Intro

So after watching uricksaladbar's video on Lisa: The Painful, I ended up falling into a trance and (almost) beating it over the course of 3 days. Legit when I picked LISA up I played it for 6 hours straight. Having beaten Earthbound and Mother 3, the way LISA builds on Earthbound's gameplay and eclectic status condition system is genuinely amazing. Like, using Brad's Fireball move with Birdie's Gasoline Spit is one of the best combos I discovered on accident and it's so fun to play. It's so painful to play. I'm sure plenty of other people have written about how Lisa's unrelenting gameplay difficulty and unfairness make you feel more attached to the narrative overall blah blah blah. As much as I adore the game mechanically, and will discuss my playthrough's details in this, that's not my focus writing this.

Also it feels redundant saying this, but spoiler warning for all of Lisa: The Painful and Lisa: The First. And CW if you haven't played, this review discusses parental abuse, sexual abuse, murder, suicide, gore, and pedophilia. All of which feature promptly in LISA.

Also mild Deltarune CH4 spoilers.

Obligatory LISA 1/2 summary

Lisa: The First: Play a Yume Nikki-esque exploration game about Lisa, a girl who is raped by her father and left in complete isolation. She can't take the abuse and kills herself before the events of the next game. Lisa: The Painful: After the White Flash, an event that caused an apocalypse and killed every woman in existence, Brad (Lisa's brother), filled with guilt over Lisa's suicide, finds a baby girl. He vows to protect her from the disgusting, rapey horrors of the outside world, until one day she disappears and he must hunt her down.

Brad and Me

So for 2 days I was so into Lisa that I forgot to eat. Not even joking, I skipped breakfast and lunch just to play Lisa all day. On the final day of my run, I had ground through Area 3, and Satan, and just gotten to the Rando boss fight. I was so close to beating him. He's the last boss before the ending cutscene plays out. Just as I got to ripping his face mask off, I heard my dad yelling at my sibling and calling them a "stupid bitch". Not the first time.

I've dealt with my dad belittling me, threatening to harm me, actually chasing me around trying to choke me out, breaking my door down, using my mom as a human meat shield, and a slew of other shit I don't feel like traumadumping about. So when he's taking out his anger on some other family member, I usually just cower in my room and ignore it. But this day, playing LISA filled me with stupid courage. So I got between them and told him to cut it out.

Yeah, that went about as well as you can expect. My dad called me a bunch of names that I don't feel like repeating in here (stupid bitch, cunt, the usual), said I was "white knighting" my siblings and my mom for trying to protect them from constant verbal abuse and getting pots and pans and shit thrown at them, said I was subhuman and below him, unfit to be a child of his, that I ruined his marriage to my mother, and that I better get my ass out of the house ASAP because my presence in the house is ruining his life. (Not the first time I've been disowned, that's for sure. Who knows when he'll renege this time.)

And that he's not giving me a single cent of his money from now on. So no paying for my college anymore. Great. I have no reason to stay in this house anymore. Anyways. Yeah so I cried a bunch and had some lame panic attacks and shit. I've got a getaway bag and a spare room at my friend's house for now, but I didn't get any fucking sleep because my dad kept breaking shit and yelling "noone cares about ME! noone cares about MY FEELINGS!" and a bunch of shit about how I'm an irredeemable monster and not his kid and how (I) STARTED IT bla bla bla. AT 11PM AT NIGHT. I swear every detail of this is important to my LISA experience ok.

So after the altercation, I swear I was lightheaded. Felt like I was about to fucking pass out. I couldn't even move. I just shut off LISA without beating Rando because I felt like I was going to puke and have a heart attack and die. My dad just has a vomit inducing effect on me when he yells at me. But after a couple hours of panic attacks and doing stuff to myself that my therapist would not approve of, I suddenly found the situation very funny. I was playing a game about an abusive father while dealing firsthand with an abusive father...! But it goes deeper than that.

Ok so Brad is a character that is initially super sympathetic. Hell, I felt nothing but painful empathy for him at the beginning of Lisa: The Painful. The scenes that always fucking get me in movies and video games are the ones involving parental abuse. I've had wholeass panic attacks watching normal movies that normal kids wouldn't react to because the parental figure was slightly mean to their kid. When Carol pushes Noelle into the kitchen in Deltarune CH4 I legit had another episode. So playing Lisa: The First and seeing Lisa struggle with isolation and abuse and suicide (I mean, she lived in a tiny suburb with an abusive father and no outlet. I can certainly relate) , and Brad getting that beer bottle thrown at him in Painful, already set the stage for my trauma-induced, seemingly morally justified anger. Brad and Lisa's dad, Marty, is a rapist drunkard asshole. Brad wants to be a better man than him. A surge of trauma-induced empathy flowed through me as I watched Brad try to save Buddy from the fate Lisa met. It's why I react so strongly to people yelling at me. Like Lisa, a good chunk of my character has been shaped by reacting to abuse. I cannot avoid it. I have been irreversably warped by it. And it's really fucking hard explaining that to my friends. I feel pathetic and half formed, like a Joy Mutant trying to reach my fleshy Trauma Tendrils outwards.

But the whole point of Painful, as frustrating as it is, is that Brad is wrong. It doesn't matter if he went through hell and got his arms chopped off and a slew of other horrible shit to save Buddy. None of the "why" matters. Only the "what". He kills hundreds and uses Buddy as a surrogate for his emotions towards Lisa, suffocating her in the process. As Buddy keeps saying, it doesn't matter why Brad is doing any of this. Just that it hurt her.

