Lisa the joyful:
This is a expansion for lisa the painful which just happens to be a different game, but it is an expansion pack.
This game fixes a lot of the main problems I pointed out when I talked about lisa the painful, and that being the combat and the level design. There have been no moments in this game when I felt I outsmarted the game and it punished me for it. Ahd the combat is a lot more fun!, but not for the reason the developer intended
The previous game combat was pretty bad. The most optimal strat was just pretty boring and extremely frustrating. Some enemies in the game have A LOT of hp, and while you do level up, the damage doesn't scale that much, the main way of actually making more damage is by getting better skills/characters, however even this falls short in the endgame. However, status effects do damage based on a % of the maximum health the enemy has, so this was the most viable way to do damage. The enemies also had random instakill attacks, so the only real way to protect yourself was to permastun the enemy. The problem is, every status effect has a chance to fail and not land, a quite high one in fact. So yeah, the best way to play the game was to just spam status effect to make the enemy not attack and for yourself to do damage and just pray that they wouldn't fail. There was no danger state, the fights were always one-sided and it all depended on RNG (also, given that there is no healthbars, status effects are the only way to know the max HP of an enemy!)
Some may see this as a good thing, at the end of the day, the game is supposed to be unfair and frustrating, but I see this as the wrong way to accomplish that goal. The GOOD frustrating parts of the game are stuff like the random, game-changing decisions you have to do at random points at the game, the random ambushes that you can learn to predict, knowing that resting could be dangerous and planning ways around not resting, etc. All of that is frustrating but it requires more from the player than just a RNG check
Lisa the joyful has a way limited set of skills, the permastun strategy isn't really viable anymore, and the optimal strategy is considerably more fun. However, this seems like a side effect, as the way the developer tried to solve the combat was to add paper mario style minigames into it. This is something that kinda has become industry standard as a way to remedy turn based combat being "boring", which I just think fucking suck ass
The problems I see with standard turn based combat are the following (or why chained echoes has the best turn based combat ever designed):
-Grinding being the optimal way to play the videogame
-Balancing, make every skill useful and not have some which are just way better than the rest
-Being able to memorize a rotation of attacks that you can just spam, without much variation between fights
Being slow is not one of the problems, it adds to the tension. Lisa isn't an action game, you're supposed to stress out over every small decision, and minmax your way into avoiding awful situations, the combat being slow only improves that feeling. In fact, if you're full of adrenaline you wont really ever be in that state, which makes for a worse experience
Adding the minigame doesn't fix any of the problems, it's just copying what other successful games did without knowing WHY they did it. It's just a bad addition to the game. (I'm sorry game industry but instead of copying minigames you should be copying chained echoes, which has TWO different combat systems that completely solve this problem and are the best combat system ever designed, no one could fucking come up with anything and this game developed by A SINGLE PERSON just came in and solved it TWICE, chained echoes is so underrated man)
The ending of lisa the hopeful is also told in a way that is really fitting of the game, having this more psychological, abstract tone which fits the game beautifully
The only downgrade in this game is that it won't surprise you as much as the original. It doesn't bring that many new ideas onto the table, and due to the scope of the game being smaller, a lot of the best moments in lisa the painful aren't going to be present on the expansion, if you've already played lisa the painful, nothing that happens in lisa the joyfull will surprise you.
Placed in B tier
This is a expansion for lisa the painful which just happens to be a different game, but it is an expansion pack.
This game fixes a lot of the main problems I pointed out when I talked about lisa the painful, and that being the combat and the level design. There have been no moments in this game when I felt I outsmarted the game and it punished me for it. Ahd the combat is a lot more fun!, but not for the reason the developer intended
The previous game combat was pretty bad. The most optimal strat was just pretty boring and extremely frustrating. Some enemies in the game have A LOT of hp, and while you do level up, the damage doesn't scale that much, the main way of actually making more damage is by getting better skills/characters, however even this falls short in the endgame. However, status effects do damage based on a % of the maximum health the enemy has, so this was the most viable way to do damage. The enemies also had random instakill attacks, so the only real way to protect yourself was to permastun the enemy. The problem is, every status effect has a chance to fail and not land, a quite high one in fact. So yeah, the best way to play the game was to just spam status effect to make the enemy not attack and for yourself to do damage and just pray that they wouldn't fail. There was no danger state, the fights were always one-sided and it all depended on RNG (also, given that there is no healthbars, status effects are the only way to know the max HP of an enemy!)
Some may see this as a good thing, at the end of the day, the game is supposed to be unfair and frustrating, but I see this as the wrong way to accomplish that goal. The GOOD frustrating parts of the game are stuff like the random, game-changing decisions you have to do at random points at the game, the random ambushes that you can learn to predict, knowing that resting could be dangerous and planning ways around not resting, etc. All of that is frustrating but it requires more from the player than just a RNG check
Lisa the joyful has a way limited set of skills, the permastun strategy isn't really viable anymore, and the optimal strategy is considerably more fun. However, this seems like a side effect, as the way the developer tried to solve the combat was to add paper mario style minigames into it. This is something that kinda has become industry standard as a way to remedy turn based combat being "boring", which I just think fucking suck ass
The problems I see with standard turn based combat are the following (or why chained echoes has the best turn based combat ever designed):
-Grinding being the optimal way to play the videogame
-Balancing, make every skill useful and not have some which are just way better than the rest
-Being able to memorize a rotation of attacks that you can just spam, without much variation between fights
Being slow is not one of the problems, it adds to the tension. Lisa isn't an action game, you're supposed to stress out over every small decision, and minmax your way into avoiding awful situations, the combat being slow only improves that feeling. In fact, if you're full of adrenaline you wont really ever be in that state, which makes for a worse experience
Adding the minigame doesn't fix any of the problems, it's just copying what other successful games did without knowing WHY they did it. It's just a bad addition to the game. (I'm sorry game industry but instead of copying minigames you should be copying chained echoes, which has TWO different combat systems that completely solve this problem and are the best combat system ever designed, no one could fucking come up with anything and this game developed by A SINGLE PERSON just came in and solved it TWICE, chained echoes is so underrated man)
The ending of lisa the hopeful is also told in a way that is really fitting of the game, having this more psychological, abstract tone which fits the game beautifully
The only downgrade in this game is that it won't surprise you as much as the original. It doesn't bring that many new ideas onto the table, and due to the scope of the game being smaller, a lot of the best moments in lisa the painful aren't going to be present on the expansion, if you've already played lisa the painful, nothing that happens in lisa the joyfull will surprise you.
Placed in B tier
