/jp/ - Otaku Culture

It's nice to see the thread is still up.
I am the user who finally finished the original game after many years without a single guide, and now I am getting progressively deeper into Yume 2kki. But after a few weeks in, I have realized I am starting to have a hard time with this game, because I just don’t know how you are supposed to enjoy it.
For example, the game is supposed to be played alone, as all YN games are. I’d say the individual experience is almost an essential component of a real Yume Nikki playthrough. Yet the online version also offers an incredibly rich experience, with the possibility to explore the territory with newfound friends, which indeed may be mandatory for some parts, since otherwise you won’t be able discover certain maps (or so I have been told), so much so I am not even sure if Yume 2kki is complete anymore without YNO.
The game is supposed to be played without a map, therefore why the original game lacked one. Getting lost on Yume Nikki is one of its main points. Yet playing without a map on Yume 2kki is akin to suicide, and so I found a program, Obsidian, to help me “cartography” the whole of Urotsuki’s dream as I go.
The game has a rich history of different developers and collaborators and finding about the whole process is a part of the whole experience. Yet any information I look up may spoil a part of the game, which should be played as blindly as possible to maintain that sense of discovery the original has (and which the successor has not only retained but also has clearly has been greatly expanded).
The game wants you to enjoy the travel, rather than the destination. Every map should be enjoyed by itself, rather than as a means for the next one. However, part of the experience is getting progressively deeper into Urotsuki’s unconscious, in fact I would say the game practically asks you to do so, and indeed some of the most mysterious bits of the game seem to happen once you are way past the point of no return and almost of recalling your path hitherto. In practice, that means I am always turn between my wish to enjoy a particular map and the need to see what lies ahead.
Further into the maps. The game is intended as a whole, hence why the maps are interconnected and, well, why it is considered a single game rather than a handful of them (which could perfectly happen given the sheer magnitude of it). Yet it is clear not only that there is clearly no interconnected narrative here (which in my opinion there wasn’t in Yume Nikki either, and wasn’t needed), but also no “overall atmosphere” to it either (which Yume Nikki absolutely had, and it was one of its defining qualities). Urotsuki’s dream landscape certainly lacks the cohesiveness of Madotsuki’s, the former of which gives me the impression of being much more mentally sound, as her dreams convey the full range of emotions rather than only mostly negative ones. Which is not bad, really, just not as gripping for a character as Madotsuki’s ambiguous angst.
Even further into the maps, the quality between the maps differs vastly, and some of them are amazing (with a few that I have found to be memorable, even better than the best Yume Nikki maps) while other are mediocre, and a few have managed to irritate me (there is one monochrome map with the constant mooing of a cow where I had to turn off the volume). What’s worse, some of the worst maps in the game could lead to some of the absolute best (I particularly remember a certain bridge which leads to a certain shrine), or vice versa, which adds to the feeling of general dissonance as a whole.
What to do with the mazes of this game? Do I painstakingly try to draw them and rack my brain trying to find whether I am in any of the 4 similar sections I already passed through ( and which one?!) or if it is a new one? Or do I just try to butthead it after mentally preparing myself to end up in the same place for at least 10 times before I find something noteworthy?
All of these questions are hard to answer because, as the consensus goes, “there is no right answer”. You decide how to play this game, and all of the aforementioned conundrums can be answered both ways depending on your preferences. Each choice has its advantages and disadvantages. It’s all about how passive and how active you want your experience to be, the pain and gain, the conscious effort and the unconscious appeal of this subgenre (probably the biggest allure of Yume Nikki for me).
Indeed, many of my doubts could apply not only to Yume 2kki, but to the entire subgenre of YN fangames. I would go so far as to say the game is proving me, and addressing the challenges it poses could lead me not only to a better knowledge, but also to the betterment, of myself. But the scope of Yume 2kki makes these issues much more apparent, and the experience of the game much more ambivalent.
Picrel is an incredible map I found yesterday.