Lisa: The Analysis

austan Jorgensen series Lisa is one of those cult hits the kind where it's quite genuinely formed a cult of people who are really into it but not many people outside the in-group really know that much about it this is probably because it's hard to talk about it's got a lot of really funny moments some excellent examples of great writing or perfect comedic timing but unlike for example undertale the story's content has some pretty gruesome and uncomfortable material it enters into an artistic territory way you'd need to know someone pretty well to feel okay recommending it to them it explores themes that can be quite difficult to talk about and which plenty of people quite justifiably don't want to and the game is too good at focusing on what it wants to be about that you can't ignore it and just focus on something else there's a process in modern game discourse I like to call me miss vacation to be a little bit cynical if you wanted to for easy clicks there are some games you can invent reasons to talk about if you need to the game's story and themes are loose and friendly and open enough that you can reapply the critical lens over and over and always have a new somewhat facile element to explore for an audience you can speculate for all time about some games if they have certain features that make it easy to do so you could even do a needlessly in-depth analysis of one character's relationship with anime no way that one was mine wasn't it but when someone like that attempts to play Lisa a game whose themes are unavoidable and specific and beautiful and horrific and sad the best one could say is this reminds me of undertale the only way to relate the experience through such a critically dysfunctional perspective is by using the lens of one of the two or three games you can talk about endlessly before going back to talking about them endlessly also Lisa came out quite a bit before undertale just saying that this is not a criticism of undertale all the pretend to think about games economy although I guess on some level it kind of is both of those rather I'm laboring to point out that Lisa doesn't get talked about too much because by its nature the reasons why it's good can be hard to talk about with that in mind I'm going to talk about it here and spoil aspects of the plot of all three of the games while not specifically summarizing them in explicit detail I would highly recommend pausing the video here and playing the games for selves they're all either cheap or free so there isn't much of an excuse not to and I don't want to preemptively ruin your experience see you in I don't know 20 hours most people probably at least vaguely know of humanity or dream diary a free game made at an early version of RPG Maker in which you control a girl named madoski who refuses to leave her room instead she can go to bed and enter her dreams the game is light on plot instead relying on exploration and curiosity about the dream worlds you visit and how they work you can collect items which have some uses but I wouldn't really say the game has puzzles per se it functions more as a dream itself floating from area to area as interesting and sometimes random events happen at you the game's well-known largely because of some of these events like when hitting a light switch sometimes makes this face appear this face probably made you mainly ki popular and this has a 1 in 64 chance of even happening I am actually had to steal this footage while the game doesn't really have a plot it has buckets of story if you feel like interpreting the ideas at the Rosalia consistent imagery of car crash victims grasping hands staring eyes being chased to sudden outbursts of quite scary visuals and music the reasons madoski doesn't want to go out into the world for real are made astonishingly clear in her dreams the game is really an exploration of one character's psyche and what they think about in the most unguarded moments people think they can escape into their dreams but you bring your mind with you and if the thing you're trying to escape from had such a big impact on you you're not getting away so easily while the game is often praised for being weird or random you mainly key has a good deal of clarity of purpose and probably resonates with people because the experiences and ideas that explores are almost universal almost everyone knows something bad could happen to them if they went outside so playing to the paranoia that can come from that reaches a lot of people in parts of themselves they don't often realize are there you may need he was pretty impactful for a free RPG maker game there are several fan games and even more original but overtly inspired works and one of them is Lisa now called Lisa the first lisa is a story about a girl trapped in an abusive home trying to imagine her escape but even in her own imagination her experiences follow her everywhere the similarities are already clear but the differences are interesting trying to find that escape does involve collecting and using various items to progress which is a little more direct than how you mainly key does it but the themes are also much more direct making them somewhat more impactful almost every character is portrayed by Lisa's abusive father and trying to play to the bizarre whims of this rather singular castis in its own way kind of depressing and scary I'd recommend people play as much of the game as they can until they find a puzzle they don't know how to solve or get sick of dying to the spiders with the father's face on them and then watch a playthrough of someone who knows what they're doing on YouTube it doesn't really hold up as a game but as a story as an exploration of a