Serbrethren
LISA: The Painful is one of my favorite games ever made, so this rating is a surprisingly bitter one that I'm forced to make.
The story? Oh no nothing's wrong there. Everything writing-wise, both old and new, are top notch. The secret content is beautifully written (here's a tip, try resting at the very first campfire once you've acquired all the boat parts in Area 3) and it ties together well into the secret content of LISA: The Joyful - Definitive Edition. All in all, it's a great package deal.
but
This Unity remake is marred by a number of minor flaws that all come together to make certain experiences feel less... weighty. Many of the sound effects feel less punchy than they used to. Some of the battle animations happen too fast. Some attacks don't even register properly, meaning certain storytelling moments in combat (which I will not spoil) lose the weight and impact that they had previously.
It's genuinely unfortunate that I have to discuss this at all because I am incredibly sympathetic to Dingaling and Serenity Forge. Remaking an RPGMaker game in Unity while retaining the feel of the original game and allowing for Austin to use the new engine for some new, creative sequences (see my earlier hint if you would like to learn more). Even so, it's a criticism I really hoped upon release that I wouldn't have to make.
They're still patching the game, so it's not as if these problems will necessarily be around forever, and hell, the overworld itself is translated near flawlessly. It's just in combat where the problems lie. I really hope it gets fixed up so I can give this version of the game the five star rating it deserves.
So which should you play? The original? Definitive?
Honestly, I would almost argue playing both. Do one run in the original game, then do a run in Definitive. Definitive adds new content that is 1000% worth playing despite the hiccups, but I think that a first time player would be losing something if they only played Definitive and not the legacy version. It's a tough sell, but I think this game is just that good. I literally played it twice in two days. It's the kind of game I relish.
But I think it's time I give LISA a rest....
is what I would say if I didn't have something to say about the Joyful!!!
The story? Oh no nothing's wrong there. Everything writing-wise, both old and new, are top notch. The secret content is beautifully written (here's a tip, try resting at the very first campfire once you've acquired all the boat parts in Area 3) and it ties together well into the secret content of LISA: The Joyful - Definitive Edition. All in all, it's a great package deal.
but
This Unity remake is marred by a number of minor flaws that all come together to make certain experiences feel less... weighty. Many of the sound effects feel less punchy than they used to. Some of the battle animations happen too fast. Some attacks don't even register properly, meaning certain storytelling moments in combat (which I will not spoil) lose the weight and impact that they had previously.
It's genuinely unfortunate that I have to discuss this at all because I am incredibly sympathetic to Dingaling and Serenity Forge. Remaking an RPGMaker game in Unity while retaining the feel of the original game and allowing for Austin to use the new engine for some new, creative sequences (see my earlier hint if you would like to learn more). Even so, it's a criticism I really hoped upon release that I wouldn't have to make.
They're still patching the game, so it's not as if these problems will necessarily be around forever, and hell, the overworld itself is translated near flawlessly. It's just in combat where the problems lie. I really hope it gets fixed up so I can give this version of the game the five star rating it deserves.
So which should you play? The original? Definitive?
Honestly, I would almost argue playing both. Do one run in the original game, then do a run in Definitive. Definitive adds new content that is 1000% worth playing despite the hiccups, but I think that a first time player would be losing something if they only played Definitive and not the legacy version. It's a tough sell, but I think this game is just that good. I literally played it twice in two days. It's the kind of game I relish.
But I think it's time I give LISA a rest....
is what I would say if I didn't have something to say about the Joyful!!!
2023
This review contains spoilers
this is the most difficult negative review i've given.
it's so hard to say that i think this game is kind of mediocre, because so, so, SO much of it is worth your time that i think its worth people looking at regardless of quality.
i'll try to be clinical about this one, but first ill address the issue i have with the game that is sort of the root of many disappointments i have with the game: the hook.
it's not fair. i know it's not fair to judge a game for what it isn't rather than what it is. i know i wanted the game to be about you killing people and serving them as hamburgers because that's what the end of the demo implied. i know i wanted to see a story that was ABOUT keeping these horrible things from your three co-workers and the guilt that tore you up inside over it. the warioware sensibilities themselves would be almost a cruel mockery of what you did. the world stays twee and quirky despite the horrible thing you did.
but it wasn't about that. frankly, i don't think it was about anything.
right, clinical.
This game is exceptional in quite a few areas, and nearly all of them involve the game's audiovisual presentation.
The soundtrack, done by Andy himself along with nelward, the Gyms, Joe Aquiare, Barchboi and lizzy are all fantastic. Despite the wide range of composers, none of them ever felt out of place in any given situation. They all fit the surreal and absurd world of Knuckle Sandwich like a glove.
The visual style, the graphics, everything is presented with such candy-coated sweetness that even remembering some of the game's more questionable sections, I also remember how visually captivating the game's battle UI is, or the silly clay animations whenever you find a goblin, or even just the random, rainbow colored NPCs that speak gibberish to you. So much of this game is so, so wonderful to experience in the moment.
The game's combat centers around microgames, timed attacks, and timed dodges. I think the game succeeds at approximately 85-90% of the microgames, while the attack and dodge system never felt wrong to me. The game continually spices up the basic attack command through three different variants, all of which felt very satisfying to pull off (I got a x28 combo with the circle attack. Thank you, Hatsune Miku, for training me). The timed dodges, too, never felt non-intuitive. The moment I figured out an enemy's tell, I could always dodge their basic attacks.
ah
i really don't want to keep going
i really wish i could just stop and leave it there
it'd be so easy
but
There are two pillars of problems with Knuckle Sandwich as a game. That being its game design and its story.
Knuckle Sandwich's game design issues are cumulative in nature. A lot of small issues coagulating into major problems that make the gamefeel incredibly unusual. I'll list them here:
- Stat values feel almost entirely meaningless with the exception of your speed. This is the root of many of the game's issues regarding gamefeel.
- Buffing and debuffing skills, for the very few that exist, barely make any impact as a result.
- There is no skill that allows you to lower an enemy's Defense. This is a problem because of a point I will address later.
- There is no consistent curve of enemy Defense values, which means your attacks will rapidly oscillate between doing 20 damage to one enemy and then doing 1 damage to the next.
- There are never any shops when you actually need shops. I accumulated vast amounts of Fortune Rocks and rarely ever used them.
- The inventory system is genuinely abysmal. Each party member is given eight slots. The items that take up space include consumables, equipment, and key items.
- Armor and Weapons rarely make a significant difference in combat.
- Boss fights are more or less scripted encounters where the boss exhausts all of their dialogue and either reduces their Defense value drastically, or they remove the RPG elements entirely and just have the fight be a completely different game.
- Even in boss fights without these scripted elements, they are oftentimes meat sponges that will take upwards to fifteen turns to beat. This, to me, is unacceptable.
- The damage dealt by your special moves is oftentimes worse than your standard attack. Even if you perfect the microgame, you can easily outdo the damage without the EP cost by doing your timed attack.
- The defend action only recovers a single point of EP. This is completely worthless and only serves to waste an action.
- The only healing skill in the game heals 11 HP. This is almost completely worthless.
- Once you acquire all three party members, you cannot swap them out in combat if your party member has fallen. This, to me, defeats the point of that system.
- I only got one skill that afflicts a status effect. It never afflicted it once.
- Status effects feel meaningless when applied to enemies.
All of these issues are either the root of an issue or are the resulting issue. Even the novelty of new microgames with every fight wears thin when every fight feels at least two turns too long and there are so few skills I can use to meaningfully accelerate the rate of combat. It's hard to prepare for any given fight because there's so few equipment, and what equipment does exist barely makes a difference. I don't even want to use skills because the damage they do barely means anything, and there's a decent chance that doing high damage barely even matters in a boss fight anyways.
