Lisa

Lisa: The Painful's themes and story are incredibly awkward and hard to explain or talk about, but its use of its own gameplay systems make the narrative the best ever told inside the medium.

Around the original release of Lisa on December 14th, 2014, I remember I was looking through my followers list on Twitch. It was still littered with people I never really watched anymore, but one game just by chance in a thumbnail preview caught my eye one day. The channel that happened to have this thumbnail went by the name of LethalFrag (who is still active to this day), he was playing a game called Lisa. I used to watch him almost daily while I was addicted to Binding of Isaac and rougelite games from way back then, and was curious to see what this... mysterious game with the Earthbound look to it was about. His playthrough was around the construction yard area where Brad (The Main Character) is controlling a bulldozer to go through this construction zone destroying any fool willing to stay within his path. What made this part so memorable was... He eventually comes into contact with another bulldozer operator by the name of Horrace, who opts to try and stop him with his years of experience. Yet just before the showdown, Horrace has a series of flashbacks detailing his tragic backstory explaining how bad he was at driving Bulldozers. Horrace, now depressed with the trip down his memory lane, no longer wants to fight, but due to his terrible bulldozing skills ends up running straight into you instead of running away. After witnessing this series of events, I was met with uncontrollable laughter, the absurdity of what just happened before me I had never really experienced in any big budget game. Lisa at that moment convinced me that this was a game that I had been waiting for my entire life to play, not since the aforementioned Earthbound had I been so intrigued by a game, the world they live in, and its characters. I would go onto buy the game, play up to a certain point where one of my party members were kidnapped by a regional gang, try to save him without spending any resources, and have the gang accidentally kill him as the response. I wouldn't touch the game for another three years until recently. I collapsed from heat exhaustion after work one day and decided, I should probably finish this game before I actually kick the bucket one day.

Lisa: The Painful is actually the second game in the series by creator Dingaling the first game titled "Lisa: The First", is an exploration game styled after the cult classic indie game Yume Nikki. The idea for both of those games is similar, you control Lisa as she goes into her subconscious to try an escape her abusive dad who goes by the name of Marty. While I've never played through the first game I have read up enough on it to understand where that game goes and how it inserts into Dingaling's second outing. Lisa: The Painful and Lisa: The Joyful, while using the same engine The First did, have both been restructured to play more like old turn based RPGs of the era, with most people referring to Earthbound when describing its extremely quirky gameplay, setting, and writing.

The game opens up with you as a young Brad Armstrong before "The Flash", an event that would cause the end of our world. He is in the midst of protecting his friend from some neighborhood bullies, a quality of Brad that shows that he always wants to try and do the right thing. After taking most of the abuse from the bullies, he heads back home only to be greeted by Marty, the father of both Brad Armstrong and Lisa, the protagonist from the first game. He's drunk, and immediately throws a bottle at young Brad and forces him to go to his room. Brad goes up the stairs, and breaks down in tears. We fast forward to a time sometime after "The Flash" happens, Brad is now old, beaten down, and taking a drug called Joy. Out on his stroll of the wasteland he comes across a newborn baby, all alone out in the wild, crying. Not knowing what to do Brad decides to try and calm it by tossing the baby into the air a couple of times, he somewhat succeeds but on the last toss, mishandles the child and drops it on the ground.

The very scenario I just described is why I think Lisa: The Painful is so compelling. You are greeted to the most bottom of the barrel emotional breakdown experience in Brad's life, and can only expect pain, suffering and misery throughout this game. Just as you convince yourself that, Brad stumbles across Buddy, the newborn baby out on its lonesome, and manages to have some sort of endearing, yet funny interaction with Buddy (Yes dropping a baby under normal circumstances should not be funny, yet in this context it works out). Lisa is a long and painful trip, it is the story of abuse and suffering for making the wrong decisions. Yet Lisa, almost with impromptu timing, peppers this terrible journey with bits of morbid humor and humanity that can't help but make you chuckle from time to time whether its in a good light or not. It breaks up the depressing themes of the story just enough for it to never become overbearing even with how dark the game turns near the end.

The Flash had the unfortunate effect of eliminating the female population. The only thing left for humanity to do was to slowly die off. That is, until Brad stumbled across the crying Buddy out in the wastes. After getting Buddy to calm down, he unfortunately learns the gender of Buddy. This causes Brad to come to two conclusions, Buddy is the only hope the world has to reproduce, yet, he has to protect Buddy from being humanity's only hope. Brad, without hesitation, takes Buddy back to his childhood friend Rick, Sticky and Cheeks to share this information with them, and also tells them his intentions. They for the time being reluctantly agree to help take care of Buddy. Over the years Buddy grows up to be able to take care of herself, but at every turn Brad continues to try and shelter her from the world outside, only to have her grow more bitter towards her father figure. Eventually Brad runs into a man called Terry Hintz and saves him from a rabid dog and the game actually begins proper as you are able to finally take control and engage in its systems. Meanwhile though Buddy with the help of Brad's friends manage to break her out of their home and let her loose into the world in hopes to turn her over to Rando and his gang, the most dominant force out in the wasteland. Brads entire reason for continuing living, gone, and its up to him, and Terry, and the people he goes onto recruit to go save her, whether she thinks she needs saving or not.