mind as an atmosphere it's emotionally quite an experience an idea that starts here and prevails throughout the series and is one of its best features is the reuse of music from previous areas but at different speeds [Music] these stories put you in the mind of characters whose psyche is damaged by their experiences and having even the music second-guess your memory of how it sounds is really disconcerting it's cool getting the opportunity to see a work very openly inspired by something else but also full of elements unique to itself or should I say you may need to itself what am I talking about the ending terminates disturbingly with this game over screen and this is actually the last we ever physically see of Lisa in a series named sir though characters have visions of her everywhere and her presence looms large in the rest of the story [Music] lissa the painful also made in a version of RPG maker has a very different approach entirely to storytelling and more traditional RPG elements and what's surprising about that is that this doesn't distract from giving the player and emotional through-line RPGs have a tendency to sharply divide their gameplay and story you level your characters and gather equipment and items and fight and then reach the next story beat in the form of a cutscene quite often you see fans of the expansive scope and story of RPGs but who aren't hugely into the parts where they have to battle monsters or level grind between those bits or the opposite where they might even skip the story to get to the part that engages them better the actual gameplay if you like both you kind of have to like them separately on different levels from one another because they're ultimately very disparate aspects of the game the painful is greatest quality is that it does everything it can to be a synthesis of both of these elements making them complement each other so directly that you can no longer really delineate them at all all the most involving story moments also have direct importance on gameplay losing all your characters or a party member or having to play Russian roulette and risk literally losing characters to random chance to continue can be devastating in the same way that in several battles as possible for a character to straight-up get killed instead of Kayode by inflicting all the deaths and loss of the story on the player mechanically by genuinely taking away everything they found or characters they play with they're forcing the player to experience the story aspects of the game on a direct level when something bad happens it's not just bad because you theoretically care about these characters it's bad because you need those people and you want those things stop taking my things speaking of things those things are important take for example fire bombs they do a ton of damage and inflict the fire effect on your enemies and very useful in boss battles or with bigger fights against larger groups or if you've already lost a lot of party members you might actually genuinely need the items you can find as opposed to a lot of RPGs where most of the stuff feels optional or just like another potion or something this causes the player to invest more in trying to find these things which makes the game more engaging and very effectively puts you into the role of someone scavenge broken wasteland for anything of value I made a video last year exploring ludo narrative the idea that while games can have stories the actual story was the players experience of the game itself through its mechanics and really engaging games forge an emotional perspective for the player to occupy through good execution of those mechanics and Lisa might be the best game I've ever seen at this it's one of few games where I've had a bad outcome was someone permanently in a hard fight a long way off from my last save or almost all of my party to Russian Roulette and continued because I'd come so far and didn't want to have to go all the way back or were self had no idea how much worse it would be if I tried again I save scum like a madman in games when I can like I have a folder on my hard drive full of darkest dungeon and XCOM saves just in case but Lisa makes pressing on despite what comes by you feel like the right thing to do and always makes it inconvenient enough that the alternative loading a save feels like a punishment itself that you want to avoid you have to press on because the last save point was way back there and who knows how many people you'll lose next time there are several points where the player is told to make a choice between losing everything they have or a person's life or one of Brad's arms these choices aren't reversible and can't be worked around losing one or both arms permanently alters the mechanics and abilities of the one party member you'll always have losing a party member whose abilities you probably need to survive losing all the fire bombs and equipment keeping you alive these are all choices that are difficult and each genuinely make the game harder you actually want because of the game's mechanics to keep all of these people because they're relevant not to the game's story but to your ability to get through the game and this means being forced to choose is more painful than most other decisions in video games if these characters were just other characters in the story that was also happening while I was playing an unrelated RPG in fights this wouldn't have mattered at all but when someone threatened Terry your best friend more on Terry later that means something these characters have mechanical value to the player who might well have come to rely on them in fights fascinatingly most of the characters in your party and Lisa