Additional Thoughts

This review is FIVE HOURS long and you expect me to have MORE to say about it??

I pretty much refuse to watch this video, because I'm sure that watching it will only make me wish that I could go back and change it. I don't think that it's a bad review where it counts (the script & research are pretty airtight) but there are a lot of aspects of making videos that I didn't understand when I made this one. This video was my first time wearing most of the hats I wore for it (video editor, script writer, voiceover... person) and I think it shows. I made a lot of decisions early on (like having the title of each chapter be at the bottom of the screen constantly) that I probably should have been more flexible on, but at the end of the day, I did basically make exactly what I had in mind while I was writing the script.

I started thinking about making a stupid video on Yume Nikki probably around 2019; I told my longtime friend and resident villain "Charlie Thall" that I could write like a hundred page essay about Yume Nikki, and he was apathetic enough to the idea that I basically did it just to spite him. Over time, I decided to go from a standard review to a documentary-style, ultimate video on everything related to the game, with bits of my personal feelings on it scattered throughout.

My memory is so apocalyptically bad that I've already forgotten most of my time working on this review, but a few stages of it do stand out. I remember when I spent literally two weeks straight digging through 2channel with a scratchpad of links, and especially the moment when I found Kikiyama's earlier Music E-Club archives (it was in ~January 2022). I remember sitting in my dorm in the summer when I decided I just needed to grind out the final few sections so that I could finally be done with the script. I remember going to the free studio at my university in the fall where I would take my shoes off to reduce background noise and try to cram as much voiceover as I could into my two hour timeslot. I remember setting my monitor on a folding table in my bedroom right after I graduated college and spending all day, every day trying to edit another 10-20 minutes of the video. Towards the end, I could click any random point in the voiceover and recite whatever paragraph I was on from memory - I literally had the entire script seared into my brain.

Charlie absolutely killed the thumbnail for this video. We went back and forth a bit and he was the one that decided to do the scene with the Toriningen in the mall. I love that, for all of the obvious iconic scenes that every other review apes for their thumbnails (kyuu-kyuu, uboa, etc.), we picked something slightly innocuous but also just so densely atmospheric & representative of the game as a whole. It's simple but iconic, it represents his style well while still feeling true to the game, it was a true lightning-in-a-bottle moment all things considered. I drew the Madotsuki avatar for the video, and in my defense, I'm left-handed and I had to draw this shit with a right-handed mouse. It wasn't until Heisei Pistol Show that I started circumventing this by drawing on paper with my left hand, taking a picture of the drawing, and then digitally re-creating it based on the picture.

The chapter names in this video are, occasionally, references. Dreaming in a Dream is obviously a reference to Bladee, Everything In Its Right Place is the opening track of Radiohead's Kid A. Behind There Somewhere is the name of a Gobou video, which used to be the most popular video about Yume Nikki on the internet, but has since been overtaken by someone who stole one of Gobou's videos to use as a gif for a beat they made and completely ridiculously turned it into a micro-TikTok-trend. Oh well.

All in all, it was fun to work on this video, and I realistically wasn't going to spend my time doing anything more productive. Before I was working on this, I had a period where I would make like 2 beats a day fairly consistently for over a year - so the OST for this video is almost all salvaged projects from that time. I kinda wish I had put more thought into the OST, since I'm really proud of the way the Shenmue and Heisei Pistol Show OSTs turned out (both all original). I think that when you're working on a project this large, everything is a game of compromise. I let myself get away with doing a lot of opulent, ridiculous, time-expensive things for this review, and if I didn't stop myself, I'd probably still be working on it today in 2024. It wouldn't have existed if I didn't make it, but I made it, so it exists.

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