Yandere Simulator

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Yandere Simulator

Legends say that he is still coding.

Genre:	Stealth Action
Platforms:	Microsoft Windows
Release Date:	Debug build April 2014 Demo build August 31, 2020 Full version TBA (originally 2019)
Game Engine:	Unity
Developer:	Alexander Mahan (aka EvaXephon or YandereDev)
Made in:	United States

"WARNING! This game contains bullying, kidnapping, torture, murder, suicide, graphic violence, partial nudity, kittens, raw sewage, cooked sewage, microwave-ready sewage, true nightmares, eldritch monstrosities, bald assassins, DK Mode, fake tans, Titans, murderous ice fairies, impossibly-strong punches, genocide crusades, spooky scary skeletons, STANDING ON THE EDGE, zombies, vampires, succubi, lewd manga, busty pink-haired schoolgirls, game-breaking bugs, an over-worked programmer, and much worse."
— The game's former warning screen

Yandere Simulator is a work-in-progress stealth action game made by Alexander Mahan (also known as EvaXephon or YandereDev) in conjunction with volunteers for the game. The game was firstly released as "debug build" in April 2014. Originally, the game was slated to be released in 2019, but there is currently no deadline as of 2020.

A prototype demo was released on August 31, 2020, and while it is possible to win the game, only one of the ten rivals has been implemented.

Plot

The game revolves around a schoolgirl named Ayano Aishi (in the game just referred to as Yandere-chan, or Yan Chan), who has never felt emotions during her childhood and pretended to be a normal girl. During the first day of her second year at high school, she meets Taro Yamada, who she falls in love with after finally experiencing the feeling of true emotions. That same day, Ayano notices a girl hanging out with Taro and finds out that she was planning to confess her love towards him next Friday. At the risk of losing her "Senpai", she has to eliminate ten "Rivals", Taro's possible love interests and obstacles that will prevent him from getting into a relationship, over the course of ten weeks.