don't matter to the main story whatsoever but I cared more about their survival because they were important to me having to choose to go without items the keep them or learn to press on without them because losing all your healing items and money and firebombs just isn't manageable is a real choice that you have to account for I can imagine having characters or items taken away being frustrating for some players but it's absolutely fitting to this one story and I do think that frustration is itself compelling the same way that having to send simpson's hantai to the brothel to keep them from losing their mind completely was in darkest dungeon there's also a lot of random events that trigger when you sleep to recover your health events like losing party members and having to get them back or everyone getting badly poisoned or just stuff getting stolen these sorts of things create a quite genuine paranoia in the player because again you want all that stuff you learn to only take the risk when you really need to and this paranoia puts you into the same sort of mindset as Brad who sees Lisa everywhere looking down and judging him this again builds on a mechanic from you may Nikki random events happened in that game but they didn't affect the gameplay all that much and they didn't even really affect the story unless your pretentious weirdo likes to read into things Lisa build the universe where you can randomly lose someone important to you and that's scary and threatening and makes you afraid to go to sleep in the game and while it's not technically a fair mechanic it's a powerful mechanic and that's actually more important than the game being balanced or fair the gameplay and story exists to get across the same ideas and do it by affecting each other in much more direct ways than most RPGs there's even a section where upon being told to choose between losing what will probably be at that point your second arm or losing all your items you have the third option of asking the character why they're doing this to you and while you briefly offered the chance of seeing past this facade he then takes both your arm and all your items as a seemingly purposeful attack on games that offer easy ways out where you can sweet-talk your way past a choice that should have been hard the player is punished for believing it would be so simple while it would have been easy to load a save here the first time through the game it felt so right for this to have happened to be punished for trying to avoid making a hard decision that I pressed on to the end regardless the games use of tons of different status effects with their own particular challenges is also really fun by the way they can be devastating meaning the player has to work to deal with them instead of trying to muscle through it by being higher-level door dealing as much damage as they can and hoping that's enough so fights become engaging questions that demand an answer do I do the most highly damaging attack or do I try and stun them or knock them down I played a lot of RPGs when I was a stupid kid or still more as a stupid adult without ever really bothering to deal with status effects using attacks that dealt the most damage and maybe using health items or phoenix downs interacting less with the mechanics and having less fun because the game hadn't really made me conditioning me to play it in a less fun or interesting way being made to plan around enemies which deal interesting status effects and learning to have to use your own effectively because otherwise you'll die makes this basically the best RPG experience i've ever actually had the game teaches you the importance of statuses in a really straightforward way your first party member terry hints is so poor at fighting that it's played for a joke this means one of the two moves you get every turn at the start of the game is free to be wholly concerned with using items and abilities and evolve healing restoring TP and SP or verbal bash which can make enemies start crying and deal 50% damage or get pissed and become far less likely to hit people but also much more likely to hit the critical damage oh and sometimes they can also hit themselves a massive damage to terry hints might be genuinely one of the best pieces of game design in the last 10 years instead of as in lots of RPGs handing you decent damage dealers and then making the player only consider status effects and healing when it's absolutely necessary or when a designated healer class comes along the second half of your starting party is functionally unable to hurt anyone so you're handed an opportunity to figure out how to make effective use of status effect and items as early on as possible and because of the game's difficulty if you don't you're basically screwed so you're forced to learn how to play but in a subtle and suggestive way you can see that sort of consideration happening in other aspects of design too one of the first key items to continue a child's bicycle because this game's great is only accessible to an enemy that you'll need a full party and a couple of fire bombs to defeat beating the boss means teaching you the value of these items which makes scrounging for them and holding on to them feel worth it and deciding to use one in a fight becomes a calculated risk because you might have needed that later it makes managing to find some hidden than the I feel incredible and yes it makes being forced to choose between losing an arm and all of your things into a genuinely nail-biting decision because they're so goddamn useful I don't think I've ever felt so attached to an expendable resource in a videogame before this is quite simply genius and then when you do get the bike you'll