Lisa in itself... I'm going to be completely honest and this is actually what drags the game down, Lisa in it's entirety, exists as a metaphor for itself. The game is about the abusive relationship Brad has with his Father, how Brad feels about what happened to his sister Lisa, Brad's oblivious abusive relationship with Buddy, how Brad needs to do whatever it takes to save his only shot at redemption as being a person. Brad goes through so much on this journey, he has good times with the party members you can recruit throughout the game, as the party system is actually about as robust as say Chrono Cross with there being a ton of side characters you wouldn't even think would join your party. Brad constantly has bad things happen to him as he camps out, like getting bitten by spiders as he sleeps, or having his stuff stolen as he wakes up, or even a random gang taking one of your party members hostage and holding him for ransom. Lisa... fucking sucks, as a game, its sometimes not even a fun game to play at all even with its pretty engaging combat system. Lisa almost tries retroactively for you to hate it, almost at every turn, by making you go through ultimatum choices with no middle ground option, you have to pick the lesser of two evils at that point in the story. There is an actual mechanic in the game where if Brad doesn't take the drug he's become addicted to, his stats all drop and he no longer does bonus damage on his combos in combat, and to make that worse there's a small adjustment to the ending of the game if you never end up taking Joy, so you get "penalized" for deciding to take it. Hell there's even a part of the game where you are forced to play with your party member's lives in a forced game of Russian Roulette, and if your party member dies in the game, yeah, there's a bullet going in his brain, and hes dead. There are also multiple boss fights in the game where the bosses have instant kill moves, with an extremely low chance of coming out the fight with everyone's neck intact. By death and kill moves, I mean it, Lisa: the Painful has bosses and events in the game that permanently remove party members from your group by random probability. I'm almost positive in certain play throughs, if things actually go wrong enough you could easily softlock your progress in the game just because of the amount of bad shit that could happen in your play through if it tried hard enough.

99% of Lisa's bad design though... is intentional, this is how it was meant to be played and played out. After all, the game has Painful right in the title. Yet... as much pain as it caused me near the last stretch of losing all of my most powerful party members and all of my items, and only having one arm left on Brad, I wouldn't have done it any other way. The shitty things that happen to you, even if they are by design... IS why Lisa is a fantastic game. By all means this definitely doesn't forgive its shitty design, its still bad design, yet Lisa actually uses this to its advantage. How? It all goes back into the story it is trying to tell. Lisa itself is a metaphor for its story. Your relationship with the game, atleast how I see it, is supposed to be... abusive. You're riding along on your children's bicycle, listening to this old man sitting on a cliff telling you a tale on how the world ends, yet he won't shut up and you're stuck there for thirty minutes. You ride across a field of fallen over rakes, and walk over them as they wap you in the face just so you can learn a new karate move. You climb a rope that goes on longer than the ladder in Metal Gear Solid 3, ONLY to be greeted by a godamn statue of a middle finger. Lisa could care less how it interacts with you as a player and how it wastes your time, yet at the end of the day Lisa the Painful isn't all shit, it knows how to make you laugh and is more than capable of showing you a good time... it just doesn't want to for like 70% of the game. This part of the reason why I can't willingly just recommend this game to everyone, why I can't just put this game on my Holy Trinity of RPGs.

There are three RPGs that I hold in the highest regard above all else, and they all differ in themes but tend to share some key points. They are all extremely quirky settings with extremely likable or hated, all of them have a fantastic story with a conclusion that doesn't need to be iterated upon by sequels, and for the most part don't run out of steam 90% through the actual game. Earthbound, Fallout 1, and Persona 4, and out of these three games, Lisa manages to tell a story better than two of them. Yet when I think about it, and I've thought about it, if Lisa actually gave a shit about you more than 30%, then maybe, maybe it would succeed Earthbound in that triangle of games. Yet it doesn't, but the complicated feeling I have is if Lisa did do that... it wouldn't be the same story, yes even if the end of the game remained the same, the journey to that end, the suffering the game puts you through, if you didn't suffer like Brad did... then honestly, the story would lose a lot of its impact. Lisa does a lot of controversial and bold things that you would never see in another game, much like the game that set the world on fire after it, Undertale did. Yet Lisa can't be that shining beacon that Undertale was for indie games. At the end of the day it has to be an unforgivable monster of a game, and for that it will always be alienated by people, whether its cause the game plays bad, or the story just goes too far in a lot of aspects. Lisa relies on it being so bad to you to be such a memorable experience, and I wouldn't want Dingaling to change that to make the game more accessible to people. Warts and all I still want everyone who is able to eventually try this game out. Lisa still has some extremely heavy themes about abusive relationships that border on the line of uncomfortable, yet through it all if you are able to whether through it the experience you have with the game will be amplified with out it interacts with you.