This is primarily a review for YIIK I.V, as someone who experienced the older versions of the game secondhand.

YIIK, at it's core, is a pretty misunderstood game. People compared it to Earthbound, went in expecting a quirky Earthbound style story, and got mad when it was really a very introspective story told to you by a chronic liar of a narrator that expects you to scrutinize everything told to you, and, in truth, does not have a happy ending, despite Alex's own insistence. In my eyes, the battle system was the game's biggest fault. The game markets itself as "A Postmodern RPG", so it is vital to approach it from a postmodern lens, or the story it tries to tell will be practically invisible to you.

YIIK I.V. is a total overhaul of the game. The aesthetics are made stronger, there are now animated cutscenes, it's made very clear that Alex's monologuing is intended to be kind of annoying, some characters get more scenes to make them feel much more distinct, and the battle system has been 100% redone into a very unique and enjoyable system. These don't make the game perfect by any means, but they would, in my eyes, bump what was a 5/10 to about a 7/10. The story is a bit easier to parse, battles aren't a slog, and overall it's a great little package.

What I, and many other people likely weren't expecting, was the additional content after you finish the story. The original primary ending has been completely rewritten, leading into a segment that I will be very sparse on details for, (although I will in a spoilered comment on this review, to prevent people from accidentally spoiling themselves), but said content felt challenging, fun, and gives enough additional story for me to bump YIIK I.V. to an 8.5/10. Not a perfect game by any means, but one I can say I did very much enjoy.

This is a review of the I.V update of YIIK and contains spoilers.

The update adds hours of new story via new dialogue and updating old static talking scenes with flashier cutscenes. This has the effect of bogging down an already terribly paced, meandering narrative with even more slow, plodding, pointless scenes in a story where the big twist is that everything was a lie told to the protagonist to manipulate him.
There's an even bigger twist now though! After finishing the original story and choosing the correct answer after the credits you unlock a new game plus. But this new game plus is actually a sequel to the original story. So how is this new story? Its a drawn out meta narrative that just reads like the developers being REALLY mad that people had the gall to criticize YIIK. "Why are things one way rather than the way I'd prefer" was a real thing I had to read, on a sign detailing that criticism is the original sin.

There are new segments in which you play as a nameless girl in the original plot, and as Cyrille in YIIK 2. Both of these boil down to boring walk to A to get item X so you can walk to B and open door Y. It only serves to pad out playtime. I used to be of the opinion that ACKK's next game should be a walking simulator because I think that their striking visuals were just about the only thing that YIIK had going for it at times. After having the monkey's paw curl a finger on me for that thought I no longer believe this.

The new combat system has interesting ideas. You can equip 3 cards per party member that apply passive effects, or that can be sacrificed for the battle to pull off an effect. There's a good number of cards too so you have a lot of options for build variety. Cards act as a barrier for your health and have to be defeated before direct damage can be done. When all your cards are gone and you've been hit, you will start to bleed out. This makes combat into a race to blast through the enemy's cards and kill them ASAP before they do the same to you. Unfortunately, the balancing of these systems is completely off and it soon becomes apparent that you can ignore almost everything and just mash normal attacks until battles are over. I guess this is still a vast improvement over the old system as terrible combat that's fast is still preferable to terrible combat that's slow
I actually even tried to take the final boss of the new chapter seriously, trying to actually use my characters abilities. He responded to this by spamming a party wide attack that reduced everyone's HP to 1, causing me to lose the fight. I squared back up against him and did nothing but normal attacks and using a healing item the one time my HP got low and he never once used that attack, leading me to believe it was retaliation for using my specials. The final boss was punishing me for trying to engage with the combat system.

This will come off as extremely harsh, but considering ACKKs response to criticism of the original was to update the story and make it about how criticism is sin I don't exactly care. This update was a waste of time. The past years and months spent on this could have gone towards the development of a new game that actually had a chance of success. You cannot fix YIIK's public perception. You are not No Man's Sky. You are not Cyberpunk 2077. You need to let YIIK go.

I love watching this hipster loser gaslight me. He's so pathetic, I love him.

a game about people trapped in a spiral of nostalgia, obsession, and regret.

tl;dr intentionally painful narration and layers of obfuscation hide a genuinely very interesting metanarrative about rejecting reality and constructing a more convenient internal narrative.

