AN RPG FEVER DREAM: AN INTRODUCTION TO YUME NIKKI
What is the defining feature of a video game? One straightforward answer would be interactivity. A screen speaks to the brain, and the brain is compelled to move an image across the screen.
Yume Nikki, 2004.
This screen-mind dialogue can be very simple — a game like Mario might be saying no more than “Run! Jump!” In less linear games, the voice can drop down to a whisper, influencing the player but giving them time to think. Few games have a voice that can awe like Yume Nikki, a free, independently-made game released to little fanfare in 2004. It didn’t say where to go or what to do, but with time the player was entranced, hypnotized by its ambient music and held down by the heaviness of its atmosphere. Its voice, both alien and sincere, burdened the player with mysteries that couldn’t be understood.
Yume Nikki, 2004.
There is a sense, among certain online communities, that Yume Nikki is ubiquitous; it has been typified as “cult,” “psychological horror,” and “experimental.” All of these categories betray the experience of the new player, who would probably not liken it to anything else at all. To provide an introduction to this truly avant-garde work, we will unfold the context in which it emerged, and then patchwork some analysis where that fabric runs thin.
Yume Nikki, 2004.
The prominence of Japanese innovation in video games is well-understood, on the whole; titles from Sony, Sega, and Nintendo alone might account for more than half of all game-related discussions around the world. Less understood, it would seem, is the history of independent game development in Japan.
In the 80s, Japan, like America and other affluent countries, had a young culture of nerds working at home on computer projects, some of which advanced into fairly sophisticated games.
Yuji Horii pivoted from journalist to game developer through placing in a 1983 competition held by Enix for hobby programmers working on home computers. At Enix, Horii created Dragon Quest, a game that would serve as a model for all future role-playing games, or at least those that would come to be known to the rest of the world as Japanese role-playing games, JRPGs.
Dragon Quest VI, SNES, 1995.
In the 90s, Japan maintained an insular community of small-scale game development through doujin sofuto, full games that would be sold or distributed for free at conventions like comiket. At the same time, an egalitarian current continued through projects taken on by companies in the industry, including Sony, who backed artist and musician Osamu Sato in the creation of Eastern Mind and LSD: Dream Emulator, completely unconventional video games that opened new avenues for inexperienced developers.
LSD in particular, which abandoned genre to deliver singular, unnerving experiences to the player through envisioning the chaos of dreams in novel 3D space, lit a flame in those seeking something new from video games.
LSD: Dream Emulator, PlayStation, 1996.
From somewhere between Sony and the truly independent circles of doujin sofuto came RPG Maker, a series of affordable game development software that enabled the semi-nerd to make a project that could rival that of the comiket ultra-nerds.
RPG Maker 95, PC, 1997.
Crowd buying doujinshi (self-published manga) at Comiket, 1996.
In 2004, Yume Nikki was uploaded to Vector, a website for sharing freeware games, alongside Kikiyama HP, a homepage for the game’s creator. Records from this period are hazy, as much digital content has expired; ironically outmoded magazines such as Freeware Almanac, which compiled synopses of notable new freeware games and stored download files to a CD, have supplied some of the only reliable information on the release of Yume Nikki.
Yume Nikki itself meaning “dream diary,” the game was presented with unusual simplicity, providing no apparent story and only the most minimal instruction. (It stands out in these publications among such green titles as Operation Liberate High School.) The game was periodically updated, with new download links and thin patch notes from Kikiyama until the summer of 2007, upon which a complete version of the game (“1.0”) was released and its creator returned to the void.
Yume Nikki, 2004.
Yume Nikki was created using RPG Maker. This fact would come as a surprise to players familiar with the vast sea of RPG Maker games that saturates the internet today; the software supplies an exact toolkit, from audiovisual assets to premade battle systems, to match the orthodoxy of JRPGs. The result has been an overwhelming visual and technical sameness, games that look and play like uninspired copies of Dragon Quest. Yume Nikki subverted this system entirely by featuring visually incongruent hand-drawn assets and including no dialogue, quests, or battles.