Perhaps it is a commentary on my lack of agency in the story. Let's talk about what the story actually is.
The game's hook, as I mentioned before, is perfect. After arriving in Bright City and going on a gameshow in an attempt to find a job, you are completely unqualified for anything and are forced to go elsewhere. You end up going to Gorilla Burger, a terrible fast food joint. At the end of the night, you're attacked by a knife-wielding gangster while taking out the trash, and you end up killing him. After the game's surrealism, this was a lurch. Even more of a lurch is when your boss witnesses a murder, and decides the best course of action is to cook him. It ends with him patenting this horrific act of cannibalism as the world's first...
Knuckle Sandwich.
It's flawless. It's immaculate. It doesn't come up again until the last hour of the game.
The actual story is that Bright City is in danger due to some sort of Anomaly. It's causing the world to go out of whack, and you need to figure out who's causing it. The problem is that a lot of people think that you're the Anomaly, and are trying to get rid of you as a result. There's also a group called the Brightfangs who have their own agenda. It's fairly self-evident early on that they are extremists working towards an ultimately positive end, and the people you and your co-workers ostensibly trust are actually not very trustworthy.
Oh, right. You deliver some food to a stupid billionaire named Mr. Apricot. He's useless, but you assume he's just some guy. There's also someone named Xander. He's a justice cop. He dies and was a stooge of the real villain, the gameshow host. He's the twist villain who is pulling the strings. Except it's actually his assistant, Prima. She's the real twist villain.
Throughout being pulled and crammed through all of these situations, there's barely a sense of friendship forming between you and your party members. This isn't an RPG where you get a character sidequest with your three co-workers that gives you some insight into them. They just exist alongside you. When the game killed them after revealing the second twist villain, I didn't feel much of anything. It was surprising, I suppose, but I knew they wouldn't commit to it. They didn't.
(Edit: There are apparently secret scenes that you get through means that are not intuitive to me and involve friendship variables. I saw the scene with Echo on YouTube. It was cute. It probably would've helped me feel a bit more for the characters. I wish they weren't so obscured.)
The point I'm getting at here is that none of this means anything. Nothing is ever developed to a satisfying conclusion. The final conclusion to the game is going back in time before the game began in order to rectify you killing the guy at the beginning and killing the Anomaly, the Tiny Baby, before it can do anything (also, the boss at Gorilla Burger had an arrangement with the gangster to kill employees and turn them into food beforehand. So it's not like the "world's first knuckle sandwich" was actually the world's first. He's been doing this the whole time to feed those rainbow colored NPCs. They're mutants, by the way. That was an okay twist that didn't amount to much).
Busdriver (the guy who occasionally pops in and goes "wow that's crazy anyways im working on goblins right now and spirit cells) helps you out at the very end and apologizes to you for ruining your life and dragging you through all of this. You're finally given the choice to either forgive him or not to forgive him, and then you can choose whether to stay in Bright City or work as his partner.
None of this means anything.
Your lack of agency in the plot is felt throughout the game in ways I would consider unintentional, and it is never directly addressed until the last minute of the game. I desperately wanted a moment where the protagonist acknowledged the ridiculousness of the plot and being shunted from place to place without any rhyme or reason. Even a brief moment of rebellion would've made it clear what a nightmare the experience was and would've given it more weight. The protagonist never did.
If the game was about overconsumption and capitalism, it failed at that, too. There was a brief flicker of hope when Prima, the second twist villain, casually asked for backup after the Anomaly escapes, and your party member asks "who's responsible for this," which she's been trying to figure out the entire game. Prima, at first, addresses the fact that there is no "one person" responsible for this. You think for a moment that she's pointing out that there is no "final boss of capitalism." It's a system. That might've saved it for me. But no. Prima is responsible for this. It's just her. She's the CEO of Capitalism, actually.
I'm still thinking about the hook.
Maybe it's actually fair to criticize the game for that hook. It had gold on a platter, showed it to me, then tossed it out in favor of semi-coherent surreal shenanigans. It's less of a "criticizing the game for what it isn't." That's more akin to watching a horror film and complaining it isn't funny enough. The film is about horror. Unless it makes itself known as a horror comedy, you can't really get mad that it isn't funny.
But attempting to be funny and failing in a horror movie would be perfectly reasonable grounds for criticizing it for that, in the same way introducing horror into a comedic game can be done poorly. If the horror is barely developed, either failing to be integrated into the game's comedy or failing to transform into its own, terrifying monster, then it fails.
You shouldn't have introduced it to begin with.
well
im gonna lie down. this was miserable. it's hard to convey how sullen this whole experience has made me.
sorry, andrew brophy
maybe next time
it's so hard to say that i think this game is kind of mediocre, because so, so, SO much of it is worth your time that i think its worth people looking at regardless of quality.
i'll try to be clinical about this one, but first ill address the issue i have with the game that is sort of the root of many disappointments i have with the game: the hook.
it's not fair. i know it's not fair to judge a game for what it isn't rather than what it is. i know i wanted the game to be about you killing people and serving them as hamburgers because that's what the end of the demo implied. i know i wanted to see a story that was ABOUT keeping these horrible things from your three co-workers and the guilt that tore you up inside over it. the warioware sensibilities themselves would be almost a cruel mockery of what you did. the world stays twee and quirky despite the horrible thing you did.
but it wasn't about that. frankly, i don't think it was about anything.
right, clinical.
This game is exceptional in quite a few areas, and nearly all of them involve the game's audiovisual presentation.
The soundtrack, done by Andy himself along with nelward, the Gyms, Joe Aquiare, Barchboi and lizzy are all fantastic. Despite the wide range of composers, none of them ever felt out of place in any given situation. They all fit the surreal and absurd world of Knuckle Sandwich like a glove.
The visual style, the graphics, everything is presented with such candy-coated sweetness that even remembering some of the game's more questionable sections, I also remember how visually captivating the game's battle UI is, or the silly clay animations whenever you find a goblin, or even just the random, rainbow colored NPCs that speak gibberish to you. So much of this game is so, so wonderful to experience in the moment.
The game's combat centers around microgames, timed attacks, and timed dodges. I think the game succeeds at approximately 85-90% of the microgames, while the attack and dodge system never felt wrong to me. The game continually spices up the basic attack command through three different variants, all of which felt very satisfying to pull off (I got a x28 combo with the circle attack. Thank you, Hatsune Miku, for training me). The timed dodges, too, never felt non-intuitive. The moment I figured out an enemy's tell, I could always dodge their basic attacks.
ah
i really don't want to keep going
i really wish i could just stop and leave it there
it'd be so easy
but
There are two pillars of problems with Knuckle Sandwich as a game. That being its game design and its story.
Knuckle Sandwich's game design issues are cumulative in nature. A lot of small issues coagulating into major problems that make the gamefeel incredibly unusual. I'll list them here:
- Stat values feel almost entirely meaningless with the exception of your speed. This is the root of many of the game's issues regarding gamefeel.
- Buffing and debuffing skills, for the very few that exist, barely make any impact as a result.
- There is no skill that allows you to lower an enemy's Defense. This is a problem because of a point I will address later.
- There is no consistent curve of enemy Defense values, which means your attacks will rapidly oscillate between doing 20 damage to one enemy and then doing 1 damage to the next.
- There are never any shops when you actually need shops. I accumulated vast amounts of Fortune Rocks and rarely ever used them.
- The inventory system is genuinely abysmal. Each party member is given eight slots. The items that take up space include consumables, equipment, and key items.
- Armor and Weapons rarely make a significant difference in combat.
- Boss fights are more or less scripted encounters where the boss exhausts all of their dialogue and either reduces their Defense value drastically, or they remove the RPG elements entirely and just have the fight be a completely different game.
