#especially when you also need to consider that brad can be permanently crippled multiple times throughout the game

[grim-echoes]

spill about LOSE-A honestly. one thing, though: everybody who plays lose-a lauds it for its candle-wax-on-nutsack, careful-incsision-against-inner-thigh, wooden-ruler-snapping-against-asscheeks difficulty which my challenge gamer brain can't. let. go. do you have any recs for truly difficult rpgs? and also is lose-a really difficult in a fun way or just because mr. bioessentialism spams one hit kill moves

i don't really play a lot of games in general because i'm extremely choosy and also conservative with my spending habits so i'm gonna ask my followers (and anyone else) to rec rpgs in place of me, but i feel like this is as good an excuse as any to say play jimmy and the pulsating mass because it's still some of the most fun i've ever gotten out of an rpg battle system on account of being very intelligently, deliberately designed and encourages the player to strategize in fun, open-ended ways that make use of all of the game's mechanics in a way that nothing feels arbitrarily designed, and buffs/debuffs, statuses, and items are all incredibly useful, and sometimes necessary to work into a strategy (it feels like one of these are relatively ineffective or way way too powerful at any given time in most rpgs, but not jimmy).

shin megami tensei as a whole kinda belongs here (not persona specifically) because the franchise is kinda infamous for being THE difficult jrpg series, and it's also similar in design to jimmy where enemy and boss design is very intelligent and deliberate, and puts its faith directly in you as the player to think carefully about every encounter and exactly how to prepare--older entries are fucking brutal due to their age, but some recent games are much more accessible and fair while still being plenty tough.

i'd honestly make the comparison to dark souls for games like this in terms of game design and how the tough-but-fair approach ties into a specific thematic element of the games, but are constructed intelligently so that failure feels meaningful. lisa is like dark souls II comparatively where it hypes itself up with how brutal and dark and shit and hard it is and how you need to be selfish and heartless to prevail but it's built on the back of a juvenile, horribly unempathetic narrative completely disinterested in the struggles of its actual most poorly treated characters and the only thing it has to say with its permadeath + enemy instakill/russian roulette mechanics is that you're a selfish cunt for trying to be a good person which like. i don't know how old austin was when he first made these games but it literally feels like some shit he designed after engaging with his first philosophical text at 14