Following my tradition of blindly buying games /v/ likes, Lisa was starting to get brought up fairly often. All I really learned about it beforehand was that it was not a happy game, and that good deeds and bad deeds both would not go unpunished while playing it. Personally, I have an innate dislike for sad stories and settings, but feel a strange compulsion to check them out regardless. Does this game get me past the personal hurdle of disliking sad things? Find out after the break.
The short answer is no, this game does not get past the hurdle.
The long answer is that I had a visceral negative reaction to this game when I first beat it. It's incredibly bleak, and at the time I couldn't reconcile the horrid people and choices I was encountering with the strange humor that honestly I really wanted to laugh at, but was too busy being disturbed.
Well, I may have also been distracted by the gameplay being all over the place. On one hand, I want to lavish it praise for its quirky party members, fun to use input system for Brad (the main character), and challenging bosses. On the other hand, I want to tear it down for its useless party members, slow moving overworld, and unfair bosses capable of randomly permakilling members of your gang.
Like I said though I really disliked this game at first. In fact, I hated it. But the more and more I think on it, the more I like it. For example, while the permakilling of party members was shocking and unfair, it's still a very unique and cool idea, and the game gives you the members to play around it. And the other party members being less good than Brad isn't a bad thing - it's just to emphasize that Brad is a competent combatant in a land of strange middle aged men who fight with their own styles. (Well, and it's not like your other party members can't positively contribute - they can. It's just that it takes all three of them to equal Brad in terms of capability. Although, Brad is pure offense, whereas other members can offer more than just that.)
Mostly though, the huge negative gut reaction points to how effectively the bleakness is used, because that's where most of my dislike came from. At first I was saying that it was keeping me from ever establishing a connection to what was going on, but as the days passed after beating it and I realized my thoughts kept turning back to this game, it's clear the game had an impact on me. Perhaps not the happy kind I'm used to, but now that I've had time to digest it, I actually quite liked the game on the whole.
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