notice that you can't move left with it and drop off because your way is blocked by this sports board on a stick you have to move right again now you've probably already equipped it because it's a new item so you pass into the other screen and you naturally go too quick to see this gap and you go over it thinking you'll drop down but instead you hop over it teaching you instantly what the bike does this little section this little section with this guy and this bike is a very subtle tutorial not just for how to use this item but for the entire gameplay loop that leads to getting it making careful use of items party members best serve using items instead of attacking building a party and gathering the resources to afford to build a party the game makes a joke about tutorials having silly signs Terry left off that teach basic stuff and mostly glorified carry but then it goes one further and teaches you how to play it seemingly effortlessly honestly game designers like this should be running our school system there's also almost no fluff to the game's mechanics the games currencies dirty magazines hey it's a world without women what else is going to represent value is pretty rare there's not many defined in the world or through side quests and outside of a few specific areas there's no real way to grind them either there's a finite amount of people and mutants to fight and almost all of them are unique characters so since outside of grinding there's basically a precise amount of mags you can't buy everything you want and don't have easy access to infinite healing items you have to ration them out make careful use of characters with heal abilities occasionally risk sleeping used a very limited firebomb resources and tougher fights and somehow in the middle of all this afford to get new items and party members there's basically no free or simple choices and Lisa and this makes almost every decision in every encounter nail-biting it's very rare that games come along that invoke kind of anxiety in players design-wise lisa equals x calm or darkest dungeon for its mechanical pipe nurse and deadliness and for its emotional tautness - it's also incredibly somatically interesting to have so many things threatened to get in the way of survival characters being unable to perform at their best because they're crying or drunk or hungover or bleeding or depressed or going through withdrawal symptoms tied directly into the story of the game a story about characters whose judgment is poorly compromised by trauma or bad experiences or drug abuse taking a step forward always costs money or items or often a character's life the Lisa games are all about this sense of losing pieces of yourself to a traumatic world often literally and trying to escape the worst of its effects to limited results some of the characters who fight are quite clearly manifestations of Brad's joy altered psyche giving a life to his imagination the spider defied quite Laden the painful are very similar to the ones Lisa had to face with the same man's face on them no less in a setting like this one with a story like this one it makes sense to be confronted very often with scenarios where everyone's just a little bit too out of their right mind to deal with what's happening to them speaking of trauma the story of the painful is fascinating and how it tackles similar ideas to the original but in a more active way the first was a very internal conflict the main characters trying and failing in their own imagination to escape an abusive life and try to at least find some peace and calm within themselves but instead they're repeatedly confronted with their abuser and horrific manifestations of them and what they inflicted on them I think the painful takes a more interesting and considered road while you're trapped almost completely in Brad's perception of his world his actions are real and have consequences that affect others his choices in how he dealt with his trauma how he raised buddy and how he reacts when she's taken these are all reactions to his experiences and how they shaped his you of the world and how to act in it I've spoken about the games difficult choices but what's equally informative is the places where the game takes choice away from you or presents you with false choices or doesn't even point out the alternatives that simply didn't occur to Brad because of the person he's become not entirely of his own volition Brad blames himself for what happened to Lisa becomes a martial artist as a post-hoc self-defense mechanism against the abuse he suffered and raises buddy the best he can and but the best he can is to shelter her from a world of people that hurt him and his sister when they were young this itself paves the way for buddy to become the person she ends up being when she's kidnapped from Brad's care or perhaps to put it a better way escapes from Brad's care brand immediately takes this as a justification for perhaps what he's been training for his entire life a rampage in which all he does is tried to protect someone he sees as vulnerable many characters offer Brad other options or question why he personally should be the one deciding how to raise or deal with the existence of the only girl left in the world and he doesn't even really consider these questions because for him the answer was obvious he pushes past these questions all the way to what a game would normally position as a heroic final stand where he finally starts to quite literally transform into a monster and enters a haze of violence where the background is just a chaotic swirl of colors and even an army of enemies are horrified Brad is unable to pursue other causes of action because of who his experiences