Yogurting was a Korean Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game released in 2005.
The story was as follows: you are an Ordinary High-School Student attending either the modern Estiva Academy or the more traditional Yoitsuki Academy. One day, the student body wakes up to find that almost all the teachers are missing, there are strange penguin creatures everywhere, and monsters have infested both campuses. Worse still, every other school aside from Estiva and Yoitsuki has vanished. Even though no lessons are being taught, no-one can relax because of these events. This would come to be known as the Endless Vacation Phenomenon.
Because most of the adults have gone missing (and the rest are clueless), the Absurdly Powerful Student Council rises up to take charge and organize an investigation into the E.V.P. Meanwhile, the World Trees on both campuses have begun to resonate, opening up a portal to another dimension where a mysterious artifact known as "the antique" is said to reside. So it's time to buck up, be awesome teenage heroes, and figure out what's going on.
There are four types of weapons that you could use: Blades (swords), Gloves (fists), Mura (headphones) and Spirit (backpacks). Though you could switch between them at will, you could only master two of them; mastering a weapon gave you access to that type's special attacks, skills and passive abilities. Blades and Gloves were best for melee characters, while Mura and Spirit characters focused more on magical attacks and support.
Yogurting was notable for its extremely cute graphical style, costume designs and the ease of leveling (and, on a similar visual note, for its amazingly psychedelic, dance-heavy promotional trailers
). However, there was one very big hurdle to playing: it was only ever in Korean, Japanese or Thai and there were very few English guides available. The typical English speaker had to stumble through a lot of dialogue choices and incomprehensible menu screens when they first started playing. The Japanese client, the most popular for English speakers of the three, also barred any non-Japanese IPs from playing the game, and registering for the game in the first place was a challenge in itself for foreigners.
1UP.com awarded Yogurting second place in a "Worst Games, Best Names" article.
As one may note from the usage of the past tense in the above paragraphs, it's also a Defunct Online Video Game - the game was sunsetted in Korea and Japan in 2010. The Thai-language company and community tried to hold on and even keep the game going, but they too eventually had to shut down in March of 2011, resulting in the game going dark permanently. The developer switched focus to its military shooter titles, with no indication given that Yogurting will have a successor or revival.
On November 2014, Yogurting was revived as a mobile puzzle game called Yogurting Pop!. Unfortunately, the game shut down on October 28, 2015.
Yogurting provided examples of:
- Absurdly Powerful Student Council: Thanks to the disappearance of nearly every adult and school, the only authority left are the student councils... who have gone on to be the ass-kickers of monsters everywhere.
- Adults Are Useless: The "Endless Vacation Phenomenon" has resulted in nearly all the adults disappearing, and the remaining adults are as clueless as the students — and the students are doing most of the heavy lifting in finding out what happened.
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: After gameplay overhauls, the endgame became grinding for your Virtual Paper Doll; this was one of the reasons the game failed, as there was nothing left to grind for.
- Animesque: The game's aesthetics and style were heavily based on Japanese anime and manga to appeal to otaku — the music video, the music itself, even the Elaborate University High were also based on typical anime tropes. This actually caused a bit of controversy in Korea at the time, where anti-Japanese sentiment was (and still is, to a lesser extent) a flashpoint — in 2005, it wasn't too long ago that anything Japanese was censored or banned in Korea.
- Elaborate University High: Both academies are massive and fancy, fancier than any private high school has a right to be. This is one of the anime tropes the game aped.
- Energy Ball: Spirit users fire these by default.
- Everything Trying to Kill You: The Endless Vacation Phenomenon animated various everyday objects into angry murder balls — one of the more common mobs was sentient cardboard boxes.
- Genki Girl: Anna, the representative for Estiva and the game's overall mascot character. That girl you see in all those dance videos, dancing excitedly and squeeing about her crush? That's Anna.
- Good Old Fisticuffs: Gloves, which offered the highest attack damage but required you to get close to an enemy.
- Guide Dang It!: Part of the game's failure was due to weird gameplay choices; one of the most aggravating "features" was where starting areas for dungeons would be, which changed every week and had no announcements or ability to teleport to — this lead to lines of players booking it to the starting area or yelling over chat where to go.
- Musical Assassin: Mura, which are weaponised headphones that act as ranged weapons.
- Personality Blood Types:You choose your character's blood type during character creation. This determines which weapon you start with.
- Rank Inflation: Missions are graded, and you need a B+ or higher to "pass" and advance.
- Token Mini-Moe: Nana, Anya's younger sister and the representative for Yoitsuki.
- Transfer Student Uniforms - Clothes are unique to either Estiva or Yoitsuki; you're not allowed to wear the uniform of the other school.
- Word Salad Title: "Yogurting"?! Even in Korea and Japan, this was made fun of. According to the developers, this was based on the term "Yogurt Cities" — thriving, big cities with a rich culture that's interconnected, and the title was meant to show this interconnected urbanity.