- Even in boss fights without these scripted elements, they are oftentimes meat sponges that will take upwards to fifteen turns to beat. This, to me, is unacceptable.
- The damage dealt by your special moves is oftentimes worse than your standard attack. Even if you perfect the microgame, you can easily outdo the damage without the EP cost by doing your timed attack.
- The defend action only recovers a single point of EP. This is completely worthless and only serves to waste an action.
- The only healing skill in the game heals 11 HP. This is almost completely worthless.
- Once you acquire all three party members, you cannot swap them out in combat if your party member has fallen. This, to me, defeats the point of that system.
- I only got one skill that afflicts a status effect. It never afflicted it once.
- Status effects feel meaningless when applied to enemies.
All of these issues are either the root of an issue or are the resulting issue. Even the novelty of new microgames with every fight wears thin when every fight feels at least two turns too long and there are so few skills I can use to meaningfully accelerate the rate of combat. It's hard to prepare for any given fight because there's so few equipment, and what equipment does exist barely makes a difference. I don't even want to use skills because the damage they do barely means anything, and there's a decent chance that doing high damage barely even matters in a boss fight anyways.
Perhaps it is a commentary on my lack of agency in the story. Let's talk about what the story actually is.
The game's hook, as I mentioned before, is perfect. After arriving in Bright City and going on a gameshow in an attempt to find a job, you are completely unqualified for anything and are forced to go elsewhere. You end up going to Gorilla Burger, a terrible fast food joint. At the end of the night, you're attacked by a knife-wielding gangster while taking out the trash, and you end up killing him. After the game's surrealism, this was a lurch. Even more of a lurch is when your boss witnesses a murder, and decides the best course of action is to cook him. It ends with him patenting this horrific act of cannibalism as the world's first...
Knuckle Sandwich.
It's flawless. It's immaculate. It doesn't come up again until the last hour of the game.
The actual story is that Bright City is in danger due to some sort of Anomaly. It's causing the world to go out of whack, and you need to figure out who's causing it. The problem is that a lot of people think that you're the Anomaly, and are trying to get rid of you as a result. There's also a group called the Brightfangs who have their own agenda. It's fairly self-evident early on that they are extremists working towards an ultimately positive end, and the people you and your co-workers ostensibly trust are actually not very trustworthy.
Oh, right. You deliver some food to a stupid billionaire named Mr. Apricot. He's useless, but you assume he's just some guy. There's also someone named Xander. He's a justice cop. He dies and was a stooge of the real villain, the gameshow host. He's the twist villain who is pulling the strings. Except it's actually his assistant, Prima. She's the real twist villain.
Throughout being pulled and crammed through all of these situations, there's barely a sense of friendship forming between you and your party members. This isn't an RPG where you get a character sidequest with your three co-workers that gives you some insight into them. They just exist alongside you. When the game killed them after revealing the second twist villain, I didn't feel much of anything. It was surprising, I suppose, but I knew they wouldn't commit to it. They didn't.
(Edit: There are apparently secret scenes that you get through means that are not intuitive to me and involve friendship variables. I saw the scene with Echo on YouTube. It was cute. It probably would've helped me feel a bit more for the characters. I wish they weren't so obscured.)
The point I'm getting at here is that none of this means anything. Nothing is ever developed to a satisfying conclusion. The final conclusion to the game is going back in time before the game began in order to rectify you killing the guy at the beginning and killing the Anomaly, the Tiny Baby, before it can do anything (also, the boss at Gorilla Burger had an arrangement with the gangster to kill employees and turn them into food beforehand. So it's not like the "world's first knuckle sandwich" was actually the world's first. He's been doing this the whole time to feed those rainbow colored NPCs. They're mutants, by the way. That was an okay twist that didn't amount to much).
Busdriver (the guy who occasionally pops in and goes "wow that's crazy anyways im working on goblins right now and spirit cells) helps you out at the very end and apologizes to you for ruining your life and dragging you through all of this. You're finally given the choice to either forgive him or not to forgive him, and then you can choose whether to stay in Bright City or work as his partner.
None of this means anything.
Your lack of agency in the plot is felt throughout the game in ways I would consider unintentional, and it is never directly addressed until the last minute of the game. I desperately wanted a moment where the protagonist acknowledged the ridiculousness of the plot and being shunted from place to place without any rhyme or reason. Even a brief moment of rebellion would've made it clear what a nightmare the experience was and would've given it more weight. The protagonist never did.
If the game was about overconsumption and capitalism, it failed at that, too. There was a brief flicker of hope when Prima, the second twist villain, casually asked for backup after the Anomaly escapes, and your party member asks "who's responsible for this," which she's been trying to figure out the entire game. Prima, at first, addresses the fact that there is no "one person" responsible for this. You think for a moment that she's pointing out that there is no "final boss of capitalism." It's a system. That might've saved it for me. But no. Prima is responsible for this. It's just her. She's the CEO of Capitalism, actually.
I'm still thinking about the hook.
Maybe it's actually fair to criticize the game for that hook. It had gold on a platter, showed it to me, then tossed it out in favor of semi-coherent surreal shenanigans. It's less of a "criticizing the game for what it isn't." That's more akin to watching a horror film and complaining it isn't funny enough. The film is about horror. Unless it makes itself known as a horror comedy, you can't really get mad that it isn't funny.
But attempting to be funny and failing in a horror movie would be perfectly reasonable grounds for criticizing it for that, in the same way introducing horror into a comedic game can be done poorly. If the horror is barely developed, either failing to be integrated into the game's comedy or failing to transform into its own, terrifying monster, then it fails.
You shouldn't have introduced it to begin with.
well
im gonna lie down. this was miserable. it's hard to convey how sullen this whole experience has made me.
sorry, andrew brophy
maybe next time
had a lot of fun playing this while my toddler brother was dazzled by the wonder effects.
2D Mario is the sort of thing that is very much "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" but that's led to a lot of stagnation over the years. we haven't had a 2D Mario game that wasn't "new" since like... 2006?
anyways, this game isn't the revolutionary 2D Mario that discards conventions and does something crazy like giving Mario a glock, but it absolutely breathes new life into this genre of Mario game, primarily through the wonder effects.
these soft power-ups/environmental fucker-uppers help each level stand out more than they would otherwise. lots of music-themed effects, too, which tended to be my favorites. i also quite liked the shadow mario and weird elongation effects.
the only area where the game really sags is the boss fights. aside from the final boss being pretty good, everything else is either bowser jr. or an airship detonation. the latter of which i could probably do with my eyes closed, and the former just being kind of mediocre. i didn't mind the deep magma bog fight, though.
but these are small potatoes. i had a really good time! i hope subsequent 2D Mario games aren't afraid to break even further outside of conventions.
2D Mario is the sort of thing that is very much "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" but that's led to a lot of stagnation over the years. we haven't had a 2D Mario game that wasn't "new" since like... 2006?
anyways, this game isn't the revolutionary 2D Mario that discards conventions and does something crazy like giving Mario a glock, but it absolutely breathes new life into this genre of Mario game, primarily through the wonder effects.
these soft power-ups/environmental fucker-uppers help each level stand out more than they would otherwise. lots of music-themed effects, too, which tended to be my favorites. i also quite liked the shadow mario and weird elongation effects.
the only area where the game really sags is the boss fights. aside from the final boss being pretty good, everything else is either bowser jr. or an airship detonation. the latter of which i could probably do with my eyes closed, and the former just being kind of mediocre. i didn't mind the deep magma bog fight, though.
but these are small potatoes. i had a really good time! i hope subsequent 2D Mario games aren't afraid to break even further outside of conventions.
well then
So my critiques from the Painful - Definitive Edition still apply here. Gamefeel in combat is kinda weird. I'd argue a bit less so, but it's still there.
