently call out Alex on his thoughtlessness or rudeness or, in Claudio's case, for being a Large Ham with a love for shojo anime.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: Among the myriad of cut content in the game is the mostly-complete remains of the original ending, changed during the game's Troubled Production despite being fully voiced. Some players greatly prefer this ending to the two from the final game for a variety of reasons:
  • The Essentia's motivations are confusing and unreliable in the original story, but the cut ending directly explains that she's been tricking Alexes from other dimensions into going on suicide missions to defeat Proto-Alex, or abandoning them if they chicken out. Alex's decision to fight Proto-Alex of his own free will after learning this expresses Character Development that many felt the final game rushed out.
  • This version's incarnation of Proto-Alex is much more imposing, looking like a gigantic armored demon instead of the shirtless creep from the final game. It was also planned to be a proper final boss rather than a Hopeless Boss Fight, complete with exclusive dodging minigames that were underutilized in the release version.
  • The ending is more optimistic, with Essentia and Alex parting ways, the latter leaving to find a new reality where he can become a better person, along with a final moment of Addressing the Player to cap things off.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • Many of the people on the game’s official Discord server are also fans of Homestuck.
  • The OneyPlays playthrough has brought a ton of new eyes to the game.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Chondra's "Spread Item" skill gives the full benefits of an item to the whole party for a mere 2 MP; keeping her in your party basically guarantees that everybody's stays at full health.
  • Due to a bug, Alex's LP Toss has broken power scaling and increases in power the more you use it. There doesn't seem to be an upper limit to its strength; after enough uses it becomes strong enough to one-shot every enemy in the game.
• Hollywood Pudgy: Much fun is made of Alex's weight with several people calling him fat to his face. This despite him looking just as slim as anyone else with maybe the beginnings of a beer belly.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Some Yuriofwind fans are just here because he's the voice of Rory.
• Low-Tier Letdown: A contributing reason to Rory's problems is this. On paper, him being a tank character is interesting. But in practice, with how long the battles drag on and the fact that you can avoid taking damage altogether, you'd want somebody that'd actually pitch in with attacks over a tank — the fact that Chondra's "Spread Item" ability is just too good of a healing move also mitigates the need for a tank, anyway. This is addressed in the 1.25 update which makes his blocking attacks do damage to the attacker as well as himself but it's not really enough to make him worth having in the party.
• Memetic Loser: Alex, due to being perceived as a whiny jerk, and is often compared negatively to protagonists from contemporary indie RPG games — when he isn't ironically presented as better than them.
• Memetic Molester: Alex again. While he's often regarded as being one of the worst protagonists in video games, most of the dislike towards him comes from his excessive usage of Purple Prose, generally being annoying and over dramatic, and his many instances of being disrespectful and scummy, as well as also just being seen as boring by many. Memes will often exaggerate his worst qualities to make him an omnicidal, manipulative pervert who will stop at nothing to get into the pants of Vella, Sammy/Semi, and/or the Essentia 3000.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The game's title. Officially it's supposed to be pronounced "Y2K", which almost everyone has universally ignored in favor of the more obvious "yeek" or "yick". Additionally, Alex's last name, Eggleston, is often omitted in favor of the game's title, with people referring to him on a Full-Name Basis as "Alex YIIK" in the vein of the "Sans Undertale" meme.
  • YIIKes, coined by a lot of the game's detractors, in reference to not only the game's lukewarm reception and some of the aspects surrounding the game, e.g. the heavy references to the death of Elisa Lam.
  • YIIKing Out^Explanation A Fan Nickname for an in-game portrait depicting Alex grabbing his temples in shock. The portrait quickly became a popular subject of ironic reposts in reference to the game and anything related to it, with the phrase "I'm YIIKing Out" or some variation thereof often being used as a caption.
  • Dave P33, who looks suspiciously similar to the main character, has been confused for the developer of the game. This led people into thinking that Alex is a shameless Self-Insert. He takes it with humor, though.
  • Lemonade. ^Explanation The Golden Alpaca boss often says this during their fight. This resulted in people parroting it in comments, often to mock the randomness of the fight. It's been since removed after an update, but still lives on as one of the game's most infamous moments.
  • Satoru Iwata December 6, 1959 - July 11, 2015. ^Explanation In the game you can find several graves, including one for Satoru Iwata, who died in 2015... even though the game is supposed to take place in 1999. The prominent anachronism quickly resulted in a screencap of the grave being popularly reposted in reference to the game.
