I have mostly mixed feelings about the definitive update. I can't
vouch for if all of these are apart of it since I hadn't played in a
long time but these are my thoughts:
• Did the usual enemies get
big HP buffs? Because a lot of these fights have become very time
consuming. Now they're not exactly harder, mind you, but they just take
too long to kill now and it's become what I disliked mainly about the
Arkantos Mod of Lisa the Joyful; most of the enemies are just HP sponges
now. I strongly recommend lowering the HP of the enemies. Not only that but because of all of the "special" death dialogue you gave enemies in certain groups any residual damage that would normally go over to the next enemy in line is instead wasted on the enemy who is already at 0 HP. The biggest problem lies with every single shadowy figure in the game (including in the new areas like the Waterfall area). They attack usually everyone at once, they come in groups, they have too much HP, and the EXP gained from them after battle is absolutely worthless and not helpful at all.
• Some of the new skills added are completely useless,
mostly Lanks' new abilities. Stink Bomb almost never deals poison to
enemies even though that's the selling point of the move in the
description. On top of that Enrapturing Speech is no better than
Powerful Speech now. It used to give Attack and Agility buffs AND Rage,
but now it just slightly buffs the team (as much as Powerful) with a
small chance of Rage. This should have been the turnaround move to
combat the final enemies of the Sportsdome, but instead it made those
last fights miserable and (like my first point) time consuming. If these skills were simply buffed to match the extra HP given to enemies (or vise verca) this wouldn't be such a consistently annoying problem.
•
I do not like that Cyclops changed to from SP to TP. Now there are
some clever ways to take advantage of this I will admit. It makes it
easier to decide who stays awake at campfires, and since you don't need
to expend as many SP restoring items on your party when needed the that's one less layer of wasted items to worry about. But once Cyclops starts learning the more
expensive and most helpful skills it becomes a real annoyance to even
build up enough TP to use them, and once they're used the TP is drained
almost completely. This wouldn't be so bad if stores sold Lucrative Tea,
or if as Cyclops levels up he gains even more TP for every dial combo
performed (because for late game 3 TP for every dial combo performed is
absolutely pitiful), but I have never (or only once) used these higher
up skills, and they simply collect dust in Cyclops' potential arsenal.
•
How much of this brand new content is blocked behind Pain Mode? I
attempted to explore these new areas being teased, but only a few
screens later I'm blocked by an impassable obstacle that can seemingly
only be made passable through a Pain Mode exclusive event trigger.
There's also apparently new party members to recruit throughout the
game, but as it turns out these events can only be triggered through
pain mode. Now I don't have an issue with pain mode in general, but with
so much content now blocked behind it what's the point of ever doing
normal mode anymore? It genuinely feels like playing normal mode only
gives you half of the experience now. There might as well not even be an
option to choose the difficulty anymore, because a vast majority of the
players will always choose pain mode JUST to get the full experience.
That would be my suggestion, either that or allow these new areas and
new party members to also be fully accessible in normal mode (though in
regards to the super secret boss I've heard about, keeping that in
particular in pain mode only is fine). Additionally all of these areas are only accessible by going past obstacles or groups of people that have always been meant to block you from going the wrong way in previous builds. I cannot even begin to explain how counterproductive that is. All this time I had assumed these new areas would be peppered in between each of the old areas to spice things up, but instead they are tucked away behind what were previously invisible walls meant to keep you on the right path. Coupled with the fact that a good chunk of the new areas are still blocked off by pain mode, I have to start the game over from scratch anyway, and that makes me immensely disappointed.
I agree with everything said here. I also happened to play through this waterfall place past the sportsdome that's supposed to be for one of the secret endings and good god this place is absolute trash tier. I think this is even harder than the final boss of the game, who does that? The First of all every single one of these weird shadow enemies are so bulky in HP I wasted some of my best items before even getting to the boss of this area, and speaking of the boss:
1. These three fish people are too bulky in HP, this battle went on for 15 minutes for me.
2. All three of them have the capability to heal everyone when they're all low on HP, effectively adding the extra 10 minutes I spent on this boss.
3. These enemies have too much HP.
4. The final, final fish guy after this battle is the most badly designed boss I have ever seen in any possible LISA fangame, and I just finished playing the demo of Lustful. This guy should have been killed the first time, giving him a second form just makes this battle drag on even longer. It also doesn't help that a random helper joins in as piles on that status ailment that makes allies refuse to be healed (why is that status even in the game?)
5. These. Enemies. Have. Too. Much. HP. More HP doesn't make a boss tougher, it just makes it longer, and makes you waste more items than you need to.
There's a fine line between hard and challenging, and hard and bullshit, and these update crossed the line of the latter by at least 50 miles. I don't feel like I lost these battles because it was my fault, I lost these battles because the RNG of my crits, stats, and dodges were not good enough. Does Stinkbomb EVER poison the target? Can intimidate actually intimidate enemies? Can hiding actually let me dodge attacks more often?
What was originally a decently balanced and overall enjoyable experience has now turned into one of the most stressful games I had the displeasure of experiencing this year, and I am extremely disappointed that Hopeful sank to the low of other Lisa fangames where things just need to keep getting harder and harder until you hemorrhage.
I just got through that waterfall area and I certainly see what you mean, those bosses are very tanky and just unpleasant to battle against. Even with this recent patch that entire area is still in pretty bad shape. Now I'm at this winter area and even this place has a multitude of problems:
• No save crow OR campfire to heal your party before you enter the blizzard section of the map. BIG problem, especially considering the Hart gang henchmen blocking the way at the start of Area 4 used too many of my valuable items.
• The snow wolves and knife fighters covered in snow are (once again, like the other enemies in this update) too tanky in HP.
• The intermittent icy winds that deal weather damage to you on the overworld. At first it's not an issue, but later on the winds start dealing actually hard residual damage to you, making you too weak to battle against any wolves that are hard to avoid because of how you run against the wind. Would be much more tolerable if I could actually heal my team with a campfire. I don't know why but there just stopped being usable campfires after I left the waterfall area, which is a problem because at this point I don't have very many items left to keep my team alive.
• With a certain party member gone at this point in this particular story route, I don't have an AOE healer anymore.
• Let's talk about how equally tanky and tedious the mutant and group of Hart henchman are in Shiver City. Once again too much HP, they hit too hard for what the average expected level your team should be at this point, and I still don't have enough items to keep my team alive. This is honestly what I'm expecting to happen for the rest of this storyline, so whatever enemies that appear after this point should be nerfed too. I understand it's a common retort to "get good" at these games, but that shouldn't be an excuse to leave flawed game design as is.
I sincerely hope the developer sees these comments (I don't have Discord for whatever server being advertised), because these are serious problems. To be perfectly honest this update came out too soon; there should have been a lot more extensive testing with balancing out this new content better. I feel like I'm playing a late alpha build again rather than a "definitive" final release.
Yep. In the Sportsdome you can talk to your party members between tournament matches when you can explore. You need to give them the right response 4 times and you'll trigger the route. Note that if you talk to both of them the one you talk to last will be the route that is activated. As for what the correct responses are, the hint is that you challenge your party members rather than side with them.
If that's not enough, spoilers: top answers for Lanks bottom answers for Cyclops