Lisa: The Joyful is kind of a disappointing followup, it lacks the openness and variety of Painful, and seemingly only exists to answer questions about the characters and setting that don’t need to be answered.

Underneath all that is still the great foundation Painful built, so definitely worth a play if you enjoyed Painful.

7/10.

has one of the most climatic (and possibly unfair) superbosses a RPG could have. they doubled down on the plot's closure. i liked how they fleshed out everything about lisa, buddy and brad.

It's a lot more frenetic than it's predecessor, and this time it works out thanks to the new mechanics. it wasn't as well balanced back in 2015.

also has one hell of a uncomfortable boss battle.

well then

So my critiques from the Painful - Definitive Edition still apply here. Gamefeel in combat is kinda weird. I'd argue a bit less so, but it's still there.

Unlike with Painful, I do think this is the best version of the game to play. While Painful mostly saw changes in the fluff, stuff like party member interactions and whatnot, Joyful has received a few small mechanical changes that drastically alter the quality of the game's combat.

The new warlord abilities are excellent. Chef's kiss. Not all of them are of equal use, but they allow Buddy to better act as a solo party member and are good enough that you could actually do a Joyless run of the game, which was previously considered the incorrect way to play and an absolute slog if you tried. Now? I kinda love doing this game Joyless. It's way more fun than I was expecting and you're going to need to do it Joyless to access the new content.

I guess they called it a "sidequest." That's a term for it. My first major issue with LISA: The Joyful - Definitive Edition is that the new content is INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT TO FIND. I mean, sure, we live in the era of just looking shit up on the internet, but this is a whole other level. You're forced to solve an incredibly esoteric series of puzzles, some of which require you to have prior knowledge of LISA: The First and the secret content in LISA: The Painful - Definitive Edition. LISA: The First isn't included in the Definitive Edition, so some players will just have absolutely no idea where to even begin.

But to swing back to complimenting the game, I do think the new content is very good. Same as with Painful. It feels more focused than the original, tying together much more nicely both with the overall story of LISA and the new content in Painful. It goes in a few bold directions that I'll admit I'm not entirely a fan of. Without spoiling, there is a specific line that is meant to highlight a character's immaturity and cowardice that ended up taking me out of the experience. Even so, I think the broad strokes are incredibly well done. Fortune favors the bold.

The problem is that if you don't seek out any of this additional content, the story of Joyful is identical to the original. It still feels unfocused trying to resolve the unanswered questions of the original and concluding the arcs of several major characters. This wouldn't be such a problem were the new content easier to find, but for the majority of players who want to go in blind, they're going to be playing through the same, incredibly flawed story that the original had, just with better gameplay. Maybe that's enough for some people, but I wish it weren't so.

This is definitely a better game than the original LISA: The Joyful, and I would consider this game great, but it isn't a masterpiece even with the changes. And if you don't know where to look to get the meat of the content, then you'll end up with a worse experience.

Now I am done with LISA.

For now.

zzz

My first impression of The Joyful is that it was a very short, very frustrating, and very disappointing as an epilogue. The second time around I appreciated the ways that it mixes up the gameplay formula more, but the package still feels flawed.

The game scales back a lot of the RPG elements of The Painful in favor of a more cinematic experience, but this is really a good thing because it plays to the game's strengths. The epilogue of this story plays out in a really satisfying way and there's some great and memorable moments. There's almost no random encounters so the story proceeds at a great pace. The humor in this is dialed back considerably compared to The Painful, but the story is still satisfying.

The additions for the Definitive Edition make this much, much more palatable than in the original release, but I still found that there were some difficulty balancing issues. Battles seem to take forever even once you get the hang of landing the critical strikes. I ended up turning on Painless Mode because the fights were far too long and repetitive at the normal difficulty. The fact that this game is only 2-3 hours long tells you just how bad the combat was.

A weird but appropriate epilogue to LISA. The Painful's mechanics were already filtered down from JRPG traditions and put into a survival-style gameplay. They worked well. Joyful filters them down even further which can get repetitive but this isn't a very long game either so I didn't feel it too deeply while playing.

As for the story, I think it's thematically rich. It's gruesome as hell, but deep and organic in how chaotic the storytelling is. I won't go into spoilers but it's profoundly upsetting to think how the last human emotions felt in this world would be resentment and rage drowning in insanity. I can't think of a better ending to this saga.