  • "WHAT'S GOING ON!?"^Explanation Multiple conversations in the game have ended up on the internet where most, if not all of Alex's dialogue just consists of him regularly asking what's going on. The most well-known example being the scene right before the Golden Alpaca fight, where even after Vella explains what's happening. And despite this, Alex still demands an explanation as if her entire spiel never happened. This is usually paired with the portrait of Alex grabbing his head in confusion, ie him YIIKing out.
  • Vibrating with motion.^Explanation The full line is "I sighed as the elevator started to shake, vibrating with motion." The last three words serve as a succinct illustration of the game's Purple Prose problem.
  • "No one cares about your dead sister!" ^Explanation  Shortly after the infamous Golden Alpaca fight, Alex yells at Rory for bringing them to the dungeon as if anyone could have sincerely anticipated it. This moment is seen as a big Kick the Dog moment, even by people that don't like Rory, and is held up as an example as to why Alex is a horrible Jerkass. It's also paraphrased, since the actual quote is Alex going "No one cares about your sister right now, we almost just died ourselves!", and the quote is also seen as one of the game's most infamous moments. The reworked Golden Alpaca even outright references this meme in mockery of Alex.
  • "YIIK and Morbius are the same thing in different mediums." ^Explanation  At some point during the 2020s the game has built up an ironic fandom of people praising it as one of the greatest games ever made in a similar vein to what happened with the movie Morbius. This led to many meme videos and "fans" ironically putting YIIK on a pedestal. This tweet was posted which had people also crossing over YIIK and Morbius in fanart and videos.
• Narm:
  • Every reviewer and YouTuber can generally agree that Alex randomly breaking out into Purple Prose to repetitively describe everything around himself in a nasty aversion of Show, Don't Tell was already incredibly cheesy. The fact that it happens all game long firmly cements it as detrimental to taking anything Alex says seriously at all.
  • The moment where one section early on in the game literally DEMANDS Alex to sit down and monologue to himself.
  • After an emotional scene in which Rory finally reveals that his sister killed herself and he's become traumatized by it, the player fights a Golden Alpaca that constantly says "lemonade". Not only does this immediately deflate the tension, it arguably ends up making fun of Rory's breakdown, ultimately coming across as a failed attempt at a non-sequitur to defuse tension that ends up just being stupid or shameless.
  • For whatever reason, when Michael becomes Proto-Michael, Alex outright calls him by that name from then on like reading off a script.
  • Near the beginning of Chapter VI, Alex loses Panda in the Soul Space as the latter turns into a plush and floats away. It's meant to be an emotional scene with Alex losing the last companion he had left (and imply/confirm that Panda only ever existed in Alex's head). However, it's really hard to take a grown adult screaming out for a toy panda seriously, regardless of context. It's also poorly edited audio wise, with the first syllable sounding cut off, making it sound like Alex is yelling "P'NDAAAAAA".
  • Michael excitedly yelling "Developed?! This thing is digital, baby!" after he and Alex encounter the Soul Survivor falls a little flat when his portrait's expression looks completely neutral.
  • As limited as the talking portraits are, the 3D models are even less emotive, with the worst offenders being Vella looking perpetually constipated and Wilfrid having a permanent dopey smile that remains even as he's panicking and dying.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: YIIK is plagued with its own issues like story pacing and sluggish gameplay, but a few controversies really brought the game into the spotlight: a few parts of the script are taken wholesale from Haruki Murakami's novels (intended to be an homage but coming across as plagiarism), and the lead developer confirmed on Twitter that the game's premise is based on the real life death of Elisa Lam in an attempt to bring awareness to it, which many saw as disrespectful.
• Padding: One of the main criticisms of the game is its sluggish pacing in its story and gameplay.
  • The game is very, very heavy on text and dialogue. But, much of it is restating information that's already been established, spending an inordinate amount of time on describing something, or derailing plot relevant details for something much less important.
  • Gameplay tends to drag on due to the nature of the minigames used to attack in combat not doing nearly enough damage for the effort expended to do them, the Mind Dungeon being tedious to use, and the amount of time it takes to get from Point A to Point B on the overworld.