have made him into the joy that he's become addicted to is described as making you feel nothing it's very clear why something like that would become a crutch for someone who's lived Brad's life by doing this the story positions a lot of traditional heroism tropes as the result of a warped perspective one of the last lines in the game before the final battle starts is I've been dead for 35 years today I live this is the first time in most of Brad's life that the world makes sense him against what he sees as an army of villains preventing him from being a father it's the only narrative that makes sense to him and the game encourages the player to think about what went wrong and why he can't think about it there are also places where the player has offered a direct choice such as fighting or sparing his father once he finally encounters him again which is itself a false one while you can choose to try to spare him Brad cannot resist himself this is an important creative choice or at least an honest one everyone wants to believe they're in full control of themselves but quite simply sometimes we aren't humans aren't rational actors Brad's been fighting manifestations of this man all his life already what's one more the painful is fittingly a game about pain it's about the suffering we can experience in our lives and how it can stick with us whether we want it to or not and influence us in ways we don't always want to see and in turn go on to make us hurt others even when we think what we're doing is right and the hurt we caused impact them too it doesn't always offer an easy solution there's no magical pill that undoes childhood trauma or allows complete control of one's actions it puts out the scary idea that none of us are free because we're prisoners of the events and lives we've lived but there's a certain hopefulness to it too for all his mistakes and in abilities to make better choices and deroga trauma induced violence he can't stop himself from committing there are still real choices to make and these choices still have meaning there are places where brad is marginally making things better for some people or at least tries to and there are often times when you can literally choose to lose pieces of yourself to try and keep others alive these little choices are meaningful and valuable the game rightfully acknowledges this by having multiple endings if you manage to outside of cut scenes never take the combat enhancing but addictive item joy an item designed to be used in harder fights that's quite difficult to go without using the ending is very slightly different and if you manage to finish the game in pain mode where everything is tougher and safe ones can only be used once the ending is again just a little bit different I think the point of these endings is that things can be different even a little if we try and that makes trying worthwhile even if it doesn't always amount to something the point isn't that Brad is a good person but that he has the potential to do better as everyone does and start asking the right questions about himself and this is a hopeful thing the final choice in the game is buddies whether or not to hug Brad and emphasize with him in spite of the pain he's caused her and the life she will live as a result of this this is a difficult choice and arguably an ultimately meaningless one do you hug a dying man or not it doesn't matter but it's a real choice in a world of many false ones Brad wasn't a good person but he didn't have as much of a say in what kind of person he ended up being as he dove light and the idea that things could maybe have turned out and helped him make better choices is the real hope of the story it's a hard-won victory to tell a story in which nothing good happens to anyone and the character you play isn't a good person but you're left feeling like people still have the potential to do better this is something the final game Lisa the joyful does its best to call back into question with somewhat mixed results Lisa the joyful first segments are an excellent microcosm of the positives and negatives of its overall story it opens incredibly strongly with a revelation about what buddy was learning during the upbringing we only saw in fleeting glimpses during the opening of the previous game buddy is forced by Brad to kill someone in order to begin to learn how to defend herself this shows us how she was able to escape capture so easily in the previous games and let's just a little into how she'll have come to see the world and of course showcases Brad learned views about that world in detail too I always wondered who killed this guy on the counter here and the answer is probably buddy but then after a cool cut to the title it cuts to black and we get some regular expository dialogue about what two characters were yet to really learn about her up to implying various things about character relationships and the reasons why the world is the way it is we then cut to immediately after the ending of the previous game where things continued in media rest these twin openings are an indicator of the two roles the Joyful has to fill the Joyful was a stretch goal for the kickstarter for the painful the mission statement being that you'll play as buddy and uncover the truth behind the world of Lisa but it turns out those are very separate things entirely and actually quite jarring when done together the world of Lisa is interesting and mysterious but part of what made it those things was that you were exploring it as a byproduct of a much more personal story where the apocalypse was just a way of putting these characters into more extreme circumstances exploring it in more detail or explaining it outright would