In Brad's quest to not become his father, he unintentionally ends up doing the same shit his father did. He's emotionally unavailable. He traumatizes Buddy by killing people in front of her. This may seem unfair to the player. Given how hard Painful is to play, my knee jerk response was "Buddy doesn't appreciate the amount of work we put in to save her". Which is what Brad feels. Which is the whole fucking point. In your quest to not repeat the same mistakes as your father, you become the father.

It's no surprise that my dad grew up in a very abusive household. He told me about as much. About the constant beatings and scrutiny he grew up under, and how relieved he was to escape the pressure of his home life.

But he keeps hurting me anyways, not in spite of but because of the awareness of his abuse. A lot of his abuse was (in his mind) to help me. To protect me. Like the time he screamed at me for not being able to do monkey bars when I was 8 fucking years old. Or the time he threatened to beat me in public at the roller rink. It was to make up for his own insecurities. As long as he was assured that he wasn't as bad as his own father, that was enough. It's weird relating to both Brad and Buddy in this, somewhat. Both that quest to avoid becoming the father and the traumatized liquid blob you become as a result of your father trying to avoid becoming the father and becoming it anyways. Of trying to reclaim his ego via unintentionally abusing you.

Relating to Brad is probably really bad though. I know I've had a pattern of abusive behavior with that same rationalization: I'm not like my dad, I'm cognizant, so therefore as long as I have good intentions I can't hurt anyone. This led to me losing a friend because I knowingly verbally abused them and they never got over the trauma it caused, for years. I know the relationship's probably over. It's just not the same anymore. And it doesn't matter what stupid justification for it I have, what excuse of "I was also a traumatized teen" I had. Abuse is abuse. I am a Brad and a Buddy at the same time.

So yeah, felt really ironic playing that whilst all this was going on. I don't plan on actually beating Painful. I figure 13 hours on my savefile is enough even if I was 3 turns of damage away from beating Rando.

my playthrough

Somehow managed to make every "wrong" decision when it came to playing LISA and still beat it fine. Went Joyless, partially because I hated seeing Brad do drugs, but also because selling Joy gets you TONS of mags to spend on weapons and healing items. Basically what that means: no drugs, game harder. That being said, every time the "give up your items" dialog came up, I somehow managed to lose both my arm and my items by being a total bonehead.

I genuinely liked Olan a lot. He left when I slept at a campfire because Nern's trashbag shawl smelled too bad. Sucks that companions perma-leave in this game, I say, knowing they perma-die too. I somehow managed to get through Painful only losing 3.

Beastborn somehow managed to survive 3 rounds of Russian Roulette. Out of my first 3 companions only Rage survived to the bitter end. After losing Shocklord and Ajeet, I ended up composing my team of the least interesting characters I had left: Garth, Nern and Rage. This was to ensure that if they were permakilled brutally, I still had trusty Harvey and Birdy to back me up and deal tons of damage.

Especially Garth. I mean, he's a porn artist with a diaper fetish. Something about him just irked me, and his Drawing ability seemed pretty weak and unreliable. Why not offer him as a meaty sacrifice to whatever monster we ran into next?

He survived every single fight and ended up being in my final party. Come the fuck on.

Also when it came down to the "mutilate your kid or kill 3 people decision", I sped through the dialogue and ended up mutilating Buddy. Whoops. From a gameplay standpoint, I couldn't really afford to lose Harvey's raw machine-gun power... that I ended up not using in the final fight. Seriously, by the time you get to late-game, Painful is a lot easier than I thought it'd be.

Beat the shit out of Marty, too. I know the whole point is that you traumatize Buddy beyond repair. That she doesn't know that he raped Lisa and beat Brad. Eh.

Nothing in the final sequence destroyed me as much as your party turning on you, though. It kind of makes sense Garth would favor Buddy being passed around by dozens of men, given he's the Kickstarter self-insert character of an artist obsessed with sexual drawings of children. But Rage? Fuck, man, I got so attached to Rage! Why is HE the only one that wants to enthusiastically have sex with a kid???? This game gets you so attached to these companions, way more than Earthbound ever did despite them having about as much dialogue as the Earthbound gang (at least in Painful Original), only to rip it away from you like a hangnail.

why is this game so racist

Seriously, none of the videos or essays I've watched/read on Lisa ever mention how fucking racist this game is? Like I didn't realize that most of this stuff got cut out in Definitive (I played Original), but the fucking monkey noises when the black guy comes on? The jokes about a white woman's black cuckold son with huge red lips? All of the "tribal" characters? (And before I hear the shit about how IT'S A FANTASY WORLD TRIBALS AREN'T 1:1 WITH ACTUAL INDIGENOUS PEOPLE, looking at you Fallout fans, why are all of the other groups in this fantasy world somewhat thought out in the context of the world while the tribal characters are lazy tribal stereotypes) Ajeet's design??? I don't really know what to make of all of it, just that it's pretty appalling that this kind of shit never gets brought up. Even the devs' "apology" for the racist stuff being removed in Definitive Edition felt half-assed.

It's an inevitable cycle. Something gets labeled a "masterpiece". People think racism is some kind of evil from the depths of hell, and not something ingrained into society that people frequently unconsciously parrot. Therefore if thing good, thing cannot be racist. It's frustrating.