The entirety of the “gameplay” is experiential, in the sense that it relies only on the player and their unguided exploration. The manufactured thrills of an RPG game, which might involve plot and character investment, resource management, or puzzle-solving, give way to that most basic condition of the video game, the merging of player and character.
Q: Why can’t I leave the apartment? A: Try sleeping.
Q: Where should I go? A: You can go anywhere.
(An FAQ made by Kikiyama after the game’s release.)
A brief tutorial flashes on the screen for new players: go to sleep, dream, wake up. During the daytime, the player character, a pink-sweatered girl, can only move between her diary, TV, and balcony— trying to exit the apartment results in the player character shaking her head. Once asleep, the player can exit through the front door to the dream world, which presents itself as a nexus of doors, each door connecting to a new world, each world to another door.
It is probably not entirely coincidental that Yume Nikki, which was in the novel position of being originally released through the internet, would configure an arrangement so analogous to websites and hyperlinks. Some of these worlds behind doors are spacious and serene— others, claustrophobic and anxiety-inducing. With the press of a button, the player can pinch the character’s cheek, exiting the dream.
Yume Nikki, 2004.
This radical simplification of the RPG format has led some puzzled players to call the game a “walking simulator;” in other words, experimental but unambitious. Without a commercial release, there was no need to define Yume Nikki by genre— and indeed there was and is no need to define it as a game at all.
Yume Nikki, 2004.
By the summer of 2005, the game had found an intense base of players on the online textboard 2channel;* one impressed commenter, among the first to finish** playing the game, concluded that Yume Nikki was “neither game nor art, but rather a miscellany of soliloquies.”
Yume Nikki, 2004.
The centralized discussion around the game mutated into a kind of mania. All places, figures, and “events” in Yume Nikki, which were never referred to by name in-game or in any supplemental material, acquired names and were subject to all forms of theory by fans.
Through the emergence of video and image-sharing websites like Nico Nico Douga, a common language for Yume Nikki was developed. It could be said that the evolution of the internet domesticated Yume Nikki, which had intentionally left players in the dark. A mostly-unnecessary translation for Yume Nikki (little more than its menu text) arrived together with an imported virtual encyclopedia for English-speaking fans. As this global vocabulary for theories was born, the personal and subjective analysis died.
Yume Nikki, 2004.
It is important to consider that in its original released state, discussions of Yume Nikki were happening on a forum without images; the ambiguity in both referenced figures and spaces was modulated considerably by memory. (The inevitable confusion of such conversations is surely familiar to anybody who has tried to describe a dream themself.)
Yume Nikki, 2004.
As a “miscellany of soliloquies,” Yume Nikki seems to stand for something unrealized by other video games, particularly those that can be “won.” Instead of offering an escape from life, Yume Nikki provides a mirror— while this has been a goal of the novel, drama, and film, it has long been absent in games. Maybe this is because we tend to have such a visual conception of “interaction,” a ball in motion as in Pong. But what is soliloquy if not interaction?
Yume Nikki, 2004.
*It is worth pointing out that all sites ending in “-chan” derive from this influential forum, founded by Hiroyuki Nishimura in 1999. Much English-language discourse on Yume Nikki was carried out through Uboachan, an imageboard named after the icon synonymous with the game itself.
**We won’t spoil the ending for unfamiliar players— it holds a certain notoriety that matches Yume Nikki’s popular categorization as “psychological horror,” but it was very original and remains worthy of note in any review of the game. It is such a shockingly literal conclusion that it may be worth debating whether it is an intended “end” at all— without a plot to guide the player, what is the “end” of a game?
About The Author:
Toby Reynolds is writing and translating from New York, where he is from. His interests span music, film, art, fashion, and all modes of culture.