have detracted from the engaging personal story taken time away from it and well it would have ruined the mystery you can carve a really sharp divide between the parts that are about kind of just expositing what happened in the past involving Lisa implying what happened to the world and who's behind it and retroactively Lee explaining the events of the previous game and the parts that make up this really interesting story about the last girl in a world full of monsters trying to become its new ruler by crossing every other warlord off a giant list and becoming a little bit of a monster herself on the way the latter is really new and unique and interesting while building on the themes and story we already know but the former is unnecessary and explains things that don't need explaining because they're not really what the story was about this doesn't just mean half the story isn't as good as it could be it also drags focus away from buddy story and weakens that half a little - it's not the worst thing in the world but I think more focus on buddy and her choices would have resulted in a much more engaging and tighter story overall that said the story that is therefore buddy is honestly great where Brad decided that for the safety of himself and his loved ones he had to close his problems off from the world and hide from the people who threatened them hoping to keep them a secret forever but he learned the exact opposite lesson and concluded that the only way to be safe was to kill everyone who could possibly pose a threat and take control she's literally crossing names off a list and slowly imagining more and more violence around her as she does so the fun thing about stories with parental dynamics like this similar to some chapters of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is through one character's behavior you simultaneously get to learn about that character and the people who made them that way a good deal of buddy's behavior reflect back onto Brad and the lessons she'd have learned either through his direct teachings or through having to live with someone like him you're still learning about precisely what happened to Lisa and what she did about it through how Brad and Buddy act and that's fascinating the massive cast of party members from the painful is not a feature here you just get buddy and temporarily Rando while buddy levels up in the play gets the hang of her new gameplay style while I said having lots of characters that you could choose from and risk losing was cool having less characters isn't specifically a bad thing instead the focuses on having one character whose moves are more mechanically dense than any individual character previously giving her both the ability to induce numerous status effects like flustered sleep bleed and poison and a slew of generally good attacks two bodies stronger attacks have a timing minigame which can be quite tough to master but a highly necessary for persevere joy makes a return and the game's hallucinatory tutorials from buddy's psyche even quite strongly advise you to use it apparently the use joy messages were added in a patch when players had trouble proceeding without it committed to not using joy the way many did in the painful because they knew there was an ending specifically for not using it there is no search ending here meaning the joy mechanic can be properly used by folks who skipped out on it before like me the story isn't the only thing that's divided the gameplay and story suffer from a much sharper divide to where the previous game had the almost magical interaction between story choices and their gameplay consequences no such choices pop up for buddy there are a couple of moments where you're given the sort of typical moral choice of little consequence you would see in inferior RPGs like deciding whether or not to drop Rando into the pit or whether or not to attack the pacifists it's a bit disappointing worse with the Rando choice it doesn't matter which choice you make it results in slightly different exposition and maybe lets you skip a fight but the same things play out no matter what with no further impact on story or gameplay but with the pacifists there's this chilling aspect showing how far buddy has gone where you can't even talk to them and attempting to or even walking past them asks you once again if you want to fight them or not every few steps but he has to actively choose not to murder which of course is the highlighted option like it's her first instinct you're never given any really difficult choices you never have to risk losing any useful items in fact there aren't really any of the rare items from the painful that would relieve harmful effect in the pinch like the poison curing cigarettes you find like 6 off in the whole game because lots of the tougher effects have been taken out entirely to support the game with largely only one character there's basically no point to the shopkeeper at all and the main path through the game gives you an abundance of joy so item management is basically gone and all the party member reviving perfume you get only matters for a very short period anyway because you're on your own this ruins what could have been a much more delicate balance of items honestly my expectations for the joyful in the first hour was super high I was imagining all the different ways of version of this battle system but mechanically based around having just one character could work status effects item management TP management learning the timing of the better attacks making the best use of your one turn per round in a fight could become scalpel sharp concentrations of important choices and a robust inventory system-wide defense and have