Unlike with Painful, I do think this is the best version of the game to play. While Painful mostly saw changes in the fluff, stuff like party member interactions and whatnot, Joyful has received a few small mechanical changes that drastically alter the quality of the game's combat.
The new warlord abilities are excellent. Chef's kiss. Not all of them are of equal use, but they allow Buddy to better act as a solo party member and are good enough that you could actually do a Joyless run of the game, which was previously considered the incorrect way to play and an absolute slog if you tried. Now? I kinda love doing this game Joyless. It's way more fun than I was expecting and you're going to need to do it Joyless to access the new content.
I guess they called it a "sidequest." That's a term for it. My first major issue with LISA: The Joyful - Definitive Edition is that the new content is INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT TO FIND. I mean, sure, we live in the era of just looking shit up on the internet, but this is a whole other level. You're forced to solve an incredibly esoteric series of puzzles, some of which require you to have prior knowledge of LISA: The First and the secret content in LISA: The Painful - Definitive Edition. LISA: The First isn't included in the Definitive Edition, so some players will just have absolutely no idea where to even begin.
But to swing back to complimenting the game, I do think the new content is very good. Same as with Painful. It feels more focused than the original, tying together much more nicely both with the overall story of LISA and the new content in Painful. It goes in a few bold directions that I'll admit I'm not entirely a fan of. Without spoiling, there is a specific line that is meant to highlight a character's immaturity and cowardice that ended up taking me out of the experience. Even so, I think the broad strokes are incredibly well done. Fortune favors the bold.
The problem is that if you don't seek out any of this additional content, the story of Joyful is identical to the original. It still feels unfocused trying to resolve the unanswered questions of the original and concluding the arcs of several major characters. This wouldn't be such a problem were the new content easier to find, but for the majority of players who want to go in blind, they're going to be playing through the same, incredibly flawed story that the original had, just with better gameplay. Maybe that's enough for some people, but I wish it weren't so.
This is definitely a better game than the original LISA: The Joyful, and I would consider this game great, but it isn't a masterpiece even with the changes. And if you don't know where to look to get the meat of the content, then you'll end up with a worse experience.
Now I am done with LISA.
For now.
zzz
So my critiques from the Painful - Definitive Edition still apply here. Gamefeel in combat is kinda weird. I'd argue a bit less so, but it's still there.
Unlike with Painful, I do think this is the best version of the game to play. While Painful mostly saw changes in the fluff, stuff like party member interactions and whatnot, Joyful has received a few small mechanical changes that drastically alter the quality of the game's combat.
The new warlord abilities are excellent. Chef's kiss. Not all of them are of equal use, but they allow Buddy to better act as a solo party member and are good enough that you could actually do a Joyless run of the game, which was previously considered the incorrect way to play and an absolute slog if you tried. Now? I kinda love doing this game Joyless. It's way more fun than I was expecting and you're going to need to do it Joyless to access the new content.
I guess they called it a "sidequest." That's a term for it. My first major issue with LISA: The Joyful - Definitive Edition is that the new content is INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT TO FIND. I mean, sure, we live in the era of just looking shit up on the internet, but this is a whole other level. You're forced to solve an incredibly esoteric series of puzzles, some of which require you to have prior knowledge of LISA: The First and the secret content in LISA: The Painful - Definitive Edition. LISA: The First isn't included in the Definitive Edition, so some players will just have absolutely no idea where to even begin.
But to swing back to complimenting the game, I do think the new content is very good. Same as with Painful. It feels more focused than the original, tying together much more nicely both with the overall story of LISA and the new content in Painful. It goes in a few bold directions that I'll admit I'm not entirely a fan of. Without spoiling, there is a specific line that is meant to highlight a character's immaturity and cowardice that ended up taking me out of the experience. Even so, I think the broad strokes are incredibly well done. Fortune favors the bold.
The problem is that if you don't seek out any of this additional content, the story of Joyful is identical to the original. It still feels unfocused trying to resolve the unanswered questions of the original and concluding the arcs of several major characters. This wouldn't be such a problem were the new content easier to find, but for the majority of players who want to go in blind, they're going to be playing through the same, incredibly flawed story that the original had, just with better gameplay. Maybe that's enough for some people, but I wish it weren't so.
This is definitely a better game than the original LISA: The Joyful, and I would consider this game great, but it isn't a masterpiece even with the changes. And if you don't know where to look to get the meat of the content, then you'll end up with a worse experience.
Now I am done with LISA.
For now.
zzz
This review contains spoilers
-me perusing through my steam library of 400+ games and stumbling across crypt of the necrodancer-
"oh hey! i remember this game. i played it like, way back in 2016 and i just kinda stopped. i wonder why i bounced off of it?"
-10 hours later-
"oh. that's why."
i'll admit that i didn't get very far on my earliest runs of the game. i'm not the best at video games now and that fact was doubly true back when i first played crypt of the necrodancer. its the sort of game that is simultaneously very easy to pick up and very easy to put down.
i'll get the parts i do like out of the way. it's got a great soundtrack, of course, and a number of the characters are actually quite fun to play. the zones get kinda samey but enemy behavior is varied enough that it never gets too repetitive
at least if you're doing well.
part of why i bounced off this game twice before actually completing the game was because losing in this game is miserable. you don't have to start all over from zone 1 (by default, anyways) but the experience of losing repeatedly means hearing the same songs with the same repetitive motions with the same enemies that just keep killing you because you keep putting yourself in bad positions.
it gets dull. really, really dull.
it's not just a "im bad at the game" thing. other rogue-likes with semi-complex gameplay loops like this one don't tend to make me feel bored in the same way, and i think it has to do with the core concept.
see, crypt of the necrodancer is a "rhythm game/dungeon crawler." all of your actions, which would normally be the dungeon crawling, are forced to follow the song's bpm. it's a novel concept, and one that got me interested in the game to begin with.
the thing is, i feel like the game designers spent a lot more time designing the "dungeon crawler" part than the "rhythm game" part. most of the difficulty emerges as a result of an enemy's specific design as opposed to how hard it is to hit notes. for most characters, you don't even need to hit all the notes unless you want to keep your money multiplier.
there are a couple instances where the rhythm element is focused on. that being bolt/coda, king conga, and the tempo up/down buttons, but all of these examples are sparse.
tempo up/down is basically just forcing you to either move faster or slower, either giving you less time to react or more time to react.
king conga is the only song in the game where the beats are not perfectly and evenly spaced out. i really, really wish more songs utilized something like this
bolt/coda is basically a living hyper tempo up button. you hit twice as many beats as normal. all this serves to do is to remove the strategic element of the game and forces you to act on impulse unless you're a top tier player of the game. i don't think most people are, frankly.
that's mostly it. most songs in the game have their notes be perfectly and evenly spaced out from one another. most runs are just mindlessly tap, tap, tapping to the rhythm. the only variation is in the songs themselves.
frankly, i think this is a wasted opportunity. give the actual rhythm part some significance! having more songs playing in different time signatures would go a long way to making the gameplay feel less monotonous. have it be so that maintaining your rhythm rewards you with more damage rather than just a coin multiplier.
but this is mostly why the game would be a soft 3/5 stars as opposed to a more solid 4. because the game, as is, is mostly solid. so why am i rating this 2 stars?
Enter: Aria
i cannot fathom Aria. in what world do you design a roguelike's story mode and have Aria be a required character to beat the main story? Imagine playing The Binding of Isaac and in order to see all of the main story content you have to play as Isaac, then Judas, then THE LOST and you can't finish the story unless you beat the game with all three characters. it's not impossible but why the hell would you gatekeep the last third of the story behind one of the hardest characters in the game?
i grit my teeth playing as Aria. it was baffling to me already but i powered through it and assumed it'd get easier as it went along. it did, to an extent. going from Zone 4 to Zone 1 meant that the difficulty waned a bit over time.
unfortunately, there was little I could do to prepare for the fight with the Golden Lute.
genuinely one of the worst final bosses i've ever had the displeasure of facing. Cadence and Melody had fights against the Necrodancer himself. while not ridiculously easy, it was the sort of difficulty i could practice my way out of.
