going to preface this review by saying i didnt play this, i watched all the cutscenes because quite frankly i am not going to buy an entire ass ps5 for this. therefore it will remain without a rating as i dont have much to say about the gameplay.

okay firstly this is straight up the funniest final fantasy game ever and every part that made me laugh was completely unintentional. like all the intentionally funny parts whatever but holy fuck.. the multiverse stuff was hilarious i cannot believe its real life that THIS is what we get out of a giant ass production with ff7 in the title.
i genuinely appreciate how they tried to recreate so many things from the original and keep it recognizable but man. first off... how do you expand upon this and still skip things like rocket town? cids entire story is skipped over? and for what? more cutscenes about zack and biggs suck and fuck adventures?
the characterization was similar to part 1 at least, i enjoyed how true to the original cloud is but im still concerned the direction its heading towards. aerith is noticeably different and i understand...? assume...? this is because of the multiverse stuff? but now i really dont know. yuffie is of course butchered, elena is NOTHING like how i saw her... i could go on. nanakis voice completely changes after we reach cosmo canyon, and i understand in the original he did talk different in the original japanese text at this point but by god the entire ass voice change was not necessary and was just straight up annoying and added another layer to the already TERRIBLE voice acting that makes one ask whether or not there was even any attempt at direction here.
somehow it feels like the misogyny has just gotten worse here. its ff7s biggest criticism, and for good reason. but they spend so much time making stupid compilation lore references and changing up random things and yet theres still somehow a dating sim, weird jokes about a literal 14 year old, and the women still feel like theyre barely even becoming their own characters. tifas slightly improved upon but... it just doesnt really hit the way it should.
i think my biggest criticism of this is how absolutely hideous it is half the time. the other half of the time it doesnt even really look good it just looks okay. nomura being off the team is so evident, there is no art direction here absolutely none. the cutscene of sephiroth killing aerith genuinely was so terrible it actually hurt to look at because of the composition and the colors honestly that entire last hour before the last prerendered cutscene was just absolutely hideous. imagine remaking a game that was one of the first to ever have cinematic cutscenes and not spending a single minute to understand how to utilize cinematics in a video game. the original game actually looked better than this even by modern standards and im not even kidding about that. like if it looked good i wouldve forgiven it for every flaw and my distaste for the plot.
anyways this made me want to play xenogears really badly so thats probably next

i'm not going to start off by saying anything as vapid as "I wanted to like LISA," but LISA's status as an undeniable indie classic was on my mind coming into playing it. It's considered up there with a game like Undertale, a game I have always considered one of the best of all time.

LISA simply fails to live up to any of it's hype, it's status as a well written, deep experience almost comes off comical and it's gameplay just doesn't work to hold up this so called "Painful" experience.

LISA's structured in a manner revolving around it's "Joy" mechanic. Joy is the in game world's most popular drug, that give's your characters a massive buff with the tradeoff of a debuff after some turns as well as story implications at certain points. The issue is, there's no real payoff for NOT using joy! At one point, one of the game's villains even says "It doesn't even matter" that Brad has quit joy. You could say this is some weird commentary that it doesn't matter if you get clean, you can't change or whatever, but that really sucks! There's almost zero repercussions to using Joy, especially if you don't actually care about the world or the characters. It's got the makings of a great choice based system, but it fails in execution

In fact, almost any of LISA's punishments fall on it's face. When resting at a fire to heal your party, LISA will often hand you a punishment (i.e killing your party members, poisoning your party, or removing your items), which can quickly be nullified by reloading your save which is always placed right next to the campfire. At first I presumed that by doing it there would be a longer term payoff, where the game would call me a little pussy for reloading, but there's nothing! The so called painful experience merely becomes tedious.

LISA has a lot of tedium in it's gameplay. At certain points in the game, one of the games villains ask you to cut off your arm or kill a party member. I never killed a party member, and I cut both arms off. The tradeoff for cutting your arms off is losing access to certain attacks as well as slower movement on ropes (And a reliance on Joy, although as I said before, it doesn't really matter). I didn't lose any attacks I actually used upon losing both arms (I used fireball every time, and that doesn't involve using arms!) and the rope speed change mererly served to annoy me (and they put in a lot of ropes afterwards!). It's not smart, it's not trying to provide a harsh experience, it just is annoying.

But LISA is known for it's story and it's world, so how does it hold? It sure doesn't.

LISA's story can be boiled down to "a cycle of abuse". It's nothing more interesting than that, and it fails to tell that story meaningfully at all. LISA's critical moment happens when Buddy (The McGuffin of LISA's story, and Brad's adopted daughter) is found with Martin (The game's overarching villain, the abusive father of Brad) the game makes you fight Martin in a boss fight. Martin is claimed to have changed, and Buddy gets in Brad's way, forcing the player to attack Buddy. This is to reinforce the cycle of abuse and WOW! It's weak! You can defend 100 turns in a row, not wanting to hurt Buddy (Trust me I did) and the game still forces you to. It's so weak, and it doesn't work at all. You're meant to feel bad for this thing you don't even want to do, that you haven't wanted to do at all.

Martin's appearance doesn't even make sense, how did he find Buddy, how's he alive? It's not explained. The world of LISA doesn't make much sense either, and not in a weird fun way. Why has society just absolutely collapsed that women have disappeared? Did men rely on women to maintain a currency that isn't porn magazines? How come every major character knew Brad or existed in Brad's life before the apocalypse? It's world feels tiny, despite having such major global consequences.

Also man, a lot of this writing just isn't that funny. I will give up that I love both Nern and Terry Hintz. They are brilliant, funny characters, but they're so underutilised. Any other party member really sucks and just isn't that interesting. There's a lot of jokes here that just don't land. Whether it's some real bad crossdressing jokes or a part where a "girl" is being used for sex and it turns out to be a man (Real funny right? What if we called him "Violated Guy" as an achievement! This shit sucks) none of these jokes land at all, and it's just real bad edgelord humour.

LISA is saying nothing and it's doing nothing. It's a game that tries to tell a deep message, but tells nothing less shallow than a children's pool. It tries to have a unique gameplay style with consequences, yet fails to punish the player for doing anything. You have to put arbitrary rules over anything to enjoy it. I don't get it I'll be honest!

Anyway, writing a negative review's taken a lot out of me, it's no fun to do. I'll end it there