Lisa: The Painful RPG

[Bjorn]

I know several other people bought this during the sale.  I started it last night, and am digging the hell out of it.  Mechanically, it's a side scrolling JRPG, but set in a crazy depressing post-apocalyptic world in which only men survived. 

 

I'll have more thoughts once I'm through it, but I wanted to start a thread to give anyone else a heads up to start the game on Normal, not Painful.  You're given the option to set the difficulty during the tutorial, and that's the only chance to set it, you can't change it later.  Painful has some additional content and changes to Normal, but it radically changes the save system.  The game uses save points, and in Normal each save point can be used as much as you want.  In Painful, each save point can only be used once.  You can't save again until you find the next one.  I started on Painful not knowing this, and ended up losing an hour of progress last night to an incredibly stupid death (literally walked off a cliff by accident) because I hadn't found another save point yet.  I'm going to restart on Normal, as if I have to deal with losing that kind of progress again, I'll just delete the damn game.  Scanning some forums, it sounds like if you know where the save points are, you can manage Painful pretty well by skipping some save points to use later, but that's much more doable on a second playthrough. 

 

Also, very early on you have to make an incredibly difficult decision involving a party member.  In case you're wondering:

 

As tempting as it might be to let Terry die because he's an annoying worthless shit, it's probably worth saving him.  The items lost are not that big of a deal in the long run, and he actually does become somewhat useful after he's leveled up a few times.

[chummer]

Bought it but haven't started. Thanks for the warning though.

 

How's the JRPG stuff? I assume you mean random encounters, menu-battles and character leveling?

[Bjorn]

I only got 3-4 hours in, so take this with a bit of a grain of salt:

 

Encounters - Mostly fixed, with some new ones added after certain events (there's some backtracking, but nothing to onerous so far), though I have found two areas with random, respawning enemies (actually useful for farming money and healing items, which seems pretty limited otherwise)

 

Menu Battles with a manual combo system for some characters.  You can choose not to mess with the combos and auto-cast them, with a minor (10-20 percent?) reduction in damage

 

Character leveling - Typical JRPG leveling, somewhat impenetrable stats go up with each level and you get new powers at some levels.  There is equipment to equip, but each character has specific equipment associated with them (with a few crossovers).  Each character has been a unique class so far, most of which have some corollary with other RPGs, but their own unique flavor suited to the world. 

 

 

 

Oh, and one other thing which I did not understand when I hit hit, because it wasn't really explained very well.  Your main character is a drug addict (and apparently a few other party characters are as well, but so far the rest of my party is clean).  At times he goes into a withdrawal/craving fit, at which point his basic attack stat gets zeroed out.  You can sleep it off (instantly cured), fight through it (certain combos still do damage, but basic attacks don't, eventually it goes away for awhile) or take some drugs to make it go away instantly and get a big stat boost for awhile.  I suspect that using drugs may have some long term implications, it doesn't strike me as just a throwaway mechanic given the opening of the game. 

[Bjorn]

I'm about two-thirds of the way through this, and I'm floored by how good, rich and complex it is.  I can't believe it hasn't done one of those indie things where it totally dominates gaming for awhile because of all the wacky, strange and interesting things that happen.  You can't go 10 minutes without something interesting happening.  And it's one of those things where I'm hesitant to even talk about the little moments, because I think spoiling those is really spoiling the core joy of the game, all these little discoveries.  As an example, the last time I played...

 

 

I worked as a prostitute in an all male brothel because I was desperate for money, servicing clients through the traditional JRPG fight sequence.  And then I found a secret fishpeople town, where I was arrested and tried for theft, but was unable to understand a single thing the judge or jury said.

 

The game is has regular misogynistic and homophobic content, with references to rape and sexual assault.  But they all feel natural to the world, because this is a world without women, where society has collapsed because the men know that they are the end of the line for humanity and are bitter, angry, afraid and without hope.

 

There are SOOOO many recruitable characters for your party, at least a couple of dozen I would say?  Which makes sense, because the game is willing to kill off your allies at the drop of a hat, permanently.  It's constantly throwing new characters at you, because you could easily be steadily losing them to attrition.  The Painful mode with its limited saves makes a lot more sense to me now that I'm a ways through it.  It's one of the few ways to seriously combat save scumming without using a constant auto-save feature. 

