LISA: The Painful - Fractured Bonds

Hey, congrats on the mod release. I'd been itching go try this ever since I saw a video on the demo. I just finished it and have a few first impressions on it.

Take these all with a grain of salt because it's like 1am and I literally just played the entire mod in one go whilst not doing everything there probably was to do or seeing ALL of the new content. I will be spoiling things up to the end of the game, obviously.

First things first, I like the movesets you gave the three dorks and the roles that they fit in the party.

They felt cool to play until about area 3, I'd say, at which point I felt that the new moves were getting a little... meh? Like, Rick gets "Strategize", which reduces SP costs for the party for 4 turns, but it's expensive, effective for basically just Rick and Sticky (Brad has always been super SP-efficient) and is therefore disappointing. Compare it to his move that literally gives everyone "Hide" for half the price, for example. I also wasn't a big fan of Cheeks until he got Party Time, but that's not too long before the part where you fight bosses with enough HP that stacking DoT statuses becomes the smarter play (and I really tried not to do that for a time). In general, I didn't find myself using the endgame moves much (Even though I could have absolutely evaporated any hope of losing a fight thanks to +Ironbody +Taunt Sticky, in hindsight)

Of course, all the differences that stemmed from having a static party are nice, like how every potential party member ends up giving you a reward instead (all the dialogue that has Brad turning down party members is amusing - and the game calling you an idiot for giving Goldie to Rooster for free, too), or how you can fight all 3 of the kidnapping-type gangs because what else are they gonna do.

Of course^2, all the aspects of lisa that were made fancier a la desolate expanse were also a welcome sight (unique portraits for various statuses, colored text and state icons when relevant terms appear in skills, etc).

I wish that the other party members felt stronger consequences, at least visually, for Brad's actions, especially when Buzzo either makes you lose an arm or cuts the other person open - like, even if the overall detriments are roughly the same, one's an (in fairness, probably severe) injury, the other is *losing a limb*. Morbid as it sounds, I think that each party member should receive an injury of a similar caliber that had a tangible effect on their moveset (like how Brad loses combo dials).

I've avoided talking about my main gripe too much, though. Look, I LOVE the concept of this, and I like the presence of the three bozos around the mod, but I don't think it goes deep enough at all on the whole "Fractured Bonds" concept.

I only saw probably around half of the campfire dialogues, so I may have missed some cool things somewhere, but otherwise most of the time these Campfires sequences felt too short and moooooostly forgettable (the two that I still remember are the one at Wally's and the one where they talk about their parents).

I felt like as the game went on the presence of the 3 started waning more and more. My interest peaked at the point where Buzzo forcefeeds you joy, because that is otherwise the point where Brad would become aggressive in rescuing Buddy because of the whole Sticky thing. Instead it's more calm and Buddy responds with "He's my Dad" instead of "I don't know" when asked by Buzzo who Brad is to them, and then the entirely different joy hallucination scene where you fight marty instead made me very excited, but I think the rest of the story was a letdown. You STILL abandon your party with Tardy, still obliterate your father, still get hated by Buddy, and still deck your friends with minimal dialogue changes from the base game. (Though the fight has some effort put into it, while I think it could have been better).

I'm not here to demand that you make radical changes to the mod you wouldn't think are worth it but I think the mod would be better off if:
1) There are scenes (again, maybe there are in the campfires I missed, but it would still be better if they weren't missable) where Brad and his friends express disagreements with eachother in this or that way to show a straining of their relationship that would reasonably lead Brad to think they're not trustworthy enough to bring to save Buddy, on top of putting more weight in the confrontation later on at Rando Island (since after that it would just be vanilla lisa, other funky ideas nonwithstanding)

2) Or, there is a different path where the bonds aren't actually fractured (subversion of expectations, +10 gamer points) and the gang tags along for the final stretch. Maybe things from there would evolve in such a way that the ending might have a happier tone. Maybe not, because Brad is a deeply traumatized person, but I would leave the execution up to the developers.

Everything said, I still think this is a fairly nice mod. I'm glad I played it.

New minigame does not work

The studded bands give pissed instead of rage

I'm actually hyped for this

Theres a Bojack reference

Automatic 10/10