okay well apparently i'll find an answer to what's going on in my dreams here but while i'm waiting for an epiphany i guess we can talk about the origins of rpg maker horror to really understand the origins of rpg maker horror we have to take a look at where many of these original games get their inspiration earthbound released in NUMBER_TOKEN earthbound really inspired so many of the conventions of rpg maker horror as well as indie rpgs in general i won't go really far into it as i'm not really an earthbound expert but the use of self-aware meta commentary as well as dark themes and surreal scary imagery not the least of which being the iconic final boss gigas i mean look at that thing but again i don't want to linger here because although the influence of earthbound is undeniable we've got a lot of ground to cover what rpg maker really did specifically very early on is allow artists to make games it's essentially an all-in-one game engine that doesn't require any programming knowledge being one of the earliest intro level game engines to do this it drew the less technically proficient but art driven developers and allowed them to focus on the art and story this is going to be very important later on but for now let's move on to the real nexus point of rpg maker horror corpse party i'd say it's pretty clear that the first real rpg maker horror game was corpse party initially released in NUMBER_TOKEN the game series has become a phenomenon and its influence in many different more modern rpg maker horror games is clear a group of high school students get stuck in a cursed schoolhouse there are many ways to die and even more ways for the other characters to get killed since then the game has spread into countless other games novels spin-offs and films again while this game is really important to the origins of rpg maker horror games i want to prioritize time here and talk about the big one yume nikki yumeniki translates to dream journal and that's exactly what the game is about you play as matatsuki and explore her dreams that's the main goal of the game while not explicitly a horror game it introduces a lot that other games would take a lot of notes from but first let's just talk about nyumeniki on its own the game is a surreal trip into disjointed imagery and strange faces the dream worlds you access can get increasingly convoluted falling further into dreams within dreams and finding things from mildly amusing to downright scary there's not really a traditional narrative being told instead just an exploration of stranger and stranger dream areas the only real goal you have is to collect NUMBER_TOKEN effects that give matatsuki different effects from goofy and not really useful to things that allow matatsuki to actually progress into new areas this surrealist style is the first thing that yume niku really did to inspire the genre again earthbound did some of this as well and yume nikki is clearly inspired by earthbound but yumeniki took it full force and as we talk about the different games that came later you'll see that NUMBER_TOKEN of these games are in some way tied directly to either yume niki or corp's party but there is another
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