Madotsuki (pictured to the right) is in a rather bad situation. Very bad.

No, she’s not surrounded by aliens. She’s not pitted in a deathmatch against 12 other opponents. Nor any other modern mainstream video game template of ‘main character in a strange predicament’. It’s a very real danger that potentially exists within our real lives. Madotsuki is stuck at the top of a high rise apartment. Stuck may – and probably is – subjective to us because trying to proceed through the front door gives us only one reaction: Madotsuki absolutely refuses to go outside.

The plain room. A scarce balcony. An old television. A very minimal room. The most that the standard city civilian can associate with are her filled bookshelves, a bed, a desk, and a diary. Items that most of us can imagine that might belong to a young woman. All you can do, and thus she as well, is heavily restricted to the aforementioned items. And it’s the bed where it all begins.

… No, not THAT you pervert. [doujins plz.]

The game is aptly titled Dream Diary (Yume Nikki). So what do we see in Madotsuki’s dreams? Sometimes it is a sterile environment. Cold concrete, and trimmed bushes lining a pathway. Where does it lead? A better question to ask here is, what kind of destination do you wish it wasn’t? What do you not desire to see? The game already seems to place us at a very meta level of understanding of this dream world. Yet, it may be how Madotsuki views her world? As if she’s playing with her own life? Was the FamiCom in the room an indication of the sole source of entertainment? Perhaps it’s better to view it as an outlet. But the game that you play on it is rather bleak itself.

Gameplay is a simple mechanic of interact with.. whatever is able to respond to you. And you will also end up gathering effects to use. Some were nifty. Some were pointless. Some were so useful that I’d be damned if there were people who managed without them. Some effects ended up with rather unpleasant reactions from nearby NPCs. These unpleasant reactions weren’t the typical “oh noes i must keel u nao” NPC scripts. A good example is the cat effect. Cat ears and tail sprout from Madotsuki. One of its abilities is drawing NPCs towards her. Often this is actually useful for moving creatures out of the way, or if you just wanted to toy around with the denizens of Madotsuki’s dream world. I don’t think I expected the effect to work on the dead corpse of a man, laying in his own blood, that was situated in the middle of a street. I left the area.

I might have been extremely lucky playing this game. In my opinion, this luck almost cost me my mind. I can’t tell if I’m a pansy. It’s not hard for well placed music to get me to cry, I’m sensitive to music that follows a formula correctly.  There are a handful of people on the internet who didn’t have to work so hard for what happened to me..

I encountered Uboa the very first time I turned off the lights. No, I didn’t get that movie cheap trill type of shock. But, at the time I was heavily invested into the game. The minimalistic music of the game put me in a rather relaxed state. Armed with that, I experienced Uboa.

Uboa creeped me out.

Uboa. It’s not scary. Eerie, but not scary. In retrospect.. I was wondering why I was so creeped out. To those who didn’t have the same reaction, I’ll just say this. Too bad. But I don’t think it’s a desirable reaction. Some people love that heightened sensitivity to eerie atmosphere. We love those small visual and audio details – when added up together, make or break the mood. I’d like to wager at this point it’s a very specific category of stimulus that is miles different from being scared. The Uboa encounter won’t shock you. It might startle you, but you would only understand me [and others] if you set yourself up like we did. All I did was stare at Uboa for a good minute. It was quite unsettling.

Just to be sure if you’re read up to here, you have played AND completed this game. With that in the clear, the ending was something prominently placed in view at the zenith of this dreadful adventure. A step ramp towards the edge of the building. The ending. I can’t even put it in an optimistic view as someone who is merely playing with software – with the hopes of it merely being a visual means for storytelling.

The ending is committing suicide.

You just played a wonderful game filled with obtuse art. Repulsive art. Funny art. Drab art. And the conclusion to this adventure is suicide. I’m not so sure what to make of it. Who knows if Kikiyama, the creator of this game, has been creating this game with no ulterior motive of grand emotional twisting. I’ll have none of that. I was saddened by the fact that our heroine, despite options that may have existed, can only see such a demise as an exit.

It’s a heart wrenching conclusion. For the standard gamer, it’ll be a disappointment. Let the over-analysis come afterward. Games like Yume Nikki require a bit of emotion investment. No desire to do such a thing will yield you with zero results, and most likely the Badge of Faggotry. It’s also not a stretch to admit that you have to force yourself to enjoy the artsy aspect of it all. It’s not an automatic thing.

Yume Nikki approaches the theme and concept from a chosen angle that worked. We are not often given a character who is so engrossed in the depths of the mind that they externally manifest themselves. It normalizes Madotsuki in this case. We view her as someone who’s being affected from the outside, which may as well be false. If we were observers looking at Madotsuki from the perspective of those who have seen her before what transpires in the game, we might simply see a deranged girl, too oblivious to her surroundings.

I can only arrive to the idea that Madotsuki’s journey into her dreams resembles gathering all of her fears and whatever external maddening factors, which leads to her eventual isolation from humanity. I interpreted it as Madotsuki’s method of coping with the horrors of real life. Collecting all the emotions and fears she had while exploring her mind. It’s a very physical manifestation for her, which probably enabled her to be able to do anything about it. Either that, or it was showing everything up to the point that she snaps.

One could fancy the notion that she really didn’t die. How else would that ramp be there? But even branching ideas from that can still be depressing.

Damn. It was depressing writing this. I need something like Red Faction Guerrila to lift my spirits.

-maserbeam