The Golden Lute is not so simple. I practiced that fight over a hundred times and could only win a quarter of them, even when I knew what I was supposed to do. let's just ignore the fact that the best way to fight the Golden Lute is by playing the fight in the most boring way possible. y'know, once again having to do the monotonous "tap, tap, tapping" against a bounce pad so the boss happens to land next to me because Aria dies if you miss a note and thus normally you have to constantly move.
again, let's ignore that.
the boss's erratic movement patterns, the fact that most of your runs are dependent on a green skeleton knight not spawning in, and the esoteric method to actually landing a critical hit on the boss makes the entire fight a long, ridiculous chore. let's not forget that you have to complete the fight after a whole zone's worth of enemies while playing as the second-most fragile character in the game. but even when playing as a less fragile character the fight is only marginally less cumbersome.
also, whose idea was it to make the final boss move like a BAT
the dam broke when i fought the golden lute. all at once i had the thought of "why the fuck am i even doing any of this?" i was having mild fun, but the game spat in my mouth and told me i'd be having way more fun playing the game with my skin flayed off.
what's that? the amplified dlc? yeah, it's alright. i don't understand why some basic QoL features that werent dependent on dlc content had to be locked behind the dlc, but whatever. nocturna is pretty powerful, which works well for the difficulty of the dlc. frankensteinway and the conductor are both very difficult final bosses, but im not playing a character made of paper. zone 5 works well as an evolution of the dungeon crawler aspect of the game while, as per usual, not doing much for the rhythm game aspect. it's fine, like i said. more fun than the base game.
i think the song's about to end, so i'll just let it run out and ill drop into a new rogueli--
SONG ENDED!
"oh hey! i remember this game. i played it like, way back in 2016 and i just kinda stopped. i wonder why i bounced off of it?"
-10 hours later-
"oh. that's why."
i'll admit that i didn't get very far on my earliest runs of the game. i'm not the best at video games now and that fact was doubly true back when i first played crypt of the necrodancer. its the sort of game that is simultaneously very easy to pick up and very easy to put down.
i'll get the parts i do like out of the way. it's got a great soundtrack, of course, and a number of the characters are actually quite fun to play. the zones get kinda samey but enemy behavior is varied enough that it never gets too repetitive
at least if you're doing well.
part of why i bounced off this game twice before actually completing the game was because losing in this game is miserable. you don't have to start all over from zone 1 (by default, anyways) but the experience of losing repeatedly means hearing the same songs with the same repetitive motions with the same enemies that just keep killing you because you keep putting yourself in bad positions.
it gets dull. really, really dull.
it's not just a "im bad at the game" thing. other rogue-likes with semi-complex gameplay loops like this one don't tend to make me feel bored in the same way, and i think it has to do with the core concept.
see, crypt of the necrodancer is a "rhythm game/dungeon crawler." all of your actions, which would normally be the dungeon crawling, are forced to follow the song's bpm. it's a novel concept, and one that got me interested in the game to begin with.
the thing is, i feel like the game designers spent a lot more time designing the "dungeon crawler" part than the "rhythm game" part. most of the difficulty emerges as a result of an enemy's specific design as opposed to how hard it is to hit notes. for most characters, you don't even need to hit all the notes unless you want to keep your money multiplier.
there are a couple instances where the rhythm element is focused on. that being bolt/coda, king conga, and the tempo up/down buttons, but all of these examples are sparse.
tempo up/down is basically just forcing you to either move faster or slower, either giving you less time to react or more time to react.
king conga is the only song in the game where the beats are not perfectly and evenly spaced out. i really, really wish more songs utilized something like this
bolt/coda is basically a living hyper tempo up button. you hit twice as many beats as normal. all this serves to do is to remove the strategic element of the game and forces you to act on impulse unless you're a top tier player of the game. i don't think most people are, frankly.
that's mostly it. most songs in the game have their notes be perfectly and evenly spaced out from one another. most runs are just mindlessly tap, tap, tapping to the rhythm. the only variation is in the songs themselves.
frankly, i think this is a wasted opportunity. give the actual rhythm part some significance! having more songs playing in different time signatures would go a long way to making the gameplay feel less monotonous. have it be so that maintaining your rhythm rewards you with more damage rather than just a coin multiplier.
but this is mostly why the game would be a soft 3/5 stars as opposed to a more solid 4. because the game, as is, is mostly solid. so why am i rating this 2 stars?
Enter: Aria
i cannot fathom Aria. in what world do you design a roguelike's story mode and have Aria be a required character to beat the main story? Imagine playing The Binding of Isaac and in order to see all of the main story content you have to play as Isaac, then Judas, then THE LOST and you can't finish the story unless you beat the game with all three characters. it's not impossible but why the hell would you gatekeep the last third of the story behind one of the hardest characters in the game?
i grit my teeth playing as Aria. it was baffling to me already but i powered through it and assumed it'd get easier as it went along. it did, to an extent. going from Zone 4 to Zone 1 meant that the difficulty waned a bit over time.
unfortunately, there was little I could do to prepare for the fight with the Golden Lute.
genuinely one of the worst final bosses i've ever had the displeasure of facing. Cadence and Melody had fights against the Necrodancer himself. while not ridiculously easy, it was the sort of difficulty i could practice my way out of.
The Golden Lute is not so simple. I practiced that fight over a hundred times and could only win a quarter of them, even when I knew what I was supposed to do. let's just ignore the fact that the best way to fight the Golden Lute is by playing the fight in the most boring way possible. y'know, once again having to do the monotonous "tap, tap, tapping" against a bounce pad so the boss happens to land next to me because Aria dies if you miss a note and thus normally you have to constantly move.
again, let's ignore that.
the boss's erratic movement patterns, the fact that most of your runs are dependent on a green skeleton knight not spawning in, and the esoteric method to actually landing a critical hit on the boss makes the entire fight a long, ridiculous chore. let's not forget that you have to complete the fight after a whole zone's worth of enemies while playing as the second-most fragile character in the game. but even when playing as a less fragile character the fight is only marginally less cumbersome.
also, whose idea was it to make the final boss move like a BAT
the dam broke when i fought the golden lute. all at once i had the thought of "why the fuck am i even doing any of this?" i was having mild fun, but the game spat in my mouth and told me i'd be having way more fun playing the game with my skin flayed off.
what's that? the amplified dlc? yeah, it's alright. i don't understand why some basic QoL features that werent dependent on dlc content had to be locked behind the dlc, but whatever. nocturna is pretty powerful, which works well for the difficulty of the dlc. frankensteinway and the conductor are both very difficult final bosses, but im not playing a character made of paper. zone 5 works well as an evolution of the dungeon crawler aspect of the game while, as per usual, not doing much for the rhythm game aspect. it's fine, like i said. more fun than the base game.
i think the song's about to end, so i'll just let it run out and ill drop into a new rogueli--
SONG ENDED!