[chummer]

2 hours in and I'm enjoying it!

 

Battles feel quick, I haven't had to do any grinding (though I'm playing on Normal mode as you suggested, Bjorn), and random battles are limited to a few areas, which I feel are three things I need to have when dealing with menu-based combat systems.

 

The  game is front-loaded with a lot of story, though thankfully it's very focused on the characters and not lore.

 

 

The game is has regular misogynistic and homophobic content, with references to rape and sexual assault.  But they all feel natural to the world, because this is a world without women, where society has collapsed because the men know that they are the end of the line for humanity and are bitter, angry, afraid and without hope.

 

Definitely. An early companion spouts some misogyny, but there's no veneer of likability to him. The game even has some meta-comments that make it clear that this dude is a jerk.

 

The music is great. This is my favorite track so far:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1a_LxEW2bU

 

Eager to play more of it.

[Bjorn]

I almost finished it tonight, I'm sure I'm at the last area, but decided to save the end for tomorrow, when I'm not super tired (why do I always hit the ends of games past midnight). 

 

 

Battles feel quick, I haven't had to do any grinding (though I'm playing on Normal mode as you suggested, Bjorn), and random battles are limited to a few areas, which I feel are three things I need to have when dealing with menu-based combat systems.

 

Having gone through almost all of it now, I'm sure Normal mode is the better way to play it the first time.  I save scummed my way out of getting fucked by the RNG a few times, but there are plenty of places where you simply have to make a very hard decision, so it's not like save scumming is really robbing you of the experience.

[Bjorn]

And I finished it last night, absolutely loved it. The battle system was getting a little old by the end, but I think that's probably because I just don't find JRPG menu battles that interesting anymore, though it held up far longer than I expected.

Still have a ton of thoughts on this, but will wait until someone else has finished it.

Oh, I decided to just look up the extra scenes from playing on Painful mode. There is some really important information for understanding the story, but unless you absolutely love the mechanics of the game, I think 'tubing it makes more sense than playing back through.

[chummer]

So I just finished it and, well, that was certainly a bizarre experience. I didn't quite grasp the ending as the dialogue moved to being very ambiguous. I think I'm going to have to check out those YouTube videos, Bjorn, so I can get a better grasp on what happened.

 

I think this game's strength is in the touristy nature of exploring a world where people are doing strange things. A thought that I had about the game was how when you're in a world filled with people that have accepted that they are the last generation of humans, they are probably more willing to do bizarre things and follow a charismatic person. So I guess you essentially spend the entire journey fighting cults?

 

I also ended up save-scumming a few times as well. The game has multiple characters that have perma-kill moves that will immediately destroy a companion. There doesn't seem to be any way to protect against them though, so I didn't feel bad scumming.

 

Part of what makes the world so weird is the music as well, which is incredibly good and often helps create meaning in the cutscenes.

 

I'll probably have more to say after I read up more on the harder difficulty content that I missed, but I'm going to point out that this game is somehow connected to a game some of the devs made in 2012 called: Lisa "The First"

[Bjorn]

So I just finished it and, well, that was certainly a bizarre experience. I didn't quite grasp the ending as the dialogue moved to being very ambiguous. I think I'm going to have to check out those YouTube videos, Bjorn, so I can get a better grasp on what happened.

 

I think this game's strength is in the touristy nature of exploring a world where people are doing strange things. A thought that I had about the game was how when you're in a world filled with people that have accepted that they are the last generation of humans, they are probably more willing to do bizarre things and follow a charismatic person. So I guess you essentially spend the entire journey fighting cults?

 

I also ended up save-scumming a few times as well. The game has multiple characters that have perma-kill moves that will immediately destroy a companion. There doesn't seem to be any way to protect against them though, so I didn't feel bad scumming.

 

Part of what makes the world so weird is the music as well, which is incredibly good and often helps create meaning in the cutscenes.