  • There's one section near the mid-end of the game where you're given a month or two's time explicitly to level grind and build up relationships with your friends and typically you only need half the time provided to you in order to see all there is to see and grind up to comfortably handle the rest of the game.
• The Scrappy: Alex deliberately being an unlikable protagonist worked too well, as many players found Alex insufferable to listen to with his extreme self-centredness and unapologetic self-entitlement, needless rambling tangents, excessive prose, and constant interjections to demand an explanation of what's going on, and none of the other party members are charismatic enough to pick up the slack. It doesn't help that he never improves too much, either, unlike Luke from Tales of the Abyss or Neku from The World Ends with You, who are treated as the golden standard for deliberately unlikable MCs and whom Alex is often compared to. The game also strongly implies he's just like the player of the game while simultaneously coming off as a self-insert character for the developer, which makes it look like he's trying to project his own flaws onto the people playing the game.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The Mind Dungeon, which acts as a physical manifestation of a level up menu, much like Fable III did with the Sanctuary and its menu system in general. It also carries over everything players hated about the Sanctuary, needlessly padding out basic menu functions, as well as forcing the player to level up one level at a time, even if they can level up multiple times.
  • Every attack in the game is carried out via a lengthy minigame which, combined with the fact that most attacks don't do very much damage, drag out fights for way too long. Similarly, when an enemy unleashes a Herd-Hitting Attack, you have to perform the Defend/Dodge minigame for every single party member, which adds to the length of battles. Cut down in the January 2021 update that gave every character a new basic attack with simplified mini-games and re-packages their old base attacks as multi-hitting Special Attacks.
  • The Skateboard item. Its intended purpose is to allow for speedy travel in the overworld but it only goes in one direction and there's no way to stop yourself unless you hit a wall, making it needlessly finicky to use at best and an active detriment at worst.
• Squick:
  • The main, all-target attack of the one of the Proto-Alex phases, Shady Alex is throwing what are implied to be socks used for masturbation ^note  aka cum socks . Nothing in detail, thank god, but still.
  • Claudio showing enthusiasm for an incest version of his favorite anime in a chapter 5 scene. Also mind you, his own sister is in the room.
• Stock Footage Failure:
  • Due to how limited Michael's talk-sprites are, his sprites mainly consist of neutral poses that don't fit the scenes where he sounds angry or scared. This gets even worse with Proto-Michael, who has a grand total of one talking sprite.
  • The female version of Player-Alex still has male Alex's voice.
• Take That, Scrappy!: People tend to loathe Alex for being unpleasant, selfish, and regularly yapping in Purple Prose. Fortunately (or at least for them), Chondra and Vella sometimes call him out for being impolite or thoughtless. Additionally, he even dies in one ending.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The golden alpaca boss fight got a lot of flak for looking like a random and forced attempt at Mood Whiplash, but some players found it a hilarious and genius tone shift. The boss design was later changed to some kind of humanoid alpaca with a giant sword, voice acting and a dramatic cutscene filled with foreshadowing. The changed was met with mixed reception to say the least, with alpaca fans being dissappointed the devs ruined the funniest moment in the game trying too hard to please critics.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Pretty much everyone except Alex, Vella and Essentia are left feeling underdeveloped.
  • The main reason why Michael is not well-liked is that he's a Flat Character for much of the game that rarely speaks after the second chapter. Then he suddenly becomes important in the last chapter by becoming Proto Michael... which is then squandered by the fact that he just exists to give another Info Dump and still dies unceremoniously with the rest of the party.
  • While Rory’s arc takes up a good part of Chapter 2, he’s mainly left by the wayside except for a few scenes afterward. It’s especially jarring considering that he’s the only one in the party that isn’t explicitly connected to a different version of Alex. Weirdly though, he’s the only character to get a resolution in one of the Chapter 5 conversations, but it feels hollow without actual character development.
  • While Chondra and Claudio are appreciated characters, their personal character arcs of worrying about their little brother don’t actually pan out. Especially since the little brother is only met by Alex, who has nothing to say and gets nothing from the revelation himself.
  • Alex mentions his sister during an early monologue and later says she studied at a certain girl's school, but Chondra says that shouldn't be possible and he reacts confused. His sister could've been tied to the plot, given more insight on his family and maybe draw parallels between Alex and Rory or Claudio who also have sisters, but instead, his sister is never mentioned again other than one random npc implying Alex never had a sister in the first place.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The game has an X-Files atmosphere for a large part of it. Until the ending abandons it for a fourth-wall breaking meta story that involves the developers putting in a character from Two Brothers, their previous game.
