This isn't a good criticism of Yiik. Seems to come down to "Gris had thought, effort and care put into and Yiik had no". Okay, but you can put thought, effort and care into anything and still fuck up if you have no idea what you're doing. You can hamfist visual storytelling just the same.
What and how does Yiik do wrong exactly? Pointing out the bloated prose was the kind of criticism I expected to see much more of.
It feels as if the guy that wrote the dialogue for this game treated it like writing a book. Things are described through text rather than visuals, you know that thing that a video game can do that a book can't. Show you things. But nah instead they felt that every single thing required as much (poorly thought out) detail as possible to help you visualize it, when instead they could have literally shown it instead.
Even if you accept that train of thought, the writing feels like he's trying to pad his own book out. And when he isn't doing that, he's writing dialogue or internal monologues that don't even bear a passing resemblance to actual human thought.
Look at the album linked on the previous page and it is just overflowing with boxes that just make you scream 'nobody talks or thinks like this, you fucking idiot'.
It gets majorly shit on, mind you.
Yeah, I mean, quite a few games use a bit of prose to describe some aspects that are hard/impossible to show on a game (small details on old games, smells, etc) and do it very well. Fear & Hunger, Silent Hill, etc.
Dude could've used flavor text to drive points home and use simple visuals to support it, instead he decided to bog down the entire game with useless drivel.
this cannot be real, i refuse to believe this is unedited
it's such a sensory overload that i was actually uncomfortable watching this
*Serious emotional moment*
*WACKY MUSIC AND COMBAT*
It's like the pinnacle of the most pretentious hipster gaming bullshit.
What is that fps, i'm going to puke
I wanted to go easier on YIIK than other people.
I'd heard the protagonist is supposed to be insufferable early on and goes through character growth later. I think "you're not original you just want to copy earthbound / whatever" isn't really a great criticism. I don't really mind the "it's a blatant self-insert" thing if the character is supposed to grow. It's definitely prime hipster material, but that's not inherently terrible.
The prose being terrible everywhere, not just the main character, made me rethink the "it's just a character flaw" thing. The "HAVE YOU PLAYED TWO BROTHERS" shit is cringey and makes the self-insert really bad. The Elisa Lam shit is pretty questionable. Not horrific, just... tasteless.
This though?
This is some dadaism anti-art shit.
"I know your sister is dead, but we're dealing with otherworldly horrors here! Wait... SHIT, we have to run!"
GOLDEN ALPACA IN A THONG WITH MODELED BULGE, DOoT DoOT dOoTot bAZoo honkkonkadongk
"WHAT WAS THAT? WHAT'S AN ALPACA!?"
This game looks terrible but there are ideas in it that could be cool if a good developer made them. I like the idea of mini games as special moves, but maybe for just finished type moves, so that it’s not every 10 seconds.
Undertale and Deltarune are what comes to my mind first.
why is the fps like 5
I do fucking love those games.
I have to admit, the very first time it was announced it looked like a really cool concept. it genuinely drew people's atention towards it based almost purely on a visual premise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vJHpfIzfvo
the setting as well is quite eye catching, to the point some people even got to the point to consider a western-ish version of what persona did - whatever that means.
of course, that was until the reviews came in and people realised that the bloated dialogues and awful script is so bad even the visual premise and setting of the game get in the way of what could had been a neat concept because it IS that bloated and it is that awful. as you've guessed, whoever edited the video was well aware of that, and did its best to avoid showcasing that element of the game in the trailer.
so to answer your question, a game that puts heavy emphasis on narrative such as a RPG needs to put heavy emphasis on the quality of said narrative - otherwise you end with an insuferable amount of unskipable text/dialogue that now you're forced to endure in order to still understand what the fuck is going on on the game you just bought. Gris is thrown into the mix because, just like Yiik, its a game that puts heavy emphasis on a narrative and the visuals that follow it- visuals that are meant to evoke something.
in other words, Yiik is that one person who played gris and goes constantly on a ramble about how "he gets it".
Yeah to be honest I like the aesthetic of YIIK a lot and it kinda bummed me out when I saw the writing.
It's clear just looking at it that Yiik is wordy, pretentious and generally bad, I'm implying it isn't even though it may have come across that way.
I would prefer a video of someone who understands story writing and gameplay design to pick apart why it's bad. Making a video just stating that it's bad is redundant since it's obvious.
Other reviews get more in-depth on the issues with the writing, with one of the more ubiquitous complaints being about how awful the main character Alex is.