2021
after 166.9 hours and 54/65 achievements done i can definitively say i am exhausted with this game
the moment to moment gameplay is excellent, as is the new tokens system which i think is a step up from the first game, as are the new skills and paths you can use with each class. it's the reason why the score is only middling and not somewhere in the depths.
this game is held severely back by one major issue. this game is torn by its ties to the original game and its desire to be a rogue-like, and thus doesn't manage to do either as well as it should.
most runs in darkest dungeon 2 takes a minimum of two hours and can get up to three. if you're very lucky (or are just doing the denial chapter) then you might get away with an hour. but do you know what i could do in one hour in another rogue-like? I could do a full run of The Binding of Isaac: Repentance. If you want a turn-based RPG rogue-like example, look no further than Hieronymus Bosch's Brutal Orchestra.
that's a good comparison piece, actually. Brutal Orchestra has a system similar to the stagecoach in that it is a UI where you choose one of so many paths in order to fight enemies, find items, etc. you know what it doesn't have? a long and drawn out stagecoach trawl where the only benefit is running over road debris to potentially get items. in Brutal Orchestra, you can go down paths quickly and near instantly and as such, runs in Brutal Orchestra at most only take about an hour. if you're not good at the game? An hour and a half. keep in mind that 1.5 hours is a generous time for how long DD2 runs last generally at minimum.
you know what else Brutal Orchestra doesn't have? five minutes of set-up before you can get into the meat of the game. must I do the fights in The Valley every time? must I ride through the stagecoach and in order to go through the Altar of Hope, to select the chapter of the game I want to play, and to pick my heroes? was all of that necessary when all of it could be condensed into one or two menus?
but here's the twist, hypothetical reader, and the twist is that all of this micromanagement and time-wasting was in the first game. you know what the first game also had? permanent and meaningful upgrades you could funnel resources into.
to be fair to the game, they sort of tried to do this, but it was a half measure. the two forms of progression that you retain between runs (ignoring chapter completion itself) is the Altar of Hope and the Memories.
the former is a sort of replacement for the Hamlet in the first game. you use candles of hope in order to unlock items for future runs. you also can pay some candles to receive benefits that will make runs easier, but it's not enough. a bizarre feature of the system is that when you unlock new items, you will start your next run with them in your inventory, but only for that run. that's odd, i thought, that they would give you a potentially busted trinket for free.
then i had another thought, why the fuck didn't the game let you use your remaining candles of hope to buy trinkets or inn items at the Altar of Hope if you are in excess, as opposed to having it fill a useless score meter? make it crazy expensive if you'd like, but it would be an easy way to keep candles of hope relevant even after you've unlocked all the items. it would make heroes feel less crippled when starting new runs.
speaking of heroes, the Memories system. it's a wash. this is the attempt by the game to recreate the "persistent heroes" from the original in a manner i can only call baffling. keep in mind that runs will often last at least two hours and that Memories reset upon death, so the marginal buffs you give your party are rendered useless by one errant critical hit. and it wouldn't be so bad, y'know, those errant crits, except each hero can only have one set of memories and you can't take duplicates into runs. you wanna play a run with your highwayman with three memories? why would you ever risk them going out unless you want them getting a new memory? in which case, hope you don't get fucked over by RNG because that's potentially six to eight hours of lost character.
this does not feel the same as it did in DD1. each hero, whether they were dupes or not, had their own personality to me. the quirks remained, as did the skills i preferred to equip on them, and they had experiences they lived through in these runs. y'know why losing them felt tragic, and not nearly as shitty as it does in this game? because i know there are other heroes, likely ones of the same class as the dead hero, who can take their place and i might even find heroes in the stagecoach with a decently high starting level so i don't feel so utterly crippled by death.
permanent trinkets, too, helped lessen the burden of death, because you were always getting something that lasts from a run so long as you don't run away without retrieving it or party wipe. in DD2, you can only win or party wipe. splendid.
were the game more like a rogue-like, they would cut out all of the filler in between the parts you actually enjoy, ie: the combat, and would just let you do that.
were the game more like darkest dungeon, long term progression would be more permanent, as opposed to locking it to future run items and minor buffs to the run that became invisible to me very quickly.
but i did play it for a while, so i must've enjoyed some of it. near the end, however, i really couldn't care less. red hook's body of work has been laid bare and i think it could use some polishing up. maybe DD3 will commit to the rogue-like bit or return to form. either way, i would probably like it better. keep the new tokens system though, i am quite fond of that.
i will gladly move on to playing Fear & Hunger 2, which is a game where i also get killed by RNG and potentially lose hours of progress and goddammit
the moment to moment gameplay is excellent, as is the new tokens system which i think is a step up from the first game, as are the new skills and paths you can use with each class. it's the reason why the score is only middling and not somewhere in the depths.
this game is held severely back by one major issue. this game is torn by its ties to the original game and its desire to be a rogue-like, and thus doesn't manage to do either as well as it should.
most runs in darkest dungeon 2 takes a minimum of two hours and can get up to three. if you're very lucky (or are just doing the denial chapter) then you might get away with an hour. but do you know what i could do in one hour in another rogue-like? I could do a full run of The Binding of Isaac: Repentance. If you want a turn-based RPG rogue-like example, look no further than Hieronymus Bosch's Brutal Orchestra.
that's a good comparison piece, actually. Brutal Orchestra has a system similar to the stagecoach in that it is a UI where you choose one of so many paths in order to fight enemies, find items, etc. you know what it doesn't have? a long and drawn out stagecoach trawl where the only benefit is running over road debris to potentially get items. in Brutal Orchestra, you can go down paths quickly and near instantly and as such, runs in Brutal Orchestra at most only take about an hour. if you're not good at the game? An hour and a half. keep in mind that 1.5 hours is a generous time for how long DD2 runs last generally at minimum.
you know what else Brutal Orchestra doesn't have? five minutes of set-up before you can get into the meat of the game. must I do the fights in The Valley every time? must I ride through the stagecoach and in order to go through the Altar of Hope, to select the chapter of the game I want to play, and to pick my heroes? was all of that necessary when all of it could be condensed into one or two menus?
but here's the twist, hypothetical reader, and the twist is that all of this micromanagement and time-wasting was in the first game. you know what the first game also had? permanent and meaningful upgrades you could funnel resources into.
to be fair to the game, they sort of tried to do this, but it was a half measure. the two forms of progression that you retain between runs (ignoring chapter completion itself) is the Altar of Hope and the Memories.
the former is a sort of replacement for the Hamlet in the first game. you use candles of hope in order to unlock items for future runs. you also can pay some candles to receive benefits that will make runs easier, but it's not enough. a bizarre feature of the system is that when you unlock new items, you will start your next run with them in your inventory, but only for that run. that's odd, i thought, that they would give you a potentially busted trinket for free.
then i had another thought, why the fuck didn't the game let you use your remaining candles of hope to buy trinkets or inn items at the Altar of Hope if you are in excess, as opposed to having it fill a useless score meter? make it crazy expensive if you'd like, but it would be an easy way to keep candles of hope relevant even after you've unlocked all the items. it would make heroes feel less crippled when starting new runs.
speaking of heroes, the Memories system. it's a wash. this is the attempt by the game to recreate the "persistent heroes" from the original in a manner i can only call baffling. keep in mind that runs will often last at least two hours and that Memories reset upon death, so the marginal buffs you give your party are rendered useless by one errant critical hit. and it wouldn't be so bad, y'know, those errant crits, except each hero can only have one set of memories and you can't take duplicates into runs. you wanna play a run with your highwayman with three memories? why would you ever risk them going out unless you want them getting a new memory? in which case, hope you don't get fucked over by RNG because that's potentially six to eight hours of lost character.
this does not feel the same as it did in DD1. each hero, whether they were dupes or not, had their own personality to me. the quirks remained, as did the skills i preferred to equip on them, and they had experiences they lived through in these runs. y'know why losing them felt tragic, and not nearly as shitty as it does in this game? because i know there are other heroes, likely ones of the same class as the dead hero, who can take their place and i might even find heroes in the stagecoach with a decently high starting level so i don't feel so utterly crippled by death.
permanent trinkets, too, helped lessen the burden of death, because you were always getting something that lasts from a run so long as you don't run away without retrieving it or party wipe. in DD2, you can only win or party wipe. splendid.
were the game more like a rogue-like, they would cut out all of the filler in between the parts you actually enjoy, ie: the combat, and would just let you do that.
were the game more like darkest dungeon, long term progression would be more permanent, as opposed to locking it to future run items and minor buffs to the run that became invisible to me very quickly.
but i did play it for a while, so i must've enjoyed some of it. near the end, however, i really couldn't care less. red hook's body of work has been laid bare and i think it could use some polishing up. maybe DD3 will commit to the rogue-like bit or return to form. either way, i would probably like it better. keep the new tokens system though, i am quite fond of that.
i will gladly move on to playing Fear & Hunger 2, which is a game where i also get killed by RNG and potentially lose hours of progress and goddammit
2007
perhaps the best game you could complete in less than an afternoon. the perfect mixture of fun physics and portal based puzzles with sharp, dry comedy while basically having only one actual character. it's no wonder this game exploded the way it did.