  • The original "save Sammy" plot is dropped halfway through the game and is only picked back up on a hasty alternate ending. It's particularly egregious considering that Sammy's situation appropriates off of a real life tragedy.
  • Similarly, every party member has a personal story and problems, like how Claudio and Chondra have a missing little brother, or Vella's still trying to get over a real bad break up. These things pepper the entire game's progression, sometimes even putting the plot on hold to emphasize them. Then everyone but Alex dies to Proto-Alex and the world ends, abandoning every single plot line but Alex's own while implying each of his friend's problems were tied to yet another alternate Alex besides Rory's sister. Even when alternate versions of the same characters are brought in, they have absolutely no dialogue or interactions whatsoever.
  • Multiple times throughout the game, Alex is delivered a scathing reaction to some of his terrible comments or particular Kick the Dog moments, like with his treatment to Rory. Just as fast as the party is quick to condemn him, however, they almost always apologize or brush it off, instead of Alex actually learning anything from it or changing for the better. It culminates in the endgame where if the player was a jerk to Rory all throughout, he kills himself and everyone gets over it disturbingly fast, to the point of Rory himself as a ghost not even blaming Alex for it. Critics have construed it as Alex being free from actual long-lasting consequences for anything he does, and completely spitting on the theme of self-improvement the game tries to push.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: In spite of how reviled the game's story is, one reason that people say they're willing to tolerate it is that the voice actors gave it their all in trying to make a convincing delivery, with standouts being Chris Niosi as Alex, Melanie Ehrlich as Vella, and Yuriofwind as Rory.
  • Alex is largely considered an insufferable protagonist by most players, particularly due to his pretentious Motor Mouth tendencies. However, Chris Niosi's delivery was usually praised as a positive point of the game (as well as the rest of the voice cast), most critics panning the writing in a vacuum as tacky and incoherent.
  • Vella's voice actress puts a lot of genuine sadness into the scene where Rory commits suicide, despite how badly written the scene was and how self-indulgently Alex responds.
• Underused Game Mechanic: A single boss fight in the Essentia 2000's mind dungeon uses an attack that is dodged through controlling Alex in a platforming minigame. This is the only time this dodge method is used, with everything else sticking with one of the three dodge/block meters, though the cut original Proto-Alex fight also had some (using a top-down perspective instead).
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Thanks to the memetic mutation of Alex yelling at Rory, more people got the context and decided to actually side with Alex in this case. Vella and Michael will scold Alex for crossing the line there but really, Alex had the right to be frustrated at someone who lied to him. If anything, some argue Alex was right for being brutally honest and Rory had to grow up and realize he can't expect random strangers to deal with his mental baggage.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Alex is a pretentious, self-centered, and flat out grating hipster who constantly engages in poorly written Purple Prose and treats the whole world and his friends as though they revolve around him and his needs. Eventually, alternate versions of him destroy the world due to their negative personality traits consuming them, and in one ending he can choose to join them. While the character was not initially meant to be sympathetic, even while trying to atone for what his other selves did he comes off as just as self-absorbed and pretentious. This led to people cheering when he dies rather than taking the moment as the tear-jerking Heroic Sacrifice it was meant to be.
  • For some, Rory is this also. His grief over his sister's death is mentioned as being an aspect of his poor decision making, and Alex is typically regarded as callous for telling him that no one cares, but some view Alex as completely right to yell at him for essentially forcing the party to run around town and complete tasks for the purpose of finding Sammy/Semi, as Rory's own goals run antithetical to that. Not to mention that he unknowingly put other people who were complete strangers in danger for something he barely understood.
• Wangst: Whenever Alex wallows in his own self-pity like after his loss against the Comet, which still makes him come off as self-centered.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The quirky colors and presentation inspired by the likes of EarthBound are offset by the fact that the game is rated M for a reason. There's a surprising amount of explicit cursing, nightmarish visages particularly in the Mind Dungeons, a lot of suicide and death context including a couple areas with a heavy amount of violence and Rory committing suicide off-screen if you're a dick to him, racial issues brought up, and a generally massive amount of Mood Whiplash between surreal humor and dark subject matter.

---