Why It Sucks

While there is a way to win the game as of August 31, 2020, there is no way to complete the full storyline. This is because only one of the rivals has been implemented after six years and the game ends after she is eliminated.
- As of December 22, 2020 after you've beaten the first week, you can unlock the Amai Challenge where you can eliminate the second rival Amai, but you have to dispose of her dead body without alarming anyone which can be frustrating.
- Worth noting is that the rivals are just the base model for female students with wackier hairstyles.
- As of the May 6th, 2020 build, there is an alternate "genocide" ending. However, it can barely be considered rewarding or an actual ending at all as it makes the game incredibly short. All you have to do is kill everyone in the school (without using cheats) and beat the game on the first day.
- It also doesn't feel satisfying to kill a majority of the rivals as they haven't done anything particularly wrong to deserve killing off other than liking senpai. Compare this to Hitman where you kill people who have committed terrible crimes that upon killing, felt satisfying as it feels like you just made the world a better place through your action (and is actually fun).
The game was originally programmed in JavaScript. This caused numerous amounts of bugs and glitches, as well as extremely low framerates.
- Now mostly fixed as of July 2017 - the code has been ported to C# and Unity 4 was updated to Unity 5, which is far cleaner and neater (though Mahan didn't do it). However, the bugs and glitches remain mostly because of BQ #7.
In general, the game doesn't know what it wants to be; sometimes a sandbox game and sometimes an actual stealth game. Not helping is BQ #9.
- Contrary to the typical stealth game with big areas to explore or locations built around one objective, the entire storyline of Yandere Simulator takes place in the school area, with the player's home acting as a sort of hub and the road to the school as a pointless bicycle mini-game.
  - As of October 2019, there is a street that the player can go to, but it only contains shops and NPCs.
- Combat only exists in the form of a quick time event and only against the delinquents or when defending against an apprehension from students and teachers.
- The game lets you do tasks like wiping off the blood with a mop which can be considered mundane, especially in the context of a stealth game.
- Instead of fleshed out linear paths for the player to take, there are half-baked elimination methods. Since they are all meant to be equally difficult there is no real benefit of choosing one over the other.
The steps required for a successful elimination are convoluted and/or extremely specific. Without looking up the YandereDev YouTube channel or the game's fan wiki, it's hard to guess the required steps.
- One way to obtain such information in-game is by getting the instructions from Info-chan, but it requires you to pay with panty shots.
- You also don't have the freedom to play how you want as you HAVE to use the elimination methods to kill the rivals. As evident in BQ #8 and #9.
The game attempts to combine the stealth of the Hitman series and social mechanics of the Persona series, which doesn't work since one contradicts the other. Hitman is stealth-focused and barely has a story since it's primarily focused on gameplay and killing people who have done atrocious things. The Persona series, on the other hand, is a turn-base RPG mixed with social mechanics where you can hang out with characters in the story and expand more on their personality, play mini-games, get a part-time job, etcetera.
Ayano Aishi, the main character of the game, doesn't really follow the definition of a "yandere". A "yandere" is someone who appears sweet and caring on the outside, but cruel and menacing to whoever poses a threat to them and their love interest. Her official backstory says that she is empty, emotionless and did not appear to show compassion for others, which makes her closer to that of a "kuudere".
Yandere Simulator suffers from extremely poor optimization. This is due to the game's coding and assets with unnecessary amounts of polygons, which is riddled with beginner mistakes such as overuse of "else ifs" and using way too many code lines in the Update procedure, which is a method that updates every frame. This leads to the FPS dropping from 60 to 20 just by turning on the shadows. It doesn't help that its creator sees nothing wrong with it calling everyone who report this problem, "children with a cheap laptop". In fact, the game uses over 3 GB of VRAM with minimum details. The game's optimization is so bad that it makes GTA IV's optimization look as good as its sequel's.
There are a number of video options that don't work right such as bloom, which is way too strong and is blinding, or other video quality options like 1080p, which will blur the characters you talk to. It was pointed out by Kappa Kaiju that this might be because these issues don't affect Yandev's playstyle so he doesn't care to fix it.
- For example, he showed there's a glitch where when going into a menu on keyboard that the button prompts for an Xbox controller will flash and that the game has no issues with running at 720p indicating that Yandev doesn't see these issues (or doesn't care about them) because he plays the game at 720p and with a controller.
Many things that could be considered rewarding because you did something smart keeps getting removed because Yandev sees it as an exploit.
- For example, YouTuber Razzbowski, came up with the idea to kill Osana by filling a pan with gasoline and put it above a doorway to drop on Osana and then put a candle in front of her, which in turn burns her to death. YandereDev saw this and "fixed" it by having Osana smell gasoline and then open the door without going through, which ruins a part of the gameplay and doesn't make any sense.
- The burning elimination has become more tedious due to Yandev removing matches from the game to make it more difficult to burn your rivals.
Since 2019, Yandere Simulator qualifies as being in Development Hell. The game has been in development since 2014, and even was initially slated to be released in 2019, but this was later changed to be "when it's ready". One of the reasons for the game being in development hell is arguably its scale; with the scale increased on a constant basis, work on the game's first rival was halted. Yandev intends on collecting the sufficient funds for the game only after Osana is completed. Without the money to hire professionals that create assets for the game, he currently has to rely on his volunteers. A demo build was released on August 31, 2020 with Osana implemented, but the full game has yet to be completed.
- In an interesting turn of event, after YanDev's assets were leaked in late June 2020, an indie programmer, DrApeis, created Love Letter, a "recreated" version of Yandere Simulator which solved the aforementioned game's optimization problem and glitches in only 2 weeks.
Yandere Simulator suffers from feature creep with each build, making the game unstable, as there's lots of content that doesn't ultimately affect the game. A good example is the easter egg game Magical Girl Pretty Miyuki, which despite being an easter egg has its own plot and character arcs.
The overall fact that players must kill students at a school comes off as rather tasteless and taboo. Also, considering them being underage doesn't help it either. This is also one of the reasons why this game was banned on Twitch.
Lots of inaccuracies. For instance, as of an August 2019 update, a new currency feature was added, but for some reason it uses US dollars despite the game taking place in Japan, which uses yen. Some of the names of characters are inaccurate and at times bad like the Nurse, Nasu Kankoshi, which is spelled wrong (it should be spelled Nāsu Kangoshi as Nasu means eggplant in Japanese) or Yui Rio, which are two first names and are the two most popular names for female babies in Japan. The school uniforms are wrong as most are wearing middle school uniforms instead of high school uniforms. While this could be a technical limitation, it could just as easily be laziness.
- It's also weird how this game really wants be primarily Japanese and focus on things relating to Japanese culture, customs, and ways of life, despite coming from a developer who is neither Japanese nor seems to understand Japanese culture outside of anime.
The game is an asset flip.
- All character models are modified versions of existing models from the Unity Store. A notable example is Ayano's model, which is actually a recolored version of the Aoi Character Pack found in the Unity Store^[1].
- YandereDev stole the grass textures and the protagonist's room from a person named Doug Clayton. According to Clayton, who asked him to remove it from the game in vain, he "did a poor job at removing the watermark". Eventually, it was removed from the game.
- From older builds of the game, the school models are used from the anime K-On! and Persona 4.
- In one alpha build, the game stole the OST, A Stranger I Remain from the Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance soundtrack. However, it was removed due to copyright issues.
- Most of these stolen assets were mismatched together without proper optimization, as evidenced by the fact that the largest asset file in the game is a model file for a toothbrush, bucket, knife and even a poster.
The "panty shot" mechanic is quite tasteless. Until mid-2019, it was the only way to get Info-chan to give you a favor.
- Now averted with information bugs, which are more valuable.
Some of the rivals are very questionable.
- Mida Rana is a substitute teacher whose hobby is seducing schoolboys. This is creepy and disgusting for a rival, as teachers would never seduce their students in real life as it could get them fired or arrested for pedophilia. Not to mention, her official artwork is heavily oversexualized.
- Muja Kina, the substitute nurse is also an adult rival in love with a student. Again, school staff members are not allowed to be in love with students. In the real world, Kina would face similar charges as Rana would.
When hackers got into YandereDev's accounts, they found out that there is a menu for nudity.
- Nude textures were discovered by dataminers. They didn't contain any explicit features and they were corrupted, but they existed in the game.

Redeeming Qualities

The intro in the demo looks cool.
This game is an example of what NOT to do if you plan to develop any indie game.

Reception

Despite the game's currently mixed to very negative reception, it has become one of the most anticipated indie games to this date.

Kappa Kaiju gave the game a 2/10 (so far), criticizing how hand-holdy it is, how buggy, the lack of freedom, and went on to say that YandereDev seems to not understand the mechanics that he's derived from the Hitman franchise. He even stated how it appears that YandereDev seems to only fix certain optimization and video issues if it affects how he plays the game. (See BQ #8)

FPS Diesel went on to criticize lack of reasonable motivation for killing Osana (See BQ #1) and lack of an interesting story to get players excited for future updates.