2001
its like getting a root canal at a very nice office with pleasant music and a dentist who you're pretty sure has your best interests at heart but you fear they may be sadistic
the pathfinding ai for the pikmin sucks!!!!
the pathfinding ai for the pikmin sucks!!!!
2019
i love games that are devilishly simple but gradually unravel into a nightmarish puzzle box
dicey dungeons is just one of those games that you can't stop playing. you can't do it! you're playing it right now. i see you. you should pick crowbar.
it's the sort of game that is just so mechanically easy to understand but utilizes that simplicity in order to craft the potential for thousands of game-breaking runs. there's so much equipment that has the potential to synergize with one another that the act of finding a really, REALLY good synergy gives you the same feeling as solving a difficult puzzle in a game.
but the game isn't all about skill. it's called "dicey dungeons" not "assemble a perfect rube goldberg machine dungeons." a lot of the game is inherently about chance.
random chance mechanics in any game are a tightrope balance. while often unwelcome in games that rely heavily on reaction timing, it's almost a necessity in any given rpg in order to avoid stagnance in either direction. it's no fun being locked into winning or losing at the very start of a fight. variable damage numbers, critical hits, dodge chances... there's a lot
for dicey dungeons, the randomness is baked into the system itself. you roll dice from 1-6 and that determines the actions you're allowed to take. this system actually works a lot better than most rng elements due to the amount of tools the game provides you that allow you to counterbalance this innate randomness.
the warrior starts with a reroll skill that can reroll dice up to three times. the thief starts with a lockpick that allows him to split up higher dice into lower dice, allowing him to utilize his equipment even if he rolls high. robot can find lots of equipment that decreases the randomness of his cpu or gives you cushions in case you bust. the inventor's scrapping mechanic is offset by choosing one of three pieces of equipment and having certain equipment be guaranteed to show up for scrapping. i could go on. every character has mechanics like this.
speaking of characters, they all act as an "ascending order of complexity" that helps ease players into the more unusual aspects of the game like a frog in a simmering pot. the complexity usually just boils down to finding the character's win condition.
warrior and thief both have very simple win conditions, that being "roll as high as possible" and "roll lots of small dice." warrior is fairly consistent throughout and thief can potentially build in a direction where his win condition becomes "roll as high as possible and get lots of countdown equipment." (you should've picked crowbar, by the way. why didn't you do that?)
robot leans heavily into the "game of chance" aspect, since acquiring dice essentially requires that robot play blackjack. their win condition is usually "hit the jackpot" but further complexity is added through either building around hitting consistent jackpots or through acquiring safety cushions in case you fail. they're probably one of my favorites because you can choose to lean heavily into random chance or lean heavily outside of it. and darn it, it's exhilarating getting a jackpot when you're expecting to bust.
inventor and witch are a bit more divisive for me. inventor's core gimmick is simple, but forces you to always have backup plans in mind. her playstyle is completely incongruous with your general win condition of setting up a kit that will work in 90% of scenarios, and her win condition is more closely aligned with "have at least 3 kits that have a 75% chance of working in mind at any given time." the best parts of playing inventor are often in the final stretch of enemies before the boss, where you're trying to optimize your kit so you can get a really good gadget that gives you that proper "90% chance of victory build" going into the boss.
witch is divisive for a different reason. she is THE setplay character. her win conditions are essentially "fill out your spellbook with equipment that synergizes well." unlike other characters, witch's power often requires a lot of preparation time and usually requires a level of foresight on the part of the player in order to avoid being trapped into bad builds.
this comes down to a specific design element exclusive to her and the sixth character, that being a lack of inventory. acquiring equipment affixes it to your spellbook, and replacing the spell removes it entirely. this one design choice is the source of many, many frustrations while playing as the witch. you can't alter the contents of your spellbook to get that golden build, you just have to know in advance what her potential spells are so you can hope to eventually get to that point.
this complexity means that witch often has the potential to do all sorts of things, i won't deny that, but much of the experience playing witch leads to her doing things worse than everyone else up until the very end. so many of my runs ended at floor 5 because fights simply were taking long enough that the witch's hp would be worn down to nothing.
the sixth character is possibly my favorite, and i won't spoil their identity. their win condition is something like "find lots of good cards, but keep your deck as lean as possible." this new cards system along with their "snap" limit break leads to some of my favorite synergies in the entire game. there is nothing quite as satisfying as curating your deck so perfectly that you can end fights in a single turn.
all of this, by itself, is pretty great. the witch may be a bit frustrating to play, but the variety in and of itself means that you'll rarely get bored so long as you're willing to experiment. but each character has six episodes which take each of these concepts and take them even further! whether it's episode 4's hard mode or the unique challenge runs of episodes 2 and 3, the "close to true rogue-like" bonus round that is episode six, or the ENTIRE PARALLEL UNIVERSE THAT ALTERS EQUIPMENT AND STATUS EFFECTS
the game always finds new rabbits to pull out of its hat, is what i'm saying.
on a more aesthetic level, the game's got a great sense of style and an incredibly great soundtrack that almost never got old for me. it's a small detail, but i love how battle themes always start at random points in a song. it's a small touch that keeps the music from ever getting too repetitive.
if you're looking for an addictive rogue-like, there are few as fun as dicey dungeons. now if you'll excuse me, i'm off to play the other level packs!
because the game has those.
seriously. they just keep finding new ways to iterate on the concept.
dicey dungeons is just one of those games that you can't stop playing. you can't do it! you're playing it right now. i see you. you should pick crowbar.
it's the sort of game that is just so mechanically easy to understand but utilizes that simplicity in order to craft the potential for thousands of game-breaking runs. there's so much equipment that has the potential to synergize with one another that the act of finding a really, REALLY good synergy gives you the same feeling as solving a difficult puzzle in a game.
but the game isn't all about skill. it's called "dicey dungeons" not "assemble a perfect rube goldberg machine dungeons." a lot of the game is inherently about chance.
random chance mechanics in any game are a tightrope balance. while often unwelcome in games that rely heavily on reaction timing, it's almost a necessity in any given rpg in order to avoid stagnance in either direction. it's no fun being locked into winning or losing at the very start of a fight. variable damage numbers, critical hits, dodge chances... there's a lot
for dicey dungeons, the randomness is baked into the system itself. you roll dice from 1-6 and that determines the actions you're allowed to take. this system actually works a lot better than most rng elements due to the amount of tools the game provides you that allow you to counterbalance this innate randomness.
the warrior starts with a reroll skill that can reroll dice up to three times. the thief starts with a lockpick that allows him to split up higher dice into lower dice, allowing him to utilize his equipment even if he rolls high. robot can find lots of equipment that decreases the randomness of his cpu or gives you cushions in case you bust. the inventor's scrapping mechanic is offset by choosing one of three pieces of equipment and having certain equipment be guaranteed to show up for scrapping. i could go on. every character has mechanics like this.