to be balanced against resistance or speed or try not to get stunned or tripped or poisoned this could have made for a really mechanically dense game I was fully prepared to say that the Joyful had the best gameplay of the three games and while this theoretical version of Lisa does almost rear its head in a few of the tougher fights against larger groups or if you commit to not taking joy it never really feels like you're being challenged in any way other than nailing the timing on bodies more damaging attacks I think the gameplay is still overall very fun and really challenging but the awareness of how much better this approach could have been makes it feel like a missed opportunity at times one of the best and sadly only examples of gameplay and story overlapping is that your other party member randos attacks are also called Armstrong style because Brad trained him as a kid that's just really cute the soundtrack in addition to containing even more heavily distorted and speed shifted versions of previous tracks has a bunch of new ones with an increased reliance on samples including new instruments vocals and even air horns I remember putting a playlist of Lisa music on at a friend's house and once it transitioned into tracks from the joyful he made me stop I really like the music not just because I have horrible taste but because it's use in the game as perfect tracks like that almost abominable six-six-six kill chop deluxe play during tougher boss fight and it's not just fitting but complimentary to the sense of being trapped in the hellish storm of drug-infused violence buddy has become this soundtrack is the most complementary to a game since Fallout New Vegas or even Planescape torment there's something to be said about the engagement ourselves with the joyful in painful my first time through I was almost afraid to open it back up again and see how much worse things could get for Brad find out who in my party I've become attached to I'd lose trying to find buddy joyful fittingly for its title makes you feel like you have nothing to lose I took a break partway through joyful and couldn't wait to open it back up and finish it and continue crossing names off the list there's something incredibly appealing about buddy's journey in spite of everything negative I've said about the story spoilers for the plot in case you somehow made it as far without playing eventually buddy kills everyone on the list but then because the ending needs to explain the universe of Lisa what follows is almost completely unrelated buddy suddenly meets the man who's behind everything we get some exposition a fairly easy fight a few genuinely fantastic character exploring hallucinations for a bit in the middle Buzzo explains the plot you and buddy didn't really need to know about and then buddy gets to choose whether to mutate like Brad or cure herself using the joy vaccine we just learned about and raise the next generation of humankind this ending really kind of disappointed me like mutating into a monster has so far been a metaphor for being taken over by your worst instinct the transformation is fueled by joy but wanting joy is fueled by having something eating you up inside until the joy ate you up and turned you into a monstrous expression of those feelings for example turning Brad into a monster obsessed with protecting Lisa and buddy by proxy I wrote the part of the script covering the pain for a year ago before I finally decided to play joyful and what I liked about the problems that appeared in that game is that they're not something you can choose to walk away from you take those parts of you everywhere and you can't just erase them from yourself I literally wrote that there is no magic cure so having the game end with buddy able to quickly and easily choose to get over the traumatic life that led her to be the person she is instead of having to learn to deal with it in the sort of personal human way I've come to expect from the series was really jarring to me the skeleton of a really good story is still here but it's obscured by having to be all the other things that it had to be and this really deprives us of the chance to really explore buddy and her choices and how she would even go about moving on from all this but at the same time I'm really touched that this series about sadness and tragedy and decline ends with a victim of abuse achieving what amounts to some sense of closure or even a happy ending and earned or not getting to put aside their sadness and depression and self-loathing and escape into the possibilities of the future I think it could have been done a lot better but I really really like what it did in a way playing this game as someone who thinks a lot about design and occasionally tries to make games of their own there's something inspirational about it like the theoretical really good game I wanted it to be doesn't exist now which means someone else gets to make that one that someone else could even be you and I think the truly fascinating power about really good games is they leave people with ideas about what they could do next they spread the ideas and concepts further by being so good even if sometimes they leave you wanting or perhaps even by leaving you wanting Lisa owes a of sorts - both humanely and earthbound which of course has inspired lots of other games including undertale itself made by someone who also started out making what amounts to an earthbound fan game some games are just excellent at spawning this desire to add to them to create something using the idea as it leaves with you and fantastically Lisa is doing just that there's already at least two really fleshed out Lisa fan games Lisa the hopeful and Lisa the