🍑🌙 | yume nikki

yume nikki

growing up in the 90’s/00’s and being a fan of JRPGs, I would’ve been remiss had I not ever heard of or played with RPGMaker (called RPGツクール (tsuku-ru) in Japanese). I remember downloading Don Miguel’s English translation of RPGMaker2000 and 2003 and playing with them, trying to make my own game for much of my time in middle school in the 90’s & 00’s.

I never ended up finishing any video games myself, but due to my exposure to this small but burgeoning community of English-speaking RPGMaker enthusiasts, I started playing a ton of homemade/doujin games made in RPGMaker.

By far, the one that made the greatest impression on me has to be a game called Yume Nikki, which translates to “Dream Diary,” an ‘exploration-based rpg’ by Kikiyama, an enigmatic Japanese creator of this even more enigmatic game.

Yume Nikki has you playing as a 引きこもり/shut-in named Madotsuki (窓付き), meaning ‘Window.’ Madotsuki cannot leave her room, which only contains her bed, a bookcase, a CRT television with attached game system (and only a single cartridge game, NASU, meaning ‘eggplant.’), a rug, and a desk and chair, which has her notebook, a dream diary on it, which you use to save.

The game seems at first, very limited, as you are unable to leave Madotsuki’s room. The actual gameplay comes from sleeping, and delving into Madotsuki’s dreams to explore.

Ostensibly, the ‘goal’ of the game is to obtain 24 ‘effects,’ which can be placed in the nexus, the room outside of Madotsuki’s room that you can only enter in her dreams, as eggs. Most of these ‘effects’ serve no purpose and are primarily cosmetic, but a couple of them are used for gaining access to other dream worlds. Once the 24 effects have been obtained and deposited in the nexus outside of madotsuki’s room in her dreams, the ending of the game can be viewed.

I won’t go into detail or spoil the ending in case you are interested and want to try the game for yourself (which is available in English at Uboachan, by clicking on the left panel where it says ‘Download Links,’ or for free on Steam), but this game was so surreal and strange to me that it left me absolutely transfixed and obsessed by the time I had experienced it in full. It’s definitely worth your time if you’re interested in surreal art like I am…

It’s worth noting that there is an additional ‘remake’ of Yume Nikki in 3D, called ‘YUMENIKKI -DREAM DIARY-‘ (available on Steam), though it is worth noting that it was developed without Kikiyama and therefore contains some differences. If you play through the original and enjoy it, then the 3D remake is a love letter (in my opinion) and worth experiencing, but I definitely wouldn’t play the 3D remake first, since I am a purist and it is my opinion that you should experience the game as it was intended first, then play any fangames or remakes.

Speaking of fangames, if you end up enjoying Yume Nikki, it has a ton of fangames, detailed in the Yume Wiki. Some of the more popular ones you may have heard of include: Yume 2kki (the very first yume nikki fangame), .flow (pronounced ‘dot flow’), Ultra Violet, and the recently-developed online fangame called Collective Unconscious, which is multiplayer.

Fangames are not the only things the original Yume Nikki game have inspired, there are plenty of popular modern indie games that have seen inspiration from it, among them the first game in the LISA series (you may be more familiar with its sequel, LISA: the Painful), Doki Doki Literature Club! and even toby fox’s Undertale.

I hope that this propaganda piece has inspired you to give the original Yume Nikki game a try, as it is one of my favorite games of all time and is very near and dear to my heart! Happy gaming~!

published: 2024.12.28
by mana