speaking of characters, they all act as an "ascending order of complexity" that helps ease players into the more unusual aspects of the game like a frog in a simmering pot. the complexity usually just boils down to finding the character's win condition.
warrior and thief both have very simple win conditions, that being "roll as high as possible" and "roll lots of small dice." warrior is fairly consistent throughout and thief can potentially build in a direction where his win condition becomes "roll as high as possible and get lots of countdown equipment." (you should've picked crowbar, by the way. why didn't you do that?)
robot leans heavily into the "game of chance" aspect, since acquiring dice essentially requires that robot play blackjack. their win condition is usually "hit the jackpot" but further complexity is added through either building around hitting consistent jackpots or through acquiring safety cushions in case you fail. they're probably one of my favorites because you can choose to lean heavily into random chance or lean heavily outside of it. and darn it, it's exhilarating getting a jackpot when you're expecting to bust.
inventor and witch are a bit more divisive for me. inventor's core gimmick is simple, but forces you to always have backup plans in mind. her playstyle is completely incongruous with your general win condition of setting up a kit that will work in 90% of scenarios, and her win condition is more closely aligned with "have at least 3 kits that have a 75% chance of working in mind at any given time." the best parts of playing inventor are often in the final stretch of enemies before the boss, where you're trying to optimize your kit so you can get a really good gadget that gives you that proper "90% chance of victory build" going into the boss.
witch is divisive for a different reason. she is THE setplay character. her win conditions are essentially "fill out your spellbook with equipment that synergizes well." unlike other characters, witch's power often requires a lot of preparation time and usually requires a level of foresight on the part of the player in order to avoid being trapped into bad builds.
this comes down to a specific design element exclusive to her and the sixth character, that being a lack of inventory. acquiring equipment affixes it to your spellbook, and replacing the spell removes it entirely. this one design choice is the source of many, many frustrations while playing as the witch. you can't alter the contents of your spellbook to get that golden build, you just have to know in advance what her potential spells are so you can hope to eventually get to that point.
this complexity means that witch often has the potential to do all sorts of things, i won't deny that, but much of the experience playing witch leads to her doing things worse than everyone else up until the very end. so many of my runs ended at floor 5 because fights simply were taking long enough that the witch's hp would be worn down to nothing.
the sixth character is possibly my favorite, and i won't spoil their identity. their win condition is something like "find lots of good cards, but keep your deck as lean as possible." this new cards system along with their "snap" limit break leads to some of my favorite synergies in the entire game. there is nothing quite as satisfying as curating your deck so perfectly that you can end fights in a single turn.
all of this, by itself, is pretty great. the witch may be a bit frustrating to play, but the variety in and of itself means that you'll rarely get bored so long as you're willing to experiment. but each character has six episodes which take each of these concepts and take them even further! whether it's episode 4's hard mode or the unique challenge runs of episodes 2 and 3, the "close to true rogue-like" bonus round that is episode six, or the ENTIRE PARALLEL UNIVERSE THAT ALTERS EQUIPMENT AND STATUS EFFECTS
the game always finds new rabbits to pull out of its hat, is what i'm saying.
on a more aesthetic level, the game's got a great sense of style and an incredibly great soundtrack that almost never got old for me. it's a small detail, but i love how battle themes always start at random points in a song. it's a small touch that keeps the music from ever getting too repetitive.
if you're looking for an addictive rogue-like, there are few as fun as dicey dungeons. now if you'll excuse me, i'm off to play the other level packs!
because the game has those.
seriously. they just keep finding new ways to iterate on the concept.
1995
pretty classic. slumps near the end with all the sidequests and a lot of it requires a bunch of esoteric nonsense, but it's got great music, a story that's both fun and harrowing (a bit tonally dissonant at times, lol), and some really good designs from toriyama
magus is funny
magus is funny
2022
(Logging ratings from glitchwave.com)
is it fair to think less of a game because getting the true ending is aggravating and you get sick of playing the game due to the tedious conditions required to achieve it?
yeah
is it fair to think less of a game because getting the true ending is aggravating and you get sick of playing the game due to the tedious conditions required to achieve it?
yeah
2018
a horrendously difficult game where you can potentially lose hours of progress due to the limited save system and with enemies where you chop off their head and they still manage to give you an infected limb on the way out
great game! would play again
okay but actually, word of advice, do not go for ending B, it is absolutely not worth the hassle and you basically need to do the same shit for ending A regardless
great game! would play again
okay but actually, word of advice, do not go for ending B, it is absolutely not worth the hassle and you basically need to do the same shit for ending A regardless
2014
i havent played this one recently but i did play it a long while ago and since im currently playing the remake of the game i wanted to give my 2 cents on the original
one of the earlier games that really went all in on the "meta" stuff, and i think the feeling of holding a small, fragile world in your hands is conveyed incredibly well by the literal "oneshot" nature of the game. i don't think another game has quite gotten this same level of ludonarrative resonance, probably because having such dire consequences for quitting the game is a potentially alienating creative choice. however, i think it works beautifully in this game.
i'm a bit sad that this isn't carried over into the remake, but i also understand why you can't really do that if you're selling it for 10 dollars USD.
the game's got just enough worldbuilding for oneshot's setting to stay with me and the characters are fleshed out just enough for their purpose. the defining character, of course, being niko. he's an incredibly lovable little fella and you feel bad for the poor kid with how much of a burden he's carrying.
the puzzles vary between typical adventure game style item crafting and the unusual meta puzzles that for its time are pretty cool and interesting.
all in all, the game is a fairly short but very powerful experience. i won't spoil the final choice of the game, but even though i knew which one i felt was right to choose very quickly, it was still one of the hardest choices in a game i've ever had to make.
one of the earlier games that really went all in on the "meta" stuff, and i think the feeling of holding a small, fragile world in your hands is conveyed incredibly well by the literal "oneshot" nature of the game. i don't think another game has quite gotten this same level of ludonarrative resonance, probably because having such dire consequences for quitting the game is a potentially alienating creative choice. however, i think it works beautifully in this game.
i'm a bit sad that this isn't carried over into the remake, but i also understand why you can't really do that if you're selling it for 10 dollars USD.
the game's got just enough worldbuilding for oneshot's setting to stay with me and the characters are fleshed out just enough for their purpose. the defining character, of course, being niko. he's an incredibly lovable little fella and you feel bad for the poor kid with how much of a burden he's carrying.
the puzzles vary between typical adventure game style item crafting and the unusual meta puzzles that for its time are pretty cool and interesting.
all in all, the game is a fairly short but very powerful experience. i won't spoil the final choice of the game, but even though i knew which one i felt was right to choose very quickly, it was still one of the hardest choices in a game i've ever had to make.
2016
This review contains spoilers
"Everybody lives, Rose! Just this once... everybody lives!"
really fun and i wish modern mario kart had a "double dash mode" and we could bring back some of these awesome combo items but holy shit if you're trying to 100% this game the ai cheats like a bastard
goes BEYOND rubberbanding and into the territory of like, outrunning chain chomps and red shells or getting a starting boost faster than a double dash boost in co-op
which is worse because if the ai racers end up in 1st and you given them like, five seconds, you will never get first unless you REALLY luck into a good item like golden mushroom with the toads
still, a fantastic game with tight controls and (mostly) banger courses
goes BEYOND rubberbanding and into the territory of like, outrunning chain chomps and red shells or getting a starting boost faster than a double dash boost in co-op
which is worse because if the ai racers end up in 1st and you given them like, five seconds, you will never get first unless you REALLY luck into a good item like golden mushroom with the toads
still, a fantastic game with tight controls and (mostly) banger courses