pointless and who knows what great designers in the future might say Lisa was the inspiration for their own project in my opinion Lisa is already doomed to enter the stream of history I guarantee you 100% one of the future best games ever made one of the next indie mega hits on Steam or whatever platform will make it into the next decade will be made by someone upon whom this game has left its mark it's kind of funny the games are all about trying to get over something move on from it forget about it but we're going to see Lisa again one day in a new form we might not even recognize and personally I can't wait hey congratulations for making it to the end this thing has been a really long time coming and I know I didn't make many jokes this time but I wanted to do the ideas the game presents justice please let me know what you thought of this one in the comments I'm genuinely quite interested in how this will be received I'd quite like to cover night in the woods with quite a similar format to this one but I'd like to know what people thought of this one first my patrons over on patreon support me making work like this tonight I'd especially like to thank Paul Lasswell Jeremy Rebecca Harold Nathan and Bronwyn congratulations by the way get dunked on Commissar taco Stephan cone Jove to catch a Boris Evan Richie Shelby Hatfield Austin schwendemann Aidan 3a Sheamus Azarian Justin conquer beard the Frankfurt Show Willow H Lewis Woodrow Tapio Turin Lewis Woodrow heretic void Ryan William Cox Lucas Koken Abby Finkel Rue Christopher McDonald feminine gia NATO Daniel Sullivan just in partridge david crags Jordan Barrett Torrence Garfield Sam Bayless Rosetti zodak wack man James Adair James did Patrick the breezy P Finnegan it's a meme meme meme meme meme me or evokes this at a deliciousness star man Nabby Alexander Wendler Jason Durso Mark Harmon big boy several rats each armed with a noble arcane power Anna so T Dave Kemp the joke daddy cabeza Lucas got shelled watered they hugged Christopher wait Tyler Howard Isabel geeky apart h-bomb a guy but with Yowie hands vagabond to be al Swaggart h-bomb a guy please read Homestuck okay fine sure I'll finally style make a difference problems Luke first but I'll do I promise Garrett Lacey I don't know like a butter or something curtsy Yost Samuel Butler gnostic dude ace Jenny Jenna Flynn Luke Swanson 9d guy Jacqueline Merritt while gobble Smurf Michael H pray Elisha Scanlon James feeley's den Neff let Gracie Lipscomb Joan n I'm daddy's little [ __ ] rub my nipples harder please the words my gold ball but written in Japanese handsome unlimited spunky McGraw nil t ax dealer of souls Daniel Han Dalton b-movie but every time they say B I donate $10 to h-bomb a guy hero of time 88 Cal Ashton Andrew Gilly Rindfleisch Shetty Quran uber uber vac lungs Alf Garvin ubered Trang Gong Gazette's nailed it basalt and jenni Eden Yankovic Zuma Garrett Mitchell Matthew Harris reman cell MacArthur momi Khalil age neon raqami minty freakin fresh gah Internet Benjamin Davidson soul Aten gold strim Kloss sue Davis Remi Elliott's Odin Aiden Bradley Daniel Stewart Jew boy kami can say Jan Anders prema George Sirach a bowl of creamy tomato soup Lauren Nathan [ __ ] Corwin light Williams Shawn Higgins Richard Pierson Rinella shout procore fully automated luxury space post scarcity communism hogging Tain's owns shadow bag three-fifths of a brain Thomas Kistner david de marzo Lou Ricard have Omar Zachary Clark Jerry Terry Gary Marshall Tom Martel Anna s K plays dota Daniel Vincent Chilton Mike Stanley the spectre of communism Lissy Roberts am i edgy yet YouTube McKenzie cockerel maan silver platter tune strim Sammy Jay Eugene Butler Jordan Tillis Owen Piper recovering zombie Jason Walter Caleb McMurphy Findlay Berwick Copley Parker Anderson Silas pumpkins Shawn Kemp David the benevolent malevolence Amy Lech Brennan arts Alexander Corbett John Cantwell Marco shod Eric hunter Z Creed's layer of the immortal dragon Robert Phillips hero a war capsule Alex Len kovitch graph and black poor Jeffrey Theobald Jack Harvey David rose Samael Scott get him dad was a loose key Alisha Parker Martell Kelly Mariela K Jenny angel and Kieran thanks very much for watching and have a great night I hope you're watching this tonight by the way if you're watching it in the morning then you might have a kind of sad day Lisa's not it's not for them it's not a morning thing Oh

Channel: hbomberguy

Views: 1,103,493

Rating: 4.9067993 out of 5

Keywords: lisa, analysis, hbomb, hbomberguy, undertale, review, game theory, why do i mock matpat so much, im starting to feel bad about it

Id: t-5_zoEsY6c

Length: 40min 50sec (2450 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 28 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/SmurfyX]

whew. boy am I excited to watch this. The only real video I've ever seen about this game is the one videogamedunkey did which doesn't really uh... demonstrate the depth of emotional anguish and horror this game has in store for its players. Or at least for the ones that get into it.

Never had an experience in games quite like Lisa. Thanks for the submission /u/uglidoll

[u/Spore124]

Really good video on one of my favorite franchises, but I feel like he didn't touch much on one of the most notable parts about what makes The Painful what it is which is its humor. While the game is absolutely full of anguish and suffering, it's easily one of the funniest games I'd ever played too. I enjoy the dichotomy.

[u/Hyooz]

Man, I love hbomberguy in general, but his insistence on taking shots at other creators/media is getting old.

This video is really great, but it's made worse by the unnecessary dig at Game Theory.

Imo at least.