From the Rock Paper Shotgun review:
[The story] sets up a fairly standard (though somewhat tired) tale, if it wasn’t for the fact that Alex is so deeply unlikable that it is a major plot point.
It’s made evident enough from his everyday interactions, like the way that he complains about being asked to do minor tasks by his mother, who paid his way through college.
In case those were too subtle, though, he eventually blows up and screams that he doesn’t care about the death of a 12-year-old girl, just to hammer the point home.
Other characters call him out on it, but inexplicably remain his friend even though he continues to treat them like garbage.
Then, he is not given a redemption arc so much as an arc where he quite literally becomes the most important person in the universe and so all must be forgiven.
From the Destructoid review:
The main character, Alex, is an insufferable jerk. From a narrative standpoint, his personality works. From a player perspective, it makes the experience incredibly torturous.
Even after the closing credits, I fucking hated this guy.
This is a person who loves to hear himself talk. Regardless of who he's addressing, he always sounds like a self-absorbed brat. At no point during this journey did I feel otherwise.
This isn't someone I'd want to spend fifteen minutes with, let alone over two dozen hours.
bumping this old thread since it's kinda the only thread about yiik and i don't want to make a new one.
https://twitter.com/TheLordOfLard/status/1119659260105773056
quote is from the dick masterson (ex-maddox guy) podcast.
The problem is that even 'horrible' characters tend to have somethings about them that make them actually interesting. If you simply create a character that's a sack of shit then don't expect people to be willing to play through as someone they despise. People don't necessarily resonate with the characters they play in videogames as them, but because there's fun in watching them interact.
"My game isn't shit, everyone else is shit! I don't have dog poop stuck to my shoe, the world just smells like poop!"
His game takes "inspiration" from Earthbound, whose sequel is probably the most thought provoking game I've ever played, but I think he's forgetting the part where Mother 3 does that because it's a well written fucking game.
I don't know having the character being a contemptible chode and have them learn to not be a contemptible chode is the laziest "character development" out there
It's one of the reasons Cars is the worst Pixar movie, McQueen is just too much of a prick to be likable for like the first half of the movie.
The Desolate Hope is fantastic for this. It has minigames you get to play out while at the same time managing the real-time combat as opposed to them slowing down the pace.
Mentioned this over in LMAO pics but just before that quote, he mentions wanting to be like Chuck Palahniuk and considering how widely misunderstood Fight Club is, his main character makes a LOOOOOOOT of sense.
Why is this always the response of people who have their games considered bad? As if games haven't had thought provoking stories.
Misanthropy is really cool, just ask my personal hero Tyler Durden!
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/134756/6fa2b367-6266-49c0-9e53-3cd2aa1fc84c/fg.jpg
Misanthropy is really cool, just ask my personal hero Tyler Durden!
It's the same with people who like American Psycho and think Patrick Bateman is just the coolest.
I love that film but I can't fathom how anyone thinks Patrick Bateman is someone you should aspire to be.
I feel like it's got less to do with the character being likeable and unlikeable and more to do with the fact that the dude's writing just isn't good. At all. It's fucking awful. Like, anyone who sits down and looks at the text in this game should be able to instantly recognize that it's a problem.
If I can see that your writing's shit after reading like 2-3 dialogue boxes, of course you're not going to be able to pull off a decent character arc, because even if your overarching structure is alright, nobody's going to see it after having to plod through the horrible, eye-gouging field of broken glass that is the prose.
Have you ever been so creatively-deprived that you had to plagiarize the living room design of a 90s sitcom?
http://isfinance.info/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/full-house-set-full-house-living-room-entry-doors-in-pilot-episode-full-house-tv-show-set-layout.jpg
https://hookedonhouses.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Tanner-Family-Living-Room-in-Series-Finale-Full-House-e1441394464975.jpg
https://www.gamnesia.com/images/uploads/first_look.png?r=1547438410
In its defense, it's more of a 'homage' that's pandering to nostalgia and the game takes place in the 90s and ashamedly reference a lot of pop culture so it might be intentional.
Way better reference than copying an actual tragedy and having a gravestone of someone who died in the late 2010s at least.
Night in the Woods was absolutely fucking amazing, was as far from as toy as you could get, and also had a MC that was more often than not quite unlikeable. Dude needs to get over it, nobody wants to read his shitty prose and dialogue for hours on end.
Gris looks amazing.
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.
