Regrettably, I’m back to playing YIIK: A Postmodern RPG. In this part we are arbitrarily level gated from progressing the story. Which makes you wonder: hey, you fought a whole bunch of battles, why haven’t you leveled up yet? Well, the answer is that YIIK decided to go for a unique way of leveling up.

Vella – the only main character that I don’t hate in any way, so far – introduces our boys to the Mind Dungeon to get swole, and it is perhaps one of the worst design decisions I’ve ever encountered in a game. You know, some people say that Final Fantasy II is a bad game because its idea of leveling up stats seemed nonsensical, but YIIK just does not respect your time.

You have to go to one specific place to level up anything and while it’s easily accessible at save points, having it be in a separate place is nonsense in the first place. Then there’s the fact that to allocate points, you have to individually go into doors, choose the stat you want and then go back in a second time to lock the choice in. Of course, you can save time by talking to the crow, but that means he gets to choose what stats you get, so if you have a specific build in mind, well, tough luck.

Why not just… i don’t know… level up after battles? Have a stat allocation screen that isn’t arbitrarily tied to a whole different location? In fact, why not just have normal stat allocation screens, because I’m sorry to backseat game developer, but I’m pretty sure just having a screen pop up after leveling up in a normal way or accessing it through a menu is way less work than constructing a whole separate location in the game.

As soon as I get to the Mind Dungeon, just skip to 21:00 and enjoy some nice music for a bit. I’ll probably just cut out future Mind Dungeon visits in the future and show stat changes afterward.

God. I’m sincerely baffled that anyone on the team thought this was a good idea.

Anyway, we also do some other minor stuff and finally proceed with the plot, in which Alex says some more questionable shit. Perish. We’ll check out Wind Town next time.