I have already played yume nikki (as you already know), but I won't be putting it on S tier.Reyalp51 wrote:
you will put yume nikki in s tier
Yume nikki is a narrative exploration game made in RPGMaker about a girl that just dreams weird shit. The gameplay just consists of you walking around and seeing stuff. No combat, no lose condition, no real goal, just explore.
This is a game that challenges the conventional idea of quality in the videogame industry, i'm sure most of you have seen these type of review at some point of your life
In order for something to be good, it must check a certain ammount of boxes, this plays into certain ideas that are baked into our understanding of games. For a game to be good, first, it must be fun, because "if it's not fun, why bother", it must have an engaging gameplay loop, but it should also probably have a good OST and graphics!, yume nikki is a game that doesn't check any of those boxes, yet is good regardless.
This is often shocking for a lot of people experiencing yume nikki (or games like this), for the first time, the idea that a game like this should not be possible. This is because that way of seeing media is heavily missguided, IMO, it just needs to feel like it's worth it, it doesn't matter how it achieves this, but you must be glad to have experienced what it had to offer. Sometimes we play games that we know are bad, because the experience of playing said bad game is worth it
What yume nikki has to offer is just a really unique experience (specially for it's time), and a very psychological one at that. By exploring and watching the dreams of this person, in a way we are exploring their subconcious, however, everything is too ambiguous to actually say anything concrete. The actual plot of the game, or the actual meaning of the dreams (if they have any), is all left to the players interpretation.
The plot of the game depends on context. Everything can mean anything, yume nikki can be about mcdonalds if you set your mind to it. Thing is, the community that has currently adopted this, have this bias that in order to really appreciate a certain piece of media, it's important to know every small detail of it. Playing the game is not enough, you must see every single detail, even the cut content, everything has to have some sort of meaning, you must watch the iceberg on it. It's inconceivable that anything may just not have any real meaning behind it, you know, maybe the person just liked making prison games
My current interpretation of yume nikki is that this was just kikiyama's sandbox. Yume nikki isn't an extremely delicately crafted horror masterpiece. I just see it as kikiyama trying out stuff, maybe displaying some of their own dreams, or at least versions of it, and it just so happens that it can be interpreted as a delicately crafted horror masterpiece
The most interesting part of yume nikki for me is the actual legacy it has. While yume nikki didn't do anything too special by itself, it did create a blueprint on how to depict someones psyche in a videogame, so other videogame took those methods and concepts and mixed it with some other stuff to create really cool stuff
For example, lisa the first (yeah I ended up playing it) is a yume nikki fangame where it uses those elements to show how lisa percieved her father. Omori has a yume nikki like section (red space) to show the fucked up state of the protagonist, picayune dreams is a survivors like game where the plot is shown by weird flashbacks told in a yume nikki format, copper odyssey just uses the confusion aspect of yume nikki ti create a REALLY confusing feeling RPG
Yume nikki isn't as much as game, but a tool for people to create (better) games, and while I appreciate the game for actually creating it, I much prefeer the games that takes yume nikki concept and run with it.
Placed in A tier because games don't exist in a vacuum and things like bias and context matters (if not it would be lower).
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still reading house of leaves, pretty good