LISA: The Pointless - Scholar of the Wilbur Sin Edition

Created a GJ account just to say this.

This fanmod is a blessing and a masterpiece, thank you for making 2021 the year of lisa.

it.

I haven't played LISA since I checked out the original Pointless a few years ago, but I don't remember the games ever being this excruciating and un-fun.

Granted a lot of my issues can also point back to the original Pointless, this expansion just aggravates those qualms I had even more.

I wanted to enjoy the immersive, crapsack apocalypse and what kinds of deranged events and interactions this mod would have to offer, but I could barely enjoy any of it because of the frustrating boss fights and the horrible micromanagement of items and currency.

If you're going to add all of these new explorable areas you should drastically increase the amount of healing items you can collect or buy, you should make enemies drop more mags upon defeat, and you should make all of these bosses not so horribly tanky; HP Sponge enemies are not fun, nor is it good game design,

I could barely take in all the new visuals and characters because I was consistently worried about what bullshit enemy was going to make me use what little items I had left.

And I want to make it clear that saying any of this at all makes me really upset, because I can tell the new sprite art, the new moves, the new allies, the new music tracks, all of it has a lot of care and passion put into it. But this gameplay. Just. Sucks.

I've been playing this mod for the last couple days and it's honestly really impressive how much content you added! In fact I honestly enjoy playing this expansion more than the current "pre-monster update" official build.

Of course, there are certain aspects that I think the official build still did better. First thing that comes to mind is healing on Garbage Island. I don't know why the tree that gave unlimited rotten fruit was changed to the rotten pool, but it just made healing the party SO much more tedious. I don't think there was anything really broken about the unlimited fruit because even though you could carry a ton in your inventory and use it as a full party heal technically, the drawback was being badly poisoned as a result (and also them disintegrating once you leave the island), which is a fair compromise. Taking that away and making the healing spot stationery while still applying poison effect afterwords makes no sense and makes health maintenance so much more frustrating, especially when there's a lot of new enemies and mid-bosses to fight (the latter of which could also stand to have their health reduced a little).

I also found myself a bit miffed at the new trading/bartering content, because it turned out an item I missed on Garbage Island was something the trader in Downtown Olathe needed. Normally in any other game this wouldn't be a problem, but since you -never- go back to Garbage Island after leaving, I was locked out of something that could have been super fun for Joel to use. I wish there could have been alternate items found in Downtown that give you the same trade offers, or if not that then at least allow Joel to wear the masks from the mask salesman that give similar stat effects.

Also as a small suggestion for Downtown, seeing as the number of kills you get actually does affect the end-game: Make it so you obtain one jersey for every franchise member you kill; that way you can closely keep track of how many kills you got so when you're replaying the game there's less guesswork on what "ending" you go for.

Now with those said, they aren't serious issues. They're more like small quality of life changes like that could make this fan-expansion even more enjoyable. Rather than making things more frustrating and "painful" (pun intended maybe?) I enjoy the idea of implementing small changes like this that improve gameplay and encourage players to explore the side paths more, while still keeping the overall challenge.

I honestly think this is one of the best fan-mods to come out of the LISA community. There is clearly a lot of love and passion put here in what was already a sort of love letter to the original LISA, and I can guarantee this experience will stick in my mind as someone who loves the series.

Found a bug, trying to go into the area past the rando troop you give jerky to crashes game, no bitmap or something