r/yumenikki

A few years ago I had wanted to create a Yume Nikki soundfont, but a lot of the samples used were rare and not posted anywhere on the internet as far as I knew. Very recently though, I discovered a WIP Yume Nikki SF (actually on this subreddit lol) with those rare RS7000 samples! Thus, combining findings from the VGM Instrument sources discord, various online sources, and ingame sounds, I managed to compile a full soundfont :D

So, this is what I believe Yume Nikki is really about. I don’t think it’s about anything at all. I don’t think anything in it has any meaning at all. I think that Kikiyama just wanted to make a game for fun. The game came out in 2004, there’s a lot of things that point to the ‘80s, NASU resembles a Famicom game, there’s the world that resembles Mother and Zelda II, there’s a lot of stuff that shows that the game is highly based on the ‘80s, which would suggest that Kikiyama grew up in the ‘80s. This could be totally wrong because nearly nothing is known about Kikiyama, but it’s the closest clue we have. So, if they were born in, say, 1984, that would make them about 20 when they made Yume Nikki. It would make sense for someone young like that to go make a game for fun. As for some of the darker parts of Yume Nikki, like Madotsuki jumping off the building and killing herself, the weird imagery and sound effects, that dead guy in the road, all that stuff, could be that Kikiyama was trying to be edgy, I mean, this was 2004 and they’d probably be fairly young and stupid. I don’t find it that surprising that someone would put that stuff on a game. As for Kikiyama being basically radio silent now while they seem to have been a little more active (although not by much) in the past, that could be that they don’t look at Yume Nikki fondly, lots of artists don’t look on their early work fondly. Stanley Kubrick, for example, disregarded Fear and Desire (which was his first film) even though it’s generally considered a good movie. Yume Nikki is twenty years old, Kikiyama probably wouldn’t want to think about it much. As for Madotsuki being a shut-in, the game’s name literally translates to Dream Diary, why would the game go outside the room? That would be like having a cooking game but letting you go out of the kitchens and talk to all of the customers, it wouldn’t make any sense. I’m not saying it’s wrong to have these interpretations about the game, I think you can interpret any piece of media any way you want, I’m just saying what I think is probably the true answer. I could be totally wrong because of how little in known about Kikiyama, but I still would like to speak my thoughts.