 

I'll probably have more to say after I read up more on the harder difficulty content that I missed, but I'm going to point out that this game is somehow connected to a game some of the devs made in 2012 called: Lisa "The First"

 

Some of the story is not meant to be understood as of now.  The dev is currently putting the finishing work into Lisa the Joyful, which will continue the story and wrap up at least parts of it (I wouldn't be surprised if some things are still left ambiguous). 

 

I think there's a fair argument to be made that you also spend the journey building your own cult.  Brad's a real force of nature, obviously one of the strongest fighters left in that area of the world.  Even out of shape and older, he was still once a martial arts master. 

 

And that taps into that there's a meta narrative about becoming the thing you hate and how cycles of abuse are perpetuated. 

 

Did you ever take Joy?  I know the ending is different based on whether you did or not.

[chummer]

Some of the story is not meant to be understood as of now.  The dev is currently putting the finishing work into Lisa the Joyful, which will continue the story and wrap up at least parts of it (I wouldn't be surprised if some things are still left ambiguous). 

 

I think there's a fair argument to be made that you also spend the journey building your own cult.  Brad's a real force of nature, obviously one of the strongest fighters left in that area of the world.  Even out of shape and older, he was still once a martial arts master. 

 

And that taps into that there's a meta narrative about becoming the thing you hate and how cycles of abuse are perpetuated. 

 

Did you ever take Joy?  I know the ending is different based on whether you did or not.

 

I think you're right about the 'building your own cult,' Bjorn; Brad is building his own Rando Army of bored wanderers.

 

I managed to avoid taking joy right up until the last three battles, where I felt it was thematically appropriate for him to do so. The part of the ending I didn't understand wasn't the world stuff, but the emotional places the characters were in as the closing came. That idea of a cycle of abuse is important, particularly when thinking about this game in context of the first one.

 

Having played through all of it now, I think the rape with the truck driver was kind of unnecessary. It didn't add anything and is never sympathetically explored. There's also plenty of other things that show the world to be a fucked-up place. I also didn't like the fact that the psuedo-Native American character is literally a red-man :/

[Bjorn]

Lisa is on sale again on Steam for anyone who is interested in it. 

 

 

Having played through all of it now, I think the rape with the truck driver was kind of unnecessary. It didn't add anything and is never sympathetically explored. There's also plenty of other things that show the world to be a fucked-up place. I also didn't like the fact that the psuedo-Native American character is literally a red-man :/

 

Are you talking about the archer, or did I miss a character?

 

The truck driver thing was kind of weird.  Obviously it was a red herring, but the idea that anyone could mistake him for a girl was unbelievable, which means, guys were just paying to rape a guy for the hell of it?

[graddy]

I purchased the soundtrack steam edition based on this thread and the strength of said soundtrack. First 15 minutes were promising! I'm hopeful that I can finish this. I'm not much for long games anymore, much less RPGs.

[Bjorn]

Steam says I played for 22 hours, and I did restart once to change difficulty, so probably more like 18 hours once you figure in time left paused and stuff (because I do that a lot).  I'm also the type of player who scours every nook and cranny of a game, and often unnecessarily backtracks just to double check something.  It depends on what you consider a long game, but I thought it's length was overall very reasonable. 

[chummer]

Are you talking about the archer, or did I miss a character?

 

The truck driver thing was kind of weird.  Obviously it was a red herring, but the idea that anyone could mistake him for a girl was unbelievable, which means, guys were just paying to rape a guy for the hell of it?

 

I'm specifically thinking about the truck driver :/

 

 

Steam says I played for 22 hours, and I did restart once to change difficulty, so probably more like 18 hours once you figure in time left paused and stuff (because I do that a lot).  I'm also the type of player who scours every nook and cranny of a game, and often unnecessarily backtracks just to double check something.  It depends on what you consider a long game, but I thought it's length was overall very reasonable. 

 

My game took about 13 hours? (Which is still a pretty good length.) I'll also say that I used a guide a few times to point me in the right direction though, so that may have prevented me from feeling the need to backtrack and double-check things. I also only did grinding twice and I don't think I spent much more than an hour doing so.

