Last night I finished Lisa: The Painful RPG and if you can't be bothered to read any longer than this first post the the only thing I really want you to know that this game is probably one of the best RPGs I've ever played in my entire goddamn life.
And you know what? You probably shouldn't read any more than that if you've not played the game for yourself, because similar to games such as Undertale, it really is the kind of thing that you just need to experience for yourself knowing as little as possible. This game is actually incredibly hard to talk about without spoiling a lot of key moments that make it so great but I'll do my best to give you a fast outline.
The game follows a man called Brad during the post apocalypse. Only this apocalypse wasn't caused by some kind of viral outbreak or nukes falling on the world, it was caused by all the women just sort of up and vanishing and then things falling apart pretty hard as a result. Brad however, comes across a baby girl in the desert one day and being a man of many emotional burdens, takes it upon himself to raise and protect the girl. However, pretty much every other man in the immediate area sees that the discovery of a woman in God knows how long means that maybe there can be some.....relief....along with a chance to save humanity and she is promptly swiped from you and you must embark on a journey to rescue her.
While that's what you get in the opening of the game there's A LOT more to Lisa than that. Each area that you go to has you encounter various groups and individuals, all with their own stories to tell and experiences to share (in the form of spoken word or baseball bat to the head depending). A lot of what goes on in Lisa is grim, morbid, disgusting, reprehensible stuff but there's a weird sort of humor going through the whole game so when you come upon this stuff it raises more of a nervous chuckle then a feeling of disdain.
But enough about the plot that I don't want to spoil because the gameplay is also really good. It's a standard RPG on the surface. It's made in RPG Maker for fucks sake so on a surface level you don't really get more standard than that. But don't let the "made in RPG maker" line turn you away because the engine has been tweaked for some real interesting effects. For example Brad is a karate master so you input his moves with keyboard strokes like a combo system. Some characters have MP based moves to do damage or inflict ailments and some characters have TP based moves so you have to spend time either doing or taking damage in order to fill a meter before you can let the big guns go.
One thing to note though is that Lisa is not an easy game. It's not impossibly difficult either but it will attempt to kick you up and down the garden path if you don't try to spend at least a little time learning what everything is and what it all does. Combat has a sort of Shin Megami Tensei feel to it where a debuff or an unlucky roll (or a lucky one) can turn the tide of a battle extremely quickly. For example there was one enemy that was absolutely shitting on my party, one shotting them with most of its attacks so in an act of desperation I decided to inflict "pissed" status to the guy. Pissed makes him crit more often but also gives him a chance to just smack himself in the face for the damage he was about to do to you. The fight came right down to the wire but in the last turn he crit himself and died from the attack, letting me live to fight on another day.
But individual encounter difficulty and decent strategy isn't the only thing you have to worry about. Lisa throws quite a lot of party members at you over the course of your adventure but I think that's to counter-act the fact that the game has perma-death. If a characters HP is brought to 0 they are KO'd and can be revived with an item or by resting. However some enemies have attacks that will just flat out kill a guy and when that happens they are gone from the game forever. These enemies are few and far between but when you know that you could lose a guy for good in one bad turn of a fight, it makes you think quite differently about your approach to the battle.
The one bone the game does throw at you is a difficulty option at the start. Normal mode lets you just play the game as standard but Pain mode has some different encounters and save points will just explode upon use. Save points are frequent and nicely placed but the fact that they are a 1 use commodity on the games harder setting really ramps up the tension. Personally I recommend the games pain mode because there are a few situations that can leave you feeling a bit helpless but a quick reload sort of sucks the impact away from that. Being a decent distance away from your last save, only to have the cruelty of the wasteland leaving you in a bad spot sparks a certain tension in the player that you just wouldn't get on normal.
So play Lisa, it's a damn good game and it's a damn shame that I don't hear more people talking about it. Saying any more than I've already said would start to get into the spoiler zone so I'm going to end here.
The soundtrack is amazing too, by the way.