Yiik is a fascinating product in so many ways, but I’m gonna focus on the narrative here because it’s by far one of the most scrutinized parts of this game for both valid and uncharitable reasons. If someone sees this with preconceived notions about the game (like I had going in), one thing needs to be made starkly clear.

Alex is quite possibly one of the most unreliable narrators in fiction.

This story should be analyzed from the same lens as, for example, American Psycho, where you need to decipher what is real and what isn’t. The story you are witnessing is NOT Alex’s adventure to track down a missing girl from interdimensional aliens, neither is it about tracking down an album that doesn’t exist, nor about saving the world. If you scrutinize Alex’s endless rambling, there are constant and clear contradictions in his perception of reality. Late in the game, Alex interprets some of these glaring ones as “reality breaking down” because the narrative he is trying to push about his circumstances is falling apart.

I would argue this game is well aware of the ways the writing style is grating and flawed; this, like Fear and Hunger’s anti-player gameplay design, approaches writing from the angle that the horrible experience of listening to Alex go on and on about meaningless drivel is part of the story it is constructing. Alex is a vapid, egotistical person, and experiencing the game from his perspective pushes that onto you. I won’t deny it can be frustrating and annoying to read his seemingly endless thoughts, but I can’t help but feel this is intentional. I’m not arguing this game is perfect. Even if the experience is intentionally painful at times, that doesn’t make it less painful to go through.

The new content from I.V. really helps clarify a lot of what’s really going on here for those (like me) who took the game’s events at face value and saw it as a pretentious and meaningless sequence of unrelated events. The storytelling really shines through when you’re no longer playing as Alex and get to interpret things without him going off every five seconds. It takes a more abstract approach to telling the story that, despite being hidden under layers of symbolism, ironically comes off as more easily interpretable than the base game’s content (due to the illusion of reality from Alex’s telling of the story).
I’ve seen people argue that “the new story content is a petty reaction to criticism about the original game”. In response, I wanna say that I can understand how this interpretation exists (notably, it refers to the act of criticism as a sin), but this ignores the context under which “criticism” is being referred to. I see it as making much more sense to interpret this as Alex’s criticism and rejection of objective reality rather than his skewed perspective ultimately causing him and others more harm than good. The base game is, in truth, Alex’s critique of reality to resemble more closely his ideal. Michael shouldn’t be his older sister’s boyfriend who just tolerated him, he should be his younger childhood best friend! Vella shouldn’t be a girl who never had any interest in him, she should be his soulmate! This reading (which seems supported by comments made by the writer) fits the themes of the story much better than a reductive “criticism = bad” view.

What I’m trying to say here is if you are willing to experience a game that can be painful and unsatisfying to go through at times with a more open lens, you’ll be able to decipher the truth behind Alex’s reality rather than what he wants you to see. Beneath those layers of deception, there is a fundamentally interesting story going on.

Oh yeah and the new gameplay is pretty fun (albeit a bit too easy), and the music goes hard. Visuals are really neat too.

they did it... it's piik...

absolute games

It's PIIK...

Jokes aside, I slept on this game when it initially released. Saw all the backlash it got and decided that it probably wasn't for me. Then I get a friend poking me a couple months ago to try out the demo they put out for I.V, Nameless Psychosis and I was hooked. The combat system, the weird-ass visuals and story, the music... I found myself actually excited to play YIIK. And when the real deal came out, I can safely say that the enjoyment I got out of the demo has since continued.

Now, that being said, even with YIIK I.V changing a bunch of things from the base game, at the end of the day it's still YIIK. If you've got hang ups about the game for whatever reason like it being pretentious as all hell or the story being incomprehensible, that has not changed. While I personally enjoy that kind of thing, it is definitely not for everyone.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to continue enjoying this intravenously.

claudio

I actually kind of liked this game BEFORE the I.V update. It was pretentious and klunky, sure, but there was kind of a dorky charm to it. This new update is "SENSORY OVERLOAD: THE GAME." Too much stuff going on, things constantly being thrown at the player, and so overpolished that it no longer feels like a lost Dreamcast game as originally intended. I wish there was a way to play the old version of it again. This is awful.