[Bjorn]

I'm specifically thinking about the truck driver :/

 

Sorry, maybe I worded that in a confusing way.  You were talking about two different characters, right?  One who was presented as possibly being Native American and then the truck driver.  I was trying to figure out which character the Native American was.

[chummer]

Sorry, maybe I worded that in a confusing way.  You were talking about two different characters, right?  One who was presented as possibly being Native American and then the truck driver.  I was trying to figure out which character the Native American was.

 

I'm thinking of the group in the last act that guards the tree under the bloodmoon, specifically:  

 

We kind of touched on the 'cult' element to the game and it feels like almost every organized group you run into is often playing dress-up: 

Rangers, Rando Army, motorcycle gang, wrestling crew, etc.

. I was wary that this was a bunch of non-native dudes pretending to native, but was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Portrayal of that boss character soured me though.

[Smart Jason]

Just finished this. Found the ending crossed over into being too impenetrable for my tastes.

[Bjorn]

I'm thinking of the group in the last act that guards the tree under the bloodmoon, specifically:  

 

We kind of touched on the 'cult' element to the game and it feels like almost every organized group you run into is often playing dress-up: 

Rangers, Rando Army, motorcycle gang, wrestling crew, etc.

. I was wary that this was a bunch of non-native dudes pretending to native, but was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Portrayal of that boss character soured me though.

 

Okay, I feel dumb, I thought you were talking about a character you could recruit.  Yeah, in hindsight that section is fucking weird, and stands apart as just being thoughtless compared to a lot of the rest of the game.  It didn't jump out at me at the time, but by that point I was really rushing through the last fetch quests and didn't give them as much thought as the earlier stuff.

[graddy]

This game makes me sad. The scenarios are so interesting and the music is truly fantastic. It burrowed into my brain and many evenings having a song stuck in my head would lead me to boot it up.

I'm stuck though. I'll stay vague. I killed the blob with a firebomb and have the bicycle, but the nice hair people kill me in one hit basically. I really don't want to stop now, can someone give me some advice?

[Bjorn]

Do you have any firebombs left, or characters with fire attacks?  There's a person who gives you a hint that fancy hair is weak to fire.  I just spammed firebombs at them.

 

There are a couple of places you can farm experience with respawning enemies (the snakes and the shadows).  There are characters who are much, much tankier than some other ones.  The wilderness guy I know is pretty great. 

 

The first time I fought the hair guys, they destroyed me.  Bad.  So I went exploring, found some side areas I had missed, leveled up, and by the time I went back I was able to handle them pretty easily.  Oh, and don't discount attacks that can cause status effects on enemies.  Stun, knockdown, and a couple of others can be chained one from another to stunlock some enemies. 

[graddy]

I think I should backtrack to the bar at the beginning and recruit another member with fire attacks. I only have the main guy and Nern. My third, the annoying guy you meet early who talks too much, was kidnapped while I was napping.

[Bjorn]

Ah, you've missed a few areas then.  Definitely do some hunting around, with the gap jumping ability of the bicycle, there are a few areas open to you now that there weren't before.  There's a gap you can't jump in one of the caves that will lead you to another character as well.  You can also rescue your kidnapped fellow.  I'll spoiler this for folks, but if you really want him back, it's worth reading.

 

In one of the town areas, there was a room that was previously empty that had some graffiti on the wall outside of it.  A few gang members and your kidnapped person will be there now.  Do not start a fight with them.  If you do, they will execute your teammate.  You have to pay to get him back.  I didn't use that guy too much, so if you want to save whatever it is they are asking for, you're not necessarily losing out on someone super valuable.

[graddy]

Beat the hair! I used three firebombs to do it though :/ they were really tough. One hit KOs on everyone but Brad. I have the Chicken guy now.

Do you think I'm under leveled at 10-12 or do you think I'll hit similar combat walls like this throughout the game? Wondering how much resolve I'll need to beat the whole thing...

[Bjorn]

The hair guys were the biggest brick wall I hit, everything else was very manageable to me, but I also made sure to comb every little side area I could find. 

 

I really don't know if that's underleveled or not, I didn't pay very close attention to what level I was at different portions of the game.

[chummer]

Lisa the Joyful is out.